Family History of Fear Page 5

  It seemed to him—or so he says, it is how he remembers it and is a feeling he is still proud of—it seemed to him that he had the world by the tail. The war was over. He stood on the threshold of a Poland that he could construct with his own hands.

  He took a formal academic oath that day, the thirteenth of October, 1950. “I put myself and my future in the hands of the dean of this august academic institution with a solemn pledge that I will aspire with perseverance to acquire knowledge and will never sully the name and reputation of this university, that I will strive to be respectful of its rules and regulations.”

  They gave him a student ID and a discount card for the streetcar, and he was given a scholarship and a room in the dormitories across the Vistula River, on Grenadiers Street. He also received financial aid the following year. All he ever got from home were fifty złotys, the equivalent of four pounds of sausage.

  HALINA I

  HALINA

  There are no photos. Not one from Łęczyca. Not one with her mother. Not one of her childhood. In the first known photograph of her, postwar, Halina is solemn.

  Behind the doors of the Batory Secondary School there was no war. No rubble in sight. Green grass, just like before, with a new generation of violets. This last detail is not absolutely definite. Instead of springtime, 1945, it might well have been autumn, in which case glistening chestnuts would lie scattered underfoot. In that area, the old trees had survived air raids and fire. In her freshman year, on the second floor, or maybe when she was a sophomore, on the same floor, a history teacher raved about the victorious Soviet army and how grateful they should all be for having been freed from the tyrant Hitler. He didn’t have to be very convincing; most of the students already agreed with him.

  She was seated in the last row. She was dark, with curly hair, curly right up to the roots, divided neatly into two braids. With shiny navy-blue bows. Halina was the only one in their class still wearing them. She had round glasses with wire frames that hooked tightly behind her ears. Big brown eyes. Freckles and a clear complexion.

  She stood out among the other girls, in their skirts made from blankets, their cotton cardigans and patched hand-me-down blouses. She was neat and well groomed. Her cardigan, dark red in color, was particularly eye-catching. Nobody else had anything that pretty. Nobody had a schoolbag like hers, either, soft black leather with a gold clasp, in which she arranged her books after every lesson. She put them all away carefully and slowly, as if she were afraid they would break, slipping into each nook with a gray paper jacket and her name beautifully inscribed in green ink on a special label: Halina Przedborska. She also had a wooden pencil box with a little sliding cover for her pens and pencils.

  Perhaps it would be best to hang on to the version about the spring before the fall of Berlin. Halina was positive she had completed only one year at the primary school sponsored by the Workers’ Friends of Children Society (RTPD) at Żoliborz before the Occupation and had entered secondary school after the war. She had forgotten the subjects she had studied informally in groups, with her mother. She went to the blackboard reluctantly. She spoke rarely and only when asked a direct question. With her eyes cast down, she responded in an orderly fashion, leaving nothing out. She was able to remember different constellations and the properties of the elements, to recite Newton’s Laws or Pythagorean theorems. She did this without difficulty, but without curiosity as well. She invested all her energy in her schoolwork, as if she were doing her duty. As if she wanted to justify her own existence. She didn’t like sports, and she did not know how to ride a bicycle. Books were the only things that really interested her, no matter how the story turned out. A habit left over from the war. At school, nobody ever mentioned the war.

  She rarely looked straight ahead. And she blinked constantly. One day, her classmate Romka asked her why. She didn’t answer right away. They had only known each other for a few weeks. Halina finally replied that she had read a lot during the war, in very bad light. Nothing more.

  A little later, when they knew each other better, Romka got another response: “Behind the armoire where I was hiding, there was hardly any light. But I had to do something all day long. I ruined my eyes.” Maybe she also mentioned the basement. She revealed this once, and one time only, and never again. You must not feel sorry for yourself and especially must not arouse pity in others.

  Romka lived in Warsaw during the Occupation. She knew exactly what was going on. Her father had taken her right up to the opening in the ghetto wall on Sienna Street once, so that she could see for herself what mankind was capable of. But when she met Halina, she did not make the connection. She did not associate her pretty dark-haired classmate with the people kept starving and in rags behind those walls. She did not realize, haunted as she was by the memory of being chased out of her house during the Warsaw Uprising, that this little girl had suffered a fate even worse than her own. She thought about that later, about the fact that as a Pole, she was better off. She could go to the park. There had always been food on the table. She remembered a child who came to their house around nightfall every day for several months in 1942, and how her mother always gave him a glass of milk and a slice of bread. Then, all of a sudden, he disappeared. Why hadn’t her parents been able to save a single Jewish child?

  The girls never discussed it at the time. I don’t know how Halina would have reacted to it. I do not know if she was even aware of what the people of Warsaw had to bear during the Occupation, the Uprising, the sewers, the couriers, the Szare Szeregi,* the refugee camp at Pruszkόw where they were sent, and the return afterward to houses without floors or windows. Romka had been all alone with her mother, without a cent, with nothing but an iron stove they found in the rubble. They had managed to bring a few utensils with them. They built a fire in the courtyard for cooking and ate from a single plate with a rusty spoon. They did not speak much about all that, in the same way that it never entered their minds to bring up the old Jewish tailor who made an overcoat for Romka just before the war and who spoke to her like no one ever had. “Young lady, if you would be so good as to turn a little to the left…” It did not matter to Romka or her parents that he was Jewish. She would have been offended if someone suggested otherwise. And that is exactly why she never mentioned him. Before the war, they would never have met. The assimilated Jewish intelligentsia rarely had any contact with working-class Poles. The daughters of fathers such as theirs did not play together in the park. They could only become friends in a liberated Poland.

  At Halina’s house, on Koszykowa Street, in an apartment on the top floor of an old building that they shared with another family, the parquet floor was always waxed to a high shine. There were curtains on the windows, not a windowpane missing, and hot water in the bathrooms. When she went there, Romka thought she was in paradise. She had no idea of the suffering that magnificent kitchen held for a little girl preparing all her father’s meals. Halina had absolutely no experience in cooking, and no matter how precisely she followed the recipes in cookbooks, the dumplings stuck together like glue, chops and cutlets came out like shoe leather, and the crêpes for dessert burned in the pan. Her father was furious. She never complained but she was often in tears. Or else she crouched on a little stool and begged her mother for help. “Mama, you see everything,” she said time and time again. “Tell me what I’m doing wrong. I really do want to get it right and keep Papa from yelling so much.” Her mother must have been in another part of heaven, because Halina never learned how to cook.

  She loved stopping by Aunt Bronka’s house for a snack on her way home from school. Her aunt made the most delicious cake. Sometimes she took Romka with her, but she felt uncomfortable on Gόrnośląska Street with her friend there. She drank tea the color of hay as fast as she could and left with great relief. She liked it better when she and Romka crossed Ujazdowski Park together, bursting with laughter, talking about anything and everything, the new geography teacher and her pretty dress. Something about that open space ma
de her giddy. I know she had to be brave. Not long before then, overhearing a conversation between her father and her aunt, she had learned of her mother’s death. The mother with whom she lived during the worst years of the war, who had been the whole world to her, whose love made up for her lost childhood. From then on she had to fend for herself, with that loss and that pain, had to take her own measure in the chaos of freedom recovered, in all the joy, relief, and contradictions of her new destiny. She was learning another duplicity than the one that had been hers until then.

  Her relatives patched their wounds. Her father and her aunts lived every day, rejoicing at the end of hell and joining in the reconstruction of Warsaw and of Poland, a new Poland in which everyone would be well and justly treated. These were not slogans to them. They sincerely believed in the promises of socialism. They sincerely wanted to believe that it was the truest of all possible truths. They didn’t ask themselves, as others did, whether or not they ought to emigrate. They wanted to be like everyone around them, not merely equal but alike. They erased all traces of the past so that they would never again have to wear an armband with a star on it. They rarely spoke of what had happened, and then said no more than was absolutely necessary.

  They chose silence as a sanctuary, and they were not alone.

  Like other survivors, they registered with the Jewish committees that came into being in Poland just after Liberation. The first year, the commission of registration and statistics of the Central Jewish Committee recorded more than 240,000 individuals. All of them were given material assistance and help in their search for the missing. They went there, at first, as they went toward houses that no longer existed, hoping that the emptiness was not everlasting and that there were still more, still others like them. They shared their distress, their decision to leave Poland or never again to be Jewish.

  On the faded pink registration form, Mama is listed next to her father. They registered together in the summer of 1946. Were they still searching for lost relatives? Did they really think that someone else might have been saved and would miraculously appear before them? Or were they applying for financial assistance? “Przedborska Halina, a student, born July 3, 1931. Parents: Szymon Przedborski and Adela Goldstein”—their real names—“of Łęczyca and Koło.” There it was, engraved in the past, the plain truth. “Address as of September 1, 1939: 18 Krasiński Street.” Further down, in the space left for wartime changes of address: “58 Leszno Street, ghetto.” As if she were informing them that she was fed up with the old neighborhood and wanted a change. The significance of the words was obvious, however, because “ghetto” was associated with Jews, like “camp,” “captivity,” “Aryan quarter.” Number 14 Koszykowa Street meant life outside the walls, meant Liberation. And that, one must not forget, came from Soviet soldiers greeted with cheers on the road from Garwolin.

  This file is the only official trace of their identity. The only evidence that her mother was Jewish. As if she were still hanging on to her mother’s hand and with her, entire generations. Later, she handled things differently. A defenseless Jewish girl had to transform herself into a Pole. Halina’s life would have been completely different if Dela had survived—if.

  But she had no mother. She was the only one left, though they were both supposed to die.

  I do not know what Halina thought about all that. Or what she had to forget in order to go on. She had to stay alive, had to be saved, as her mother swore she would. She did not know the rules of this new game. She was content to watch from the sidelines. She imitated the people closest to her. They kept quiet. So did she. Hunting down Jews, it appeared, was at an end, but could you trust it? She has no memory of it now. Even so, at the time she had to know, must have heard about the Kielce pogrom. And all the other instances of the murder of Jews, in forests, on trains, when they showed up at their houses. They went back home, but their places were taken. Their pantries, beds, wardrobes, belonged to their neighbors now. The Jews were not welcome. In the years immediately following the war, approximately two thousand citizens of Jewish origin were murdered in Poland, according to estimates.

  They had no place to call home. Within two years, more than half of the survivors left Poland forever. Those who remained, like Halina’s father, truly wanted to believe they had a right to live in their own country.

  She had no wish to look behind her, or inside, either, where there was only fear and shame. Her new fate—Polish, Aryan, orderly, clear—could not be tainted by dread: that is, by the past; that is, by the memory of the ghetto; that is, by being Jewish. That had to stay a secret.

  On the first of June 1947, young Halina Przedborska was baptized in the church of St. Vincent de Paul in the parish of Otwock.

  Who led her to the church in Otwock, right beside the Catholic cemetery in which her mother was buried? Because it was not faith, not fascination with religious rituals, and not organ music.

  She had learned how to pray during the Occupation, in her first hiding place in Żoliborz. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” She recited it so often, she could say it perfectly, which pleased the ladies who were keeping her safe in the basement of their house and who shortly thereafter sent her farther away. They told her about Jesus Christ and the Cross, things she had never heard before. “Forgive us our trespasses,” she apologized. Later on, that prayer came in handy—“and deliver us from evil”—when the Germans came close, as they did in several of the places she stayed under the name of Alicja Szwejlis, Aryan. This girl also learned how to kneel to pray and how to bring her hands together. “Our Father, who art…” She always had to be careful with the Sign of the Cross, though: “…and the Holy Ghost,” from the left to the right shoulder. “Amen.” She had good papers now, Polish, solid. With the seal of the Cross. She knew she needed the same ones after the war.

  Who could have put an idea like that in her head? Someone in charge of dealing with the outside world? Could it possibly have been her father—the Communist, the master builder, who went to great lengths to avoid even passing a church? No, it never would have occurred to him to take refuge in the Almighty. He did not pray to any God. He believed in the Party. Could it have been his brother-in-law, then? Oleś, Aunt Frania’s husband, the one who had saved them, who trusted no one? Who saw that his three sons, born of Jewish mothers, were all baptized? In the church where Halina received the sacrament, Oleś—Aleksander Majewski—appears on the registry as her godfather.

  My mother does not remember the ceremony. She does not remember the priest looming over her and pronouncing, “Halina, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” or if the holy water had any taste.

  Nobody forced her to do anything. What counted most, no doubt, was the will to live, an urge so strong it consented to practically anything. It is difficult to draw the line precisely between my mother as a sixteen-year-old and the young woman she wanted to be. The parents of that young woman—the father, Szymon, forty-four years old, engineer, and the mother, Adela Zmiałowska, whom he married in 1930—were both Roman Catholics.

  Father Jan Raczkowski never suspected a thing. The official stamp of approval, purchased for ten złotys, was authentic.

  Some of Halina’s classmates claim she was always withdrawn, as if she were hiding something that she couldn’t shake off. Though the two of them were close friends for years, it took her almost half a century to tell Romka how her mother died. Was she haunted by the past? Did she dream about the war? She could control herself during the daytime, but what about the nights? Was she frightened of them? Sometimes, on Gόrnośląska Street, after devouring chicken broth with lima beans or chopped liver, which they never called by its Jewish name, Aunt Bronka spoke of Łęczyca. Whatever the subject was—delicious dishes that only Grandmother cooked on Poznańska Street, the wine and liquors in the cellar, the right way to chop and marinate meat, or about a good Tokay or the special set of dishes used for Seder, or the view of the meadow—neither she nor her cousin M
aryś wanted to hear a word of it. Absolutely everything else was more important—school, friends, games, their wonderful new life without the slightest hint of fear. They could go to school, meet people, walk in the streets with their heads held high, normally, just like other people. They did not want to hear even the merest echo of the past. What was beginning was so much more important. They had a brand-new world to build, houses and lives, with modern foundations made out of concrete and no looking back. As in the myth, one glance back might wipe it all out.

  She does not remember hearing about the founding of the state of Israel. The year 1948 was not particularly memorable. She did not go to the unveiling of the monument honoring the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto on April 19th of that year. The ceremony took place on a plot of land in the old Jewish quarter on the fifth anniversary of the Uprising. It was cut out of the same black granite from Sweden that Hitler had reserved for all the monuments to his own victories. She avoided that part of the city.

  Reconstruction. She was engrossed by it as the daughter of a man who had dedicated a large part of his life to figuring out how to raise Warsaw from its ruins. She took no direct part in the effort, unlike her friend Baśka, who frankly remembers more of their childhood than she does. The two girls spent a lot of time together studying for final examinations at Kochanowski Secondary School, which Halina attended after Batory Secondary School, and they have remained good friends ever since.

  Baśka was a child of the Warsaw Uprising. Her apartment building was burned to the ground. Her family lost everything. They came back to an ocean of rubble. She remembers the Old Town as a gigantic wreck of a place, with piles of rubble one story high. They loaded children into army trucks after school and drove them to Krasiński Square, where they handed out hammers and pickaxes to separate the bricks. All the necessities were missing. They did not have proper material for construction, or tools, or adequate means of transportation. But people were bursting with energy, drunk with a thirst for life, for the opportunity to negate the destruction of their city.