Free Matters of Honor by Louis Begley

Hornungs that evening and in the days that followed. As we talked, I learned, in bits and pieces, the war story that Archie had wanted to hear. Henry spoke reluctantly, and I believe that if his mind had not been fixed on Margot he wouldn’t have said so much.
    Apparently, Henry’s father had not been really rich before the war; he had been merely very well-to-do, on the scale of successful Jewish businessmen in Poland, one that, Henry stressed, was different from the scale valid in Holland or elsewhere in Western Europe. Poland was a poor country, he insisted; “rich” or “well-to-do” there wasn’t the same as for instance in London. The family business was the export of foodstuffs, especially Polish hams, which were a major producer of revenue for the country, and arts and crafts and decorators’ wares like kilims. There were also investments in real estate in Krakow, where they lived. Mr. White had obtained a law degree and was about to begin the obligatory lawyer’s apprenticeship when his father died. As the only son, he had to take over the business. His choice of bride was conventional in the extreme. He married the daughter of the leading Jewish lawyer, also very well-to-do, and received a handsome dowry, including an apartment building on a good street within the walls of the old city. She had finished her own university studies, in Polish literature, and, when Mr. White sought her hand, was planning to obtain the higher degree required for teaching in state secondary schools. That project came to nothing, in part because eleven months after the marriage Henry was born. Running my father’s household took up all her time, said Henry, even though she had a staff of four or five. The new family like the parents was too well placed, too respectable, and too Polish in speech and habit to have suffered in daily life from the campaign of insults and indignities directed at Jews beginning with the coming to power, after Marshal Pilsudski died, of a right-wing nationalistic and anti-Semitic regime. That had to wait for the arrival of the Germans.
    Krakow became the seat of the German government of Poland, and there was no delay in requiring Jews to wear the yellow star, or in the establishment of the ghetto in the old Jewish quarter called Kazimierz. Before that happened, however, his mother’s parents fled to Zakopane, in the Tatry Mountains, where it had been their custom to spend the summer months, always at the same hotel. The owner had agreed to hide them. Henry’s parents never found out exactly where or how they were hidden; the general idea had been that they would be out of sight and earshot—therefore out of danger—in a cottage outside Zakopane belonging to that man. Did he eventually tire of harboring Jews? Did he sell them to the Polish police or directly to the Gestapo? Did a neighbor denounce them? None of his father’s inquiries after the war elicited answers he could trust. He did hear that a Jewish couple that could well have been his in-laws was taken to the Gestapo building in Zakopane before Christmas of 1942 never to be seen again. The hotel keeper himself died in 1943, apparently of pneumonia; his family had moved away. The father found it troubling that the man should have died of a natural cause; it suggested treachery on his part. If he had been denounced for harboring Jews, in all probability he would have been shot.
    The road to safety followed by Henry’s parents was similar, but it did not end in disaster. His mother’s old Latin teacher at the
gimnazjum
—he explained that this was Polish high school—one Pani Maria, a remarkable woman who during her youth had been involved in the Polish socialist independence movement, spontaneously offered to take Henry and his mother into her house on the outskirts of Krakow and hide them until the end of the war, which she didn’t doubt would end in Germany’s defeat. No less impressive than her courage and generosity were Pani