In the Mouth of the Wolf by Rose Zar

bunker. He was my father once again: tough, decisive, firmly in command.
    â€œDon’t argue with me! You’re leaving tomorrow. You’re not staying here for any reason. Tomorrow morningwhen the column leaves for work, you’re going, too. Swear to me you will! I no longer care what happens to me, but you must survive. It is your duty to me. It is your duty to your mother. It is your duty to the Jewish people!” Though everything inside me cried to stay, there was no way I could disobey him. I turned to Renia. “You heard what my father said. I leave in the morning.”
    That was what happened. When everyone left for work the next day, I went, too. The Jewish policeman on duty gave me a peculiar look when we passed his post, but Renia pulled my sleeve and we went by without any trouble. I went to the Shop with her group, where I gave back my armband, put on my lipstick and the rest of my disguise, tied a scarf around my head, and, at eight o’clock when the streets began to fill up, went back to Mrs. Banasz’s apartment. I spent the night there and caught the train for Kraków in the morning.

Christmas Eve
    Â 
    Â 
    Â Â Â Â Â Â I came back to Kraków looking forward to having a job and a permanent place to stay. I found neither. Lodzia had moved out, but Mrs. Mokryjowa was unable to give me her place because of the drug salesman. For some reason he took a violent dislike to me the one time we met and told Mrs. Mokryjowa that if I moved in, he was leaving. Mrs. Mokryjowa was very apologetic, but what could she do? He paid for his bed by the month, and when he wasn’t there she could rent it for the night to someone else. She was making a lot of money off that salesman, which was why he was the one boarder she couldn’t afford to lose. I understood her predicament and assured her Iwasn’t angry, but where was I to go now? Mrs. Mokryjowa said the old couple in the basement would take me in until I found a permanent place of my own. In the meantime I could go on using her apartment as my Kraków address. I then asked if any mail had come for me from the Central Labor Office. She shook her head. Nothing. Not even a postcard. So I still didn’t have a job.
    I went down to the Central Labor Office the next day to see what the problem was. The woman from Zakopane was at the front desk, and I was happy to see she still remembered me. I asked if any jobs had opened up since I was last there. She was about to say no, then hesitated. “There is something,” she said. “A girl was supposed to be interviewed for a job this morning, but she never showed up. I can give that job to you.” She filled out all the forms and gave me an address to report to the next day. I was now officially an employee of the German Army with the glorious title of “stairway janitress.”
    Â 
    Early the next morning I reported to a military hospital downtown, a former Catholic school expropriated by the Wehrmacht (the German Regular Army). The building was four stories tall, and my job was to mop the stairs, all ten flights of them, including the landings! Believe it or not, there is a technique for mopping stairs. I learned it the first day on the job from the person I was replacing. You can’t close off the whole staircase because people still have to get from floor to floor. Instead you block off one half of the staircase, sending the traffic over to the other side while you mop from top to bottom. Then, when the first side is dry, you do the other. And so it goes, from one landing to the next, from the top floor to the cellar. Of course, by the time you finish the cellar, the stairs at the top are dirtyagain, so the job never ends. Many of the staircases had runners which I had to roll up and drag outside to beat out the dust. And I cleaned toilets.
    After a few days on the job, I noticed that the only Germans in the hospital were the doctors, nurses, and clerks.