Such Good Girls by R. D. Rosen Page A

Scandinavian fable about a bear named Kurol who was king of the forest. The other was called Mr. Thermometer, a poem about a sickly child much like herself. Later her mother would buy her a small walleyed bear with a quizzical expression to keep her and Halinka company, but Zofia barely knew how to play. Tea parties were foreign to her. She knew nothing of nonexistent tea and invisible cakes.
    “What do you think of Halinka’s dress, Bear?” she’d ask, wait a few seconds, then say, “Well, that just shows how much you know about girls’ dresses.”
    “Halinka thinks you’re handsome, Bear,” she’d say, then pause. “Now you say something nice about her… . Yes, go ahead… . That’s very nice of you, Bear. Yes, I think she has beautiful hair, too.”
    The neighbors made sure Laura knew that their furnished apartment had been occupied by Jews before they were deported. Laura lived not among Jews, but among their things. The furniture in their apartment. The sidewalks on which she walked were paved with gravestones from the Jewish cemetery; the dresses the town’s poor Polish Catholic girls wore were made from Jewish prayer shawls.
    Whenever Laura slipped on the icy stone step by the front door, she was convinced that the previous occupants were reprimanding her from their crowded graves.
    Occasionally Zofia would walk around town after school, looking in the gift shop window or the ice cream store, wishing she had a few zlotys. Other times, she’d go to the park, sit under a chestnut tree, and read. One day she saw notices posted in the park that a Pole was going to be executed in the town square the next day. She didn’t think she’d like watching a Pole being killed, so she stayed home. On the following day, she did venture into the square to pay her mother a visit at work in the two-story stone agricultural cooperative. Right there, near the front door, at the base of the front of the building, she saw streaks of blood. More blood had pooled, and dried, between the stones of the sidewalk.
    Zofia stared, trying to summon a mental picture of the event that had left these stains. Next to her, a man shook his head. He wore a brown overcoat that was too big for him and had probably belonged to a bigger, and now dead, man.
    It wasn’t that Zofia had become inured to the apparent cheapness of human life in Poland—she still shuddered at what could happen to her mother or her—but like all children, even in a time of war, little pleasures loomed large, none larger than the treat her mother brought home from work one evening: a Suchard chocolate bar that Herr Leming had given her. Zofia couldn’t recall ever having tasted chocolate, but she must have. Why else would her mouth water at the sight of it? Chocolate, fresh vegetables, and fruit were almost impossible for most ordinary Poles to obtain. When Zofia came down with scurvy from a lack of vitamin C, one of her aunts in Kraków had somehow acquired an orange and sent it to her. But an orange was such a luxury that Laura was able to trade it to a nearby farmer for enough apples to last the entire winter and cure the scurvy. But chocolate? It was in her mother’s hand just inches away, and her eyes grew wide.
    Then, just as her mother was about to give her the candy, she suddenly pulled it back.
    “Mama!” Zofia protested, but not before the candy had already disappeared into an apron pocket.
    Her mother said it might be poisoned.
    Zofia was perplexed. “Poisoned?”
    “You know Herr Leming, the man I work for?” She explained that she didn’t trust him. He was a German and might try to poison them.
    “But why would he poison us?”
    She explained that the Germans hated the Poles almost as much as they hated the Jews.
    This was disturbing news to Zofia. The Jews were detestable, dirty, and worthless. Her teacher had made that clear. Besides, the evidence was everywhere. Why else would some of the streets of Busko be paved with Jewish gravestones? But