But from that moment, Renia could not sleep. What had she done? What if the gendarme gave it to the Gestapo? That would make her situation much more difficult. The letter, albeit coded, contained information and a few addresses; items needed to be removed from those locations. Most important, she wanted the comrades to know where she was. But with each day, as she sunk further into the vortex of the Nazi prison compound, it seemed less and less likely that anyone would find her.
*
Late one night, four women and a baby were brought into the cell. They were all Jewish, except for one woman, Tatiana Kuprienko, a Russian, born in Poland. Renia befriended Tatiana. Speaking in a Polish-Russian mélange, Tatiana explained that she had been hiding these Jewish women who had helped her before the war. She sheltered and fed six adults and a baby in her attic, assuming nobody knew. She hired a counterfeiter and arranged for them to get wildly expensive Polish papers, hoping they could find work in Germany. Most of the women were hesitant to part from their husbands, whose features were too Jewish, but one woman left for Germany and had written to say that she’d found a job.
“Two and half months later, the police arrived at my house with a seventeen-year-old Polish boy,” Tatiana continued. “Before I could say a word, the boy told the police that I was hiding Jews. We were all arrested. My two brothers and the counterfeiter too. I still don’t know how they knew about the attic, the fake papers, the woman in Germany, even the counterfeiter’s fee. Before taking my testimony, they read aloud what they knew; everything was true.” At the police station, Tatiana was beaten. The Gestapo told her she was lucky to be Russian; otherwise, she’d have been hanged. They kept threatening to kill her or lock her up for life.
Two days later, the Jewish women and their husbands were transported to Auschwitz. Two days after that, the Jewish woman who had left for Germany was brought in, in a state of utter despair. Sure that she’d survive by spending the rest of the war working for a peasant near Berlin, she’d suddenly been arrested. After interrogation, she was carried back to the cell on a stretcher, disfigured to the point that Renia hardly recognized her. Large pieces of flesh were torn off her body. The Nazis had gagged her mouth, then pounded her feet with metal rods, and pierced her skin with a hot iron. Despite this torture, the Jewish woman didn’t disclose the name of the counterfeiter or that she knew Tatiana. The Nazis used similar methods to abuse Tatiana.
One day, when she was in better spirits, Tatiana told Renia, “After all I’ve been through, I have a feeling I’ll be freed one day. I must live to take care of my mother. I have a wealthy brother-in-law in Warsaw; maybe he’ll bail me out.”
Renia smiled, assuming she had gone insane from all the beating.
A few days later, Tatiana’s name was called. She went pale—another interrogation. It would be her end. She exited the cell and was taken by the Gestapo.
But a few minutes later, Renia heard maniacal laughter. Tatiana returned, kissed every one of them, and told them she’d been freed. She was going home!
When she came over to kiss Renia, she whispered in her ear that, indeed, her brother-in-law had paid a half kilogram of gold for her.
Renia’s eyes lit up. If it was possible to bribe the Gestapo, even here at Mys?owice, maybe there was hope.
*
One afternoon a taxi arrived at the camp gate. Two men in civilian clothes got out, presented papers that said they were undercover Gestapo men, and headed to the men’s ward, to the most terrible of cells, where living shadows were chained to their beds. The plainclothed Gestapo called out the names of two young men who’d been convicted of leading a partisan gang. They unchained them and hauled them to a waiting car that quickly disappeared. The guards saw the Gestapo carrying the prisoners, which was never done, became suspicious, and just after the taxi left, notified the Gestapo in Katowice. It turned out that the two “plainclothed Gestapo” were partisans who’d used fake papers. All four men had disappeared. Free.
Renia was simply elated. “That incident awoke my passion for life and my faith in freedom,” she recalled. “Who knows, maybe a miracle could happen to me, too.”