Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  My father’s reaction would have upset a less determined woman. ‘It’s crazy to bring a new life into the world at this point,’ he said. Hitler had already annexed Austria, marched into the Sudetenland, occupied Czechoslovakia and grabbed Memel, and from his vituperative attacks on Poland it was obvious that country would be next.

  This failed to disturb my mother who glowed with happiness, her eyes more lustrous than ever under straight black brows slanting above her Tartar cheekbones. Some faces consist of curves; my mother’s were straight lines sketched with a fine pen. ‘You’re worried about the future, but there’s no future without children,’ she told him. They were living in a spacious apartment on Potockiego Street, a tree-lined boulevard whose handsome stone-faced buildings had graceful balconies overlooking the park. Autumn lingered that year, and fallen leaves crackled under her small, quick footsteps as she strolled under the linden trees. Let politicians worry about politics: she was going to have a baby.

  I was born during a sweltering July night which my mother thought would be her last. As if I had some foreboding about the world awaiting me, I refused to emerge from the warm security of the womb, until finally the obstetrician clamped his forceps round my stubborn skull and yanked me out with so much force that I had the outline of the forceps imprinted on my head for weeks. ‘You looked like a war casualty, but from the moment you were born you were the image of your father,’ my mother used to tell me. I think she emphasised this resemblance to create a bond between my father and the child he hadn’t really wanted.

  My father was thrilled to have a girl—boys had caused too much uproar in his own family, whereas girls at least were more controllable. He wanted to call me after his father, but as his brother Jean in Paris had just named his baby Danielle, my father chose Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon and of the hunt. It was an original choice. Too original for Poland where children were usually named after Catholic saints and martyrs like Teresa, Zofia and Cecilia, and whose namedays were marked on the calendar and celebrated on that day for the rest of their lives. When my father applied to register the birth, the thin-lipped registrar wiped the surplus ink off his nib, placed it neatly on the ink stand and looked up from his ledger with a frown. ‘Diana? Isn’t that a pagan name?’ So in deference to the prevailing culture which made things hard enough for Jews without having heathen names, I became Danusia. It took another nine years, and a journey to the other end of the earth, before I was to reclaim the name my father had chosen for me.

  I have a photo of my mother holding me when she came home from the clinic. She’s wearing a percale dress with zigzag patterns and a triumphant expression. But when a month later I was still waking them every night with my howling, my father decided to take action. One night, without telling her, he moved my cradle into the furthest room and closed all the doors so that she couldn’t hear my indignant screams. I slept through the night after that.

  This was probably just as well because soon there was enough tumult in the world without me adding to it. In that hot Indian summer of 1939, when wheat fields and pasture lands shimmered in the sun and the orchards hung heavy with fruit, Poland itself resembled an overripe plum ready to be plucked. The whole nation awaited the inevitable attack with such tension that the announcement of war came almost as a relief from the uncertainty.

  For months newspapers had carried increasingly grave reports about the gathering storm, but nobody understood the significance of the nonaggression pact signed by the German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop and his Russian counterpart, Molotov. By securing Russia’s neutrality during the impending conflict, Hitler had paved the way for his invasion of Poland.

  As Hitler’s tirades became more hysterical, in cafes and taverns all over Poland, fists crashed on counters and glasses shook as people argued about what was going to happen. On Polish Radio the stirring voice of Commander-in-Chief Marshal Smigly-Rydz reaffirmed that Poland would never surrender Gdansk or the Corridor. Buoying up national morale, the Marshal kept praising the brave, invincible Polish army and harking back to the victorious battle of Grunwald five hundred years ago. ‘We defeated the Teutonic menace once and we’ll do it again, we’ll show them another Grunwald!’ the optimists cried, shaking their fists.

  In Krakow’s main square at midday, the bugler’s haunting fanfare floated down from the gothic towers of the Mariacki Church, as it had done for centuries. As always, the trumpeter stopped abruptly mid-note in memory of his heroic predecessor. On that stifling August day, no-one could suspect that the interrupted fanfare of this bugler would usher a period of barbarism and carnage unequalled in the annals of the western world.

  Now, on the eve of another barbarian invasion, a tremulous soprano voice brimming with emotion began singing Poland’s national anthem. ‘Jeszcze Polska nie zginela i nie zginac bedzie.’ ‘Poland has never been annihilated and will never perish.’ Others took up the song and the square resounded with the stirring words. It’s not surprising that Poland’s anthem related to war and conquest. For the past 1000 years, Poland had not enjoyed twenty-one consecutive years of peace.

  In the lemony light of dawn on 1 September, a droning sound of engines from above drew my mother to the window. She looked at the dainty Tissot watch my father had given her for their third wedding anniversary. It was five o’clock. The roar grew louder, and she stood frozen while big black aeroplanes of the Luftwaffe flew low over Krakow, grotesque black stains blotting out the light. Then they vanished like a disturbing dream.

  Along with the rest of Poland, my parents heard the announcement which was to change their lives forever. German radio relayed Hitler’s hysterical screaming. Poland had supposedly attacked the Third Reich and the two nations were now at war. Heydrich’s scheme to disguise a band of German criminals as Polish soldiers and stage a phony attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz had provided Hitler with a pretext for starting World War II. Tuned in to their radios, disbelieving Poles heard the Führer’s cynical words: ‘Heute morgen haben wir zurückgeschlagen!’ ‘This morning we’ve hit back!’ Several hours later, a million and a half German soldiers were pouring across the Polish frontier to avenge this trumped-up attack.

  Throughout the day, shortwave radio stuttered warnings in code. Warsaw: air alert. Krakow: air alert. Lwow: air alert. With the droning sound which made people tremble, German warplanes roared towards their targets and dropped bombs on major Polish cities, railways and columns of soldiers trying to reach the front.

  Glass shattered, buildings crumbled, and teams of first-aid workers pushed their way through fallen bricks, burrowed through mountains of debris to free those who were trapped underneath. Newspaper headlines shrieked WAR!, the ground shook, and all over Poland grave faces gathered around the radio, trying to figure out what would happen next.

  While the fighter planes and dive bombers of the Luftwaffe poured death and destruction from the skies, German Panzer divisions were flooding over Polish plains. Driving eastwards from Pomerania and westward from East Prussia, thousands of tanks with heavy armaments thrust deeper and deeper into Poland. Helmeted soldiers in motorised vehicles laughed and joked as they rolled inexorably over rutted country roads, meadows and barley fields, pushing onward to entrap Warsaw in a giant pincer movement from which there would be no escape. They couldn’t wait to show these Slavs and Jews who was the master race.

  On the third day of the war there were terrifying rumours that the entire Polish airforce had been wiped out, even before most of its planes had time to get off the ground. Day after day, people gathered around their radios hungry for news. Most of the time they only heard the defiant strains of Chopin’s Military Polonaise which raised their spirits while it broke their hearts.

  There was still no news about the ground battles. How could an army whose cavalry still used lances hold out against howitzers, tanks and cannons? Whenever she thought about the soldiers, my mother’s anxious thoughts flew to their nephew Tusiek, who’d enlisted just before the war. She
saw his tousled fair hair and heard his bantering voice, and tried to ignore a growing sense of foreboding.

  While they sat beside their wireless sets anxious for news my parents heard Colonel Umiastowski’s broadcast: ‘All men of military age must withdraw immediately to the east.’ Perhaps the High Command planned to assemble an extra group of fighting men to hold off the German offensive some time in the future. Acording to rumours, Polish defeat was imminent, the remnants of the dazed Polish army was in retreat, and the government had packed its archives and gold reserves and fled eastwards.

  At first the idea of fleeing from Krakow seemed nonsensical to Henek, who tried to dissuade his friends and relatives from leaving. Andzia and Zygmunt had already left for Lwow, as had my father’s cousin Kuba Spira with his wife Niusia and their children Alinka and Bronek. ‘There’s no point in running away,’ my father argued. ‘Where will you go? How will you live?’ But as more and more people fled, he got sucked into that spinning vortex of panic which gripped the city. He would to go to Lwow to Bronia’s family.

  ‘I’m certainly not going to trundle across Poland with a tiny baby,’ my mother had said when he told her of his decision to leave. She didn’t believe that he’d really go until she watched him folding two white shirts and placing them together with some underpants and undershirts into the worn brown suitcase. After wrapping several thick slices of rye bread and butter in rustling pergamom paper, Henek unlocked a small drawer at the back of his mahogany desk, took out some money, and divided it equally between them. There wasn’t much.

  ‘When you’re ready to travel, I’ll arrange for you to come and join me in Lwow,’ he told her. It never crossed anyone’s mind in September 1939 that a woman with a baby wouldn’t be safe in a city occupied by a civilised nation like the Germans. My mother’s face was white and her heart bumped crazily in her chest but she remained resolute. Before leaving, my father asked her to move in with his mother. ‘You’ll be safer there than on your own,’ he said.

  As Henek limped along the road heading east, he noticed that everybody was overtaking him. If it wasn’t for his gammy leg, he wouldn’t be falling behind, but he couldn’t allow himself to dwell on that old grievance. All around him vehicles were bursting with passengers and bulging with parcels and packages. Pigskin suitcases and billowing bundles of pillows and eiderdowns, candlesticks, birdcages and heirlooms swayed from the roofs of cars or tottered from rickety horse waggons whose carters had to keep whipping their bony nags to keep them pulling the loads. Wayfarers dropping with exhaustion sometimes hung onto the sides of the carts which swayed and tilted until the cursing drivers shook them off.

  From time to time Henek managed to get a ride on a cart and rest his blistered feet, but the rides were all too brief, and when they ended, Lwow seemed as far away as ever. And at the end of each exhausting day, he faced the problem of finding a safe place for the night. As he hobbled towards Staszow along the dusty road, trying to avoid the potholes which tripped him up, he mopped his perspiring neck with a handkerchief and moved to the edge, where tall poplars gave grudging shade. As the last shafts of sunlight slanted through the trees, he wondered where to spend the night. Nearby, a group of travellers were discussing an offer of lodging. Apparently a local farmer had invited them to spend the night in his barn. Glad to have some company, Henek went with them, because he’d heard that solitary travellers were sometimes lured into farmhouses, robbed and murdered.

  But just as he was stretching out on the prickly straw in the barn, pulling his shoes off his swollen, blistered feet, he overheard one of his companions murmuring to his neighbour. ‘My cousin Maciej knows the village blacksmith here, and he reckons that some of the peasants around here wouldn’t think twice about doing someone in to get their money,’ he said, and drew the edge of his large hand across his throat in an explicit gesture.

  Henek’s heart was thumping. Any moment they might appear and slit their throats. He pushed his sore feet back into his dust-encrusted shoes, picked up his case and crept out onto the moonlit road. Better to die standing on your blistered feet than be slaughtered in your sleep.

  In his memoirs my father describes the stress of having to be on his guard day and night. Not far from Przemysl he stopped near a wayside shrine of the Virgin Mary garlanded with poppies and cornflowers. When Henek looked up, he saw a barefoot peasant in a loose shirt who walked out of the forest and planted himself in front of him, scythe over his shoulder. His eyes slid quickly down my father’s herringbone suit and leather shoes. ‘Szczesc boze!’ he said in the traditional Polish greeting which means ‘God bless you’. ‘You look tired, honoured sir. Come to my hut and rest. I’ve already got thirty souls there, all nice and comfortable, like. They’re going to stay with me until the Germans are gone. You’ll be as snug as a mouse behind the stove. Why wear yourself out on the road?’ he said with an ingratiating smile. Feeling uneasy, my father thanked him but scrambled to his feet and continued on his way.

  He still had over four hundred kilometres to go.

  The countryside had never looked so seductive. The sun felt warm on Henek’s arms and he breathed in the juicy scent of summer grass. High in the branches a lark was warbling above the tree tops. Along a winding stretch of road which skirted barley fields, he watched women in headscarves tied low over their foreheads threshing the grain and tying the sun-scented bundles into pointed stooks. Further along, the harvesters lifted the cut wheat high into the air with their rakes and tossed it onto a waggon, pausing occasionally to wipe the sweat off their foreheads. Engrossed by this timeless scene, Henek was startled by a voice. ‘Ej, prosze pana, why did you leave your home?’ drawled a toothless peasant with grizzled hair. ‘There’s no need to worry, good sir. The Germans are civilised people.’

  My father was incredulous. ‘But don’t you care that Poland is being overrun by foreigners?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Us peasants are always exploited by one landowner or another,’ he said in his slow, drawn-out way. ‘No matter who rules Poland, it’s all the same to us, our lot never improves. But mark you now, the Germans, at least they’ll get rid of the lousy Jews at last!’ And he spat a gob of phlegm onto the dust.

  Henek looked away. With his incisive glance, bright blue eyes and reserved manner, he didn’t fit the stereotype of a Jew, so people didn’t curb their anti-Semitic comments in front of him. He couldn’t get the peasant’s words out of his mind. ‘We’re going to have two enemies against us in this war, not just one,’ he thought bitterly as he trudged on.

  By the time my father reached the outskirts of Przemysl, his legs felt like blocks of granite, and such a weariness fell over him that he sank under a plane tree by the roadside, staring at its spiky green pods. He knew that the Germans were catching up but he didn’t have the strength to go any further. Resigned, he abandoned himself to his fate.

  But on this occasion fate was good to him. Suddenly, as if in a dream, a carriage appeared with two magnificent horses, the kind of lacquered landau that wealthy landowners rode. To see an elegant chariot like that, with only the driver inside, travelling along this road, with the Germans so close behind, made Henek wonder whether exhaustion had made him delirious.

  Forgetting his weariness, he leapt to his feet and hailed the driver, even though he didn’t expect him to stop. To his boundless astonishment, the man pulled on the reins, whistled softly to the horses and motioned for my father to climb in. ‘I’m delivering this landau to a man in Krakowiec, but I can take you there if you like,’ he said. The driver was a good-natured, chatty fellow, and for the next twenty-seven kilometres Henek couldn’t get over his good fortune.

  The almost magical quality of that episode lifted his spirits and gave him the strength to walk on to Jaworow, which was only fifty kilometres from his destination. But here his spirits sank again. Jaworow buzzed with the rumour that soldiers weren’t letting any more refugees into Lwow because the city was full of homeless people. This looked like the end of the road. He
couldn’t go forward and he couldn’t turn back. Henek wandered around the town square trying to figure out what to do. While prowling around he noticed a Polish army officer pushing a wounded soldier into a taxi. ‘Take this man immediately to the main hospital in Lwow,’ the officer ordered. He slammed the car door and strode away.

  In one of those instinctive actions which were to save his life several times in years to come, Henek poked his head into the driver’s window. ‘Excuse me, I’m a doctor,’ he heard himself saying. Glancing at the injured soldier’s greenish face and the red-stained bandage around his chest, he improvised, ‘Your passenger looks very bad. Perhaps I should come and keep an eye on him. If he bleeds to death while in your care, you’ll be in trouble.’ The driver was an impassive man with sleepy eyes and a droopy moustache. He didn’t look overly impressed by my father’s argument but he shrugged and nodded. ‘Dobrze, co mi zalezy. Okay, what do I care, get in,’ he said.

  As the car lurched towards Lwow, Henek realised that this wouldn’t be an easy ride. He couldn’t stand up because the roof was too low, and he couldn’t sit down because the injured soldier took up the whole back seat. He glanced longingly at the empty seat beside the driver, but since he was supposed to be taking care of the wounded man, he couldn’t very well sit in the front. Somehow he managed to extend his stiff leg, hold onto the edge of the seat with one hand and to the roof with the other, all the while pretending to be ministering to the patient along the way.

  Finally in Lwow he rang the doorbell of his in-laws’ home, swayed on the doorstep and collapsed.

  CHAPTER 13

  While Henek was recovering from his ordeal, his sister Lunia with her husband Berus were stumbling around the town square in Radom with glazed eyes that saw nothing. People turned to look at the stately woman with her upswept hair, stylishly tailored suit and distracted manner. Like sleepwalkers, the couple pushed open the door of the first cafe they came to and slumped at the nearest table. While Berus stared into the distance, his face white and taut, Lunia covered her face with her hands and repeated one word over and over. ‘Tusiek! Tusiek!’