The Girl in the Green Sweater by Chiger Krystyna & Paisner Daniel

Author:Chiger, Krystyna & Paisner, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-3123-7656-7
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2008-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

Five

OUR LADY OF THE SNOW

Imust pause here and share what I know about Leopold Socha’s background, because it is useful to understand what motivated this man to help us the way he did.

He had not lived such a happy or noble life, our Socha, before meeting my family. He had been in and out of prison. As a child, he got into all kinds of trouble. He was orphaned at a young age. He was a ruffian. School was not important to him. It is a heartbreaking thing, to know someone and to come to love and admire that person and then to discover that he had such a difficult childhood. That is how it was with Socha. He ran with a group of young men who did not respect other people. He was never violent, but he was disrespectful. Certainly, he did not respect other people’s property; he became a petty thief. His concept of right and wrong seemed to have more to do with what he could get away with, whether or not he would be caught. He was good at stealing, but not so good that he could avoid the police. By the time he had reached his middle twenties, he had served three separate three-year terms for robbery—once for a bank job that had captivated all of Lvov for its brazenness and careful planning, and once more for a petty break-in at an antiques store.

The bank job was well-known in Lvov. Socha entered the bank through the basement, approaching by the sewer where he would later work and where we would seek our sanctuary. It was quite a clever plot, the authorities said, and after Socha made away with the cash, he stowed it in one of the pipes leading away from the Peltew River. My father remembered reading about it in the newspaper. Indeed, Socha might have gotten away with the heist if he had not been so reckless with his spending and with his tongue, and the lesson he learned was to choose his words and his audience very carefully. His great worry, during the long months he was protecting us, was that one of his colleagues would have too much to drink and boast about the Jews they were hiding in the sewer. Already, he had learned this lesson, and he knew that to violate it here would mean certain death.

The antiques store robbery was a great coincidence. It was the sort of break-in Socha and his hooligan colleagues performed regularly, only here he happened to target an antiques store owned and operated by my mother’s uncle. We discovered this association some months after our first meeting. Socha took some silverware, some jewelry. My mother remembered this incident, and now she was sitting across from the man who had perpetrated it. Of course, it no longer mattered about the silverware and the jewelry, but it was a strange point of connection just the same.

Somehow, Socha met and married a good woman named Wanda. She convinced him to turn his life around.

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