Family History of Fear Page 7

  “In the course of the first fortnight of this month of May, Tuszyński was arrested by the authorities of the Internal Security Services for having commented on a broadcast of the BBC in a public place in a manner prejudicial to our current relations.” That was the statement in a note bearing a “Confidential” seal.

  My mother cannot remember those days. But she recounted her visit to the Mostowski Palace to a girlfriend, thanks to whom I can imagine her there. Had she been summoned, or did she go there on her own initiative? No one can tell today. It was a blond young man from the countryside, “with a broad face, semi-literate, you see,” who questioned her.

  They reproached Bogdan for telling anti-Soviet jokes and listening to Radio Free Europe in the apartment on Puławska Street. She denied it, as she also denied he had made disastrous comments, for trumped-up political reasons, about a certain match against the Russians. She didn’t remember what match; sports did not interest her, she had an indulgent attitude toward what was called “physical culture.” She was in love and ready to do anything to protect her man.

  “Is it true?” The blond young man wouldn’t let go. “Is it true, because there is an accusation against Tuszyński, that he is an anti-Semite?”

  They all remembered that he had made Jewish jokes. But no one took it seriously; neither did she. She stood up and, facing the officer, who was seated, she said, “Look at me closely. He is my fiancé.”

  I like her making this small theatrical gesture, full of confidence. Did she risk anything at all by doing it? It seems not. She admitted that she was Jewish, as if that rendered the accusation absurd.

  She fought for his release, she defended the man she loved. It’s extraordinary to me, but perhaps I am mistaken. I never knew her thus. I don’t know if in other circumstances she had ever admitted her origins so openly and defiantly.

  Aside from the accusations of anti-Semitism, having told anti-Soviet jokes and listened to Western radio, Bogdan was accused of hanging a cross above his bed in the student dormitory and of “spreading false information about the massacre in Katyn”; he had declared that it was the work of the Russians. This sort of offense meant two to three years in prison.

  The accusation concerning Katyn was the most serious. That concerning anti-Semitism had some weight but was also shameful. There were rarely any consequences. His friends all affirmed this. As for listening to hostile radio, it was not necessarily proof of ideological depravity. People who were implicated were often absolved if they reacted appropriately to the hostile propaganda. Knowing what the enemy thought could be valuable. But Katyn, that was dangerous.

  One night they released Bogdan, after seven days of detention. They asked him to appear in the office of the ZMP so they could review the case and so he could provide additional explanations. “They will take care of you.” The chairman of the board was one of Bogdan’s close friends.

  The meeting was set for mid-June 1952 in a large hall on the second floor of the Casimir Palace. No one can remember whether they had gathered only the journalism department or other faculties as well. With the distance of time, some recalled the podium in the middle of the room; others, friends speaking from the lectern. Tables and chairs were arranged in three rows, or perhaps two with an aisle in the middle. Several dozen people were present, or perhaps several hundred. In the back unknown people sat on tables, workers from the UB, the Internal Security.

  His comrades got up one after the other, the same ones with whom he had played ball, gone drinking, those with whom he roomed. They made accusatory statements. They repeated what he had said in the course of a dinner, or while shaving, or in a café, or playing cards. About Katyn he had said that the crime had not been committed by the Germans and that while the Soviet Union was promulgating a policy of peace, at the right moment they could start a war. As for the economic problems, he was dissatisfied and blamed it on the environment rather than looking for the root of the problem.

  “Although he is the boyfriend of a certain Przedborska, who is of Jewish origin, he is an anti-Semite, which is evident in the statements he made.”

  Those who tried to raise objections were rebuked with a categorical “Sit down!” One or two announced that they were going to monitor him on the ideological level. For a moment he tried to defend himself by invoking the proletariat from Łόdź and insisting that this was a misunderstanding. However, by a unanimous decision of the collective he was expelled from the ranks of the ZMP as a hostile element with alien ideology.

  The signature on the note with the label “Confidential” and dated June 17, 1952, is illegible.

  They crossed the enormous courtyard of the university holding hands; no one came toward them. Bogdan still remembers today that she was by his side.

  Expulsion from the ZMP almost invariably meant being expelled from the university. Yet Tuszyński was allowed to remain there.

  The matter had run its course when he had to take his examination in dialectical materialism with Professor Adam Schaff. He remembers the exam because he took it at the same time as four Jewish, he says, girls, each of whom received five out of five. As for him, Schaff had written, in his own hand, “Unsatisfactory,” which he rarely did, people said. Someone heard him say that individuals like Tuszyński, unworthy of the trust of the organization, did not deserve any other grade in Marxism-Leninism.

  Professor Schaff’s teaching assistants claim that it was unbelievable that a major Marxist philosopher had anything to do with such an incident. He had more important matters to take care of. Besides, he rarely supervised his own exams. It was they, his teaching assistants, who were in charge of Schaff’s signature, who gave the exams.

  My father failed. This grade, “Unsatisfactory” (two out of five), appeared in his transcript with the signature of the professor. Adam Schaff was Jewish, that was not a secret.

  In the fall, Bogdan passed his makeup exam in dialectical materialism with a four out of five.

  As an enemy of the people, his life was made difficult in the department. That’s what he says today, that’s what he really believes, and he knows who should be held responsible for it. Were the Jewish professors effectively all prejudiced against him, or was his persecution only the result of his imagination and his biased outlook? In those days no one wondered if brilliant students were Jewish, no one had singled them out; it never occurred to anyone to link intellectual capacity with genealogy. No one talked about it, any more than they discussed the number of Jewish scientists. No one can recall any conflict of this nature. No one ever wondered who were the grandparents of Professor Schaff, the author of Introduction to Marxism, the most frequently reprinted textbook.

  Bogdan never spoke ill of his Jewish friends at the university. He continued to affirm that when Halina and he first became acquainted, their backgrounds had no meaning, did not count, and certainly were not a problem. His friends have the same recollection. Did his aversion only concern those in the upper echelon?

  It was said that his final thesis, Sports in the Service of American Imperialism, was a pioneering work, judged favorably as a propaganda pamphlet. He passed his exam on June 23, 1953, with the grade of “Excellent.” He obtained his diploma from the department of journalism, graduating in philosophical and social sciences.

  In July 1953, Halina wrote him in a letter that she had had a frank conversation with the vice-chancellor, who made it possible for her to continue her studies in literature, a necessary condition for obtaining her bachelor’s degree, and helped Bogdan find work with the radio station. “The staff member Tuszyński started working at Radio Station of Warsaw on the 1st of September,” she wrote him proudly. “Are you happy?”

  “I am very pleased with the work assigned me,” he wrote in his report. “I am fully capable of devoting all my faculties to my professional tasks, in order to add, in the small measure of my work, my own contribution to the edification of socialism in our country.”

  In an evaluation dated May 1954, he was deeme
d politically honest, “a man who is devoted to us.”

  * * *

  * Katyn: the site and burial grounds of a mass execution of Polish officers during the Soviet Occupation, which the Soviets tried to blame on the Germans. (A.T.)

  HALINA II

  Who first noticed the other?

  Did she notice him: blond, athletic, with blue eyes? Or did he notice her: delicate, brunette, with a serious expression? Where did it happen? In the courtyard of the university, or at a meeting of the ZMP; at the dean’s office, or in class? It happened quickly, as if each had been waiting for the other. Or perhaps it was in the class on dialectical materialism, or history. Let’s say history. Neither knows how or when, but they remember that they quickly became a couple.

  MY MOTHER, HALINA PRZEDBORSKA, AND HER WARSAW UNIVERSITY DIPLOMA. SHE OBTAINED A MASTER’S DEGREE FROM THE FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY IN 1955.

  When they met at the beginning of autumn in 1950, my mother was nineteen years old; he was younger by one year. Both were born in the first week of July. Halina weighed about 108 pounds dressed and wanted to gain some weight. He had been boxing until recently in the featherweight division.

  He was her first boyfriend, and she was his first girlfriend. Almost in one outburst, she had told him everything about herself. They visited the grave of Halina’s mother in Otwock.

  My mother was eight years old when war broke out. Two years later she walked along the streets of the ghetto looking for green trees. A high wall separated the Jewish quarter from the Poles. She had to look up, and even then a narrow frame of barbed wire and glass shards hemmed in the sky. She knew a few places from which you could see the Krasiński gardens on the other side. She liked to think about this garden; she knew that her aunt Frania strolled there, pushing her newborn in a carriage. People said Frania was on the other side of the wall because she looked as if she belonged there.

  In the course of the summer of 1942, my mother left the ghetto, although it was forbidden for her to walk in the streets of the city. She spent her twelfth birthday in the Żoliborz neighborhood, in the basement of the same house in which she had lived with her father before the war. She was always afraid. She read for hours on end by candlelight. People said that her looks betrayed her. They changed her first and last names and taught her how to pass from one hiding place to another and never ask questions. They also taught her Catholic prayers and how to make the Sign of the Cross.

  In July 1944, friends of her father sent her to a summer camp for orphans in Wilga. There she was known as Alicja Szwejlis. Her mother visited her there once. She came on foot from Otwock, where she worked in Mrs. Czaplicka’s boardinghouse. She couldn’t take Halina with her then, but she promised to come back as soon as she could. She never returned, neither after the flight of the Germans nor later, when the guardians came to fetch their wards.

  After the war, my mother decided to look at herself in the mirror for the first time in five years. She liked the little girl she saw. “Pretty little Halina,” she said. “Pretty little Halina,” she repeated.

  The war had left her with nothing, except her life and fear.

  …

  My father was seven years old at the outbreak of war. He lived with his family in his grandfather’s house in Łόdź. He had light-colored hair and piercing blue eyes. In a photo taken the day of his First Communion, dated May 1940, he looks in good health. He stood amid trees in bloom holding a bouquet, wearing a fine suit with short pants and a shirt with a spread collar. Next to him was his mother, Marianna, in a suit trimmed in white and wearing a hat. He came out of the war convinced that with a little luck he would get along fine in life.

  It could have been the other way around, with my father the one reading in a basement, afraid of the dark, and my mother wearing a white First Communion dress, standing in a park by the church. It would have been more difficult for a boy to be saved. Mother could have been on the sunny side and Father in the dark.

  Halina wrote love letters to Bogdan in green ink on sheets of white notebook paper now yellowed. In neat handwriting, slightly angular, she counted the days and the hours, the days and the hours she waited. She waited to throw herself into his arms, she waited to snuggle up against him, to forget all her troubles and worries.

  It was he who saved her letters. Twelve letters, all twelve beginning with “Darling,” “My love,” “My little cat.” Today I can’t think of any way to describe these terms of endearment other than futile.

  He had a sunny disposition and was unaware of everything that frightened her within herself, the flashbacks that returned and surged in her head and wouldn’t let her sleep. When she was alone on Sunday afternoons in the apartment on the third floor, the others having gone for a stroll, she sat at the oak table, listening. “In the small café where you whispered ‘I love you’ to me for the first time…”—the old tango interpreted by the Trida Sisters. A sad and languorous melody, similar to the rain on the window and the monotonous ticking of the clock.

  “The book is lying shut on the sofa, my knitting has fallen on the floor and I don’t even want to pick it up…” She went out only as far as the mailbox, to send her latest letter, or else she waited for the mailman.

  One evening she had gone to the train station because she thought Bogdan was coming back. He had gone to Tczew on family business. Her waiting led to disappointment. She took a long time returning home from the station. Then she had written, “You can’t do that. Show a plate of warm food to someone famished, and take it back without her even having a taste. Mean!” She thought about going a second time to wait for the train, but she dreaded another solitary return home.

  Besides, it was getting late and her father did not want her to be out at night. Once he had left her on the doormat for half the night as punishment for being five minutes late.

  …

  Her father was so distant, separated not only by his own silence by also by his wife, to whom he was completely subjected. She had a strange first name, Żena. Halina held it against her father for wanting to change his life so quickly and radically. Certainly he had not seen her mother for ten years, but she had been dead only for five years. How could he have forgotten her? Perhaps you have to forget; how else to continue living? But couldn’t he have found another woman, a woman like his friend Marysia, whom she liked so much? What really transpired between those two? Halina sometimes visited her secretly; she received presents from her, dresses in packages from London or secondhand clothing. After alterations she wore them to dances and they matched her trumniaki, old tennis shoes she had dyed black herself. If Żena had only known…She could confide in Marysia, but Żena had never even hugged her. Neither had her father. Żena would shut herself up in her room or would ask herself rhetorical questions: Why did her father marry this woman? He needed someone to do the cooking? But she never cooked. We have Miss Jόzia, who comes to clean the house; Żena has to attend meetings. He wanted to have ideological discussions over breakfast?

  She remembered what she overheard Aunt Bronka say late one night in Ujazdόw. Everyone thought she was asleep. They spoke in muffled tones, almost whispering. Bronka always spoke to her brother cautiously, as if to a child.

  Halina had known for a long time that she would hear these words one day. She couldn’t ignore it. “If she were alive, she would never have left her daughter in such a state.” The absence of her mother caused a permanent pain she felt at every step. Mother wasn’t here and would never be here.

  It was on rainy days that she missed her mother the most. She still had the stockings of Scottish wool that her mother had brought to her at the summer camp in Wilga in 1944. They had become too small for her but she kept them in a drawer. She would bury her face in them to recapture the smell of that moment.

  Of those years, Żena remembered that Halina was uncommunicative. “Distant” was perhaps too strong a word to characterize her relationship with her father, but it certainly never went beyond the bounds of correcting her be
havior. Żena says, to the astonishment of my mother, that she was very disturbed by this. They did not relate to each other as a family. She heard Halina complain to Bronka that after the Liberation her father had not been in a hurry to fetch her. Żena said that it was unfair to blame Szymon. He had to come to terms with many absences at that point.

  They never had the time to learn to know and grow to love one another, little Halina and her father, the father and daughter. And in the end they had not known how. Before the war, he was rarely at home in Łęczyca, which he left to work in Warsaw. They saw each other on Saturdays and during holidays. She was closer to her grandparents than to him. She had not seen him during the whole Occupation, five years: the ghetto, the hiding places were always with her mother. He was not with them in the most difficult times. He appeared when nothing could be saved any longer. There were so many things that he did not understand.

  She would find echoes of the warmth of Łęczyca again in Aunt Bronka’s house in Ujazdόw. There everything was in motion, alive—the kitchen, the laundry, the neighbors, the friends, the conversations, the card games. Not only did Aunt Bronka serve broth with beans and the same gefilte fish as at Przedrynek Place, but she gave Halina the feeling that she belonged to someone. She gave the feeling of being confident that the future would come out fine one way or another. The war widow, who in addition to her husband had lost her whole family, brought comfort to others.

  In her father’s house on Puławska Street a chill atmosphere reigned. Halina escaped by joining her friends and Bogdan at the university. Disciplined and concentrated in her studies, she took notes, which the others in the group benefited from subsequently. From the beginning she was interested in literature.