Journeys with My Mother Read online

  All of this is now gone, as is most of the pre-war city. Also gone is the great variety of characters, which is why my mother liked telling me how interesting, how beguiling, street life was.

  Nalewki, Pańska, Towarowa and Smocza streets were like the extension of her home. Beyond, there was another Warsaw. The closest of many parks was Krasinski’s, further away was Saski and Łazienki (the Royal Baths) which, years later, became my playground. Though smaller than ever in its long history, Dolina Szwajcarska, the Swiss Valley, can still be found if one knows where to look. Before the war it was one of those exquisite parks of intimate bowers, yet spacious enough to hold street theatre, open-air concerts, cafés and beer gardens and, in winter, the most elegant ice-skating rink in Warsaw.

  Walking along the streets cost nothing and Ola loved looking at the refined buildings and shops displaying the latest Parisian fashion or their skilful imitations. In early spring, on every corner country women sold tiny bunches of violets, sprigs of mimosa and lilies of the valley. When the season moved towards summer, the robust scent of lilac took over. Some of the city’s attractions weren’t so accessible to a not-so-well-paid midwife, but Ola was impatient to see everything, the cabarets as well as plays and films. Apart from the prohibitive cost, there was another obstacle: she looked too young to be admitted. She went to some lengths to look older; with high-heeled shoes, her lips red, a large hat slightly askew keeping her face partly obscured, she would lean on her companion’s arm. More often than not, someone challenged her. Then, flushed with embarrassment, she had to explain herself.

  Whether it was because of the area in which she grew up, her schooling, or her first job at the Jewish Philanthropic Hospital, Ola was familiar with the dark side of reality. Nothing, it seemed, could alleviate poverty or prevent illnesses borne out of malnutrition and terrible living conditions. In the thirties many people died of tuberculosis or simply of hunger.

  When Hersz fell ill, the family was living in another apartment on Nowolipki Street. The throat cancer advanced fast, swallowing was painful and he had to be fed through a tube leading directly to his stomach. It was Brana or one of the girls who would tip watery food into a little funnel. He suffered without complaint. Sometimes, when the smell of freshly cooked food drifted from the kitchen, he asked for some, chewing it slowly before spitting it out.

  He could no longer work. The workshop, an outbuilding in the courtyard, was neglected. The Depression and the boycott of Jewish traders took their toll and fewer people bought his printed scarves. The housekeeper had to be dismissed and Brana divided her time between running the household and the business.

  By then, the three oldest sisters, Ewa, Tosia and Ola, were already independent. Ola worked at the Charitable Jewish Obstetric Hospital at the corner of Pańska and Żelazna streets. The shifts were long, the pay paltry.

  During a time of massive unemployment, Ola thought herself lucky when one of the doctors suggested work in a private hospital. She took it on without abandoning her first job. In the new one, she was often called to attend to women convalescing from childbirth, nursing their newborns. They were rich women prepared to pay good money for home visits.

  I wish today were not as bright and hot, so I could more easily imagine the coolness and the smell of water on the day my parents met as their boat moved along the Vistula. Ola was eighteen, her short, wavy hair parted in the middle, which seemed to be in vogue; she liked looking fashionable.

  I have a photo from this, or perhaps another, summer excursion. She is dressed in white, smiling and radiant; it was the smile that made her truly beautiful. Leaning against the rail, she looks with envy at a group of young men, their arms on each other’s shoulders, dancing the hora. Had she been less shy, she would have joined them. The outing was organised by Promień, a left-oriented club of the Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair. Every political party worth its salt had its own club, a library, amateur theatre group and sporting activities. These clubs were very popular with secular Jewish youth. My brother and I owe much to this liberating social phenomenon. How else would my parents have met?

  Initially, Ola was not particularly attracted to the slim, dark-haired, blue-eyed man who paid her so much attention. Władek, who had just returned from six years in Palestine, was twenty-three, well read in leftist literature and passionate about social change. She found him impressive but not at all irresistible. At first they met at club functions and afterwards he insisted on walking her home. The idea of walking next to him, let alone arm in arm, was excruciating. So worried was she about being seen with a young man that she walked very fast, pretending they were not together. For his part, Władek tried to stay close to her. A comic and inauspicious beginning.

  The story given to me appears incomplete because, in due course, it was Ola who kissed Władek first. ‘I was always a good girl,’ my mother would say, hinting in a roundabout way that she wished I were more amenable.

  ‘You were?’ I would say, feigning surprise, suppressing glee. I knew that when it came to compliance, Ola’s actions were contrary to the advice she gave me.

  When Ola decided to live with the man she loved, my grandparents were understandably alarmed. They’d hoped for someone altogether unlike Władek, someone with an established social position capable of supporting a future family. Worse still: Ola and Władek rejected the whole idea of marriage as a superfluous gesture to bourgeois convention. It was a matter of principle, as if a sanctified marriage would somehow diminish their love, causing everything they stood for to collapse. A religious ceremony in particular – civil marriages did not exist in Warsaw – was beyond the pale.

  Brana and Hersz, however, were not so easily defeated. They had their own principles and did everything possible to impose their will. They prepared a surprise wedding. The stratagem, however, failed abysmally. When the prospective newlyweds found out that in place of a regular family dinner, they were about to be wed under the chuppa,4 they turned and left, not to be seen for a long time. So it happened that my mother, a dutiful and loving daughter, left her parental home to live in sin with my father, an unemployed communist. I can well imagine my grandparents’ despair. The censure of the tightly knit Jewish community traumatised them. They felt betrayed, even dishonoured, tormented by lack of filial loyalty, astonished by Ola’s intransigence, her inability to make a gesture, if only for their sake.

  Ola carried her parents’ pain and her own guilt for the rest of her life. As she began to look back, she regretted her decision. If not for the war, it would have been just like any other family conflict. No one knew then how it would end, I tried to comfort her, but she was inconsolable.

  The war did happen and my mother felt guilty for surviving it.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ says my mother, standing at my shoulder as I write.

  3

  Back to the Past: Grodzisk

  To speak the names of the dead is to make them live again.

  —Egyptian proverb

  I lost my grandparents twice. They were killed before I could get to know them and I felt their absence deeply. Then, to make matters worse, for years my parents never mentioned them in recollections and anecdotes. Their own wounds were still raw. It was easier to avoid the topic.

  When it came to conjuring images of my grandparents, my reading of fairytales came in handy. So my stooping grandmothers’ heads were covered in kerchiefs, tied babushka-like under their chins; my grey-bearded grandfathers, leaning over their walking sticks, were old and kindly.

  After I visited the death camp in Majdanek with my school, my grandparents acquired the unearthly presence of the long-dead; I preferred not to know how or where they saw the last days of their lives.

  So it is comforting to know that they had a life before they died, that Hersz was a real person, loved the circus and, just like me, enjoyed piping hot, strong aromatic tea, a great deal of it; that Henoch, my paternal grandfather, gave my mother a gold watch and taught her a few Russian phrases, which helped us
in our escape from Warsaw. Missing from the picture is their faith, their rituals, their immersion in an old and rich culture that shaped and defined all my predecessors’ lives.

  I do not blame my parents for absenting themselves from their Jewish past. Their life and mine had a different trajectory, their experiences an entirely different flavour. They hoped that if I were ignorant of being Jewish, I would never feel stigmatised, would avoid hatred. And worse than hatred – the contempt in which Jews were held.

  I am glad to be marked with familial features, carrying my ancestral genes, sharing the idiosyncrasies of my people, even though a deep connection with my tribe has been lost. But this disconnection doesn’t really bother me. The truth is, I have no wish to be part of any diaspora claiming my identity, which is for me to shape.

  As serendipity would have it, over the years I have accumulated a respectable collection of old family photographs which I owe to my father’s uncles and cousins who, having the presence of mind to leave Poland in the twenties and thirties, kept them in the safety of their drawers. Now my predecessors, though still enigmatic, have a worldly appearance.

  An image of Babcia Luba, on my father’s side, came my way only recently. Three years ago my brother, who lives in Lausanne, told me about it. On the subject of how the photograph had turned up, he was hazy and I, on the other side of the phone line, found it hard to believe it could be a picture of our grandmother and her brood. ‘How do you know it is them?’ I kept on asking, careful not to be swayed by hope. Once I had the photograph in my hand, however, I recognised my very young father, even his siblings, as if I had known them ever since childhood. My heart gave a lurch – I was looking at my family.

  Here, my never-before-seen grandmother is surrounded by her seven children – my father, the oldest, is about fifteen; the youngest is one and a half at the most – each one spruced up for the occasion. But not my grandmother. She looks as if she had come out of the kitchen only a moment before sitting down for the photo. She does not wear a headscarf or a wig, or any jewels. Her simplicity is touching. None of them smile; only little Róża – Różyczka – bedecked with an enormous bow in her hair and another, equally large, at the front of her dress, seems to feel the sense of occasion and beams timidly. Oskar – I can only guess that he is the one in the sailor’s top – looks wistfully ahead, his head tilted. (It is hard to imagine him as the self-assured, reckless young man who acted as a courier between the Warsaw Ghetto and the partisans. Even more difficult to accept is his slow death at the hands of his torturers who attempted to extract the names of others.)

  There is another photograph I like, that of my paternal great-grandfather, Izaak Leib. Corpulent and jovial, a kaszket pulled low over his large head, his eyes – light in colour, alert – remind me of my father’s blue eyes. I like to think that my father also got his playfulness from him. Izaak Leib does not give the impression of a person who would spend too much time praying or discussing the finer points of Torah. He was a tailor, not a scholar. Then again, he could have been a pious tailor.

  The opposite could be said about Jankiel, my mother’s grandfather. Frail, book in hand, he looks as if he had no joy in life. He, too, is dressed in a traditional Jewish kaftan, his beard untrimmed, confirming the futility of the Tzars’ efforts to force Jews to dress like everyone else, to renounce their religion. At the time of my great-grandparents’ birth – the mid-nineteenth century – Poland was partitioned, its eastern territories falling within the Russian Empire, its inhabitants without rights for self-determination and no civil or political freedoms. That is where my ancestors, at least those that I can account for, had the misfortune to live.

  I am less lucky when it comes to retrieving mementos on my mother’s side, for her numerous cousins left for France soon after the First World War. When the German army entered Paris in the Second World War, all but two of her relatives – men, by marriage – remained alive by fleeing Paris and, in some cases, France. One of the few surviving photographs is the one I have of Jankiel.

  Twelve years after the war, in the autumn after my matriculation, my mother and I went to visit her French relatives. I was astounded to find an entire tribe of cousins, all from Grodzisk Mazowiecki, thirteen siblings, each married with children. I had never imagined families could be so big. They represented the full range of wealth and social standing, political leanings and religiosity. The oldest in the family was an orthodox Jew; another, by contrast, had turned to Jesus, eventually becoming a pastor. The rest, however, were satisfied with observing Jewish holidays, visiting the synagogue once a year on Yom Kippur.

  Long before I got hold of the photograph of Jankiel to inspire me, I went to Grodzisk Mazowiecki, the town near Warsaw where he had lived for most of his life. I went there on an impulse, without preparation, with a friend who was not in the least interested in my uncertain quest. Predictably, nothing much was gained.

  A few years later I went there again, alone and better prepared, which was just as well. It was hot, and meandering through an unfamiliar town in the full sun turns investigation into a chore.

  Luckily, I was quick to locate the cultural centre and to find Łukasz Nowacki, a young man specialising in the history of Grodzisk’s Jews. He and his colleagues worked to restore and remember the town’s Jewish past. At the time, the centre’s collection of Judaica was very small, and I was glad to add to it. Grodzisk dreaming is vital as almost nothing remains of the 500-year-long Jewish presence. What remains are the sites: where the synagogues once stood; the market where, in time-honoured tradition, spirited trading was the norm; a few houses in which Jews lived identified by Stars of David or the indentations left by a mezuzah.5 It was in the marketplace, in front of St Anna church, where in February 1941, Jews were forced to assemble before being deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, then to Treblinka.6 None of them, it seems, returned.

  The Moscow–Vienna railway line, built in the mid-nineteenth century, runs through Grodzisk Mazowiecki. It promised development and prosperity to what was then a small village of no significance. The railway acted as a magnet, drawing Jews from many neighbouring communities.

  It is possible that Jankiel’s parents were caught up in the same trend. As the village grew into a town, some Jews became rich quickly. Despite the presence of the charismatic rebbe Elimech Szapiro, who settled in Grodzisk and established a powerful centre of Hasidism,7 quite a few Jews assimilated.

  Nothing, however, indicates that Jankiel wished to assimilate. He was a Cohen8 and a Hassid, a man of undiluted faith who did not trim his beard, who danced for the joy of God and, I imagine, spoke to Him directly. At the time his photo was taken, Jankiel was widowed. My great-grandmother, Chana, suffered from poor health and had died long before the war.

  With time, many Jews left overcrowded Grodzisk. By the 1930s, their number had dropped to a fraction of what it was previously. Jankiel must have felt alone; none of his children remained in Grodzisk. Three of his sons emigrated – to Belgium, America and Palestine; and Hersz, my grandfather, who had moved to Warsaw, was no longer alive.

  Jankiel would have been troubled by many other things, of course: illness, money, or his granddaughters, especially Ola. He strongly disapproved of her living, unwed, with a hatless, beardless young man, a communist to boot, who’d broken out of the faith. Jankiel tried his best to warn Ola against this liaison: ‘This man will use you and then discard you like a squeezed lemon,’ he cautioned. Had I known Jankiel, would I have loved him unconditionally, felt solicitous despite his religious strictures, his austerity and his resentment of my father?

  When the war broke out, Jankiel was in Grodzisk alone. Like many people from the outlying provinces, he assumed that the capital would be a safer place to outlast what everyone hoped would be a short war. He moved in with his daughter-in-law Brana and her children.

  But it soon became evident that his hopes were misguided. Warsaw was heavily bombarded, and conditions in the Nowolipki household, affected by fear and shortag
e of food, offered little comfort to the old man. At the first opportunity, he made his way back home. It must have been a traumatic and exhausting journey for someone his age: nothing functioned properly, and the tracks of the electric shuttle train were partly destroyed. From that point on, I know nothing of Jankiel’s everyday struggle for survival. I can only assume that he shared the same misery as other Jews in Grodzisk. As in other towns, they were confined to the ghetto. Thousands of Jews were brought from surrounding villages and towns to live in a very small, already overcrowded area, making everyone’s life unendurable. For a short time, the city council provided ration cards, allowing one to buy bread, salt, sometimes sugar and other products, if one was lucky. Then nothing. It was possible, if risky, to sneak out of the ghetto and sell some possessions to buy food. But following the confiscation of his dye workshop, what could Jankiel possibly sell?

  After years of choosing not to contemplate how each of my predecessors died, now, when writing, I do allow myself to consider various possibilities. I would like to believe that Jankiel succumbed to illness or hunger before the ghetto was liquidated. Here he is, frozen in time, in the only existing photograph of him. Perhaps taken against his will.

  There is a fragment from a book about Grodzisk.9 The last death certificate was written in the Book of Births, Marriages and Death on 25 November 1940: ‘Ernest Abraham, son of Aron and Henrietta, born in Olbryck, at present living in Grodzisk, trader, died at twelve thirty.’