Such Good Girls by R. D. Rosen

Polish Catholic named Tadeusz, a member of the Resistance and the brother of one of Laura’s coworkers. The two had fallen in love and were seeing each other regularly, much to Laura’s distress. It would still be dangerous if anyone, even a Resistance fighter, discovered that Putzi and her family were Jewish. The Poles had already proven themselves to be more than capable of murdering Jews without any help at all.
    Laura begged Putzi not to fall in love with the boy.
    “It’s too late,” Putzi said. “I already have.”
    “It can’t end well. Someday we will leave Busko-Zdrój. We can’t stay here forever. And then you’ll have to forget him.”
    “Then I’ll stay with him here.”
    “No. We must stick together. He’s not right for you.”
    “How can you say that? You see me with Tadeusz! You see how in love we are! He wants to marry me!”
    “You’ll see. You’ll regret it. How can you put our lives at risk?” Laura said, who was haunted by her own ill-advised confession to the priest. “Haven’t we lost enough family? His brother probably already knows we’re Jewish. I’ve worked alongside him for the last two years and he’s no dummy. You know the Poles are better at identifying Jews than the Germans.”
    As it happened, Tadeusz himself soon figured out without much difficulty that Putzi was Jewish. He not only had grown up with a Jewish family—and spoke better Yiddish than Putzi!—but he had been badly treated by the Nazis and sympathized with Jews. The relationship continued—for now.
    For Zofia, life was better. The Sunday afternoons she spent with her mother and Putzi in Spa’s Park were more relaxed than before, especially when they weren’t downwind from the rotten-egg smell of the sulfur baths in the grand building at the far end. From the Danish Red Cross came candy and from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association came Spam and Crisco, which Zofia greedily spread on bread that had not seen much butter. The Red Cross arranged a trip for the town’s children to a convent in Rabka, another spa town in the mountains, where Zofia got to kiss a prelate’s relic ring, a moment that transported her.
    A few weeks before the first Christmas after the war, Zofia wrote Santa Claus:
    I am requesting candy or a small doll or cookies or a sled. I am asking for skis, but most of all I would like a small doll, but dressed in that pretty dress in the gift shop window and wearing shoes. Sometimes I was a good girl and sometimes not. I cannot tell exactly how many times, because I did not count. I do not know if I deserve it all. I beg your forgiveness and Mommy and Auntie, but I would like to ask you not to be angry with me, I will be good.
    Zofia
    What Laura wanted for Christmas was something else: freedom. She had no address for her uncle Max Schaerf, but in desperation wrote him anyway in care of “New York City, America.” She sent it off in January 1946, and waited week after week for a reply. In the meantime, the past was impossible to escape—both in her mind and in reality. She heard from friends that Julek, the Pole who had escorted them to Kraków and stole their luggage, had accompanied her brother Manek to the Lvov train station two and a half years before on the day he was, or so Julek had told her, hanged. Suspecting him of betraying her brother, Laura had to fight the urge to report him to the Russians as an anti-Communist.
    “They’d know what to do with him,” she told Putzi.
    “Well, why don’t you?”
    Laura sighed. “It won’t bring Manek back. And, anyway, how can I become what I despise?”
    Laura and Putzi played along with the Russians. Although neither she nor Putzi could bring themselves to become members of the Communist Party, as long as they didn’t reveal their Judaism they felt safer than before. They didn’t feel so alone and different inside, because more and more Polish people around them had also lost family. Yet not to be able to