It was dark when he finally reached home. White-faced, the skin stretched taut over her cheekbones, Bronia sagged against him. ‘I was sure that the Germans had caught you and I’d never see you again,’ she gasped. He looked anxiously at the flushed, listless child lying in the iron bed. ‘No change,’ Bronia sighed.
They tossed in bed all night, unable to sleep. It was torture to have the drug yet have to wait till morning to fetch Dr Forycki, but they didn’t dare disturb the doctor late at night. Early next morning, Henek rushed over to the doctor’s house. As if by a miracle, within half an hour of receiving the injection, my temperature dropped and the stomach cramps ceased. My father wasn’t surprised because he’d pinned all his hopes on this wonder drug but he was taken aback by Dr Forycki’s comment. ‘Dr Boguslawski, you have no idea how lucky you are, because that injection doesn’t always work!’
In the meantime the postmistress hadn’t wasted any time voicing her suspicions about the new dentist. Her mother added some observations of her own and, before long, rumours about the Boguslawskis were spreading through the village. Danuta Zawadzka told her friend Bronia with a cheery laugh, ‘You’ll never guess what our village is buzzing with today. Some busybody at the post office has been saying that Danusia must be a Jewish child because she’s got curly hair!’ My mother made light of the rumour, and they both laughed, but there was no smile on Bronia’s face when she reported it to my father.
Henek immediately called me to him. He sat me down on a chair and proceeded to brush my hair until not one wayward curl remained. Then he twisted the strands into tight little plaits. From that day on, this became our morning ritual. While I squirmed and wriggled, my father patiently straightened out my thick brown hair, brushed back the tendrils from my face, and braided them into tight plaits. Every single curl must be ironed out until not one suspicious kink remained. I had to look like a Polish Catholic girl.
He did this gently and lovingly, but with a child’s sensitivity I must have sensed the desperation behind each stroke of the brush. I have a photograph of myself in Piszczac taking part in a church procession. I’m standing between two little girls, a tray of rose petals suspended around my neck. In spite of all my father’s efforts, tendrils of soft hair have escaped from my plaits and form a soft aureole around my solemn face. My companions, on the other hand, have strands of almost white hair which hang straight, the way Polish hair should, and their giggling faces don’t have a care in the world.
The fear that my curly hair was going to expose our Jewish identity and cause our death affected my father for many years to come. Long after the war was over, years after we’d arrived in Australia, when I was already fourteen, he still insisted that I keep my hair in plaits and refused to let me cut it. He was still terrified in case it looked too curly. I detested my old-fashioned plaits and decided to defy him and cut my hair, but while the hairdresser was snipping them off I sat on tenterhooks wondering if I was going to emerge with a mass of frizzy hair. To my relief, and that of my father as well, I emerged with smooth, slightly wavy hair.
It’s hard for me to grasp that in spite of all the traumas and the terror they suffered during this time, my parents were also leading an apparently normal social life. There were sleigh rides in the snow, walks in the woods, and the fun of picking earthy mushrooms and small dark blueberries which hid under flat wide leaves. While the men played bridge, my mother and Danuta Zawadzka became close friends and gossiped about the county secretary who was having an affair with the town clerk’s wife. My mother was very fond of Danuta, but beneath the laughter and the confidences one niggling thought bothered her: would she still be her friend if she knew the truth?
Danuta had recently had a baby boy, Krzysztof, and the two women often talked about the trials and tribulations of child-rearing. One day Danuta came over and it was obvious that she had something on her mind. ‘Bronia, I have something important to ask you,’ she said. My mother’s heart turned over. ‘I’d like you to be Krzysztof’s godmother.’
My mother was flattered because this was an honour that some of Danuta’s other friends were longing for, but being a godmother meant taking on a religious responsibility and forming a lifelong relationship with the child. ‘It was a dilemma. I had to lie in order to survive, but I couldn’t deceive my friend,’ my mother explains. ‘The trouble was, I couldn’t accept her offer but I couldn’t tell her why. What reason could I give?’ Finally Bronia figured out an excuse. Shaking her head regretfully, she told her friend, ‘I’m terribly sorry but I can’t accept because I bring bad luck. All the children I’ve been godmother to became sick.’
Henek’s chess game with the priest became the highlight of the week for them both. Father Soszynski admired his opponent’s strategies which always left him outmanoeuvred. He thrived on the challenge and never lost hope of beating Henek one day. As they faced each other across the chess table at the start of a new game, the priest looked up at his opponent. ‘Perhaps this time I’m going to win!’ he chuckled.
While Henek was considering his move, Roman Soszynski sat forward with an expectant smile, waiting to see what the older man would do. There was an air of nobility about this man whose wit and impeccable manners the priest admired. Henek was an asset to Piszczac, no doubt about that. Father Soszynski had heard rumours about the Boguslawskis. Periodically someone raised a query about Bronia’s origins. Someone said that she was a Jewess, others that she was a communist. And today someone had said something about Danusia, who was such a quiet, obedient little girl.
Before making his counter-move, the priest looked steadily at his opponent. ‘At school today one of the children said that Danusia was Jewish,’ he said casually. Henek’s eyes were boring into his face. ‘I told them it wasn’t true,’ Father Soszynski continued. ‘I said I knew Danusia and that she couldn’t be a Jewish child because she was so obedient and well brought up.’ Henek breathed out again. Thank God. The comment about Danusia was a back-handed compliment, but he understood that the priest was letting him know that he was on his side.
Now Roman Soszynski swooped down on his queen’s rook and his boyish face was beaming. ‘Checkmate!’ he cried.
A long shadow fell across the little girl tracing patterns in the dirt with a stick. After watching her for a few minutes, the stranger asked, ‘What’s your name, little girl?’
Without looking up, she replied, ‘Danusia Boguslawska.’
‘But what was your name before that?’ he insisted.
Henek, who was standing by the open window, froze when he heard the last question. Instead of rushing outside and grabbing the child to prevent her from answering that insidious question, he was struck dumb and stood there helplessly awaiting her reply on which all their lives depended.
The child looked up, stick poised in her hand, and stared at the man’s ingratiating smile. ‘That’s always been my name,’ she said with a touch of impatience.
Henek breathed out in relief. This time there had been a reprieve, but what would happen next time? For the rest of the war, however long it lasted, their lives would hang in the balance of every single word they uttered.
Thinking back on this incident today, I don’t know whether I’d simply forgotten our original name or whether I knew that it must never be mentioned. My mother’s strained white face and my father’s relentless patience as they repeated our new name over and over must have impressed me with their gravity. But whether it was my good memory or bad memory that saved our lives on that occasion, it’s a revelation that our survival depended on me, as well as on my parents.
‘Not long after we arrived in Piszczac, you said something that made my blood freeze,’ my mother suddenly recalls while reminiscing about the war years. ‘We’d just passed a Jewish woman in the street and you pointed at her armband and said loudly: “Look, Mummy! You used to wear one of those!” I nearly died!’ We sit in silence looking at each other, balancing the horror of my innocent comment with the miracle that no-one had o
verheard it.
Several years ago in Sydney I attended a workshop based on reclaiming and healing the child within. During a guided meditation, I saw a little girl of about three or four crouching behind a door, watching me with eyes in which I sensed fear, apprehension and mistrust. This was a child who lived suspended between knowing and not knowing, who stifled feelings and suppressed reactions. Without understanding the significance of the situation, she knew that one wrong word from her would cause disaster, that there were secrets she must never tell because their lives depended on them.
For the first time in my life I came face to face with the child who still lives deep inside me.
CHAPTER 22
Four men sitting around a table wreathed in the smoke of a kerosine lamp scrutinised the cards fanned out in their hands. Realising that it was his turn to put down a card, one of the players sat forward. He seemed to be moving in slow motion as his hand hovered above the cards, seemed about to select one, then stopped in mid-air while he mulled over his choice for a few more minutes, and then moved tentatively towards another. The minutes ticked away. He closed his thumb and forefinger around a card but hesitated yet again. This time, however, the slim, tense man on his right sprang forward, plucked the card out of his astonished hand and rammed it down on the table with a thump. ‘Wake up!’ he shouted. ‘Are you playing or dozing?’
Henek shot his brother a furious look. If Izio didn’t curb his temper, he’d be the death of the whole family. Izio was known in the village by his Aryan name Jozek Orny, but a name wasn’t enough to allay suspicion. Playing bridge every night with the phlegmatic Bultowicz brothers was excruciating for him too, but it was vital. He had to have a social network in the village so they wouldn’t be regarded as out-siders. The brothers were good-natured men who arrived at ten every night after closing the shop in the market square which they’d taken over from the Jewish owners who’d been deported.
‘Now, now, Mr Jozek,’ one of them chided in his good-natured way, ‘we mustn’t get impatient! We don’t have a train to catch, do we?’ Beneath the mild words, Henek could sense disapproval. He’d always known that having his brother Izio with him in Piszczac was a terrible mistake. Ever since arriving in the village Henek had made an unremitting effort to blend in with locals, to speak in a more dispassionate way, to toss back glasses of vodka, and to behave like the others in church, but his brother’s reckless behaviour was likely to undermine all his endeavours and put them in danger.
It was our second summer in Piszczac and my parents had just started to feel that they were becoming accepted as part of the community, when out of the blue a letter arrived from Izio saying that he was coming to join them. He’d just escaped from the Krakow ghetto by bribing a guard and had nowhere else to go. In the last months brutality in the ghetto had intensified, and during their lightning raids SS officers sank to new depths of cruelty as they set about their task of emptying the ghetto and deporting its inmates to Plaszow Concentration Camp.
Although the Germans kept insisting that they were only sending people to work camps, occasionally someone managed to escape and tell their gruesome story. They spoke of trains which sped through dark woods at night; of sealed waggons where hundreds of men, women and children were crammed for days in searing heat without food or water; of dead bodies which tumbled out when soldiers armed with rifles and savage dogs finally unhasped the doors; of the exhausted, emaciated people who’d survived the hellish journey only to be stripped naked, herded into bare cement rooms, gassed and shoved into ovens carefully designed to burn human bodies. They spoke about black smoke which poured out of tall chimneys day and night, and about the sweetish stench of burning flesh that hung in the air for miles around. They spoke of these things but nobody believed them.
Sometimes a card arrived in the ghetto, creased and grimy, dropped through the cracks of a cattle train and posted on by a farmer who found it fluttering among the daisies in his field. One day Izio received such a card. As he and I talk, the last rays of the harsh Californian sun drill through the window of his flat and I have to shout and repeat each question because his hearing aid is making a buzzing sound. What with that and his wife’s pitiful condition, my uncle is maddened to distraction. His second wife Zosia slumps in her wheelchair like a rag doll, unable to speak or move, a dribble of saliva threading down her chin, her wasted legs agape but her eyes horribly alert.
‘My poor Zosia used to be a dentist, she spoke six languages, now look at her!’ Izio laments. ‘How do you expect me to concentrate on your questions when I see her suffering like this?’
Eventually he calms down and returns to his story. ‘Some time in 1942, while I was still in the Krakow ghetto, I received a tattered postcard.’ I sit forward, anxious not to miss a single word. ‘It said: “We are on a train bound for God knows where. Help us!” It was Karola’s handwriting. The postmark was Belzec.’ Too shocked to speak, I watch tears splashing down his furrowed cheeks. ‘She wrote it in that cattle truck. Imagine it,’ he shakes his head in wonder, ‘she wrote to me while she was inside it, knowing what was about to happen to them. She threw it out of the train and some villager must have picked it up and posted it on.’
We sit in silence while the sun glares into his hot room. I think about that lovely, fun-loving young woman and her handsome adoring husband who both loved life so much yet had so little time to enjoy it. I recall my mother’s words. ‘Karola would have survived on false papers because she looked like one of Hitler’s ideal Aryans with her tall slender figure and ash-blonde hair, but Stasiek refused to get false papers. He was too naive to believe that anyone would wish him harm, and poor Karola stayed with him.’ When I ask Uncle Izio to show me Karola’s postcard, he slumps in his chair. ‘When I escaped from the ghetto, I didn’t want the Germans to find anything incriminating on me, so I destroyed it. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have kept it no matter what. I destroyed the last words that Karola ever wrote!’
When the last of the inmates of the Krakow ghetto were about to be deported to Plaszow, whose Commandant Amon Goeth used prisoners for target practice, Izio bribed a guard and escaped. As there was no place to hide in Krakow, he decided to come to Piszczac. ‘When your father heard that I’d given Izio our address and that he was coming to stay with us, he could have killed me,’ my mother recalls.
‘How could you endanger us like that? How could you tell him where we were, when we agreed that nobody must know? He’ll be the death of us!’ Henek reproached her. Bronia bit her lip. She knew he was right, but she’d had no choice. ‘Anyway, it’s done now so there’s no point in recriminations,’ she said. ‘Luckily Izio doesn’t look anything like you so we don’t have to say he’s your brother.’
When Henek had calmed down, he figured out a way to prevent the villagers from becoming suspicious about Izio’s sudden appearance. He advertised for a dental technician in the Warsaw newspaper so that when Izio arrived he could introduce him as his new technician. Izio was good with his hands and would soon learn the rudiments of dental work, but at the same time Henek would have to coach him how to behave so as not to attract attention.
But Bronia and Henek soon realised that no amount of coaching would make Izio blend in with the locals. Although he’d changed his name to Jozef Orny, there was something about his cast of features and the melancholy expression in his fine dark eyes that looked Jewish. But his temperament was a bigger threat than his appearance. Hot tempered, impatient and argumentative, he didn’t seem able to curb his tongue. Henek often warned him about the importance of sounding cool and understated, while my mother urged him to tone down the extravagant compliments he paid the village women whose hearts he set aflutter.
Now, glaring at his brother across the card table, Henek realised with a sense of foreboding that Izio seemed unable to grasp the danger to which his behaviour was exposing them. A few more outbursts like this and the villagers would soon know the truth.
Finally the interminable rubber of
bridge was finished. It was past midnight when the Bultowicz brothers were draining the last of the vodka. ‘We’ll be seeing you at Mass on Sunday then, Mr Jozef,’ they said.
‘Not me!’ Izio replied with a short laugh. ‘I’m a believer but not a churchgoer.’ Henek winced. He could envisage this bizarre comment making the rounds of the village, adding more fuel to the growing speculation about the newcomer.
They were still sitting around the table when a loud banging on the door made Henek start. When he opened up, he felt the colour draining away from his face and bent over, pretending to be searching for something on the floor so that the two hulking German police officers wouldn’t see his terror. They strode inside, whips in hand, looked around, and when they spotted the cards they shouted, ‘Where’s the money?’ After my father and his partners hurriedly explained that they were playing bridge, not poker, and there was no money involved, the Germans quietened down and turned to my father. They’d come to see him about some dental treatment.
That night, after everyone had left, Henek sat up for a long time, every fibre in his body throbbing and churning. We’re walking on a gossamer tightrope flung across a deep abyss, he thought. How long can it be before it breaks? Anything would be better than living with this unremitting anxiety. Not a day passed without rumours about them, not a night passed without nightmares of Germans coming to take them away. Only that week a group of schoolchildren walking past their house had yelled, ‘Jude! Jude!’ Like all villages, Piszczac had its layabouts and drunkards who drank with the Gestapo officers in the taverns. They would denounce their own mothers for a bottle of vodka. How long will it be before they denounce us, he wondered.
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