That same day German soldiers grabbed a Jew and ordered him to set a synagogue on fire. When he refused, they shot him. This was Ajzyk’s Synagogue, where I heard voices on my first visit to Krakow.
By December my mother had become impatient to join my father and her parents in Lwow, but now she had a border to cross. Seventeen days after war was declared, the Bolsheviks had annexed the eastern part of Poland, so Lwow was now in Russian hands and there was a frontier in Przemysl between the German and Russian areas.
But however bad things were under the Bolsheviks, at least they treated everyone equally badly and didn’t single out Jews for persecution like the Nazis did. In mid-December, when snow settled in soft drifts in the woods, frost etched patterns on the windowpanes, and skies looked as sad and grey as people’s faces, my father arranged for someone to guide us across the border.
Crossing from the German side was nerve-wracking because gimlet-eyed soldiers scrutinised every traveller, searching for Jews who might be travelling without armbands or carrying money or valuables. Any pretext was sufficient to beat, arrest or shoot. My mother’s heart was pounding so loudly that she was sure they could hear it through her black karakul coat. A small group of Jews just ahead of her were taking a long time to go through. The guards were examining documents and shaking their heads, finally they motioned for them to step aside. Agitated, one of them started arguing but the soldiers shouted for silence and pushed them aside, yelling for them to stay where they were.
Just as my mother stepped resolutely towards the sentry post, a voice shouted ‘Jude! Jude!’ It was the man who’d been stopped from crossing; he must have realised that she was Jewish and was trying to stop her out of spite. Gripping me tightly in her arms, my mother kept her head high and hoped that the guard wouldn’t realise that the man was shouting at her. With her ivory complexion, straight nose and direct green-eyed gaze, she didn’t arouse any suspicion, and the guard waved her through.
Thank God. Now she only had to get past the Russian guards and they weren’t likely to cause any difficulties. Only another step and she’d be on Russian soil, safe from the Nazi terror. But the thick-set Russian guard stepped in front of her, barring her way. ‘Not so fast, dziewiczka maya, my dear girl,’ he jeered. Grasping her arm, he started hustling her into a hut nearby that served as a border detention centre. All my mother’s pent-up anxiety burst out and she started to berate the sentry guard. ‘The German guards let us through, so why are you stopping us?’ she argued. ‘Look at me, with a baby and these bags, do I look like a criminal? Why are you keeping me here?’
The young guard wasn’t used to being shouted at by a slip of a Polish girl who barely reached his shoulder. He spat out a torrent of abuse, words she’d never heard before. Leaning towards her he yelled into her face, ‘Dziob twoja macie!’ She had no idea what that meant, and without stopping to think, she yelled back at him, ‘Dziob TWOJA macie!’ He looked disbelievingly at the defiant little woman in front of him with the Tatar cheekbones and large green eyes. ‘What did you say?’ he roared. So she repeated it.
For the rest of her life, my mother couldn’t get over her audacity. ‘I must have been mad,’ she’d say with a twinkle in her eye. ‘Fancy swearing at a border guard. He could have bashed me up or had me deported. Do you think I had any idea what I was saying?’ Here she’d lower her voice in embarrassment. ‘I actually told him to go and fuck his mother!’ Whenever she told this story, my children Justine and Jonathan would look fondly at their feisty little Nana who still hadn’t lost her spirit at eighty.
Perhaps the guard had realised that she didn’t know what it meant because someone trying to get across a border wouldn’t abuse the guard. Or perhaps by flinging the insult back at him she’d taken him by surprise. He strode away from her and left her in the detention hut under the watchful eye of his colleague.
About thirty people were squashed into a tiny area. As there was no room to sit down, she had to stand, cradling me in her arms. Probably sensing the tension all around me, I began to bawl. The food my mother had brought for me was gone, and all she had left was an apple. Somewhere she found a little spoon and started scraping it for me. I swallowed the mushy bits but spat out the harder pieces, spraying them over those who stood nearby. As they watched me spitting out bits of apple, the tightly-furled faces around us relaxed and in spite of their anxiety, people began to smile as they recalled their own child-rearing experiences.
My mother managed to get to the window and looked outside. The branches of the slender birches were bare and stark and the frozen ground was scuffed by bootprints. Her stomach was churning. How long were they going to keep us in that hut? What would she give me to eat next time I was hungry? Outside the hut, she noticed a man in a cloth cap standing beside his wooden cart holding the reins of his solid mare. It would be wonderful to climb into that cart and ride all the way to Lwow.
The more she stared at the man, the more familiar he looked. No, she must be imagining it, it couldn’t be. But it was. There was no mistaking those furrowed cheeks, the snub nose, that tuft of fair hair sticking up out of the cap. It was Antek, one of her father’s customers in Lwow. She remembered him from the days when she used to keep the books for her father’s business. Whenever a good customer needed more time to pay, she always extended credit for an extra few months, and she remembered giving Antek credit.
If only he’d turn around. Leaning eagerly out of the window, she tapped on the frosty pane and called his name softly so that the guards wouldn’t hear. ‘Antek! Antek! Over here!’
Finally he looked up and his face lit up with a grin when he recognised her. ‘Jesus Maria, Miss Bratter, what are you doing here?’ he asked, his crinkled grey eyes wide with astonishment.
Glancing around to make sure that the guard didn’t see her, my mother indicated that she wanted to get away. Antek nodded and motioned for her to throw her bundle of possessions out of the window. ‘Go and stand near the door, I’ll come and get you in a minute,’ he whispered.
That night my mother and I slept on a mound of scratchy hay which tickled her nose and made her sneeze. Next morning Antek took us to the railway station and we arrived in Lwow that same day.
But it was no longer the Lwow my mother knew.
CHAPTER 15
While his family in Poland were living under foreign occupation, Avner was living a comfortable life in Antwerp as a diamond merchant. On 10 May 1940, however, the war caught up with Belgium. When bombs started falling on Antwerp, Avner’s son Adam was drinking champagne with a married woman in their apartment building. At twenty, he was a bon vivant with a diffident personality and a bright mind which he’d never applied to anything for very long.
The bombardment resulted in a mass exodus from Antwerp and, like other refugees, Avner and his family packed hurriedly and left for France. They planned to change trains in Ghent but when the connecting train failed to arrive, they were stranded at the station. Since Belgian troops were using this railway line, the station became a target for German bombs and it shuddered all night with explosions. Later Adam heard that the stationmaster was a Nazi spy who used to signal to the Germans whenever trains were about to pull out.
While Adam was dozing on the platform, a bomb hit the stairs just above them. His mother Hela shook him. ‘Quick, go and stand against the wall or under a doorway, it’s too dangerous here!’
But Adam couldn’t be bothered. ‘I’m tired, leave me alone,’ he grumbled. He is reminiscing about the first day of the war in Belgium at his sister Wanda’s home in Connecticut where the three of us have gathered to talk about the past. ‘In actual fact, I’ve never worried about anything,’ Adam shrugs. ‘Que sera, sera.’
Wanda doesn’t recall feeling frightened that day either. ‘Of course my mother would have said that I wasn’t scared because I had no heart. “You have a stone where a heart should be!” she always said.’ Then she adds, ‘Mother and I were always at cross purposes. I wanted her to love me, and sh
e wanted me to love her.’
My heart aches as I think of all the missed opportunities, wasted time and tragic misunderstandings which undermine the closeness that all mothers and daughters long for.
This is the first time I’ve ever met these two cousins about whom I’ve heard so much. Wanda was my parents’ favourite niece, and all my life I heard that she was vivacious and accomplished, that she spoke six languages and had been an interpreter at the United Nations. And so beautiful with her raven locks and bright blue eyes! When Wanda said that she would pick me up from JFK airport when I arrived, I expected to see a gorgeous young woman with masses of black hair. So I didn’t notice the elderly woman with short-cropped grey hair standing next to me until she looked into my face with huge blue eyes and asked with a New England twang, ‘Are you Diane?’ I soon found out that my cousin was forthright, forceful and funny, with an irrepressible sense of humour which kept me in peals of laughter during my visit.
In 1939, however, Wanda was a striking but less assertive girl of seventeen who turned heads in the street because she looked like the actress Hedy Lamarr, but was more animated. Thinking back to their exodus from Antwerp, Wanda recalls one incident of panic. ‘That was on the train heading for Cognac when I suddenly realised that our parents weren’t on board.’ She turns to her brother. ‘But how did it happen that we got separated from our parents?’
Adam’s smoothly combed white hair, deep lines on either side of his nose, and cornflower blue eyes remind me of my father. He gives Wanda a superior look and mutters, ‘She never remembers anything,’ as if she wasn’t there. ‘Mother felt so ill that she thought she was having a heart attack, and in the middle of the night she got off the train to look for a doctor and Father went to look for her. While they were still asking for a doctor, the train moved off with us on it. Our parents didn’t have any money on them, no passports, nothing, and Father was in his slippers. When they realised that the train had gone with us on board, they sent a message for us to get off at the next station. Somehow they got hold of a caboose and caught up with us that way. I’ll never forget the sight of them riding that contraption!’ he chuckles.
Wanda leans forward. ‘You know, a funny thing happened on the way to the gene bank. Adam got all the remembering genes and I got the forgetting genes! But I do remember that we were lucky to get off when we did, because all the refugees on that train were later interned in concentration camps.’
When it had become obvious that invasion was imminent, most of the diamond merchants of Antwerp decided to relocate in the Cognac region of France, and that’s where Avner and his family were now headed. But it didn’t take Avner long to figure out that Cognac wouldn’t be suitable because it was an area of conservative vignerons who’d lived there for generations and wouldn’t take kindly to Jewish merchants.
Avner’s instinct proved right. Initially the wine producers seemed happy to have the added business in their area, but on Sunday, when they saw that not one of the newcomers attended Mass, they realised that they had Jews in their midst. Several days later the town authorities told the refugees that there was no room for them in Cognac but that they would find Royan more congenial.
No sooner had Avner rented an apartment in Royan than it became clear that France was about to fall to the Germans. They had to get away as soon as possible. ‘Some of the Antwerp refugees asked my father to become their leader, as if he was Moses getting them out of Egypt. And really, if not for him, none of us would have got out of there,’ Adam says.
Although private vehicles were almost unobtainable, Avner managed to buy a sixteen-seater bus. Strapping some of the luggage on the roof, he crammed the rest amongst the twenty-three passengers, some of whom had to sit in the aisle. On their way to Biarritz the bus guzzled gas at an alarming rate and at the top of a hill it suddenly conked out.
Adam’s eyes gleam with nostalgic pleasure as he recalls how he saved the day. ‘I lifted up the driver’s seat, levered up the wooden planks, checked the battery and discovered what the problem was. One of the cables had worked loose!’ He becomes so animated recalling his triumph that the stroke-induced slur in his speech almost disappears.
It was drizzling when they reached the southern town of Bayonne. The streets were jammed with the cars of refugees from all over Europe, including King Zog and his entourage who were also fleeing the Nazis because Albania had just been invaded. It was mid-June, Petain had already capitulated, and everyone was desperately trying to get visas for Spain.
There were no vacant rooms left in this postcard-pretty Basque town whose houses were painted in vibrant colours and shaded by orange trees whose scented blossoms made their heads swim. On the first night Adam slept under a bench at a bus stop, on the second inside a kiosk. Everyone was fleeing to Morocco, and after spending three days running to every travel office in town, Avner managed to obtain a boat passage for Morocco in exchange for their bus. But just as they arrived at the wharf, they watched their ship sailing away, leaving a flurry of foam in its wake. They ran along the jetty, shouting and gesticulating but to no avail. Their hopes of leaving Europe had been dashed. But Adam’s face breaks into a smile. ‘You never know when a disappointment can turn into a blessing: all the ships which got away from Bayonne that week were blown up by German submarines!’
Back in town they got their bus back and spent the next few days zigzagging along remote Pyrenean mountain roads to Perpignan. As soon as they arrived, Avner decided to try his luck at the Moroccan consulate. But when he went to pick up their passports the following day, the secretary told him that unfortunately they weren’t eligible for Moroccan visas because they had Polish passports.
Avner spent a long time chatting up the secretary, turning on the full force of his charm and promising her a gift in return for the visas, but there was nothing to do but wait and hope. Drinking espresso coffee in one of the noisy smoke-filled bistros in town that afternoon, Avner noticed a young woman who suddenly lurched forward as the heel of her shoe snapped off. Recognising the secretary from the Moroccan office, he leapt to his feet, rushed outside, retrieved the heel, and announced with a flourish, ‘Mademoiselle, today I’m returning your heel, but tomorrow, if you get us those visas, I’ll bring you a bottle of perfume!’ The next day he got the visas.
At the Spanish border they faced another problem. Refugees were forbidden to take any valuables out of France. ‘The French were very crafty,’ Adam recalls. ‘When we arrived, they weren’t interested in what we’d brought with us, but now that we were leaving, they weren’t going to let us take our valuables out of their country. The diamonds were all we had, and we had to find some way of getting them out.’
As usual everyone turned to Avner for a solution. ‘Leave it to me,’ he assured them. ‘I’ll find a way.’ Without telling the others where they planned to secrete the jewels, he and Adam dismantled part of the bus, put the diamonds in little packages, and pushed them into the hollow of one of the metal support poles. As Adam talks about this incident, he is no longer a slow-speaking seventy-year-old with a limp, but an eager young man again, sharing an adventure with his father.
Going through customs with their illicit cargo was nerve-wracking. ‘Smile, Wanda!’ Hela kept nudging her daughter, hoping that this pretty girl would distract the guards’ attention from the contents of their bus. Finally they were driving across the border. As they sped into Spain, they whooped with joy. They’d made it safely out of France, their assets intact.
It was in Mataro, the first Spanish town they came to, that they discovered with a shock that while Avner and his family had Morocco stamped in their visas as they’d requested, all the others had received visas for Curaçao. After the initial dismay, Avner came to the conclusion that South America would be a much better option than North Africa, but when he asked about visas to Curaçao, he was told that this could only be arranged in Madrid.
Once in Madrid, Avner decided to try to migrate to the United States. As Wanda spoke English,
he took her with him to the embassy as an interpreter. The secretary at the American Embassy sent them to the American Consulate. The consul took a fancy to Avner and Wanda and told them that he didn’t have the authority to issue residents’ visas, but if they could obtain a visa to any South American country, he could give them transit visas to the United States. Once they set foot in the States, they could apply for residency. With that they began making the rounds of the South American consulates, and Avner hoped that his dazzling daughter would soften officials’ hearts. It worked. At the Brazilian consulate the ambassador’s Mexican secretary Enrique became so infatuated with her that he made it his mission to get them a visa. At the same time Avner kept sending gifts to persuade the ambassador: a little diamond here, a bonbonnière of Swiss chocolates there, and of course big bouquets for Madame l’Ambassadrice in between.
But while he was in the process of obtaining transit visas for New York, Avner heard that as soon as young men arrived in the United States they were drafted into the army and sent back to Europe. He wasn’t going through all this so that his son would end up dead on some European battlefield. When the devoted Enrique produced visas for Brazil, Avner decided to start a new life there.
Before leaving Madrid Adam dismantled the bus support bars in the garage and brought them to their hotel where he sawed them in half to extricate their diamonds. ‘That’s how I started my career as a diamond cutter!’ he quips, and adds, ‘But if I’d been really smart, I’d have driven off with the whole van—it had about half a million dollars worth of diamonds in it. Unfortunately only a small share of that belonged to us!’
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