Family History of Fear Page 3

  I considered myself to be at the same time better and worse than others. I adapted easily to circumstances, and I could handle all sorts of situations with no problem, but I rarely took the initiative. I liked to be part of the group, wholly integrated. Somewhere deep inside, though, I felt different from others and, in a vague way, more important. I performed all my tasks without complaint. I tried hard to please, responding to everyone’s wishes, real or imagined. I was an echo.

  The feeling of being worse than the others remained superficial, but I never managed to figure out where it came from. It seemed to me that, for who knows what reason, I had to work hard to be better than others. It was really important, and a lot of things depended on it. Better, because I was in truth worse than others. But nobody must ever find out.

  I was a good student. They made me read my essays aloud to the whole class, like the one on the paper bird or about Heart: A Schoolboy’s Journal by De Amicis. I recited poems in assemblies on special occasions. I brought home report cards with perfect grades and the stamp of an honor student. And for me, as for my mother, that was taken for granted. My photograph for being first in the class was displayed in a store window on Wolska Street nearby, right next to one of the few department stores in the city. My father did not have time to go see it. Summers, he worried whether I was playing ball or if I was riding a bike. Winters, he made sure I knew how to ice skate well. I went to overnight camp with the Young Pioneers, where I earned every badge possible for field exercises.

  I wanted to be grown up. Especially so I could begin to live. I wanted to be grown up because adults knew things and were not afraid. My childish world had broken into two pieces that no one could glue back together. With every passing year, I found it harder and harder to believe that these two had ever formed a whole. Power in every sense of the word was on my father’s side. Resolute, sure of himself, prominent, supported by a big family, he was firmly planted on the ground and on his own two feet. Even with another man beside her, Mama seemed defenseless to me.

  At Christmas, Mama and I decorated a tree. It gave off the same scent of the forest as before, but it wasn’t the same. It reminded me of a poor relation in ill-fitting finery. My grandma’s Christmas tree in Łόdź was more real somehow, much more joyful. We hung little angels, toys and nuts, a ballerina with golden slippers, a little mouse with a red bonnet, and tiny bells. The Star of Bethlehem twinkled on top of the tree. “Hark! The herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the newborn King.’ ” All over the plump little tree, we sprinkled stars strung on paper ribbons that my grandma and her sisters had spent their evenings making. The smell of fresh sweet bread filled the room. We waited together for the holiday to begin. “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.” We sang Christmas carols. We prepared to welcome the Savior.

  On our holiday table, the wafer was prominently displayed, but it seemed out of place. It took me a long time to understand the symbolism. It looked stale to me, left over from the year before, always the same. It tasted like dust, and when the moment came for me to take my share, I felt vaguely embarrassed. I could feel the presence of a lie, but I could not locate it. Something unexplained, something mysterious, secreted under the crust of that childhood.

  The same holidays that other children looked forward to embarrassed me. I couldn’t wait for them to be over. Mama and I were always alone together. It was painful. An undefined threat hung in the air, and all our daily routines seemed designed for somebody else, as if they’d been cut from the wrong pattern. We were living outside this special parenthesis. Our sense of being shunted aside became more acute. The neighbors on our floor formed closed circles; tightly united in the joy of a common prayer, they were inaccessible. More than ever, I was far from them.

  The surprise of presents on Christmas Eve didn’t especially cheer me up, either. My dreams revolved generally around new books and were quickly realized. My mother did not approve of impulsive expenditures on principle: you had to have money because you never know what’s coming. She got that from the war.

  Grandfather, my mother’s father, lived on Puławska Street. Armed with a prewar diploma in engineering, he directed an enterprise charged with reconstructing the capital. He loved his office with its huge desk and two black telephones. He often raised his voice. He was constantly photographed in the company of high government officials at ceremonies to inaugurate new buildings and new housing complexes, which were more and more numerous, and to dedicate monuments and the cemeteries for Soviet soldiers that were also constructed under his supervision. His work took him to China and the Soviet Union, from which he returned with collections of things like compasses, and flashlights, and cameras manufactured by Smiena. He accounted scrupulously for every bit of money spent, limiting his expenditures to the bare minimum. He considered many things to be extravagances—not only cigarettes and alcohol, but also the resoling of his shoes if that had not been foreseen in the budget.

  He helped me write letters in Russian to Valerka in Leningrad, a pen pal who had been assigned to me at school. “So, what’s going on, eh?” he said whenever he saw me, tugging on my ear. That must have been a rare expression of tenderness from such a powerful and austere man who ignored affection or, perhaps, had forgotten about it. He never mentioned my grandmother.

  In 1949, he married for the second time, a marriage of convenience to a dry, haughty neighbor who lived on same floor. The mayor of Warsaw himself performed the ceremony. Once a week, without fail, they attended a concert by the Warsaw Philharmonic. It seems he had perfect pitch. He played the violin in his youth. On the occasional family gathering, on Friday nights, he and his sisters would play something from their repertoire of chamber music, by Brahms or Ravel.

  I had no idea where he came from or who his parents were. I never saw an old photograph. I could not boast about cousins on my mother’s side. Or about their graves. Or the graves of their ancestors. We never told family stories. Or commemorated anything, either.

  The most important smell of my childhood was the one in Aunt Bronka’s kitchen. They lived in a development of small wooden houses near Ujazdόw, in the heart of the city, not far from the Sejm and several old parks. It was a little like being in the country. The minute I walked through the door, I could smell something that I recognized later as garlic. I was in the fifth grade when Aunt Bronka suddenly left Poland with her entire family. Some of her kitchen utensils appeared in our house. Ceramic bowls for turning milk into buttermilk and a great selection of utensils for pastry. The plastic graters to clean the pastry boards still tasted of cake, and apple charlotte, and little croissants with raisins. As my mother listened to Western radio stations at night, she grew worried and angry. And then she began writing long letters to foreign countries. In the place for a return address, she kept up a steady stream of invented names. She signed the letters with the name of our dachshund, Nutka. She was scared.

  My grandfather never mentioned his cherished sister’s name again, and shortly after that, he stretched out on the sofa and refused to get up. In a conversation I overheard, I learned that they smeared his front door with excrement. He was expelled from the Party and retired from his position.

  Years later, I learned what March 1968 represented in the history of my country. Anti-Semitic riots triggered the last great wave of emigration of Polish Jews, those who had stayed after the war and after the pogrom in Kielce and who had not jumped at the chance to flee the country in 1956. Those who had felt the most Polish.

  In the little garden in Ujazdόw someone else picked the strawberries and cherries. Even in Łόdź, on Perłowa Street, it wasn’t the same as before. Grandma had gotten sick. We went to visit her in the hospital. As long as she had the strength, she wrote us letters. She died during vacation. I was twelve years old, but it wasn’t me crying at the funeral. It was my father. In front of the white marble gravestone adorned with a sepia photograph that didn’t resemble her at all, they set up a small bench.

  I had to co
nfront everything by myself. I shared my father not only with his new wife but also with their two daughters. No more Grandma to console me. I couldn’t get over a sense of humiliation, but I did not know what I’d done. I came home from Sunday lunches at my father’s house (tomato soup, pork chop, stewed pears) sated and sad. Our house felt empty, and all my efforts to win my father’s forgiveness were in vain.

  Early on Sunday afternoons, I would find myself at a streetcar stop on Niepodległości Avenue. I was alone. By then, they had decided to let me go out on the streets by myself. I squeezed in my hand a brand-new one-thousand-złoty bill. Alimony—the amount my father had been paying every month for the last few years for my upkeep, according to the agreement my parents made after they separated. The bill was usually new, as if it had come right off the press. I knew I must not lose it. When I was little, it seemed like a very large sum to me. Later, when I learned the value of money, I wondered why I meant so little to him.

  We would all wait for him. Usually, in the house, or in successive apartments that changed according to his fortunes and the increasing size of his family. He rang the doorbell several times impatiently and then opened the front door, loaded down with suitcases and bags. He greeted his wife and their two daughters, and then it was my turn.

  I always felt like I was intruding on them. Intruding when they hadn’t seen each other for weeks. How many times did I vow never to put myself through that again? How many times did I repeat that vow, so that I would never forget it? But I went back. And I kept going back, drawn by some irresistible force. As if humiliated on the scene of my defeat. Afterward, I slipped away to a bathroom or downstairs to my father’s office, where he had an armoire big enough to hide in. In there, I couldn’t hear anything, neither their joy nor my despair.

  I was nine when my first half sister was born. They presented her to Grandma and the rest of the family in Łόdź like a big bundle, which they welcomed and unpacked enthusiastically. Nestled inside was a thin little girl with very pale skin. She was crying. Toys had arrived at the same time she did. Little rubber elephants and tiny rabbits that squealed, rattles shaped like little hearts and multicolored paper wreaths that festooned her bed and her baby carriage. The richness and profusion of all this equipment was impressive.

  I was nine and twelve years older than my sisters. When they were born, I had a feeling that, for me, things were going to deteriorate. I needed my father. I didn’t know how or when to tell him that. I understood much later that for him I was not just a daughter, but a pawn in the game he was playing with my mother. He couldn’t forgive her for abandoning him, for not loving him. I knew nothing about that. In my eyes, in my head, he was the one who had packed up and left. I often felt he did not love me at all and that perhaps I was the reason for his going.

  I went there every Sunday. I sat on his lap. He teased me about my big feet and about my nose and my hair, but I didn’t know how to take a joke. His ridicule hurt. Even the fact that I read a lot provoked mockery. My flawless report cards made no impression on him that I could see. I do not remember any compliments from him or any recognition that I was trying to fulfill all his expectations. I did not know what to do to please him. And that was all I wanted.

  It seems he was proud of me. I never felt that when I was a child.

  I remember the postcards I would get as a child. Shiny, colorful, sometimes round or elongated. He signed them “Tata” (Papa). Even today, when I get a letter from him signed like that, even today, all the feelings from that period in my life come flooding back.

  He always wrote with a Parker ballpoint pen, in black or blue ink. The T slightly apart from the other letters, standing firmly on its little leg; the straight line on top—like a roof—attached almost invisibly to the base, and it too is firm and energetic. The a resembles an o endowed with a little tail written so delicately, and it is attached to the t that follows it like a cross hung with another tiny a. Tata. Papa. My papa. When I see that, it brings tears to my eyes.

  On the way to school, I went right by the old orphanage of Dr. Janusz Korczak. I knew his books, but I had no idea that he was Jewish and had gone to his death with the Jewish children in his charge.

  I was in my second year in high school when one of my classmates, a redhead named Arturek, delivered a glowing report in our civics class, praising Hitler for having resolved the Jewish problem. He said that Hitler had purified Poland of its Jewish scurvy, something many had tried to pull off before the war without success. The teacher made no objection. I did not understand what he was talking about.

  I did not understand why Mama broke down and sobbed during a film about the Warsaw Ghetto. There was no calming her. I knew practically nothing about the Jewish quarter in prewar Warsaw, and when streets like Pawia and Miła came up in the poems she read to me, it never occurred to me to connect them. The tailor Izaak Gutkind might well have been named Jan Kowalski for all it meant to me. “Izaak” sounded no different than “Mieczysław” or “Piotr.” For me, the Jews were as long ago as the Egyptians and as exotic as Indians. I certainly had never met any. I lived with that conviction for a long time.

  I graduated from high school with honors.

  The world of books took the place of daily life. I felt better at the ball with Anna Karenina than at a party for my friend next door. When I went out for a walk, I much preferred the company of the lady with the dog from Chekhov. Fiction seemed to have only privileges, participation without consequences. There, I was safe. Certainly, Emma Bovary poisoned herself, but you could simply start reading from the beginning again, and there she was. I found nothing ridiculous in Don Quixote’s duel with the windmills. Instead of admiring my aunts or my schoolteachers, I was smitten by Phaedra and Antigone, and Cousin Bette and Uncle Vanya were the closest relatives I had. I went for a long time without realizing I was living in the skin of others. Not once did it enter my mind that Mama, my mama, was Jewish. I simply could not conceive of it. Being Jewish was something ignoble. Was a fault. That is what I got from my father.

  My mother maintains that she had decided to tell me the truth about her Jewish origins and the fate of the Jews during the war when I turned nineteen. I don’t remember that at all. I took my cue from her, but I not only hid it from the world, I hid it from myself. I considered her secret as a humiliation and a disfiguring feature, something it is appropriate to be ashamed of. Otherwise, she would never have hidden it from me. These Jews, who were so rarely mentioned and who were the target of inexplicable outbursts by my father, were suddenly revealed as my family.

  She kept silent in order to construct a wall, she said, between me and all the pain I might have encountered in this country because of her. I made an effort to think of this as the greatest possible expression of a mother’s love for her child.

  After the war, many of the Jews who remained in Poland chose to keep their origins quiet. They had survived and decided to make a break with all that. They decided not to be Jews any longer. Better not to admit it; you never knew when they would come after you again.

  My mother’s family had lived in Poland for two centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, her grandparents on her father’s side—the Przedborskis and the Hermans—were considered Jewish elite, leading very assimilated lives in the little town of Łęczyca, sixty miles from Warsaw. They owned buildings, a printing company, a warehouse of wine and liquor. They held honorary positions as town councilors. On her mother’s side, the Goldsteins were much poorer, Orthodox Jews.

  When war broke out, my mother was about to enter second grade in elementary school. She remembers a part of the family from Łęczyca arriving in Warsaw and all of them going together into the ghetto. They lived there almost two years in conditions that grew more and more deplorable. And then, one after the other, they were taken to the Umschlagplatz and shipped to Treblinka. Her great-grandmother went and also her grandmother along with her brothers and sisters; also a daughter with her family along with a handful of cous
ins. More than twenty people in all. Those who had chosen to stay in the ghetto at Łęczyca perished in the camp at Chełmno nad Nerem, located nearby.

  Only those who managed to cross over to the Aryan side and go into hiding with false papers were saved. Besides my mother and her mother, who was killed in the streets right before the end of the war, my mother’s aunt and her son were also saved. And her aunt’s sister, who was married to a Pole. Their brother—my grandfather—spent the five years of the Occupation in an Oflag, a POW camp for officers, in Woldenberg.

  I did not learn all that right away. The past was revealed to me little by little, and always in whispers. As if it were still better not to know.

  II

  Our Home

  MY FAMILY, PICKING MUSHROOMS NEAR ŁÓDŹ: MY PARENTS, GRANDMOTHER MANIA, HER SISTER STEFA, MY FATHER’S BROTHER, WŁODEK, AND ME