Free Such Good Girls by R. D. Rosen Page A

blue-striped blouse a little coat for her bear. Zofia was delighted. Putzi’s talents extended to the kitchen as well, where she prepared welcome alternatives to her sister’s repertoire. So consistently good was her cooking that it would become legendary when one of the peasants she tutored brought her as payment a goose, a rare delicacy, and Putzi managed to burn it beyond recognition.
    Putzi’s arrival made Laura long all the more for Fryda. All they had was a letter, postmarked Gelsenkirchen, Germany, where she had volunteered for a women’s labor camp after her boss at a pharmacy in Bochnia, near Kraków, threatened to expose her when she wouldn’t sleep with him. Fryda, a fragile beauty in the best of times, said she was slowly being starved to death and pleaded for food parcels. In addition, she wrote, the Allies were bombing the camp daily and she was hiding in a shelter, wanting to die. Laura tearfully put together a package of what she could spare and sent it off.
    There were times when Laura could barely sleep, her fear of exposure was so great, and she would lie in bed with the thoughts flying around in her head like bullets. When she did doze off, sleep was like another occupied country, in which her husband and all the dead were alive again. It is amazing how much a human being can suffer, she thought to herself more and more. One is made of steel. You spring back and carry on. But her secrets were growing too big to be contained, and it was worse because she had no one to share them with but Putzi.
    “I’ve had no choice, but for months, she’s been running and hiding when she sees me coming,” Laura confided to Putzi, tilting her head in the direction of Zofia’s bed, where only a tiny hand could be seen peeking out from under the eiderdown.
    Putzi told her that when the war was over, there would be time to make amends.
    “If this is over. And by then, I’m afraid it will be too late.”
    Putzi said she’d speak to Zosia. “I’ll make her understand.”
    “She’s so hateful,” Laura added. “Do you know what I heard her say to her doll the other day? She told Halinka not to play with Jews. She said, ‘They kill Christian babies, you know.’ Now I understand how easy it is to raise anti-Semites. There’s really nothing to it.”
    A letter from Fryda arrived, this time from the Fraxel Fabrik company in Hanau am Main, Germany.
    My Dears!
    I already wrote you once that I was transferred to a different factory, in which I am already two weeks. I was taken quite arbitrarily, straight from work. I suppose additional workers were needed here. Although others traveled with me, they were assigned to agricultural work while I was selected to sit here by myself. The town is quite large, the factory as well, but the conditions as usual. Maybe this war will finally end and we will happily tell stories about our experiences. Chin up, don’t pick up anything in the street, because there is war going on and one has to be careful. Don’t let anyone take advantage of you.
    Kisses, Fryda
    Like everyone else, Fryda took the precaution of writing in code, so the truth had to be read between the lines. Phrases like “taken quite arbitrarily,” “the conditions as usual,” and “we will happily tell stories about our experiences” all hid the reality of forced labor and forced optimism in the face of catastrophe. No, they would never tell stories happily, but at least, Laura hoped, they would be able to tell them.
    By the end of 1944, there was something in the air in Busko. Even a seven-year-old girl could sense it. Something like confusion and disarray. In Zofia’s school there was much talk that the Germans were really losing the war. Soon, people were saying, the skies would be full of Allied planes and the Polish people would finally be freed from their German occupiers.
    Around this time, while Zofia was visiting her mother at the cooperative, there was a commotion in the courtyard behind the