Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  Until they found a room, Andzia and the children stayed in a small hotel which was even more frightening than staying with Slawa. Every night when the Gestapo searched the hotel, doors banged and blood-curdling screams resounded through the corridors as they dragged guests out. When they banged on Andzia’s door, she hid Fredzio and handed over her papers in such a feisty manner that it allayed suspicion, but she knew her luck wouldn’t last.

  Little Fredzio often woke in the middle of the night to the sound of piercing screams in the street outside, or to the quieter, but infinitely more terrifying sound of his mother sobbing inside the room. For many years to come, those bloodcurdling yells resounded in his dreams. In those nightmares, smashed skulls lay on the ground with brains spilling out, streets split apart and turned into chasms beneath his feet, and menacing Germans chased him until he could run no further, and impaled him on barbed wire. Fifty years later, the vulnerable boy called Fredzio Rosenbaum has come a long way from those traumatic times. He has become a successful businessman called Fred Ross who lives in Maryland, has three brilliant sons, and enjoys an ideal retirement travelling all over the world with his wife Phyllis, but he still can’t bring himself to talk about those dark war years. My cousin Fred is the only member of the family who refused to talk about his war experiences. He has broken his silence only once, to tell his sons what he went through, and locked the past in a drawer labelled ‘Not to be re-opened’.

  When Andzia called about a vacant room in Zlota Street, the landlady invited her inside and explained that she was letting a room because her husband, an army officer, had been killed. ‘My late husband was an officer too,’ Andzia said. Encouraged by their mutual woes, the woman said, ‘Let me show you what a Jew did to my husband in Romania.’ She unfolded a sheet of newspaper, pointed to an item in an unfamiliar language and, in a voice crackling with hatred, spat out, ‘My husband’s superior, Colonel Goldberg, was a Jew and he shot my husband. Someone sent me this article from Bucharest.’ Sitting so close that Andzia could taste the hatred on her warm breath, she said with hypnotic intensity, ‘Pani Sulikowska, if you ever see any Jews anywhere, you must turn them over to the Gestapo straightaway.’ Andzia was wondering how to get away from there as fast as possible when the widow’s next words took her by surprise. ‘So when would you like to move in?’

  Once she and the children had a roof over their heads, Andzia had to find some means of earning money and once again Slawa came to the rescue. Ever since arriving in Warsaw she’d embarked on a new industry—making cigarettes. She bought bags of tobacco on the black market and learned to roll cigarettes with a special gadget, tapping them to smooth out any bumps. When they were ready, she arranged them in the flowered Morvita boxes she saved from the cigarette papers. Most people only bought one or two cigarettes at a time, but with her cheery manner and attractively presented boxes, she had built up a regular clientele.

  Andzia and the children became involved in Slawa’s lucrative enterprise. With her nimble fingers, Andzia boosted the cigarette production; Krysia sometimes went down to the shadowy wharf to buy a sack of tobacco, while Fredzio sold the cigarettes to kiosks and passers-by who found it hard to resist his cherubic face.

  April breezes were blowing leaves around the city footpaths when Krysia wrinkled her nose, sniffed, and called her mother over to the window. ‘Mama, come quickly!’ Columns of thick smoke were blackening the sky and flames crackled high above buildings in the distance.

  By April 1943, almost all of the 400 000 Jews of Warsaw who had been walled inside the ghetto since 1940 had been killed. Many died of starvation, frost, disease or from the brutality of guards who terrorised them. Most were deported to Treblinka, a death factory whose gas chambers and crematoria consumed thousands of men, women and children every week. When the remaining Jews in the ghetto found out that the Germans were planning to totally destroy the ghetto during Passover, they resolved not to give up without a fight. In one of the most heroic episodes of the Holocaust, twelve hundred young ghetto fighters armed with hand grenades and Molotov cocktails, seventeen rifles and a few pistols opened fire on a force of German soldiers and SS troops with heavy artillery, machine guns, howitzers and tanks. For the next two weeks, to the rage of the Germans and the admiration of the citizens of Warsaw, the defenders of the ghetto held the Germans at bay, while buildings crashed and crumbled, and despairing mothers leapt out of blazing buildings with their children to their deaths. The ghetto fighters knew that the outcome was never in doubt, but they were going to die fighting and make the Germans pay a high price for their lives.

  Outside the ghetto walls, a hurdy-gurdy was playing, fair-haired children rode painted horses on a carousel and Warsaw went about its business. ‘The ghetto is fighting,’ people said. ‘The Zhideks are burning.’

  Standing at the window, Andzia watched the flames and tears poured down her face. Standing beside her, the landlady clucked her tongue and tried to console her sobbing tenant. ‘It’s dreadful that we have to witness such a shocking sight but, really and truly, it had to happen.’

  Not long after the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, Andzia’s brother Izio suddenly appeared on her doorstep. In spite of his harrowing flight from Piszczac and the long, tense journey to Warsaw, he still managed to look the picture of elegance, the crease in his trousers razor sharp, and the small hunting hat with the feather tilted at a jaunty angle. It would be hard to hide him in her room with the landlady coming in and out, but Andzia didn’t hesitate. She pulled most of the stuffing out of the mattress she shared with her children for him to sleep on, and made him swear never to leave the room.

  Each day Izio waited impatiently for her to return. He listened intently to her stories about the cigarette business and with his shrewd business mind helped her and Slawa double their productivity and increase their sales. The days dragged for him until he felt that if he didn’t get out of the room, he’d explode. While Andzia was helping her sister roll cigarettes and Krysia and Fredzio were accosting passers-by to buy them, he waited until the landlady went out, put on his hunting hat and crept downstairs. As he hadn’t been out for several weeks, he was wobbly and he’d only taken a few gulps of fresh air when his legs gave way under him and he fell on the footpath. His eyes travelled up a pair of shiny black boots, khaki trousers and a leather holster. He’d fallen at the feet of a German soldier deep in conversation with a pretty blonde. Uncle Izio chuckles as he tells the story. ‘You’ll never guess what happened next. He helped me to my feet and then turned back to his girlfriend!’

  Encouraged by this stroke of luck, Izio sneaked out again a few weeks later. This time he was shopping for a hat. ‘The hatter across the road advertised the best quality Austrian hat for only one zloty because it was all he had left to sell. Naturally I couldn’t resist it! It might have been made for me and I put it on straightaway, but when I came out of the shop, I almost collided with a member of Colonel Roehm’s SS Brigade with the red armband and the death’s-head insignia on his cap. Before I had time to get out of his way, he bashed me over the head so hard that I reeled, but what upset me the most was seeing my beautiful new hat rolling into the dirt. As soon as he lost interest in me and strode on, I ran back to pick up the hat, but it was stained and I never wore it again.’

  As time went on, Andzia realised that the caretaker fancied her. She’d seen him watching her with an insinuating half-smile. He was always asking whether she needed any help and paying her clumsy compliments. ‘A good-looking woman like you must get lonely at nights,’ he’d wink. Several times he’d followed her up the stairs and she’d had to slip inside quickly to get away from him. ‘Why don’t you send the children outside so I can come in and talk to you?’ he’d say. He was becoming a problem but she couldn’t risk antagonising him because already some of her neighbours were gossiping that her daughter Krysia had sad Jewish eyes.

  To make matters worse, Izio suddenly became ill. He shivered with fever, his eyes looked glassy, and perspirati
on drenched the sheets. Occasionally he lost consciousness and mumbled in his delirium. Andzia told Fredzio to make a lot of noise to drown out Izio’s mumbling and he used to shout the multiplication table over and over again. To this day he can still recite the multiplication table in Polish. Andzia was frantic because the landlady, who liked her company, often came into their room and sat on the bed where Izio lay groaning and mumbling. Whenever the landlady came in, Fredzio had to jump around on the bed and ruffle it so that she wouldn’t see the figure under the eiderdown. Somehow Andzia managed to maintain a normal conversation and stopped her eyes from darting to the shape that bulged beneath the bedclothes. ‘I’ll tell you something really strange,’ Aunty Andzia said, a smile playing around her mouth. ‘In spite of his fever, whenever the landlady came in and sat on the bed, as if by magic Izio always stopped twitching and moaning, and never uttered a single sound!’

  Slawa managed to find a doctor whom they could trust. He was the doctor from the Pawiak Prison who sympathised with their plight because he had a Jewish wife. He diagnosed typhoid fever but said that apart from cold compresses and fluids, all they could do was hope and pray. Their prayers were answered because Izio recovered. When he was strong enough, he moved into a room of his own across the street.

  Slawa was still living at Nowogrodzka Street with her mother and sister, Rozia. She discouraged her mother from going out in case she forgot the words of Our Father, and warned Rozia not to pray aloud or leave her Siddur lying around in case the landladies saw it. Snow had been falling steadily throughout December and Slawa’s woollen coat was covered in white flakes when she rushed upstairs with the black bread and cottage cheese she’d bought them for dinner. She’d just taken off her threadbare sodden shoes and was rubbing her frozen feet when one of the elderly landladies appeared at the door, twisting a handkerchief in her arthritic fingers. ‘The caretaker has just told me that we have some Jewesses here,’ she told Slawa, gesturing towards the room occupied by Lieba and Rozia.

  The next day Slawa started looking for new accommodation for them. She’d heard about a Mrs Wiatrak and her friend Mr Zawoda who were said to let rooms to Jews with Aryan papers. When Slawa said that her friends, Miss Popkiewicz and her mother were looking for a room, Mrs Wiatrak explained that as it happened, she did have a vacant room, as her Jewish tenants had recently left for Hungary. To be on the safe side, she asked Slawa to meet her at the letting office, so that it would look as though they’d never met before.

  Slawa understood that Mrs Wiatrak had to be careful, and agreed to meet her the following day at the letting office on Marszalkowska Street, as if by chance. Mrs Wiatrak would come in ostensibly to advertise a vacant room, and Slawa would take it then and there. The landlady insisted that Slawa’s name wasn’t to be mentioned, only the name of the ladies renting the room, so that in case they were ever denounced, no-one would ever find out that she’d known their identity beforehand. It was only much later that my aunt understood why Mrs Wiatrak was going to such lengths to protect herself.

  January is a sad, bleak month in Warsaw, but the beginning of 1944 brought hope that the war wouldn’t drag on for much longer. From illicit broadcasts and information obtained by the underground, news about the unstoppable Bolshevik army sweeping towards Poland aroused the hope that if only they could hold out a little longer, they would live to see the Nazis defeated. One group, however, viewed the Bolshevik advance with growing apprehension. Many members of the right-wing underground army mistrusted the motives of the Russian Politbureau and foresaw that one struggle would end but another would begin.

  A chilly mist rose from the Vistula River and seeped into the grey buildings of Warsaw’s Praga district that frosty January day in 1944 when a middle-aged woman fussed nervously over her stooped, grey-haired mother as they looked through the window of Mrs Wiatrak’s flat, waiting for Slawa to arrive. Lieba and Rozia rarely went out these days and Slawa’s visits were the highlight of their week.

  As soon as they heard the familiar knock, Rozia hurried to the door and hovered over her sister with their groceries. As Slawa bustled around the room, unpacking the bread and cheese and trying to make cheerful conversation, she noticed that Rozia didn’t take her eyes off their mother who’d become greyer and more shrunken. ‘I don’t want to stay here any more,’ Lieba shivered. ‘I feel I’m going to die here. Last night I had a terrible dream about your father. Usually I dream that he’s alive and his spirit is protecting us, but last night I dreamed that he was dead. That means he won’t be able to help us any more. This is the end.’ Thirty years earlier, Lieba’s own mother had had a similar presentiment of death. Slawa looked helplessly at her mother. They both knew that there was nowhere else for her to go.

  As the months dragged on, Lieba’s face sagged and her shoulders became more hunched. Spring came late that year. The buds had begun to swell on the rose bushes and sap was coursing along the boughs of the lime trees when Slawa set off for her weekly visit to her mother and Rozia. Hidden under the laundry, groceries and boxes of cigarettes in her shopping bag was a packet of jewellery she’d been asked to sell. As she hurried along the street, the only sound was the clicking of her heels. Turning into Wolominska Street, she almost ran into a group of German soldiers who were pistol-whipping their captives as they pushed them into a waiting truck. She flattened herself against the cold stone wall. One minute earlier and she too would have been in that truck that was speeding towards the Umschlagplatz.

  Pale and trembling, she climbed the wooden staircase to her mother’s flat. She was about to knock when she saw something that made her hand freeze in mid-air. Her heart stopped beating. The door was padlocked.

  CHAPTER 25

  With the image of her mother’s padlocked door seared into her mind, Slawa flew down the stairs and rushed across town to find the landlady, Mrs Wiatrak. But when she ran up the stairs to the Standtortverwatungstelle, the German firm where the landlady worked, to her astonishment it was not Mrs Wiatrak but her friend Tadeusz Zawoda who came towards her, and there was no smile on his usually benign face. The words spilled out of Slawa’s mouth in panic. ‘I was bringing Miss Popkiewicz and her mother some food but I don’t understand what’s happened, there was a padlock on the door.’

  Surveying her with cold disdain, Mr Zawoda reached for the food in her shopping bag and said, ‘Well, they won’t be needing this any more.’ The floor swayed under Slawa’s feet as she tried to grasp what he was saying. ‘They’ve gone. I must say, they were pretty brave. They were taken away at midnight.’

  Her thoughts were spinning around so fast that Slawa thought the top of her head would lift off. Since he knew so much about it, Mr Zawoda and his friend must have denounced them, a couple of jackals posing as helpers of the Jews. She wanted to spring forward and claw his treacherous face.

  He’d already taken out the bread, butter and eggs, and his grasping hands were already on the cigarettes. Any moment now he’d discover the small parcel of jewellery she’d been given to sell. ‘Get your hands off my things!’ she shouted.

  His eyes became malevolent slits. ‘Don’t get on your high horse with me. If you don’t get out of here this instant, I’ll turn you over to the first policeman I see.’

  Realising that he had her in his power she stumbled out of his office. There was no point asking about her mother’s things. Mrs Wiatrak had the key to the padlock and the two of them would divide up the spoils. ‘There was no doubt in my mind that I only got out of his clutches because there wasn’t a policeman around at the time,’ she wrote in a report she sent to the Polish authorities after the war.

  On her way to the tram stop, Slawa tried to grasp what had happened to her mother and Rozia. Now she understood why Mrs Wiatrak and her friend had gone to such lengths to set up their supposedly chance meeting at the letting office, and realised how the previous Jewish tenants had come to vacate the flat. She longed to sit down and collect her anguished thoughts, but lingering in the street was dangerous and
she walked on, trying to look confident in spite of the panic she felt.

  At Izio’s place she sank into a chair and just looked up at her brother, eyes full of despair. When she was finally able to tell him what had happened, he paced around the room, his face white and drawn, fists clenched. They had to find out where their mother and sister had been taken before it was too late, but even making inquiries about missing Jews was risky.

  They could hear the ticking of Izio’s watch as they sat in clammy silence in the tiny room. Then Izio looked up, trying to remember something. He’d heard that a lawyer called Pawlowski had good contacts with Germans in high places. Perhaps he’d be able to locate their mother and sister if they were still alive. Thanks to their thriving cigarette business, they’d be able to pay his high fees.

  Within one week the lawyer had good news. Lieba and Rozia were being held in Warsaw’s Pawiak Prison. Slawa closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. They were alive! ‘Please do whatever you can to get them out while there’s still time,’ she said.

  While awaiting news from Mr Pawlowski, they sent bread and sausage for their mother and Rozia, and felt reassured when a brief note arrived confirming that the parcel had arrived. Finally, at the end of July, Slawa heard the news that made her dance around the room like a jubilant schoolgirl. On 1 August her mother and sister would be released.

  But on that day Warsaw had an appointment with history. The underground army rose up against the German occupation. The Warsaw Uprising had begun. For Lieba and Rozia, however, the timing was disastrous. On the first day of the Uprising they were marched into the prison yard with other inmates, lined up against the wall and shot.