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By Root 23064 0

—that terrible Warsaw simulacrum of Satan’s antechamber—the ham lay unwrapped and pinkly glistening on the desk between herself, handcuffed, and a hyperactive, monocled zealot who almost exactly resembled Otto Kruger and who demanded to know where she had obtained this contraband. His interpreter, a Polish girl, had a coughing fit. “You be a smuggler!” he said loudly in clumsy Polish, and when Sophie replied in German she received her second compliment of the day. A big molar-filled greasy Nazi smile, right out of a 1938 Hollywood movie. But it was barely even a pleasantry. Did she not know the seriousness of her act, did she not know that meat of any kind but especially of this quality was designated for the Reich? With a long fingernail he pried loose a fat sliver of the ham and conveyed it to his mouth. He nibbled. Hochqualitätsfleisch. His voice suddenly became tough, a snarl. Where did she get such meat? Who supplied her with this? Sophie thought of the poor farm woman, knew of the vengeance awaiting her too, and temporizing now, replied, “It was not for me, sir, this meat. It was for my mother who lives on the other side of the city. She is seriously ill from tuberculosis.” As if such an altruistic sentiment could have the vaguest effect on this caricature of a Nazi, who was already being besieged by knocks at the door and an irruptive jangle of the telephone. What a wild day for the Germans and their łapanka. “I don’t give a damn for your mother!” he roared. “I want to know where you got this meat! Tell me now or I’ll have it beaten out of you!” But the hammering at the door continued, another telephone began ringing; the little office became the cell of a madman. The Gestapo officer shrieked to a subordinate to have this Polish bitch taken away—and that was the last Sophie ever saw of him or the ham.

On another day she might not even have been caught. The irony of this smote her over and over while she waited in an almost totally dark detention cell with a dozen other Warsovians of both sexes, all strangers. Most of these—although not all—were young, in their twenties and thirties. Something about their manner—perhaps it was only the stolid, stony communion of their silence—told her that they were members of the Resistance. The AK—Armia Krajowa. Home Army. Here it suddenly occurred to her that had she waited only another day (as she had planned) to journey out toward Nowy Dwór to procure the meat, she would not have been on the railroad car, which she now realized may have been ambushed in order to trap certain members of the AK who had been passengers. By casting a wide net for as many exceptional fish as possible, as they sometimes did, the Nazis came up with all sorts of minor but interesting minnows, and this day Sophie was one of them. Sitting there on the stone floor (it was midnight now), she was smothered by despair, thinking of Jan and Eva at home with no one to look after them. In the corridors outside the cell there was a constant jabber and hubbub, a shuffling of feet and a jostling of bodies as the jail continued to fill up with the victims of the day’s roundup. Once through the grilled aperture of the door above her she caught a quick glimpse of a familiar face, and her heart turned to lead. The face was streaming with blood. It belonged to a young man whom she had known only by his first name, Wladyslaw; the editor of an underground newspaper, he had spoken to her several times briefly at Wanda and Jozef’s apartment on the floor beneath her own. She did not know why, but she was at that moment certain that this meant that Wanda had been arrested too. Then something else occurred to her. Mother of God, she breathed in an instinctive prayer, and felt herself go limp as a wet leaf with this realization: that the ham (quite aside from the fact of its having been devoured by the Gestapo) had doubtless been forgotten, and that her own fate—whatever it might be—was tied up with the fate of these members of the Resistance. And such a fate swooped down on her with a black foreboding overwhelming enough to make stale the word