The Storyteller Read online

  "In the office," I told him.

  "Ooh," he teased. "A posh job."

  I looked down at the skirt I was wearing, which was threadbare at the knees after so much use. "Oh yes," I joked. "I'm practically royalty."

  But we both knew how lucky I was--unlike my mother, who had lost most of her eyesight from sewing in the near dark; or pretty Darija, who was still cleaning at the officers' headquarters and whose graceful dancer's hands were now cracked and bleeding from lye and soap. In comparison, twelve hours at a typewriter in a warm office was a walk in the park.

  Just then Herr Fassbinder passed by. He looked from me to Aron and back to me again. Then he shooed me into the office and instructed the little ones to return to work. I had sat down at my desk to type requisition forms when I realized Herr Fassbinder was standing in front of me. "So?" he said, smiling broadly. "You have a boyfriend."

  I shook my head. "He's not my boyfriend."

  "Like I am not your boss."

  "He is just a school friend." I was nervous, wondering if Aron could somehow get in trouble with his employer for talking to me at my own job.

  Herr Fassbinder sighed heavily. "Well, then, that is a shame," he said. "Because he is very much taken with you. Ah, look, I have made you blush. You should give the young man a chance."

  After that, whenever we needed textile supplies, Herr Fassbinder would specifically request that Aron be the one to deliver them. And he would conveniently assign me to unlock the storeroom for him, although there were others at the factory who were more suited to that job than a secretary. Afterward, Herr Fassbinder would come to my desk and pepper me for details. He was, I realized, just a matchmaker at heart.

  Gradually, as we sat together in the little office, he began to confide in me. He told me of his wife, Liesl, who was so beautiful that the clouds would part when she stepped outside. She could have had her pick of any man, he told me, but she chose him because he knew how to make her laugh. His greatest regret was that they had not had a baby before she died--of tuberculosis, six years ago. I came to see that all of us in the factory, from the littlest girls to me, were his children.

  One day, Herr Fassbinder and I were alone in the office. Work for the embroiderers was halted from time to time because various raw materials had not been delivered; this time, it was thread that had not arrived. Herr Fassbinder went out for a little while, and when he came back, he was flustered. "We need more workers," he barked, more upset than I had ever seen him. I was scared of him for the first time, because I didn't know what we would do with more workers when we couldn't even occupy the girls we already had.

  The next day, in addition to our usual 150 employees, Herr Fassbinder had recruited 50 mothers with young children. The children were too young to do anything of value in an embroidery shop, so he had them sorting the threads by color. Aron came by with bolts of white fabric. The textile divisions had been employed to make fifty-six thousand camouflage suits for the Eastern Front in the summer; we would be stitching the insignia to match.

  I knew, because I processed all the orders, that we hadn't been contracted to do this, and that we had just turned into a glorified day-care center. "That's not your problem," Herr Fassbinder snapped when I asked him about it.

  That week the announcement was made: twenty thousand Jews were to be deported from the ghetto. Chairman Rumkowski had negotiated the number down by half, but lists of the ten thousand who would be leaving were made by ghetto officials. The Roma, who lived in a separate part of the ghetto, were the first. Criminals came second. Then those who didn't have jobs.

  Such as the fifty mothers who had just recently arrived.

  Something told me that if Herr Fassbinder had been able to take all ten thousand people on that list into his little Fabrik, he would have.

  The first week of January, all the people who had been put on those lists had received their summonses--wedding invitations, we called them, with irony: a party no one wanted to attend. A thousand people were taken each day to the trains that led out of the ghetto. By then, our shipment of thread had arrived. By then, our new employees had settled in and were embroidering insignia as if they'd been born to it.

  One night as I was covering my typewriter with its dust cover, Herr Fassbinder asked if my family was all right. It was the first time he had ever spoken of me having a life outside these walls, and I was startled. "Yes," I said.

  "None were on the lists?" he asked bluntly.

  I realized then that he knew far more about me than I knew about him. For also on these lists were the relatives of those who were Roma, who had no jobs, or who were criminals. Such as Rubin.

  Whatever deal Basia had made with the chairman had been a thorough one. She did not know where her husband was, or if he was still alive, but she had not been recommended for deportation because of his crime.

  Herr Fassbinder turned out the light, so that I could just discern his profile in the moonlight that spilled through the small window of the office. "Do you know where they are being taken?" I blurted, suddenly brave in the darkness.

  "To work on Polish farms," he said.

  Our eyes met in silence. That was what we had been told about Rubin, months ago. Herr Fassbinder had to know, from my expression, that I did not believe him.

  "This war." He sighed heavily. "There is no escaping it."

  "Would you say that to someone with papers?" I whispered. "Christian ones?"

  I have no idea what made me tell him--a German--my biggest secret, the one I had never even told my parents. But something about this man, and the lengths he had gone to to protect children who weren't even his, made me think he could be trusted.

  "If someone had Christian papers," he said after a long moment, "I would tell that person to go to Russia, until the war ends."

  As I left work that night, I started to cry. Not because I knew Herr Fassbinder was right or because I knew that I would still never go as long as it meant leaving my family behind.

  But because when we were locking up the factory office in the dark, where no one else could see us, Herr Fassbinder had held the door open for me, as if I was still a young lady, and not just a Jew.

  *

  Although we all had believed that the lists created in January would be a single horrible moment in the history of the war, and although the chairman's speeches reminded us and the Germans how indispensable we were as a workforce, only two weeks later the Germans demanded more deportees. By now, rumors were running as fast as fire through the factories, nearly paralyzing production, because no one ever heard again from a person who had left on one of the transports. It was hard to believe that someone who had been resettled wouldn't try to get word to his family.

  "I heard," Darija said one morning when we were waiting at one of the soup kitchens for our rations, "that they're being killed."

  My mother was too tired these days to stand for hours in the massive crowds that lined up for food. It sometimes seemed it took more time to get our rations than it did to consume them. My father was still at the bakery, and Basia was picking up the baby from his day care--they had officially been disbanded but still operated illegally at many of the Fabriken, including Basia's textile factory. That left me with the job of getting the rations and bringing them back home. At least I had Darija with me to pass the time. "How could they possibly kill a thousand people a day?" I scoffed. "And why would they, if we're working for them for free?"

  Darija leaned closer to me. "Gas chambers," she whispered.

  I rolled my eyes. "I thought I was the fiction writer."

  But even though I believed Darija was telling the wildest tales, there were parts of her story that rang true. Like the fact that now the officials were asking for volunteers and promising a free meal if you went on one of the transports. At the same time, food rations were being cut--as if to persuade anyone who was on the fence about the decision. After all, if you took what Rumkowski said at face value and could get out of this hellhole and fill