The Whore of Solna Street

A Story by Helen Maryles Shankman, author of They Were Like Family to Me

Arno would always remember how it rained that day, the day that the remaining Jews of Krakow moved into the Wlodawa ghetto. Before him, he pushed a cart with his most precious possession, his sewing machine, hidden safely under a canvas tarpaulin, along with a single suitcase of clothing. The rain beat a tattoo on his battered hat, on the tarpaulin, on the deeply rutted road, on the bent backs of the tired exiles.

Surprisingly, Arno felt himself lucky; by now, the others in the long, sad procession had lost parents, children, homes, businesses. fortunes. He, on the other hand, had nothing to lose; he had been orphaned long ago, and had never made enough money to marry.

He was assigned a room in a run-down brick building which must have been grand at some point during the nineteenth century, a ground floor apartment reached by a dark, dank passageway through the courtyard. Down the block, there were blackened pits with stone stairs leading up to nowhere, fireplaces hanging from broken chimneys, relics of the first weeks of the invasion. Still, he was happy; others had to share rooms with strangers. At least he had privacy, a bed, a table, a chest of drawers, a stove. When he walked a little ways past the houses, he could see miles of undulating fields punctuated here and there by stands of trees and the sun shining on the River Bug as it bent along its way between Poland and the Ukraine.

His work papers said he was a tailor. The Jewish Council put him to work under the broad jurisdiction of Willy Reinhart, Commandant of the labor camp, repairing German uniforms. The people who worked for him said he was a fair man, a good German; if the Jews worked hard, they would survive. He had protected them so far.

His parents, when they were alive, had been soft-spoken and hard-working, and their son was no different. Occasionally, in Krakow, a girl would come to him for a wedding dress, or a young man for a suit to be married in. Eyes down, mouth full of pins, he would murmur congratulations, take his measurements, and they would flutter out the front chattering like songbirds, never knowing how much the little tailor envied them their happiness. Times were hard; he could barely afford to pay for his room, food, wood for the stove, let alone a wife.

He was in Wlodawa barely a month when the matchmaker came to him with a shiddoch, a match. Such a pretty girl, she said. Kind-hearted as the day is long. As cheerful as a little bird, always going about her chores with a song. A beautiful figure. And such a cook! But why had the matchmaker come to him instead of one of the other men in town, he wanted to know. Because her last husband had divorced her, the matchmaker answered him with a shrug. It’s a small town. You know how people are.

Upon meeting her for the first time, over weak tea at the matchmaker’s house, his heart thrummed with joy. The matchmaker had not exaggerated a single feature; if anything, she had neglected to do her client justice. Dora, that was her name, had a head of dark blonde curls and big brown eyes of a shade which could rightly be called gold. Her skin was an indescribable blend of cream and bronze that had almost the sheen of the satin he used to use back in the days when he still made bridal gowns.

He dared a timid smile. When she smiled back, deep dimples appeared in each of her pink cheeks. The merry eyes tipped up at the corners like a cat’s.

Stumbling over his own words, he suggested a walk. To his escalating delight, she accepted, and they dawdled together, side by side, down the path out of town towards the grassy banks of the Bug River. When they could just see the spires of the Roman Catholic basilica poking up above a copse of trees in the distance, she reached for his hand. Arno took her face in his shaking hands, and like a man starved for food, kissed the teasing pink lips. Right there, in broad daylight, under the spreading boughs of a weeping willow tree, she put his hand on her breast.

For hours, they lay down in the long grass by the edge of the peaceful Bug, watching the water eddy lazily past their feet, his fingers cupping her round and perfect breast, feeling her heart beat, her every breath. The little tailor thought he would expire from happiness.

They were married a week later in the Rabbi’s study. There were no guests. Two of the Rabbi’s sons served as witnesses. Afterwards, the matchmaker produced a small reception, with sweet wine and cookies made with real sugar. The young couple — well, they could hardly be called young, she was in her twenties and he was already in his thirties — walked hand in hand to their new home together before the evening curfew.

At the doorway of his poor apartment, he hesitated. Suddenly, he remembered he had so little to give her. Well, what could he do; the deed was already done. They would have to make the best of it. He hoped she wouldn’t be too disappointed. He bent down, and in a romantic gesture that surprised even himself, he lifted her into his arms and carried her over the threshold.

Once inside, he set her back down onto her feet, a little embarrassed at his own show of chivalry. She stood in the middle of the room surveying the tenement that was to be her new home. Anxiously, he followed her gaze to the chipped porcelain sink, the pieces of china that did not match, the scratched dresser from a previous owner, the wobbling chair, the table with one leg shorter than the others. One by one, she took in the sights, running her small, white fingers over each flawed object with evident delight; and then she turned to him.

“And the bed?” was all she said.

He drew back the curtain that ran down the middle of the room to reveal its one real treasure, an antique four-poster bed.

His fingers trembled as he unhooked the tiny buttons that went all the way down the back of her borrowed dress, the silk tanned with age. From what he had learned in yeshiva, he knew that women were timid, delicate things, subsuming their finer instincts to the brainless, ravaging desires of men.

But not Dora. Dora was a revelation. She threw him back on the bed and peeled off his clothes using both hands and teeth, exploring every part of him with her mouth, her fingers, her tongue. Shocking him, delighting him, doing things he imagined only prostitutes did in the squalid back rooms of big cities like Paris and Warsaw, he came with explosive rapturous pleasure again and again, and so did she. Later that night, as she fell asleep in the circle of his arms, her round cheek resting over his heart, his soul expanded with a love he never thought he would be privileged to know, and though they occupied but a poor room in a dilapidated apartment in a small town at the farthest razor’s edge of Hitler’s Europe, he thought himself the luckiest man in the world.

“Hammer, Arno, master tailor,” Reinhart read aloud from his work papers, in that hearty, reassuring voice of his. “Good! It happens we are in need of a tailor.”

He clapped Arno on the back, congratulating him on his new marriage. Upon meeting Dora, something in his eyes flared, then banked. Though it was widely known that the Kommandant had a weakness for pretty girls–it was no secret that he kept a mistress in his castle at Adampol–it would be unseemly for the Reich Commissioner for the Collection and Distribution of Agricultural Products to be seen lusting after a Jew.

Though Arno would have been ashamed to admit it, what with the war going on, young men dying, the Jewish people persecuted, whole families disappearing every day, his own life was a model of perfection. Dora washed and cooked and cleaned and fussed over small things while he sewed and pressed German uniforms. In the evenings, he read aloud to her from books and newspapers while she tidied up after dinner.

But it was at marketing that she truly exceeded all expectations. Other Jews in the ghetto might subsist on rotten potatoes and boiled water, but not Arno. Daily, Dora sallied forth into the streets armed with little more than a basket on her arm and an old knickknack with which to barter, but time after time she returned with items of unimaginable luxury; a bar of scented soap, oranges, real coffee.

She did, in fact, sing like a bird. His foot on the treadle of the sewing machine would slow to a stop, and he would sit there staring dreamily into space, his heart swelling with love, as his little wife hummed snatches of popular tunes over the clink of dishes in the sink. She would break into the overture from Carmen as she ran a damp towel around the dusty moldings, trill the tango as she went down on her adorable knees to banish dirt from the hidden corners of the room.

There seemed to be no bottom to her passion. Nothing in his humble upbringing prepared him for this. They made love every night and every morning, excepting the time during the month when they were forbidden to each other. Sometimes she even came to him in the height of the day, curling herself around him from behind as he pedaled furiously away at the sewing machine, her sweet, tapering fingers drawing circles on his back, walking their leisurely way down his chest and abdomen until they disappeared beneath the sheath of his trousers. Whenever this happened, the German uniforms just had to wait. Along with the laws governing the Sabbath and kashrut, the Rabbis had taught Arno that a man must satisfy his wife, a commandment he was happy to oblige.

As he tramped through the streets of the ghetto, he sensed people were looking at him differently. Certainly there was something changed about him. No longer was he merely a poor tailor; he was a poor tailor with a beautiful and desirable wife. He thought he attracted their envy as he had once attracted their pity.

So carried away was he with his happiness, that he even mentioned children to her, as a kind of dream for the future. A dream it was, too, in a town still recovering from the horrors of the Kinderaktzia three months earlier, when the Germans took the children away.

He had expected her to be thrilled; women loved babies, everyone knew that, but to his surprise, she had given him a tight, perfunctory smile. He let it drop. She was wiser than him, he thought. Perhaps the future was too much to hope for. They would have to settle for right now.

In October, a man stopped to stare at him as he loaded up the wagon that came once a week for the mended uniforms. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk on the other side of the street, wearing an imported overcoat, a good felt hat, a tie. His haircut looked like it had recently seen a barber; it was smartly cut, slicked back with pomade. His shoes, black wing-tip oxfords, were polished to a high shine. Arno would have pegged him as Gestapo, had it not been for the white schadenband with the Jewish star on his arm.

Curious, Arno met his gaze, and the man averted his eyes and continued on his way. Suddenly, he realized. He had been looking at Dora.

She was just returning from her marketing. The stiff breeze put points of red in her cheeks, her dark golden curls fell around her pretty head in lovely disarray, like after love.

“Who was that?” he said to her.

She had been caught off-guard; now she was smiling at him, the dimples disarming him, deepening in her cheeks. “No one,” she said. “Maybe he has me confused with someone else.”

“He seemed to know you,” he persisted.

She pushed an errant lock of hair behind one ear, as perfect as a seashell, a gesture as fetching as it was distracting. “Look what I got you,” she said breathlessly, uncovering her basket.

Arno looked down. The basket held a pair of men’s oxfords. He took them from her, turned them so they caught the light. They were polished to a high shine. He put his arm around his wife’s waist and guided her back into the courtyard of the building.

That night, after a particularly impassioned session of lovemaking, Arno watched Dora sleep. Almost with detachment, he noted the way her pretty pink lips were nearly smiling, the way the long, feathery lashes lay on her full, round cheek. For all that he loved her, he barely knew her. Her parents had died young, she had made a bad marriage. Was there more to it than that?

Stirring in her sleep, she threw one golden thigh over his hip, nuzzled into the hollow of his thin chest like a baby animal looking for warmth.

With this one unconscious gesture, Arno felt ashamed of himself. How someone like him, without looks, without money, without connections, had ended up with such an exotic creature as this was a miracle. Suddenly, he felt a great tenderness towards his little wife. Perhaps the man in the street was someone from her unlucky past, so what. Perhaps suspicion was the lot of all plain men married to women more attractive than themselves. Besides, he reprimanded himself, what fallen woman could enjoy such guiltless slumber?

She sighed. He couldn’t resist the pink lips, even in sleep, and when he kissed them, the whiskey-colored eyes cracked open, and she smiled, moving her body closer to his to find him already rigid down there. And then the things she did with her hands, and the things she did with her mouth, banished all such suspicions from his mind, at least until the end of the night.

In the days that followed, Arno noticed that people were staring at him everywhere he went. In the bais medrash, when he went out to pray. At the newspaper kiosk, while he fished in his pocket for zlotys to pay for his Gazeta. In the line at the tobacconist’s. Among the bolts of fabric, when he went to buy thread. A group of women huddled on a street corner fell silent as he passed, waiting until he was halfway across the avenue before plunging into a furious babble of gossip. One man had the gall to point at him as he whispered something into his companion’s ear.

But he had no real evidence until a week later. It was October, the nights were growing longer, the weather, colder. Though it was already twilight, Dora had not returned home from an errand commenced in the early afternoon. Arno had been living in Hitler’s Poland for too long not to have heard similar stories of men and women who went out on an errand and never came back. Fearing the worst, he put on his coat and went out into the blue evening.

In the market square, the farmers and merchants were packing their goods into baskets and crates and piling them onto the backs of wagons. Street lights were coming on, shadows were long. That was when he saw Dora emerge from a strange doorway, patting her hair back into place. Faint with relief, he hastened his step, eager to catch up to her. But then a man emerged from the same doorway, adjusting his trousers as he walked in the opposite direction.

Could it be a coincidence? The man leaned forward, hurrying, his hat pulled low over his face. At the end of the block, he made a swift right, heading towards the better houses. For just a moment, the streetlamp illuminated his features, and then he passed beyond its reach. Arno realized that he knew him; it was Tendler, who used to be in the stock market. The little tailor felt his legs sagging from beneath him. Feeling faint, he grabbed for support at the wrought iron banister at the foot of a public building.

On the steps of the town hall, a group of German officers loitered, waiting for someone in the building. Their car idled at the bottom of the steps.

“Some piece of ass,” Arno heard one say.

“Mm, mm, mm. Look at the rack on her. Too bad she’s a Jew whore.” replied his friend.

“How can that be? She’s blonde.”

“Some of them are blonde. You should have seen the ones back home in Hamburg. Go on, talk to her. She’s willing.”

The first officer was incredulous. “You must be kidding. A Jew?”

“Don’t be such a pussy. It’s Dora. The whore of Solna Street. Half the men in town have had her.” He dropped his voice, looked craftily up and down the street before confiding, “I’ll bet even Reinhart’s had her.”

With that, they both chuckled quietly. Finally, they noticed Arno lingering near the bottom of the steps. Nonchalantly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do, the officer drew his gun and pointed it at the little tailor. The bullet zinged harmlessly off of the cobblestones behind him.

“Get out of here,” he yelled to him, without rancor. “My aim gets better after curfew.”

His brain on fire with the words he had heard, Arno stumbled through the streets of Wlodawa. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. She loved him, he told himself, she loved him with all her body and all her heart, and sometimes her lips, and sometimes her fingers, and sometimes her tongue, and sometimes between her breasts, and sometimes the cleft of her ass, and sometimes on top, and sometimes on her knees, and sometimes five times in a single day. Arno was bereft, as if someone had offered him the answer to every last prayer he had ever made, only to find it snatched away at the last instant.

He found the rabbi who had married them, just as he was sitting down to his poor dinner of blackened potatoes. When he heard why the tailor was there, the rabbi deflated a little, like a balloon that was running out of air. Yes, of course he knew about Dora. The girl was his niece, the daughter of his brother. The baker in the town of Turno, he had died years ago, in a tragic exploding oven incident; a brand new brick oven hadn’t cured properly before he’d lit it up for the first time. His wife remarried within the year, (who could blame her, times were hard), to a rough man who abused the poor girl. To protect her, she said, the mother sent her away; from then on, she was passed from relative to relative, like a game of hot potato. One cousin sent her away when she found her oldest son making time with Dora in the back room instead of fixing watches in the shop; another kicked her out after her husband whispered words of love to his young cousin in his sleep, words he had never spoken to his own wife. The next relation was a farmer, a widower with a teen-age son. Dora had been there for almost a year when the son stabbed the father with a pitchfork over her affections.

The stories circulated through the Jewish world, making the rounds of the many little towns in the Lublinskie district. Eventually, the stories made it back to Wlodawa.

The Rabbi sent for his brother’s daughter as soon as he heard. He didn’t know what to expect; the stories made her sound like the worst sort of low person. He was surprised to find instead a lovely young lady of sixteen, beautiful, kind, eager to please. Perhaps the young men in the stories had taken advantage of the girl. Perhaps the details had been invented, or exaggerated, fabricated to disguise the meanness of families who had only reluctantly taken her in. The only blemish he could detect was a lack of learning; no one had thought to send her to school.

As quickly as he could, the Rabbi found her a husband, a young man with the right sort of background, the kind that wouldn’t ask too many questions. A poor yeshiva student would be grateful for a flawed jewel like Dora. He performed the ceremony himself.

But it wasn’t long before the boy paid him a private visit, his wisp of a beard quivering with indignation. She wasn’t a suitable wife, he said. The Rabbi had ruminated on this for a while. Did she spend the day gossiping, complaining, lying around? No, the young man answered glumly, their room was as clean as could be. Was she a bad cook, then? No, no one could hold a candle to Dora when it came to cooking, it was like she was a witch, she could take stones and make them delicious. Was she ignoring him, denying her wifely duties? The yeshiva student replied, averting his eyes, that she was all a man could ask for in that department and more. That was part of the problem.

This was when the Rabbi heard about Dora’s appetites, her secret rendezvous with other men. Like the children’s rhyme, she began with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. The list would eventually expand to include tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man…she had yet to fulfill the final vocations in the verse.

For the next month, the yeshiva boy spied on her behind stables and shuttered storefronts, watching in fascinated horror as she performed eye-poppingly adulterous acts in every possible position, getting an education he never would have found in his holy books. The boy had an explanation for his bride’s behavior; she was possessed by a dybbuk. He even thought he knew whose dybbuk it might be; the prostitute Goldie Gold had been found dead in a field last September, around the same time that Dora arrived in Wlodawa. Coincidence? He didn’t think so. No, the boy didn’t want an exorcism; he wanted a divorce.

The Rabbi brought Dora in, confronted her with her husband’s accusations. Why, he wanted to know. His voice was harsh. Was it maliciousness? Ingratitude? Boredom? Was it for money?

Dora raised miserable eyes to him, the long lashes clumped with tears, liquid pools of gold. No, of course not. It wasn’t any of those things. She meant no harm to anyone with her generous acts of love. The explanation was simpler than that; if someone was kind to her, she wanted to make them happy. How could she say no?

A dybbuk is a doomed, wandering spirit that torments the living into strange, inexplicable behavior. The Rabbi went so far as to look up exorcism in one of the mystical texts. He would have to assemble ten men in a circle around her, recite Psalm 91 three times, blow a shofar, then pray for the dybbuk to leave.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flies by day;

Nor for pestilence that prowls in the darkness; nor for the destruction that ravages at noon…

…For you said, “The Lord is your refuge,” the Most High, you made your home;

There shall no evil befall you, neither shall any plague come near your tent.

The Rabbi let his eyes fall upon the girl’s voluptuous curves, knowing that if he were a dybbuk, it would take more than ten men, a psalm, and a shofar to make him leave Dora’s delectable body. Nor could he imagine anything in Dora’s love to be a pestilence, or evil, or a plague. And because he was a modern man, who read a great many books, among them the works of Sigmund Freud, he reflected on the kind of childhood Dora must have had, one that might have generated in her a desperate desire to please whoever was in front of her at whatever the cost, and to find happiness wherever she could, among impoverished relations who might provide her with food and a roof over her head, but not that most basic of human needs, love.

The Rabbi saw in Arno a last chance for his dear, damaged niece. He had erred in pairing her up with a local boy, he saw that now; a man like Arno, from the big city, might understand that Dora was not possessed by a demon, but by the past. That there were diseases of the spirit that could be cured in time, given enough patience, enough love.

The Rabbi pulled himself upright, became professional. The marriage was a mechach tos, invalid due to trickery or concealed information. By Jewish law, he didn’t even require a get, a divorce. He could walk out of the apartment a free man. What did he want to do?

Arno was hunched over, shaking his head, clutching at the strands of his thin brown hair. Before Dora, life had been an arid plain of duty and obligation, but at least his heart had been safe.

He thanked the Rabbi for his time, rose from the table. The Rabbi’s wife saw him out. “Poor girl, growing up like that,” she murmured under her breath as she clicked the door shut. “Her only vice is that she loves too much.”

Arno trudged through the muddy streets, barely lifting his feet from the cobblestones. It was after curfew; he could be killed for the crime of being outside after dark. He didn’t care; if a Nazi bullet found him, at least he would be delivered from this heartache. He should just turn around, disappear, never come back, he told himself. But his feet seemed to have a mind of their own, crossing the courtyard, slogging through the passageway. When he lifted his fist to knock, it felt like there was a great weight attached to the end of his arm.

Footsteps, and then the door swung open. The bed was made, the floor was swept, the table was set for two, there was a fire in the grate, and a pot bubbled away on the tiled stove. Something smelled wonderful, something he couldn’t immediately identify.

Dora’s angel face gleamed up at him, her blonde curls tied fetchingly back in a bun. “Look at what I have for you!” she crowed, pulling him by the hand into the apartment. “Now close your eyes.” Reluctantly, he allowed himself to be towed forward. All the way over, he had been gathering up the courage to tell her to get out.

She made him stand over the stove. There was a clash like the sound of cymbals as she lifted the lid off of the pot. Freed, the smell that burst forth into the atmosphere swirled up through his nostrils, dazzling his olfactory senses, addling his brain, conjuring up wild visions.

It was the smell of family gatherings, the smell of a thousand Friday afternoons long past and now gone forever, of a thousand Jewish mothers in a thousand Jewish villages preparing for the Sabbath, the day of rest. It was the smell of home.

“Chicken soup?” he said incredulously. “Where did you find a chicken?”

Laughing with joy, she kissed him on the nose. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said gleefully. The curls bounced and shimmered when she shook her head. “A girl has to have some secrets!”

Not even the Poles had chickens, the Germans had confiscated them all. Together, the tailor and his wife ate the soup down to the last drop, and then they devoured the flesh and sucked on the bones. Afterwards, Dora pulled him down onto the bed, where for the next several hours, to his immense surprise, she surpassed even her own greatest feats of skill up until that date, at least as far as he knew.

The Aktzia started around midnight. German soldiers came knocking on the doors of the ghetto with axes, crowbars and rifle butts. The air was wrenched by the sounds of girls screaming and the laughing of soldiers, as the market square filled up with Jews.

Arno was up with the first gunshots. He worked for Reinhart, he thought they would be safe. Still, they had to wait in the square all night as the Gestapo checked papers.

All the Nazi bigshots were there. Falkner, head of the drainage project. Rohlfe, head of the Gestapo. Reinhart, commandant of the Adampol labor camp. All around the square, Arno could hear gunshots, the cries of women, breaking glass. The SS men were chatting about a hunting party Reinhart was planning for important visitors from Berlin. Behind them was a cordoned-off area containing a small group of Jews. Of these, Arno recognized only Soroka the saddlemaker and his family. For some idiotic reason, he remembered that the oldest daughter raised rabbits.

Rohlfe’s dog was lunging and snapping at his ankles. “I know you,” said Reinhart as he inspected Arno’s papers. “The tailor with the pretty wife.”

Dora positively twinkled. Her cheeks were round and rosy, her dimples deep and winsome. Arno wondered when she had found the time to apply lipstick. Reinhart’s eyes flicked covetously over her voluptuous figure, and then he smiled back at her. Oh, no, not you too, Arno thought with despair.

“This one belongs to me,” Reinhart told Rohlfe. A soldier with a clipboard made notes. He turned back to Arno. “Go home,” he said, his big voice as reassuring as a warm blanket. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow is another day.”

There was a loud crack. Even Reinhart jumped. Behind them, Rohlfe was standing over a boy, not yet sixteen, fallen on the cobblestones. With horror, Arno recognized him; the Rabbi’s son, who had been a witness at their wedding. The boy’s hands covered his chest, as if he was protecting something delicate under his shirt. As they watched, Rohlfe leaned over, put his pistol to his head.

Reinhart lowered his voice, spoke rapidly. “For God’s sake, don’t come back to work,” he said passionately. “You understand, tailor? Don’t even go home. Find a hole to hide in until all this is over.”

Falkner was staring at him. Reinhart straightened back up. “Nothing to worry about,” he said heartily, for the benefit of the others. “It’s just another transport. The Reich needs good workers. Everything is going to be just fine.”

The room had concrete walls that sweated when it rained. It was about fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long, and forty-five people were living inside it. There was a shower, made from a car radiator, and a real toilet, a miracle of engineering that drained to the outside. It was through this hole that air flowed into the room, fouled by the smell of the latrine. By day, a dim, yellow light was emitted by a bare bulb hanging limply from the center of the ceiling.

Outside, snow lay along the boughs of the fir trees, but inside the bunker it was so warm that no one could bear to wear clothes; the inmates sat on their hard wooden bunks in their underwear.

It was Lemberg who had first come up with the notion of building a bunker. His brother-in-law, Rosen, from the shipping family, had offered his cook’s brother a fortune to allow them to do the necessary construction under his house. The plan wasn’t without its risks; a Pole could be killed for hiding Jews. Ivan would have to organize food for forty-three people without arousing unwanted attention.

Dr. Siegel was there, the renowned heart doctor, and Loeb, the lawyer. Rubin, whose company manufactured light bulbs before it was seized by the Germans. Jelinski, the jeweler. Adler, who had a big factory that made men’s shirts. Domsky, who had made a killing trading in gold. Tendler, whom Arno had seen hurrying away down the street.

The men in the bunker all knew each other; until recently, they had formed the body of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council manipulated by the Nazis. They had money and blood ties and polish and business connections, they had lived near each other in the elegant homes on the square, they married their children off to one another, they had seats together in the best section in shul, they were educated and sophisticated and wealthy and worldly, everything Arno and Dora were not.

Arno sat in his underwear on the wooden bunk he shared with Dora and tried to read an old newspaper. He talked to no one, and no one talked to him. Officially, the men turned their backs on the couple, although Arno often caught them ogling his wife, smiling at her in a friendly way that made him feel a little sick.

Even here, in a subterranean vault buried five feet under a two-room wooden hut, there were class distinctions. The other side was the good side — where the families were, where mothers made their children eat meals at regular times, reminded them of their manners, tried to teach them letters and sums from schoolbooks they had brought along with them. Two of them were even continuing with their music lessons.

It was at night that the difference between the sides became apparent. When the lights blinked out, adolescent boys came stealing over for passionate fumbled encounters with secret girlfriends, married men came sniffing around for a little dalliance. In the hothouse atmosphere of the bunker, life’s most urgent needs pressed on.

After the Aktzia, Arno had hovered among the piles of German uniforms, watching Dora pack.

“Where are you going?” he said disconsolately. “We have no money. We don’t know anybody.”

In answer, she had snapped the suitcase closed, dabbed on perfume, and adjusted her little hat in the mirror, tilting it just so. Then she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. He could feel her heart beating against him under the cloth of her coat. Her eyes glowed at him, back-lit like a cat’s, in the yellow light from the single bulb.

“Do you trust me,” she breathed, slipping her hand under his jacket to rest on his chest.

Before daybreak, he found himself following her through deserted streets to the non-Jewish side of town. Here the houses were built in the traditional Polish style, one-story wooden cottages with slanted roofs, kitchen gardens white with frost. Dora went behind one of them, knocked softly on a red door painted with a bright geometric pattern. A tall Pole with a prominent Adam’s apple opened the door just enough to allow Arno a glimpse of hairy, well-developed chest under his robe.

The Pole brightened when he saw who it was, embraced her enthusiastically on both cheeks. Arno thought miserably, is there any man in town who doesn’t know my wife?

He led Dora through the house to the kitchen, sparing not even a glance for her husband. He pried up a section of the parquet floor, then used a hand broom to sweep away a couple of inches of soil. Under the soil was a trapdoor. When he flashed his flashlight into the hole, forty-three pairs of eyes shone back at them in the darkness. Dora and Arno climbed down a set of raw wooden stairs into the vault.

Any other man would have been elated. Arno had wondered how would they pay for it all.

That night they slept in their clothes, curled around each other like a pair of kittens. Dora made love to him in four different ways before she finally came; he had to hold his hand over her mouth to staunch her cries. He didn’t know who might be listening, in the hot, impenetrable darkness of the bunker.

The bell rang, scattering Arno’s thoughts. The trapdoor thumped open. Ivan came downstairs into the bunker, carrying two baskets.

To Rosen, he said, “Look what I’ve got for you!” Ivan whipped away the cloth covering the basket, revealing a chocolate cake. Arno couldn’t believe such a thing still existed. The last time he had seen anything resembling a chocolate cake, it had been 1939. Ivan might as well have uncovered a basket full of fairies.

Rosen, whose girth suggested that a few weeks without sweets might do him some good, inhaled the fragrance like it was perfume. “Ah, Vashka. You always know just what I want, even before I do.”

He stopped at the Tendler’s next. “I told you so,” said Ivan jovially as Tendler’s skinny wife clapped her hands together with excitement. “Maybe you won’t doubt me next time. You wanted a hazelnut torte? I got you a hazelnut torte. What Vashka wants, Vashka gets.” From a suitcase she kept under the bunk, Mrs. Tendler handed something to Ivan that glistened in the yellow light. The Pole pocketed it with a smile. A bracelet, Arno thought, or a pair of earrings. Personally, he thought Ivan was reckless, throwing around money like that. There were too many poor villagers who might guess how he could afford to buy chocolate cakes and hazelnut tortes on a factory worker’s salary.

Ivan had a habit of running his fingers through his long blond hair, and he was doing it now, carelessly smoothing his forelock back from his handsome face. Arno’s heart sank. He was making his way over to their side of the bunker.

For a moment he stood before them, gazing hungrily at Dora where she lay on the bunk, her lovely body more enhanced than concealed by her bra and panties.

“What do you want,” Arno said.

“Hey, Hammer,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”

Arno didn’t reply. Dora put down the magazine she was looking at and smiled. Ivan gave her a certain lingering look. Arno’s hands curled into fists as he watched his wife follow their Polish keeper back up the stairs, keeping watch over her lovely bottom until it vanished into the gloom above.

It would be hours before she returned. Aimlessly, the tailor wandered over to the other side, where the men sat playing chess. As long as no one noticed, he could pretend that he belonged.

It was a heated match, Tendler against Kaplan. Kaplan was the better player; Tendler had already lost most of his pawns, his rook and his queen, on risky forays into Kaplan’s territory. Frowning at the board, Tendler noticed him standing there.

“What are you doing here, Hammer?” he said, removing a cigarette from his lips. “Looking for your wife? Maybe she’s under here.” He picked up the king, then the bishop, while the rest of the men broke into laughter. “No? Well, maybe she’s under the Queen.”

Humiliated, Arno stumbled back to his bunk. Even after he clapped his hands over his ears, he could still hear Tendler’s voice calling after him, ringing off the walls. “Check in the shower! I think I saw her in there with Jelinski’s oldest son. He was going to show her how to blow on his flute!”

It was three more hours before the trapdoor swung open again, bringing Dora swaying back down the stairs. Ivan followed close behind, strutting like a peacock, wearing a smirky grin and looking much refreshed. The Russians were giving it to the Germans in Stalingrad, he announced cheerfully. They were hacking them to pieces. It wouldn’t be long now.

Dora slipped into the shower. Arno hunched further into the shadows, but Ivan spotted him anyway, and shambled over to join him where he sat slumped on his bunk. As if anyone needed further proof that God had a sense of humor, his wife’s lover reserved a special affection for the man he was cuckolding. The Pole was the only person in the entire bunker who sought out his company.

“You know why we’re late?” he said, drawing a packet of Caros from his trousers. “I told her I lost a button on my jacket. She wanted to fix it herself.” He flopped down on the bed, tapping a cigarette on the wooden pallet to settle the tobacco. “Incredible woman, Arno. Incredible. It’s like she’s two women. The one in the bedroom, and this…this…baleboosta.” he said, using an old Jewish word that indicated a housewife of superior abilities. He lit a cigarette for himself, offered one to Arno, who refused. He made a face. “God, how do you stand the smell down here?” he said.

“Not much of a choice, is there.”

Ivan leaned back on the bed, crossing his arms behind his head. “Hell of a battle in the forests the other day,” he offered, adding a stream of blue smoke into the already ripe atmosphere. “An ambush. Killed a lot of Germans. They’re pretending to be furious, but really, they’re terrified. I was there yesterday, I saw what was left of them. Just pieces. People are saying it was partizans. You know what I think?” he said confidentially, leaning closer.

Arno grimaced; he could smell Dora’s perfume on him. He wished Ivan would go away.

“I think it was spirits. The earth is saturated with blood. The land itself is fighting back.”

He studied the pattern the smoke made in the thick hot air. “Ever think about joining the partizans, Arno?” he said carelessly. “That’s what I would do, if I were you. Live in the forest, fighting the Nazis…die like a man. I wouldn’t wait for them, cooped up down here in this coffin.”

Once again, Arno found himself speculating on why Ivan had agreed to Rosen’s plan. Wlodawa was a small town, people talked just to pass the time, or lied to the Gestapo to avenge old feuds. If he was suspected of hiding Jews, the Germans would torture him, then kill him. Before the war, Ivan had been an Uhlan, one of Poland’s legendary cavalrymen, with a horse, a dashing uniform, and a lance. He was captured on the very first day of the invasion. By the time he was released, Poland belonged to Germany. Perhaps, in his way, he was still fighting the Germans. That would have some appeal for a daredevil like Ivan. Then again, perhaps it was for the sheer hellish thrill of it.

Ivan was pondering the people on the other side of the bunker. “With all the starvation in the ghetto, how did they get so fat?”

“They were the Judenrat,” said Arno. “People paid them to get off the transportation rolls. They never starved.”

Unfolding his lean, athlete’s body, Ivan climbed to his feet. He cast a final yearning glance towards the shower, but Dora refused to reappear. “Well, I’m off,” he said. “See you tomorrow, Arno. Say goodbye to Dorushka for me, will you?”

He slouched off towards the narrow stairs, the pet nickname leaving a bitter taste in Arno’s mouth. Before he could mount the first step, Dr. Siegel stopped him, slipping something into his hand. His wife’s birthday, tomorrow, Arno heard him say. Something special please.

With the sound of the trapdoor slapping shut, Dora emerged from the makeshift shower stall, wrapped in a kimono, a gift from Ivan. “He’s gone?” she said. Arno nodded assent. She came to sit beside him, rubbing a towel through her curls to dry them. The simple intimate gesture tore at Arno’s heart. His head drooped. She put the towel down, took his hands in hers. They lay limp and lifeless in her lap.

“Close your eyes,” she said. Obediently, he did. Something cold was placed upon his thighs. “Go on, look!” she urged him excitedly.

A mound of sausage lay coiled on the plate on his lap. “Where did you get it?” he asked miserably.

“Ivan,” she said. “He really likes you, you know,” she added, an additional strike at his heart. Ivan liked him because he didn’t consider him a threat.

He pushed it slowly away. “It’s for you.”

She pushed it back. “I already ate.” The yellow tiger eyes begged him. “Please Arno. Have some. For me.”

All right then, for Dora. Though he had no appetite, Arno forced himself to take a bite of kielbasa. It made a hard lump in his throat as it went down.

She watched him eat. He would have been surprised to know that she could describe in detail the exact hazel coloring of his eyes, the irises a soft, mossy green that reminded her of the Bug River, with an inner rim around the pupils like grains of brown sugar. Had she been raised in a home where people spoke of such things, she would have told him that the kindness in his gentle, worried face meant more to her than a pair of wide shoulders and narrow hips. A little schooling might have given her the vocabulary to express how she shared his hopes and fears, much as being raised by loving parents would have given her the confidence to say how very dearly she loved him, and that the things she did, she did for them both.

“Are you very unhappy with me, Dora?” he said quietly.

She hated to see the beautiful eyes grieve. She knew only one way certain to make a man happy. The silky robe slipped down her shoulders.

He felt himself react, as he did every time he saw her naked. As the war wore on, other women grew pale and starved-looking, drained of color and vitality. But Dora was more desirable than ever, the globes of her breasts high and firm and round, her curves like the shape of a cello, with the fingerprints of another man all over her body.

She took his hand and placed it on her breast. He couldn’t help himself. She closed her eyes and shuddered as he brushed his thumb over the nipple.

“Are you a dybbuk?” he breathed in despair as she pushed him onto the bed.

“Shhh,” she said, covering his mouth with her lips, pulling him deeper into the shadows of the bunker.

The next day, the Loeb’s three year old daughter came down with a fever. Red spots appeared on her abdomen, like insect bites. Each cough shook the hot little body the way a dog shakes a rat. She cried and cried, a high, tired sound that set tempers on edge. The inmates eyed each other warily. The wails of crying children had brought the Gestapo down on too many bunkers. Ivan was quickly dispatched to locate a friendly doctor.

The little girl had typhus, he said. It was unavoidable, it happened anytime people lived in close quarters, with rats or lice, as they had in the ghetto. The doctor, an old-world type with gray hair and a little pointed beard, gave her an injection and told them to pray.

To everyone’s relief, she improved. A few days later, Ivan shimmied down the stairs with an important announcement. From somewhere, the doctor had obtained a sizeable quantity of typhus vaccine. For the right price, he had agreed to inoculate everyone in the bunker. Personally, Ivan thought it was a good idea. They lived in dangerous times; one sick person coughing could give them all away.

The wealthy Jews on the other side all agreed. Everyone would receive a needle, even the ones who couldn’t afford it. Ivan went back upstairs, the men went back to their game of cards.

The trapdoor boomed open again, admitting Dora. Along with the other men, Arno watched his wife’s sculpted bottom swing slowly down the stairs.

Instead of going into the shower, as she normally did, she came to stand over him where he sat on the bunk. Arno gave her a timorous smile. “Are you hungry?” he asked cautiously. “I saved you some barley soup…of course, you’ve probably already eaten…”

Something was wrong. For the first time since he had known her, Dora looked sallow, the color frayed from her cheeks. When he grasped her hands, he gasped; her fingers were deathly cold.

Like an arrow, his thoughts flew to the worst possible scenario; she was carrying Ivan’s baby. “What is it, darling?” he said gently. “Whatever it is…I’ll try to help.”

“They’re going to kill us, Arno,” she whispered.

She’d been upstairs with Ivan when she heard the sound of a car’s brakes in front of the house, she said. It was followed by footsteps, and the dreaded knock at the door. Hopping into his clothes, Ivan told her to stay quiet, then locked her into the bedroom. Something, intuition, or a sense of self-preservation, awoke her curiosity, drove her out of his bed and across the room. She pressed her ear against the plain wooden planks of the door, trying to make out what was being said.

Arno winced away from the cruel words, the blunt acknowledgement that his wife was sleeping with another man, but she gripped his wrists, forced him to listen.

“…bags of money,” she heard Ivan say. “I’ve seen it. Money and gold and jewelry and diamonds. Whole suitcases full of it.”

She recognized the cultured voice of the doctor. “Of course I can do it. We’ll tell them I’m giving them vaccinations against typhus. But what will you do with all the corpses?”

“What corpses?” said Ivan breezily. “They’re in a vault under the ground. I’ll shut the trapdoor and walk away. It’ll be like they never existed.”

Dora’s heart was beating so loudly she was sure they would hear it through the door. There was some haggling about how they would split the proceeds, a toast to their future success, and then she heard the doctor leave. When Ivan came back into the bedroom, he was flushed and tipsy. That had been two hours ago.

“How long do we have?” said Arno.

“I don’t know,” she said.

The tailor looked into his wife’s face, the bowed angel lips, the golden eyes. He cupped his hand around her soft, round cheek. “What if we just leave,” he murmured. “Tell him we want to take our chances in the forest. No one cares about us. We don’t have any money in our suitcase.”

Dora shifted her gaze to the people on the other side of the room, the men with their backs to them, the mothers who would have nothing to do with her. For some reason, he was visited with a preposterous vision of the spa in Rapkha, where his parents had taken him when he was a child, the inmates in their underwear reminding him of the men in their bathing trunks playing cards around the swimming pool.

The champagne-colored curls quivered around her face like a halo. “Of course we have to tell them,” she said.

“It can’t be,” said Rosen, shaking his bald head. “It can’t be.” He sagged heavily onto the bunk, perspiring. In his underpants, he looked like an enormous infant in an oversized diaper.

“It’s true,” said Arno. “Dora was in the next room. She heard them talking.”

Dr. Siegel, fanning himself, looked sick. Loeb, who had successfully argued his clients’ innocence in the most important court cases in the country, stood motionless in his boxer shorts, helplessly clenching and unclenching his fists.

“What if we just offer him more money?” suggested Domsky.

“How can we trust him after this?” Adler interjected. “He might agree and poison us some other time. It would be so easy.”

There was a babble of confusion. In the close confinement of the underground room, forty-five Jews had forty-five different opinions. Tendler’s skinny wife was the loudest, her shrill voice cutting through the humidity and the cigarette smoke. Ivan had done so much for them, Ivan was risking his life for them, Ivan was their friend. Why should they believe the word of that whore?

They were interrupted by a sound from above, thump thump thump. Ivan was stomping on the floor to warn them that they were making too much noise. In the heat and the stink, a strange, defeated silence descended over the inmates of the bunker.

Strangely, it was Tendler who came to their defense. Tendler, who had made a fortune on the stock market, Tendler who had slept with his wife, Tendler, who never missed an opportunity to needle Arno, leveled one look at Dora, told his wife to shut up, and started to organize.

They had no weapons, so they would have to use whatever they could find. Sacks and suitcases came sliding out of hiding places under the bunks. The last Jews of Wlodawa dressed for battle, secreting jeweled letter openers and ornate silver forks in their pockets and sleeves. Men who shaved stropped their razors. Arno gripped his shears. Even Jelinski’s ten-year-old son clutched a little pocketknife with a mother-of-pearl handle.

The plan was to overcome Ivan and the doctor when they came down the stairs, tie them up with ladies’ stockings, then wait for nightfall. After dark, they would leave the house in twos and threes to avoid attention, making their way towards the nearby forests, where they would try to join up with the Resistance. Even this had its risks. Through their complicity with the Germans, the Judenrat had had a hand in sending many of the partizans’ loved ones to their deaths. Some of them would be meeting enemies in the forest. They would have to take their chances.

At two o’clock that afternoon, the bell rang, the one that announced that Ivan was coming down. There was the sound of dirt being scraped from the cover, and then the trapdoor was thrown open.

There was a collective intake of breath. Every hand tightened on its makeshift weapon. But it was only Ivan calling for Dora. Everyone turned to look at her.

“Don’t go,” Arno implored her.

“If I don’t, he’ll be suspicious,” she whispered back.

Their eyes met. She was wearing the dress she had worn on their first date, a rich ruby silk with a deep portrait collar, and he remembered the sound of it swish-swishing during their long, rambling walk to the Bug River, the way it swayed around her calves, the feel of it under his hands as he had kissed her for the first time.

It seemed to him that she wanted to say more, but there was an impatient whistle, like a man calling his dog. “I’ll see you later.” she promised. She twined her fingers through his and kissed him lightly on the lips. Without looking back, she ran up the stairs. The trapdoor flapped closed behind her.

Drops of sweat stood out on every forehead. The tread of footsteps moved back and forth on the floor overhead. Someone recited the Shema Yisroel. A child cried, and was quickly hushed.

Finally, Ivan climbed down the narrow stairs into the room. Behind him they could see the doctor with his medical bag.

He seemed surprised to see them in street clothes. “Hey, why is everybody dressed?” he said. “Someone having a party?”

This was the moment for action. Someone should have yelled, “Now!” Instead, there was an uneasy silence as the Jews of Wlodawa, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, hesitated.

Ivan half-turned, stared directly at Arno, frowned. Without warning, he bolted back up the stairs. “Go, go, go!” he shouted to the doctor, shoving him back up the steps.

Now the inmates sprang into action, but it was too late, the trapdoor slammed shut before anyone could reach them. Dora, Arno thought desperately, and vaulted up the stairs. But he could only raise the wooden panel a few inches, even when he put his shoulder against it. Ivan must have moved a piece of furniture over the opening.

In his panic, Arno had the strength of three men; he pushed again, and something gave, went toppling over with a crash. Arno scrambled up into the cold fresh air.

The inmates of the bunker raced through the kitchen and burst through the front door. Startled villagers stopped and stared as the leading members of Wlodawa’s vanished Jewish community went tearing past the Orthodox basilica and down Bronislowa Street.

Except for Arno. Arno ran through the house, frantically calling Dora’s name. He found her sitting up in Ivan’s bed. After a tearful embrace, they too, made their way to the Parczew Forest.

After joining the partizans, Dora and Arno battled courageously alongside their Polish and Russian brothers in the great patriotic struggle to defeat the Germans. After Liberation, they sailed to Palestine on an illegal frigate, splashing into the surf and kissing the sand before being bundled into trucks by brave kibbutzniks waiting for them on the beach at Haifa. The Rabbi was right. Given enough love and patience, Dora’s disease of the spirit was finally cured. She never wandered again.

Here is where our heroes are transformed from frightened Jewish mice into proud and productive settlers of the new land of Israel. How amusing it was when Arno learned to drive a tractor! How Dora laughed when Arno was chased by an angry rooster! How happy she was, working in the children’s house! She went on to give birth to thirteen healthy, strapping children, all of whom adored her. Everyone lived happily ever after. Arno spent the rest of his life worshipping at the small, perfect feet of his brave and lovely wife, whose only real vice was that she loved too much.

How I wish that this was the end of their story, not the one where the frantic search Arno makes through the house ends with a smeared trail of blood that leads to the kitchen door. How much more satisfying and just it would be than the real ending, where Dora is kicked to death for the part she played in snatching Ivan’s fortune from his grasp, where she is dragged into the frozen garden and left to die of internal bleeding, where Arno drops to his knees in the snow besides his dear, wandering Dora to wipe the blood from her lips as the other inmates of the bunker look on in appalled consternation. For human beings, though they hold within themselves the astonishing power to build soaring cathedrals, and majestic pyramids that will stand long after we all are dead, are still made from soft yielding flesh that parts too easily at the touch of a knife, that blackens and splits all too quickly under the toe of a boot.

The rest of the story is true. Arno escaped into the forest, where he became a partizan, quickly earning the nickname “The Hammer” for the force and the swiftness of his retribution. It was with his second wife that he arrived in Haifa, with whom he lived on kibbutz, learned to drive a tractor, had children.

Reinhart himself saw to it that Ivan was charged with Dora’s murder. The papers with his signature sat in a file in a drawer at the police station until the end of the war. For all I know, they are still there. After all, the victim was only a Jew. Surprisingly, it was the villagers who saw to it that justice was done. Dora had made many friends in Wlodawa. Someone, he never knew who, pointed Ivan out to the Russian victors as a Nazi collaborator. The intelligence officer, whose last name was Levin, saw to it that he was drafted promptly into the Soviet Army. He was killed in action shortly after.

In 1991, Arno received a small package in the mail, from Miami Beach, Florida. He didn’t recognize the old man in the photograph on the dust jacket, but he still remembered the name.

Tendler had published an autobiography, a memoir of his war years, complete with photographs and architectural renderings. How he had procured a picture of Dora, Arno didn’t want to know. But there she was, smiling, adorable, dimples winking at him from the glossy pages of the book.

With surprising humility, Tendler recalled the story of the bunker, how the lives of forty-four men, women and children were saved by the quick thinking and selflessness of a single unique individual. Heroes do not come from only one walk of life, or from one class of people, he admonished the reader sternly. They can arise from anywhere, at any time. Remember this, and do not forget. Even a whore can be a hero.

“To Dora, blessed be her memory,” read the dedication. “Holy, righteous and pure.”

Tears came to Arno’s eyes. Lovingly, he ran his thumb over the tiny black and white portrait. There was a burst of laughter from the garden, causing him to glance up from the book. His granddaughter was on the patio with some friends from her army unit, chattering away in Hebrew. Under the shade of the orange trees, they were stitching the last bits of ribbon and trim onto their Purim costumes. This year, she was going as Queen Esther. Arno felt his face relax into a blissful smile, as it always did when his gaze fell upon his darling girl.

Dvora had a head of dark blonde curls, and big brown eyes of a shade which could rightly be called gold. Her skin was an indescribable blend of cream and bronze that had almost the sheen of the satin he used back in the days when he still made bridal gowns. When she laughed, which was often, deep dimples appeared in each of her pink cheeks. And the thought came to him, as it often did, that perhaps there was something to that dybbuk story, after all.