‘At home I was a fussy eater and turned my nose up at most of the food that my mother put in front of me. I wouldn’t touch fruit with the slightest blemish, or meat with a morsel of fat. Only cakes from the best patisseries were good enough for me. My mother used to shake her head and say, “One day God is going to punish you for being so fussy.” When I was so hungry that I would have devoured anything, I remembered my mother’s words.’
But no matter how hungry she was, or how many people were dying around them, Mania never gave up hope. ‘We have to stay alive to see the Germans defeated,’ she used to tell those who were weak and in despair. ‘We have to survive so we can see them crawling in the gutter.’ Having Misko there boosted her morale. ‘Whatever we had, we shared between us. I saw that those who had someone to care for, or who cared about them, did better than those who were alone,’ she told me. ‘The first to die were the single men.’
She recalls that by pressing against the barbed wire, they sometimes saw Germans riding bicycles, carrying shopping bags and leading normal lives. ‘Later those people said they knew nothing about Belsen.’ Her voice rises with anger. ‘How could they lie like that?
‘By 1945 the real horrors began. Tens of thousands of prisoners on death marches from other camps poured into Belsen in a pitiful condition, but nothing was provided for them, no roof over their heads, even though it was winter, and no food, not even water. By then we were no longer living: we were slowly dying,’ my aunt recalls. ‘Hunger gnawed at me day and night, it made me cry. People were as transparent as ghosts, you could count each bone, and the flesh had disappeared from their buttocks. Those who could still walk stumbled around like grotesque skeletons, others were too weak to move and lay dying in their own excrement. The first sign that someone was about to die was that they turned yellow. We called them “Mussulmans” because of the colour of their skin. They just lay there and lost interest in everything, even food. In a few days they were dead. I really don’t know how I survived,’ she muses in a drained voice. ‘Sometimes I wonder, was it me or was it someone else?’
It was from one of the new arrivals that Mania found out what had happened to the Henings, Lilka and her little daughter, and all the others with South American passports who’d looked forward to going to Vittel. They’d been taken straight to Auschwitz and gassed.
Although the inmates didn’t know what was going on outside, sometimes while queueing up for their rancid turnip soup, they could hear the guards talking and they began to realise that the war wasn’t going well for the Germans. By the beginning of April, when they saw allied planes flying overhead, they knew that the war must be coming to an end.
On a fine spring day in 1945, two years after Mania and Misko had been transported to Belsen, the guards rounded up those few who could still walk and herded them to the station and onto the waiting train. Cheered by the rumour that they were going to Switzerland, Mania and Misko found themselves on a train speeding through Germany. Past Hanover, they heard gunfire but didn’t know who was shooting.
At Madgeburg, the firing became so intense that the train couldn’t go any further and stopped beside the River Elbe. While it was stationary, one of the prisoners overheard that their guards planned to take all of them down to the marshes and shoot them. Hearing this, one of their group tried to persuade the German commandant to reconsider. ‘How will it benefit you to kill us?’ he said. ‘You know you’ve lost the war. The Americans will be here any moment. If we tell them that you let us go, they mightn’t kill you.’ But the American column had already caught up with them and when the soldiers found out that the guards intended to kill those ghostly survivors of Bergen-Belsen, they shot them.
It wasn’t until Mania reached the nearby town of Hillersleben that she realised that the war was over. She could hardly believe her ears when she heard the Americans announce to the German residents, ‘Get out of your flats and make room for the Jews!’
I’m looking at a photograph taken several months later, on a sunlit street in Brussels. A slender young woman in a check jacket and high-heeled shoes leans against a handsome balding man and smiles lopsidedly for the street photographer. Aunty Mania and Uncle Misko look like any carefree young couple on holiday.
CHAPTER 29
By the early summer of 1944 while Mania and Misko were still languishing in Belsen, it was clear that the Russians would soon enter Piszczac. Everyone was speculating about what would happen and some said that the village would be caught in the crossfire between the two armies, and that there would be fighting in the streets. Like some of the other Silesian refugees, Jurek and Danuta Zawadzki were planning to move westwards. But Henek and Bronia saw no need to flee from the Russians. In fact they couldn’t wait for them to arrive.
Even now, on the eve of German defeat, my parents still couldn’t relax. Henek overheard Stanislaw Lewicki talking about someone his underground colleagues had caught in the woods. They’d checked him out, found out he was a Jew, and shot him. ‘One of these days we’ll have to get you into the woods and check you out too!’ Mr Lewicki told my father with a meaningful look. To the villagers Mr Lewicki was a resistance hero, but to my parents he posed a constant threat. Although the rumours had quietened down after their New Year’s Day confrontation, my parents knew that they were still in danger. ‘If the war had gone on any longer, someone would have turned us in,’ my mother used to tell me. ‘We were hanging on by our fingernails.’
But when the German retreat became imminent, the atmosphere grew tense. No-one knew what to expect and people feared the lawlessness of the retreating and advancing armies. As my father was packing our belongings, ready to leave the village if necessary, a sturdy peasant woman in heavy boots and a thick headscarf walked into his surgery and asked him to make her a bridge. Pointing to the suitcases and bundles piled in the centre of the room, he explained that he’d already packed his instruments. ‘The Russians are about to move in,’ he said. ‘This isn’t the time to be starting dental work.’
She explained that she wasn’t worried because she lived deep in the woods, safe from marauding armies and gun-happy soldiers. Henek was intrigued at the thought of a community living in the forest. ‘If you want me to do this dental work, you’ll have to take me with you!’ he joked. To his astonishment, she nodded. ‘Be ready to leave early in the morning with all your things, and I’ll pick you up.’
The sun was rising in the wintry sky when a rickety cart with rough-hewn sides clattered along the dirt path leading to our house. As soon it was loaded up with suitcases, my small iron bed, bundles of eiderdowns, the dental chair and boxes of instruments, we clambered up beside the peasant woman as she picked up the reins and whistled to the horse to get moving.
We were just about to swing out of the yard when a long German supply column of foot soldiers, lorries and armoured vehicles appeared in a cloud of dust and rolled along the street. As we waited for the endless cavalcade to pass, they suddenly came to a dead stop outside our house, blocking us in. ‘Now what do we do?’ Bronia whispered. ‘We’re stuck.’ Henek didn’t dare ask German soldiers to move on during their humiliating retreat; besides, the last thing he wanted to do was to draw attention to the cart, our belongings and ourselves.
Henek slid down from the cart and drew closer to the column. Perhaps he’d be able to find out how long they were planning to stay. As he strained to hear what the soldiers were saying, he realised that they weren’t speaking German at all. He was listening to a language he recognised from his boarding school days. They were Hungarian soldiers in German uniform. Addressing the platoon commander in Hungarian, he asked for help to get the cart across the road.
Astounded that someone in this godforsaken place could speak Hungarian, the commander looked at the distinguished greying man with the military moustache who spoke to him in his own language with such an authoritative manner. ‘He must have thought I was a high-ranking espionage officer stationed close to the border to pass on information,’ my fa
ther wrote in his memoirs, ‘because he clicked his heels, snapped to attention, and gave a sharp salute.’ Out of the corner of his eye Henek saw one of the villagers staring at this extraordinary scene. ‘I’ll see to it immediately, sir,’ the commander replied in Hungarian and ordered the soldiers to move on so that we could pass.
As the cart trundled on towards the woods, my father marvelled at this turn of events. ‘You see, nothing in life is ever wasted,’ he used to tell me. ‘If it hadn’t been for the fact that I spoke Hungarian, we wouldn’t have got out of Piszczac that day, and who knows what might have happened.’
Deep in the woods where she lived in a little community of eleven families, the woman gave us a room in her hut and my father started work on her bridge. For the first time since the war had started, Henek felt calmer and tossed less in his sleep. In this peaceful forest where mushrooms sprouted in moist loam and blueberries grew in patches laced with sunshine, he went to bed without feeling afraid.
He was fast asleep when the glare of a lantern shining into his face made him sit bolt upright. When he jumped to his feet and lit the kerosine lamp, Henek saw a thick-set soldier in Russian uniform with a younger one standing behind him. Although he’d been waiting for the Russians to liberate them, he felt uneasy wondering why these two had come to see him in the middle of the night. When the stocky one demanded who he was and what he was doing there, Henek stiffened. ‘I’m waiting for the war to end,’ he replied. Immediately, the older of the two Russians gave a triumphant shout: ‘Aha, ty udral z Germancem!’ ‘You’re a German collaborator!’
Henek’s heart was thumping. He knew that the vanguard of any army dispensed summary justice, and if these two decided that he was a German collaborator, they would shoot him. Cold sweat was trickling down his back. Surely after surviving the Nazis, he wouldn’t be shot by his liberators. When he tried to explain who he was, they stared at him with impassive faces and he tailed off, resigned to the fact that they couldn’t understand him. Suddenly they burst out laughing and thumped him on the back. They’d known all along that he wasn’t a German collaborator. They knew he was a dentist and had come looking for alcohol.
Well aware of Russian soldiers’ reputation for heavy drinking, rape and robbery, Henek couldn’t get them out of the hut fast enough. ‘Vodka nyet,’ he kept saying in the few Russian words he knew. ‘Nie ma vodka.’ Hearing this, the older man made menacing gestures, ‘Get some food ready because we’re coming back with our own vodka!’ he shouted.
The sun had barely risen and light was slanting through the slender mottled trunks of the birch trees when the Russians returned with a big bottle of vodka which they slammed down on the wooden table. They sat down heavily, sprawled out, and shouted ‘Dawaj stagan!’, pointing to two big tumblers in the cupboard. Pouring vodka up to the brim, the older soldier tilted his head back and proceeded to swallow one quarter of a litre of vodka without stopping to take breath.
When his glass was empty, he poured himself another full tumbler with a steady hand, but for his younger companion, who had also drained his, he poured only half a glass. Henek watched astounded as he drank one tumblerful after another as if it was water. Still sober, the soldier asked my father to make a crown for one of his teeth. After Henek had taken an impression of his tooth, the old soldier propped his large head against his meaty hand and slept for an hour. Henek fitted him with the crown and the two left, thumping his back in gratitude.
Later Henek found out that he’d had a lucky escape. These two had been wandering around the countryside conning the peasants. The first soldier would go into a peasant’s hut and trade an army blanket for a bottle of vodka, and a short time later the second would arrive and, pointing accusingly at the blanket, would threaten the peasant with imprisonment for being in possession of army property unless he returned it immediately. Within a few days, however, the regular army caught up with these entrepreneurs and ended their alcoholic marauding.
When we returned to Piszczac several days later, it was already in the hands of the regular Russian army. It was March 1944 and for this part of Poland the war was over. For five years my parents had lived on the razor’s edge. They rejoiced with their Piszczac friends, wept tears of joy as they sang the national anthem, and linked arms in toasts of Bruderschaft. Now that the Nazis had gone, Henek began to relax. ‘Finally I can tell them that we’re Jewish,’ he told Bronia.
She stared at him in dismay. ‘You can’t be serious,’ she said. She still sounds indignant about it even after almost fifty years. ‘After all you’ve heard them saying about Jews, how can you even think of telling them? Do you expect them to say “Isn’t that wonderful?” You don’t live in the real world!’ She shakes her head in tight-lipped disapproval. ‘Sometimes your father wasn’t very realistic. Luckily, he listened to me that time.’ Not long after my parents’ argument, Piszczac buzzed with news. Some Jews found hiding in the forest had been murdered. Bronia flashed Henek a meaningful glance.
We stayed on in Piszczac for another nine months, posing as Catholics to the end. Lolling around the camp fires every night, Russian soldiers drank vodka, slapped their legs in boisterous Cossack dances, and sang melancholy songs of the Steppes in soulful Russian voices which boomed through the village.
Winter had ended but spring hadn’t yet begun when my parents went to say goodbye to the priest and their Piszczac friends. I was lifted into the back of a truck which was covered by a khaki tarpaulin and saturated with acrid fumes of gasoline which bit my throat. It was March 1945 and we were returning to Krakow.
On the way, we stopped in Lublin. While queuing for bread, Bronia looked up and screamed with delight. Coming towards her was Henek’s cousin, Janek Spira, and his wife Maryla. Janek’s usually lively brown eyes filled with tears when he told them that his mother Salomea and younger brother Karol had been killed. Salomea Spira, who had Aryan papers, was on a train when German soldiers entered her carriage and asked her name. She was so petrified that she couldn’t remember her false name. Realising she was Jewish, they shot her on the spot. Janek’s brother Karol had managed to survive on false papers, but one week before the war ended, someone denounced him to the Germans.
Maryla and Janek, who didn’t have a zloty to their name, were expecting a baby. ‘How can I bring a child into the world at such a time, how will I manage?’ Maryla lamented.
‘Don’t worry, things will work out,’ Bronia reassured her. ‘You’ll never regret having a baby.’
For the rest of their life, Maryla and Janek were grateful for my parents’ moral support at that difficult time. Not long before she died, Maryla wrote to me. ‘When Anne was born, your father gave me a beautiful doll for the baby, saying that each baby brings its own luck.’ Anne, who inherited her parents’ warm and hospitable nature, became a doctor and lives on a religious communal settlement in Israel with her husband and three children.
As they travelled to Krakow my parents occasionally saw Russians leading groups of conquered German soldiers through liberated towns. No longer immaculate and invincible, they looked scared and shrunken while bystanders jeered, cursed, spat and hurled rotting tomatoes, yelling, ‘Let the bastards have it!’
My mother watched in silence. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to join in with them,’ she told me. ‘Maybe among those soldiers there was one decent man.’
The war was over.
CHAPTER 30
Down in the street, people hurried along cobblestones glistening with melted snow, their chins buried deep inside their upturned collars. Occasionally a tram, an angry pillar-box red, splashed the street with colour as it ground its way towards St Florian’s Gate. Although I was sitting by the window, I wasn’t interested in the activity outside. Already at the age of six I’d discovered the pleasure of escaping into the world of books and was engrossed in The Golden Slipper, a historical novel set in medieval Krakow which Aunty Andzia had given me on St Nicholas’ Day.
‘A gift for Chanukkah,’ she’d said holding o
ut the book. I squirmed. I didn’t know what Chanukkah was but I didn’t like the sound of it. Although I didn’t ask, and nobody explained, I noticed a quick glance pass between my mother and my aunt. I was a bit scared of Aunty Andzia whose eyes stabbed you like pins, not like Aunty Slawa who had a merry laugh. Aunty Slawa hadn’t said anything about Chanukkah. ‘This is for Christmas!’ she’d said, handing me a doll’s tea set.
After six long years, we were back in Krakow. In months to come, like bruised birds returning from faraway places, Jews drifted back from concentration camps and gulags. Some had spent years squeezed into recesses behind walls; others had been bent double in holes beneath barn floors, or stooped in freezing pits in the forest. There were children who’d forgotten how to smile and play, youths aged before their time, and adults whose pasts had been snatched away.
They came back to a city which felt like an empty shell. Kazimierz, once the heart and soul of a vibrant culture, had become a ghost town. Streets and marketplaces which had bustled with life and colour for five centuries had now fallen into an uneasy silence. Broken tombstones littered ancient cemeteries, synagogues lay in ruins, and prayer houses, Talmud-Torah schools and community halls were taken over by people who didn’t mourn the destruction of Jewish culture. They hadn’t yet discovered that they too would be impoverished by the loss.
Day after day Jews clustered around the noticeboard in Dluga Street and ran trembling fingers down the lists of survivors posted by the Jewish Committee, hoping against hope to find the names of their missing loved ones. Gradually they discovered the bitter truth. The Nazis and their willing helpers had almost succeeded in wiping the Jews off the face of the earth. Out of 225 000 Jews who’d lived in Krakow in 1939, only 15 000 had survived. Out of over three million Jews who’d lived in Poland before the war, only 250 000 remained, and most of them had survived not in their native land but in the Soviet Union. In concentration camps, death camps, extermination camps, labour camps, ghettoes, forest groves, hillsides, villages and cities, six million innocent people had been gassed, shot, hanged, beaten, tortured, mutilated, set on fire, buried alive and starved.
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