Bela, needing to find a job in Grodno, went to the employment office.
“Can you speak German?” the clerk asked her.
“Sure.” Yiddish was, after all, so close.
The clerk quizzed her. She turned her vus into vas （what）。
“You speak very well,” he complimented. Her bad Yiddish had come out as decent German. “I have a job for you,” he offered. “You can be a translator—at the Gestapo office.”
A job with the Gestapo? An insane risk, Bela knew, but also a position that could help her in extraordinary ways.
The next day, she began working at the Grodno Gestapo, mainly an administrative office. The boss liked her immediately, as did most of the primarily German staff. Bela was in charge of translating Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian into German. “Suddenly,” she recalled, “I was multilingual!” She also cleaned and served tea.
To find a flat, Bela evaded the intellectual neighborhood where her accent would be recognized. She rented a room on the outskirts of town from a Belorussian widow who, Bela hoped, wouldn’t notice her linguistic errors. She tried to make herself comfortable in the tiny surrounds, where Jesus icons lined the walls. But when she came home from her ten-hour shifts, those Jesus images filled her with fear, as did her Sundays at church—more so than her days surrounded by Nazis. Bela was always careful to go to church with a colleague and stand behind her, so that she could imitate every movement.
A week into her job, Bela asked her boss for official papers stating that she worked for the Gestapo. He signed on the spot. With these, she went to Grodno city hall, explained that all her ID had been destroyed, and asked for a full new set. The clerk was so afraid to mess with a Gestapo worker that he rushed her to the front of the line. They drew up an ID with false details. Bela had won the lottery: free movement.
With her papers, she was able to stay out past curfew, even near the ghetto, where she went to help. She had to report to Vilna and offer the comrades her new papers as samples for forgeries. But it was nearly impossible to obtain train travel permits—these were reserved for the military. So, one morning, Bela went to work in tears. She explained that her brother had died in Vilna, and she needed to bury him; the Polish tradition said he’d have to be buried in three days. Then she would need to take care of errands—it would take a week. Her Gestapo boss consoled her and personally accompanied her to get the train passes.
Overjoyed, Bela arrived in Vilna and, dressed as a Christian woman, planned for the right moment to enter the ghetto and pin on her star, which she’d buried in her wallet. Near the ghetto gate, a woman with long blonde braids approached her. “Don’t we know each other?”
Bela’s heart raced. Who was this? “What’s your name?”
“Christina Kosovska.”
The woman took out a photo from her wallet. It was a group of comrades. Bela was among them! “My real name,” she whispered, “is Lonka Kozibrodska.”
Lonka. Bela had heard plenty about her. A master courier with impeccable Polish and a very pretty, Christian look, Lonka had the wisdom and charm of “a high priest, with her long blond braids arranged like a halo around her head.” Comrades often wondered if she was sent by the Gestapo as a plant. In her late twenties, and from a cultured family just outside Warsaw, tall and slender Lonka had studied at university and was fluent in eight languages. While Bela, almost a decade younger, was a street-smart working-class girl, burly and quick, a crafty commoner, Lonka had the confidence of an educated, worldly woman. Lonka did not use her bold looks to intimidate comrades, but she did to impress Nazis. “More than once,” her comrade wrote, “a ‘Gestaponik’ helped her carry her valise with forbidden materials because he thought she was a Christian girl.” Lonka, who had quickly risen up the ranks in Freedom with her joyful but diligent demeanor, traveled through the country, transporting weapons, documents, and once, an archive. Now she was here on a mission from Warsaw. Together they blended into a workers’ group and entered the ghetto—the first of many collaborations.