by Bina Bernard
“Leaving Lena behind was horrific, but we needed a safe haven for the family that was left,” he said. In a halting voice he asked, “Do you remember how difficult it was for us to leave Poland?”
Hannah felt her body stiffen as she remembered.
The Russians had sealed the borders. Only people who had to be repatriated were permitted to leave the country. Once again her father had arranged for a set of false identity papers. They were to be Hungarian refugees trying to get home. Back in full war mode, this time they were protecting themselves against the Russians.
Old and frail, Emma refused to go with them. She wanted to be buried next to her husband. Harry took her to stay with a distant cousin in Lodz. Hannah was overjoyed that Emma had decided to remain in Poland. In Radom, Emma was more attentive toward her, but Hannah was sure it was only because her parents were watching. Teaching her to tell time on the old mahogany clock did not make up for the hundreds of terrifying hours she had spent waiting alone in Warsaw until Emma came home.
They sold most of their possessions except for a few things Grandma Sonia had left with Ela: her silver candlesticks, a tablecloth she’d embroidered, her silk shawl, and some random pieces of silver. Her father converted the money from the sale into gold coins.
They left Radom by train and crossed into Czechoslovakia in the middle of the night. On the train Harry thrust the coins into her hand. “Put them in your mouth.” Startled, she obeyed. When the train stopped in Bratislava, a Russian guard approached Hannah and, smiling, led her away from her parents. She was terrified. When the guard offered her candy, she refused. She kept her lips tightly closed and the gold coins safe.
Still smiling, the guard said in Russian, “You’re a nice little girl. I have a daughter your age in Moscow.”
Hannah could hear her heart pounding.
“Govarish po Russki?” he asked, pointing to his mouth.
As she’d been coached, Hannah pretended not to understand. She was supposed to be Hungarian, not someone who could speak Russian.
Actually the Russian soldiers who liberated them in Koslow had taught Hannah Russian. Billeted in the barn while she, her mother and Emma lived in the farmhouse, they seemed less menacing than the German officers who terrified her. Still she kept an eye on them, determined to figure out what they were plotting.
“Govarish po Russki?” one asked the first day she brought them food. She shook her head.
“I teach you!” he said in Polish and grinned.
Hannah’s head bobbed up and down. And her Russian lessons began! Most Poles were not so friendly with their Russian liberators.
Once the Russian border guard was satisfied she was Hungarian as her identity papers indicated, he brought her back to her parents, and the three of them were allowed to re-board the train. They were careful not to speak Polish onboard until they found an empty compartment and settled in. Then Harry told Hannah to spit out the gold coins, which he put in the money belt strapped around his waist. Though her father never complimented her for a job well done, Hannah was happy just to have the coins out of her care.
“Go to sleep,” her mother said as the train clanked south. Wrapped in the down quilt they had brought along to keep her warm, Hannah quickly fell asleep with her head in her mother’s lap, and dreamed of the courtyard for the first time. Her own screams of “No! No!” woke her up.
“It’s only a dream. It can’t hurt you,” her mother reassured Hannah. Exhausted, she fell asleep without ever describing her dream.
After two weeks of staying in safe houses in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, they finally arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, in the American sector. Off the train, her father surprised Hannah when he scooped her up in his arms, and spun her around. “We are very lucky. We survived the war, and we’re still a family. We must be very happy from now on,” he said. Sadly, there was no joy in his voice.
“After all these years, why did you finally decide to tell me about Lena?” Hannah demanded.
“You’re a reporter. If anyone can find out what happened to Lena, you can.”
“What?” she shouted. Hannah was almost as shocked by his answer as she was to learn she had a missing sister.
“Hannah, you’re like me,” Harry said. “Or rather, the way I used to be. You can do anything.”
She glared at her father. Still unaccustomed to hearing such praise from him, at this point Hannah didn’t much like the comparison.
“Before I die I want Lena to know that I came back just as I promised,” Harry said. “I need her to forgive me for leaving Poland without her.”
“That’s just great! You expect me to fix something you screwed up years ago? You expect me to find her? After all this time?”
“Yes. You’re the only one who can do it.”
“So the only reason you’re finally telling me about Lena is because you want her to forgive you.”
“We wanted to tell you many times. But decided to spare you.”
“Spare me! What did you spare me besides love and affection, Dad?” Hannah’s rage was boiling over.
“Don’t be angry. Try to understand,” Harry pleaded. “It wasn’t easy for me. Every time I looked at you I saw little Lena waving goodbye to me at the convent. I didn’t mean to shut you out. But holding you at bay somehow made not having Lena with us bearable.”
“I understand perfectly. You abandoned both of your daughters, just in different ways,” Hannah answered coldly. “I was the only child left. You should have loved me even more!” she screamed.
“I always loved you. I just couldn’t show it.”
Harry closed his eyes, and whispered, “I did the best I could. I’m so sorry I hurt you!”
He could never forgive himself for his failure to get Lena back. But now he was desperate to undo the damage between Hannah and himself, which he’d caused.
“I couldn’t hold you close because I couldn’t hold her,” Harry said softly, his voice a stark contrast to Hannah’s shouts.
“You punished me for something you did!”
“I punished us both. I saved you and not her.”
“Remember when I told you I never asked to be saved, and you slapped me?” Hannah shot back, her body rigid, her nails almost drawing blood in her clenched fists.
“It was a reflex. I didn’t mean to slap you. It hurt so much to hear you say such a thing to me. All I ever wanted was for us to be a loving family.”
“Great! Wanting it is not the same as making it happen, is it? Your defense is you couldn’t be a loving father to me because you failed to get Lena back?” Hannah mouthed each word carefully, in the same dreaded tone her father had used to admonish her over the years.
“Forgive me, Hannah. Please. Please,” Harry begged. “I wish I could go back and change everything.” His breathing labored, Harry could barely speak. “I am . . . so sorry that Lena . . . was always between you and me . . . that I never told you how proud I was to be your father.”
But Harry’s mea culpa did not lessen Hannah’s anger.
“All those years wasted! If she is alive, Lena never benefited from my pain or your guilt!” Hannah yelled at her father.
“What’s going on here?” Molly shouted as she walked into the living room.
Without realizing it, Harry and Hannah were both standing and from Molly’s perspective it looked as if they were locked in physical battle. She stepped between them, and made Harry sit back on the sofa.
The blood had drained from his face.
“He’s having one of his fibrillation attacks! Get some water and the pills on the dresser,” Molly ordered.
CHAPTER
5
“HOW IS HE?” Hannah asked as Molly came out of the bedroom. Her own voice sounded raspy and unfamiliar.
Hannah had been pacing around the apartment like a caged animal looking for an escape hatch. She wanted to run, but had to make sure Harry was not dying.
“It’ll take time for the medicine to take effect. But I thi
nk he’ll be okay,” Molly said solemnly.
“Good. I’ve got to get out of here.” Hannah reached for her bag and field jacket.
“Don’t go!” Molly said and planted herself in front of the apartment door.
“I don’t want to fight with you, Mom.” Hannah shook her head. “I need to be by myself.”
Molly didn’t budge.
“Mom, get out of my way! I mean it. I’m too mad. I can’t stay here another minute!”
“Does being mad solve anything?”
“Maybe not, but at least it’s an honest feeling. Until now, I’ve been living a lie. We all have.”
Molly tried to embrace her daughter.
Hannah put her two hands in front of her, keeping her mother at bay.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Mom? Instead of telling me not to fight with Dad? Why didn’t you tell me what the fights were really about?”
“I wanted to tell you but I couldn’t. We decided it would be better for you not to know.”
“We decided or Dad decided?”
Molly cast her eyes down to avoid her daughter’s angry stare. She was relieved their secret was finally out. That secret had caused so much damage between Harry and Hannah. Many times Molly had considered telling Hannah everything. But long ago Harry convinced her that if Hannah knew it would only make matters worse.
“It’s not always easy to know what to do,” Molly said. “We thought we were protecting you. That it was best to say nothing about Lena.”
“Best for whom? You were protecting Dad’s image. You were never protecting me. It was always about him. You didn’t want me to know that my father was the kind of man who would leave Poland without his child!” Hannah’s tone was bitter.
Once she realized she couldn’t temper Hannah’s anger, Molly stepped aside and let her daughter leave. Let it all sink in, she thought. There was time to talk about this later.
As the elevator hit the lobby, Hannah rushed out. She zigzagged around the children playing in the courtyard, but once out on the street, Hannah slowed down and was jostled on either side by parents wheeling strollers two abreast along 86th Street heading east toward Central Park. They were chatting, enjoying the warm, sunny May afternoon while anger oozed out of Hannah’s every pore. Tears streaming down her face, she searched for memories of Lena. But all she had was the dream. Was I so jealous of her that I erased her from my memory? What were we like as sisters? She wondered. Hannah couldn’t trust her parents to provide the answers.
She needed to talk to someone who would tell her the truth. Hannah decided to start with her cousins, Leah and Helena. She searched for a public phone along Central Park. After running for twenty blocks in her high-heeled platforms, a huge tote slung around her shoulders, Hannah was out of breath and about to give up her search when she reached the Mayflower Hotel at 62nd Street. Inside the hotel lobby, she found a phone booth and called her cousin Helena in Queens. Hannah let the phone ring and ring and ring before finally hanging up.
“Why don’t people have answering machines?” she muttered angrily to herself. Her displeasure was pointless. Whether Helena had an answering machine or not was immaterial. Hannah’s aversion to talking into a mechanical device would have prevented her from leaving a message. Frustrated, she decided to try Helena’s sister Leah in California.
Hannah didn’t have enough change for a long-distance call and wasn’t about to call her cousin collect after passing up her daughter’s UCLA graduation last June. She rummaged through her tote for her rarely used AT&T phone card and dialed, after she got Leah’s number from information.
Hannah checked her watch. It was only 11:30 California time. Hope it’s not too early to call, she thought. Hannah knew Leah would most likely still be sleeping. She and her husband owned a bowling alley in Torrance that stayed open late on Saturday night.
The phone rang almost ten times before a sleepy female voice came on.
“Haaloo,” Leah said in her deep voice that was often mistaken for a man’s.
“Sorry for waking you up, Leah,” Hannah apologized.
“Who is this?’ Leah sounded annoyed.
“It’s Hannah.”
“Hannah! Has something happened to your father?”
“No, nothing like that. But it is about my father.”
“What about him?”
As she blurted out what she’d learned about Lena, Hannah was crying so hard, her cousin could barely understand what she was saying.
“Calm down, please, Hannah. What can I tell you? You really know everything already. You once had a sister, and Hitler took her away.”
“Please, please, tell me what she was like! Tell me how I used to play with her. Did we like each other? Tell me why I forgot all about her!”
“Oh, Hannah. You poor child. Don’t beat yourself up because you forgot Lena. You were just a baby. Did your father tell you how sick Lena was? That they sent her to stay on a farm because the air was better,” Leah said.
“He told me. But that was only for a month. What about before? I don’t even remember playing with her. What was she like?” Hannah asked.
“You want to know what Lena was like?”
Hannah could almost hear a smile in her cousin’s voice.
“She was a doll. Always happy. You were younger but Lena did whatever you wanted. She always let you be the boss.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me about her? I can understand not telling me when I was a child. But later?”
“It was not a subject your father could talk about. He never forgave himself for leaving Poland without her.”
“Why didn’t he try to find out what happened to her once we left Poland? The American authorities would have helped, wouldn’t they?”
“When we crossed into the American zone, we filled out papers. Your father never listed Lena as a daughter he left. He was ashamed. Later he was afraid if he admitted he lied he wouldn’t be allowed to come to America. Do you understand? Things were not as simple as you think.”
“They’re not so simple now either. My father thinks I can find Lena after all these years. After he muffed the job, he’s sticking me with it. Thirty-one years later he expects me to find Lena!”
“I’m sure it’s more a wish than an expectation, Hannah. If anything, he just wants you to try. He loved her very much. Not getting her back almost killed him. Your father has carried a very big weight on his heart all these years.”
“He made me carry a lot of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Just babbling. How is Marvin? And Jennifer? I’m sorry I didn’t make it to her graduation.”
“That’s okay. We didn’t expect anyone but my sister to come. We’re fine. Graduation seems so long ago. Jennifer moved in with some friends in Santa Monica a few months ago. We haven’t seen very much of her since.”
“But she’s okay, right?”
“We hope she hasn’t turned into a hippie.”
“Do you think her roommates are druggies?”
“Jenny says no. But we’re parents, we always think the worst.”
Hannah actually laughed and promised her cousin to keep in touch.
Hearing someone else’s perspective made her calmer. Outside the hotel it was still a beautiful sunny afternoon. She decided to walk to clear her head. As she strolled along Broadway, no longer out of step with everyone around her, Hannah remembered how the bright lights and the circus-like atmosphere of Times Square had made her spirits soar when she was a child. But this day Times Square and all its action did not cheer her. Hannah hailed a cab home.
She ignored the flashing red light on her answering machine when she walked into her apartment. Hannah dropped her tote by the door, kicked off her shoes and headed straight for the bedroom. Lying on her bed, she mindlessly watched the abstract images on the ceiling as the afternoon sun flickered through the blinds. In a few minutes she was in a deep sleep.
Her mother’s voice, yelling int
o the answering machine, woke her.
“Hannah, if you’re there please pick up! I’ve been calling you and calling you. Where are you? Hannah, please call. Please come back. Your father needs you.”
Hannah almost reached for the extension next to her bed, but stopped herself.
“My father needs me. Isn’t that great? Where was he all these years when I needed him? Tell me that, Mom. I’ve been the obedient daughter long enough. Running whenever you call. I’ll come back, if and when I feel like it. Right now, I don’t feel like it,” Hannah shouted. Hearing herself addressing the machine made Hannah break out laughing. “I’ve finally flipped out!”
She didn’t pick up the phone, but now fully awake, Hannah leaned against her upholstered headboard and started to re-examine her rollercoaster day. She struggled to understand the mixed emotions she was experiencing. Why am I not as angry with Mother? She had kept the same secret. She’d left Lena in Poland, too. But Hannah realized she never felt abandoned by Molly. Annoyed yes. Never abandoned. If anything, her mother wanted to be too close. The more Hannah analyzed her feelings, the clearer it became that her overwhelming rage toward Harry was not due to his keeping Lena a secret, or for leaving her sister in Poland. Hannah was furious with Harry for all the years he’d cut himself off from her. Once she realized that her anger toward her father totally crowded out any sense of loss of Lena, Hannah felt ashamed. She was my sister and I never missed her!