Read The Girl in the Green Sweater for Free Online Page B

we were not being taken out into the street along with our things. Soon, all of our furniture was gone, including our piano, a fine August Förster, one of the best pianos ever made. My mother used to play for us, very beautifully, but the piano had been silent since the German occupation. Still, it pained her that this wonderful instrument would be taken from our apartment and that she would never play it again. The piano was claimed by a German officer named Wepke, a man who was acting as the interim governor of Lvov. The only solace was that Wepke seemed to appreciate how fine a piano he was about to receive and that he could also play it beautifully. It was the poetic way to look at the injustice, to see that at least the piano would be enjoyed and put to beautiful use.
    I have kept a picture in my mind of my brother and me sitting on the floor of our apartment, our furniture all but gone, the walls checkered with bright squares where our paintings used to hang. In another time, in another place, it would have been a picture of any two children, their household packed for a move out of town. I sat on the floor and watched and listened. I could see the shine of the piano pedals against the polish of the officer’s boots. Watching him play, listening to him, you would never think he was capable of cruelty. The splendor that spilled from his fingers! The joy! When he was finished, he stood and complimented my father on the piano. Then he made arrangements for the instrument to be transported to his apartment across the street. Before it was taken away, my father wrapped the piano carefully with a blanket pulled from our linen closet. It pained him to lose the piano, but it pained him more to seeit damaged. He stamped it with his name—ignacy chiger—on the small hope that he would someday get it back, after the war. Always, he was thinking ahead to the end of the war. Always, he was hopeful, and so he put his stamp on everything.
    Before the piano was taken, another officer came to the apartment and admired it, but my father told him the instrument had already been claimed. My father leapt to his feet with misplaced pride. He said, “I am sorry, sir, but the piano has already been claimed by Officer Wepke.” In his voice, I could hear how pleased he was that our fine piano was the focus of so much attention.
    The second officer was very angry when he heard this, no doubt because Wepke had him outranked and also because he had gotten to the piano first. Afterward, my father admitted that it had been foolish of him to announce with such pleasure that the piano was not available, because this second officer could have easily shot him right there in our living room. It was just the sort of stupid reprisal he kept hearing about, and he regretted saying anything the moment the words left his lips. Luckily—another miracle!—this second officer did not take his disappointment out on my father, but contented himself with some of the remaining things that had not yet been claimed.
    The next day, the piano delivered, Wepke sent an officer back to our apartment with a package for my father. It was our blanket, along with a bottle of wine and a note of thanks for the piano. I was six years old, still a child, and even I could recognize the absurd mix of humanity and inhumanity. It was a curious gesture of civility, we all thought. My father wrote about it after the war, how it was strange to find decent people among such animals. That such a people, with such a high culture, could do such terrible things . . . it was unthinkable.
    With our piano now in the possession of such a high-ranking officer, we were left alone for a few weeks. My parents took the opportunity to distribute some of their possessions among their few Polish friends. Silverware, china, jewelry, some furniture . . . whatever the Germans had not claimed for themselves, my parents gave away to non-Jews, with the hope that we might recover the property or that