Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  Later, when Wanda and I are alone on the sundeck sipping peppermint tea in the long New England twilight, she says, ‘All his life Adash has been the boy who never grew up. He’s extremely bright, with a photographic memory, but never wanted to study anything. My father sent him to a private school in Antwerp to refine him but he never learned to get on with people. He used to fly into terrible rages for no reason. He must have a lot of anger in him, but he’s not prepared to deal with it.’

  Finally, with visas in hand, they travelled to Lisbon where they boarded a Brazilian vessel carrying mercury to South America for military purposes. It was a primitive ship with poor facilities, but they were thrilled to be on their way at last. The day after they sailed, however, the ship was apprehended by a British war vessel and kept in Gibraltar for a month.

  In October they finally arrived in Brazil. Avner had never imagined a city as spectacular as Rio de Janeiro where volcanic peaks covered in tropical vegetation soared above dark blue bays, and palm-lined beaches created a permanent holiday atmosphere. With its sensual, fun-loving people, Rio was a hedonistic Garden of Eden, but Avner had a tough time making a living because he neither spoke the language nor understood the culture. Before long, however, his entrepreneurial instincts came to the fore once again. He bought a large villa on the Avenida Atlantica which skirts Copacabana Beach and persuaded a wealthy Belgian émigré to finance him to open a nightclub.

  He decorated the nightclub in opulent Louis Quatorze style, with gilded trimmings and carved furniture. While waiters in tails carried flaming shashliks ceremoniously to the tables, a group of Russian gypsies wrung the diners’ hearts with nostalgic Slavonic airs. Late at night jazz pianists made them tap their feet in time to the beat of George Gershwin and Glenn Miller. Avner congratulated himself on having created the kind of nightclub he himself loved to frequent.

  It looked as if Avner’s worries were over.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Russian occupation of Lwow which shocked my mother when she returned with me to her home town in December 1939, had taken the whole city by surprise three months before. On that sultry September day, her sister Mania Schwartz had been standing on her balcony when she witnessed a scene she would never forget. Turning to her husband, she called, ‘Misko, quick, come and look at this!’ Spilling along the entire width of Aleja Focha Avenue and down Grodecka Street came a ragged throng like debris floating on the current.

  There were Russians, Kalmuks, Mongols and Turkomans, Uzbeks, Circassians, Georgians and Kirghiz, some with high cheekbones and flattened noses, others with slanting eyes. Some of this motley army wore conical fur hats with flaps and long dun-coloured coats that reached their ankles as if they’d just left their yurts in the steppes. In clothes powdered with dust, they straggled all over the road without any apparent formation. Their footwear was as oddly assorted as their outfits, and few wore boots. With her keen eye for detail Mania noted that many coats were fraying and unhemmed, with threads trailing from them. They looked as if they’d grabbed their clothes before the tailor had time to finish them, and rushed off to distant lands. And they just kept coming, a bobbing sea of men in ragged clothes streaming down the street.

  These shabby soldiers were the advance guard of the million-strong Russian army coming to occupy Lwow. Mania gave a short laugh of derision. ‘Just look at these conquerors! They look more like a horde of beggars!’ She felt no terror, only contempt for their unkempt appearance. Terror she’d felt two weeks before when German bombs had exploded all over Lwow. She’d pressed her hands over her ears while her windows shattered and glass crashed into jagged splinters all over the room, and wished that she’d criss-crossed the panes with brown tape as she’d been instructed.

  When Mania had heard the sirens’ shrill whine that day, she didn’t realise that war had started. It was a balmy September day of an unusually long, hot summer that smelled of red apples, ripe peaches and black cherries. They’d been alerted to expect a bomb drill, and she’d assumed that this was it. It was only when she heard explosions ripping buildings apart that she realised this was no rehearsal. German warplanes were dropping bombs on their city. War, whose possibility they’d all debated heatedly for so long, had actually begun.

  From the yellowish pall of dust that had risen behind the railway tracks, she’d realised that the glass-domed central station and the streets around it had been hit. For hours Lwow had been torn apart by explosives and webbed by the sickening wail of sirens. Those who’d diligently attended first-aid courses grabbed their kits and rushed to bomb sites where they’d stared at the debris and devastation and wondered how to reattach severed limbs with rolls of bandage.

  Mania couldn’t believe that the good times could end. Lwow, which in Austro-Hungarian times had been the capital of Galicia, was a lively city of cafes, restaurants and nightclubs, and she frequented them all. By day she gossiped with her girlfriends over lemon gelato and iced coffee at the Cafe de la Paix on Legionow Street, and strolled along the promenade on Akademicka Street, choosing patterned silks for her new summer wardrobe. In the evenings she often persuaded Misko to go dancing.

  She told me about her carefree prewar life many years later in Sydney when she was living in the same building as my mother. Like an enmeshed married couple who are miserable together but can’t live apart, she and my mother were still fighting the same battles. In spite of all that she’d gone through, Aunty Mania hadn’t lost her passion for clothes or her wry sense of humour. She was a good raconteur and a good listener, and I loved spending time with her, which provided my mother with yet another grievance against her sister.

  As she places a big slice of her orange and almond torte on my plate, Aunty Mania recalls that while German bombs were falling over Lwow, she heard a strange message relayed over the airwaves. ‘Because the Polish government has abandoned our brother Ukrainians, we are coming to your aid.’ This enigmatic announcement from Russia was repeated several times each day. Everybody knew that the German and Russian foreign ministers Ribbentrop and Molotov had signed a pact, but no-one yet suspected the sinister significance of this statement.

  On 17 September the world became silent. The bombing had stopped. When they switched on the radio they heard an excited Russian voice saying, ‘Fellow Ukrainians, we are on our way to help you!’ The Polish airforce had been demolished, the army had been decimated, and the Polish prime minister, along with his entire cabinet, had packed up the nation’s gold reserves, state documents and historical archives, and fled to Romania. Now, to add to the shock of their devastating defeat, Poland had been carved up like a dead turkey between Germany and Russia, into east and west. The secret agenda of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was now exposed in all its duplicity. While the dark shadow of the Third Reich fell over western Poland, the areas to the east of the San River, including Lwow, were occupied by the Bolsheviks who had stabbed Poland in the back. There was no more Polish prime minister, no more Polish government, no more Poland.

  And now, standing on her sunlit balcony that September morning, Mania watched the Russians streaming into Lwow ostensibly to rescue their Ukrainian colleagues. She sensed no menace in this ragtag army, not even in their big grey tanks decorated with scarlet hammer and sickles that followed like slow-moving monsters. But although she wasn’t frightened, there was something inexorable about them that disturbed her. Perhaps in the oppressive air that hung around them she smelled the pillars of black smoke that they’d left behind, saw the funeral pyres of torched villages and heard the screams of a thousand women thrown down into wayside ditches and raped.

  Lwow, the ancient city of lions, was part of Poland but its population was evenly divided between Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. The Ukrainians had chafed under Polish domination since 1659. Most of them hated the Polish Catholics who ruled over them, and detested the Jews they’d brought in their wake. In 1648 Boghdan Chmelnitsky’s bloodthirsty hordes galloped across the rolling steppes and thundered through the narrow lanes of Polish
towns. When their pogroms were over, Polish villages had been laid waste and over 100 000 Jews lay dead, some after being skinned alive.

  Apart from religious anti-Semitism which had been inculcated by the church for centuries, many Ukrainians believed that all Jews were communists and blamed them for the country’s economic problems, even for the famine caused by failure of the wheat crop. It was true that many Jews had become socialists as a reaction to the repressive, anti-Semitic policies of the government; after all, the socialists promised equality for everyone.

  The most extreme right-wing party was Endecja, whose demonstrations struck fear into Jewish hearts. My mother saw Endecja members armed with lumps of wood standing outside Jewish stores to prevent shoppers from entering. As the boycotts continued, many Jews lost jobs and businesses and lived in abject poverty. Poor people sold off their belongings to survive, even their chairs and eiderdowns, covering themselves with newspapers on bitterly cold winter nights. In broad daylight students and hooligans roamed the streets brandishing sticks studded with razor blades, and slashed the faces and bodies of any Jews they encountered, confident that the police wouldn’t intervene.

  Now Mania watched the street below where young girls with apple cheeks and plaited coronets of fair hair and youths with snub noses and cloth caps lined the road to greet the Russians. Many waved blood-red flags decorated with hammer and sickle or threw garlands onto the tanks. ‘Welcome to our Russian brothers!’ they called. In fact, the arrival of the Bolsheviks didn’t thrill either the Poles or the Ukrainians—both parties mistrusted the Russians—but for the time being the Ukrainians pretended to support their so-called liberators. Today they greeted the soldiers with flowers and offerings of bread and salt, the Slav symbols of hospitality. Later they would settle old scores.

  My grandfather Bernard Bratter, who was a socialist, wasn’t worried about the Russians. ‘Things won’t be so bad under the Bolsheviks,’ he told Mania, sipping his tea in that painfully slow way of his, as if chewing each mouthful. ‘You’ll see, they’ll treat everyone fairly, and there’ll be plenty of food. Back in 1915 the Russians brought us buckets of caviar and slabs of halvah. They’re not bad people.’

  ‘My father was very laid back about most things,’ my mother tells me. ‘As a young man, he only worked for two days a week and played billiards the rest of the time. Money wasn’t important to him. He was happiest when he could close the office and go to the pool hall. It used to make my mother mad!’

  Even those who didn’t share Bernard Bratter’s optimism about the Russians agreed about one thing. At least Jews wouldn’t be persecuted under the Bolsheviks as they were under the Nazis. From the moment they arrived, the Russians spread propaganda about the new workers’ paradise in Russia. They stroked children’s heads, gave them sweets, organised festive parades, and handed out photographs of Stalin, Lenin and Voroshilov like holy pictures. Communist Russia sounded like a utopia of liberty, equality and fraternity.

  At first the workers of Lwow couldn’t wait for this egalitarian wonderland. There is nothing as sweet as revenge, and the prospect of stripping their former bosses of their wealth, status and privileges warmed their hearts. At last the tide had turned. But it soon became obvious that the Soviet Union was a paradise without food or consumer goods, because instead of bringing buckets of caviar and slabs of halvah as my grandfather had predicted, the Russians bought up all the food they could lay their hands on and exported truckloads of Polish provisions back to Russia.

  The sophisticated residents of Lwow watched with amusement as the Russians behaved like children let loose in a toyshop. Some of them had never seen watches or umbrellas, and it wasn’t unusual to see grinning Russians rolling up their sleeves to reveal a dozen watches fastened all the way up to their elbows. They bought shoes by the dozen, handbags by the score. One day Mania’s husband Misko came home with the latest Russian joke. ‘I found out today why they’re all so happy in the Soviet Union,’ he said. ‘When they can get bread, they’re happy, when they can find butter they’re very happy, and if they can find a pair of shoes to buy, they’re absolutely ecstatic!’

  But the backwardness of the Russians and their insatiable appetite for shopping soon ceased to be a laughing matter. Food became so scarce that long queues formed in front of every grocery and butcher shop, and people had to barter their belongings for butter, eggs, cheese or chickens when the peasants came to market. Their shrewd eyes were quick to spot the silken sheen of Mania’s blouses and the trendy cut of her ankle-strap suede shoes, and they handed over slices of lightly smoked, pale pink ham or rings of garlic-spiced country sausage in exchange for clothes they would never have been able to afford in normal times.

  Clothes were Mania’s lifelong passion. She didn’t have my mother’s regular features or flawless complexion, but she had long shapely legs, slim hips, a devil-may-care smile and a foxy air of sophistication. People liked her because she always had an amusing anecdote to tell, often against herself. As a child she had contracted rheumatic fever which damaged her heart and made her prone to chest infections every winter, so her parents and her husband indulged her. According to my mother, Mania got good mileage out of her poor health.

  When they were growing up my mother preferred working in her father’s office to meeting friends in cafes, and had to be dragged to the dress-makers to have new clothes made. Mania, on the other hand, adored dressing up, flirting, shopping and gossiping, all of which was anathema to my mother. In today’s psychological jargon, you could say that Mania was her sister’s shadow self.

  By the time my father arrived in Lwow, the city had swollen with refugees flooding in from the German-occupied zone. While applying for his resident’s permit, on a hunch he backdated his arrival in Lwow before the war. It occurred to him there might come a time when long-standing residents would be treated better than recent refugees.

  Within a short time he found a job at the dental clinic in the Gas Company and also improvised a surgery in his small flat, so he earned enough to live on. For most of the refugees, however, life in Lwow was a struggle for survival. Haggard, destitute people roamed the streets and some became so desperate that thousands gathered each day in front of the German consulate, applying for visas to return to the German zone. Faced with starvation, they were unprepared to take their chances with the Nazis.

  Among those who’d already returned to Krakow were my father’s sister Karola and her husband Stasiek. Unlike most of the refugees in Lwow, Stasiek spoke Russian which meant that he could get a job, and when my grandfather Bernard heard that the municipal administration was looking for a Russian-speaking clerk, he’d recommended the attorney from Sosnowiec. To his amazement, Stasiek refused the offer. A clerical job was beneath him, and he didn’t want to work for the Russians. He disapproved of their ideology and their methods and had no desire to be part of their machinery.

  My grandmother shook her head in irritation. ‘Your brother-in-law has his head in the clouds,’ Toni muttered to my father. ‘At a time like this you can’t pick and choose where you work. Who else can can give him a job here except the Russians? The man’s a fool.’ Soon afterwards Stasiek decided to return to Krakow, despite the fact that Governor Frank’s cruel grip was squeezing the Jews tighter every day. He argued that the Germans were cultured people, they loved art and music. They were hard but they were fair and law-abiding. Karola was a spirited woman with a mind of her own, but his persuasive manner convinced her to return with him. Life is made up of small decisions which, like brick upon brick, imperceptibly shape the structure of our existence. In wartime the smallest decision had enormous repercussions because once you veered off one path and followed another, there was no turning back.

  As time went on, my grandfather Bernard grew more disillusioned with communism each passing day. No-one who had ever held a government position or had a business was safe from scrutiny, denunciation, confiscation and often deportation to Siberia as well. It was bad enough that the commun
ists had deprived him of all his income by confiscating his steel business and his block of flats, but even the workers were badly treated, and people had to cheat and steal just to survive. One evening Misko came home with another Russian joke. ‘Did you know that there are three categories of people in Russia? Those who’ve been to jail, those who are in jail, and all the others, who soon will be!’ Like most jokes, this one was based on reality.

  One day Bernard was shocked to receive a summons. He was ordered to appear before a tribunal on a charge of being a bourgeois, a major crime as far as the communists were concerned. Employers accused of exploiting or oppressing workers were hustled away, thrown in jail and brutally interrogated. After confessing to crimes they’d never committed, they were often sentenced to years of hard labour in the Siberian gulag from where many never returned.

  Someone with a grudge must have denounced Bernard to the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, but at the hearing his former employees testified enthusiastically on his behalf. ‘Comrade Bratter was not an exploiter, he was like a father to us,’ they declared and gave numerous examples of his kindness over the years. Although the tribunal acquitted him, he was shaken by the experience. He’d coped with the blow of losing his business and having to work at some pointless job to justify his existence, but being hauled into court and charged with exploiting workers distressed him. He became depressed. Aunty Mania recalled that one morning an acquaintance stopped him in the street. ‘Mr Bratter,’ he said, ‘do you realise that you’re wearing pyjamas?’ Bernard rubbed his bald head in embarrassment. He’d left home for work without getting dressed.

  As accommodation in Lwow was scarce, the communists ordered people to share their apartments with strangers and that’s how Misko’s Russian boss at the railways came to move into their flat with his wife and teenage daughter. Although she was upset about the invasion, Mania was fascinated by her tenants. All that Nadia seemed to eat was herrings whose fishy smell permeated the flat. ‘I’m telling you, from the minute Nadia opens her eyes in the morning, she drinks vodka and eats herrings. Even the curtains stink of herrings,’ Mania confided to her parents in an attempt to cheer them up.