Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  And these atrocities hadn’t been perpetrated by some pagan tribe in a remote and primitive land centuries ago. They were committed by the obedient citizens of the most progressive and cultured nation on earth. Much of the savagery had taken place in devoutly Catholic Poland, among rustic villages, rustling forests and meadows whose innocent beauty made your heart ache.

  But there were those whose courage and humanity had been a beacon on that black night of the human soul when compassion almost vanished from the earth. They were the feisty nuns who took in Jewish children, the devoted nannies and housekeepers who passed their Jewish charges off as their own children, the stout-hearted peasants and compassionate town-dwellers who risked the malice of their neighbours as well as the revenge of the Germans by offering sanctuary to their own countrymen destined for extinction.

  In this atmosphere of grief and restrained optimism we rented a flat on Florianska Street, a long cobbled thoroughfare running from the Glowny Rynek to the medieval gate of St Florian’s which led to the Planty Gardens. The crumbling eighteenth century facades of the houses in our street were decorated with heraldic emblems, cherubs and statues of saints. I remember climbing the curved staircase in the dark entrance hall to our high-ceilinged flat on the second floor. My father had his dental surgery in one room, while we lived in the other. My iron bed stood against the wall, near the white tiled stove in the corner, and we ate my mother’s tasty dill-flavoured potato soup and bigos stew at a small wooden table with a single bulb dangling above our heads.

  My father’s brother, Uncle Izio, was a frequent visitor. As Vice-president of the Jewish Committee, he brought my mother the news that Mania and Misko had survived Bergen-Belsen and were living in Brussels. By then Bronia knew that, apart from Mania, her entire family had been wiped out. Dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins had been consumed in the flames of the Holocaust.

  When all efforts to find her relatives had failed, Bronia travelled to Lancut to claim her grandfather’s land. It took weeks to process her application, the loneliest, coldest, most miserable weeks she could recall. When her claim was finally approved, she sold the land for two hundred US dollars, a considerable sum at the time, especially for my parents who had nothing.

  Not long after Bronia returned to Krakow, an angry letter arrived from a cousin she thought was dead. Moniek, the only member of his family to survive, had just returned from Siberia and accused her of grabbing the inheritance to which he was equally entitled. ‘I had no intention of cheating him,’ my mother tells me. ‘Chaim Goldman and Breindl Faust were his grandparents too. But before I had time to do anything about it, Henek got so upset about the letter that he sent him the whole two hundred dollars!’

  ‘Why didn’t you just split the money with Moniek?’ I ask. She waves her small hand in that impatient gesture of hers and utters a short, exasperated sound. ‘Because as usual your father rushed in and didn’t ask my opinion,’ she retorts. ‘He couldn’t stand someone thinking that we’d taken advantage of them, so he gave him the lot, finish! You know how impulsive he was. I had such a hard time in Lancut and then Moniek got all the money, but then I thought, let him have it. He had a hard time in Siberia, and then came back to find that his two sisters had been killed.’

  Now that the war was over, the euphoria of having survived had faded and the problems of peace began. Andzia was depressed because Zygmunt hadn’t come back, and the prospect of bringing up two children on her own weighed her down. ‘Don’t worry,’ Henek told his sister. ‘I haven’t got much, but whatever I have, I’ll share with you. If I have two crusts of bread, I’ll give you one.’ A few days later, my mother was strolling with me in the Planty Gardens when she overheard Andzia complaining to her friend, ‘I can’t rely on anyone to help me. All I can expect from my brother is a crust of bread!’ My mother admired her sister-in-law’s courage but she couldn’t stand her vituperative tongue. ‘Andzia is like a cow that gives you a bucket full of creamy milk but suddenly for no reason kicks the pail over and spills the lot.’

  Izio and Lola’s wartime separation had become permanent. During the war, she’d fallen in love with another man and she married him as soon as her divorce from Izio was finalised. My mother was an inveterate matchmaker who couldn’t bear to see her good-hearted, good-looking brother-in-law remain single, and before long she’d found someone for him. ‘I’ve met the perfect woman for Izio,’ she told my father one day. ‘Zosia Guttentag is intelligent, cultured and very attractive.’ They hit it off immediately. Izio was impressed by this refined woman who was a dentist, spoke six languages, and looked at him with eyes that glowed like dark pansies. Before they married, Zosia set one condition. She’d survived the Holocaust by working as a maid for a German, but Izio was never to ask her about her war experiences. ‘They shared everything and were extremely close, but there were things my father never knew about her,’ their daughter Lee tells me in Los Angeles many years later.

  One of Izio’s duties as Vice-president of the Jewish Committee was to distribute the aid parcels which arrived from the United States. I remember the excitement of unpacking the big boxes of United Nations relief rations stamped with UNRRA labels. The packets, cans and powders inside mystified us. There were boxes of crisp yellow flakes that no-one knew what to do with, packets of sugared crystals called Jello, and thin grey sticks which turned into rubber when you chewed them. My cousin Fredzio, who always seemed to know things, taught me to stretch the gum out without breaking it, and to save it for the next day by sticking it onto a plate.

  Fredzio, who was four years older than I, was like a brother to me. Together we took the tram to the Glowny Rynek, went to the Pantechnikon where we peered through special glasses at pictures which changed before our delighted eyes, and rode my red wooden scooter in the Planty Gardens. Fredzio was unhappy because the other boys at school taunted, tormented and bashed him for being Jewish. For six years he’d been terrified of being killed by German soldiers, but now he was frightened of going to school with his own countrymen.

  Many years later, when we meet again, my cousin Fred tells me that the time he spent with me in Krakow was the only part of his childhood he recalls with pleasure. ‘You were my favourite playmate,’ he says. Although we hadn’t seen each other since 1948 and had only corresponded about family events and personal milestones, from the moment Fred arrived in Sydney in 1987 with his wife Phyllis, it was as though we’d never been apart. Our childhood bond had survived a separation of forty years and separate lives on far-flung continents.

  Although the war had ended, and most of Poland’s three million Jews had been wiped out, those who’d survived still felt insecure. It wasn’t paranoia. There were many incidents of Jewish survivors being ambushed and murdered, and between 1945 and the end of 1947, over 1500 Jews were murdered by fellow Poles.

  But it was the pogrom in Kielce that made my parents realise how deeply-entrenched anti-Semitism was in their country. One hot July day in 1946, in the town of Kielce, a little Catholic boy returned home after being missing for two days. Frightened of being punished for running away, he told his parents that the Jews had kidnapped him. Before long, the town was buzzing with rumours that Jews were kidnapping Catholic children and using their blood for making matzohs, an anti-Jewish slander which had been the excuse for pogroms back in the Middle Ages. Most of the Jews of Kielce, who by then numbered less than two hundred, lived in Planty Street, and that’s where the boy’s father headed, along with a mob of angry townspeople brandishing clubs and crowbars, followed by policemen armed with revolvers.

  What happened next resembles the medieval pogroms in Krakow and the wartime barbarity of German soldiers. In an orgy of bloodlust, the mob, aided by the police, butchered every Jew they could lay their hands on. They threw tiny children through the window of the third floor cheder, ripped open the wombs of pregnant women, battered old men and teenagers to death, and then beat the corpses to an unrecognisable pulp. One man was so disfigured that the only thing whi
ch identified him was the number the Nazis had tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz. Forty-two Jews were murdered on that beautiful summer’s day in Kielce. They’d survived Hitler only to be massacred by their fellow countrymen.

  I was discussing life in postwar Poland with Aunty Andzia in Tel-Aviv when she shocked me by saying, ‘It was because of the antisemitism that your father had you baptised after the war.’ This came as a shock—I had no idea I’d been baptised—and I thought that she’d made a mistake, but when I questioned my mother about it after my return, she nodded. ‘When it looked as though we’d be staying in Poland, your father decided we should be baptised so you’d never have to suffer what we went through. I was totally against it. Being baptised didn’t help Jews during the Holocaust, but he was adamant that it would make your life easier.’

  Even now, after all this time, it’s hard for me to think about being baptised without feeling uncomfortable. The idea of baptism bothers me even though I understand why he did it and know that my father felt intensely Jewish all his life and never denied who he was.

  As a pupil at a Catholic school run by the Prezentek order of nuns, I learned to draw poplar, plane and chestnut leaves, copied the letters of the alphabet onto my slate, and learned the difference between cumulus and rain clouds. Whenever our attention strayed, the nuns made us kneel on dried peas in the corner of the classroom. No matter how much you shifted and wriggled, those peas bored into your knee joints.

  Like my father, I wasn’t good at sums, but I excelled in religious education, according to the report card which my father kept all his life. During church services, I was beguiled by the odour of incense which wisped from the censer, and by the perfume of full-blown roses whose petals spilled onto the white altar cloth like splashes of blood.

  In fact, I was so steeped in religious teaching that one afternoon, after I had walked home by myself, I horrified my parents by announcing that I hadn’t looked to see whether any cars were coming because I had a holy picture in my pocket. ‘Sister Cecilia said that if I always kept Jesus Christ with me, he’d look after me,’ I explained. My mother looked horrified, while my father said, ‘Sister Cecilia is very wise but you still have to look both ways before you cross the street.’

  Sister Cecilia is no longer alive when I return to visit the convent in 1989 with my husband Michael and daughter Justine, but the headmistress, Sister Fabiola, is eager to show me around. The highly polished linoleum corridors of the school and its old-fashioned wooden desks look familiar. In one of the classrooms girls in navy skirts and blouses with sailor collars, just like the ones I used to wear, jump to their feet when we enter. ‘This is Pani Diane Armstrong from Australia who was a pupil here once and has come back to see her old school,’ Sister Fabiola tells them.

  I don’t tell Sister Fabiola that Danusia Boguslawska who attended the school from 1945 until 1948 was a Jewish child whose parents had been too apprehensive to reveal her religion. There isn’t time to delve into the murky waters of Jewish-Catholic relations and my chest tightens at the very thought of it. After so many years, I still feel uneasy about revealing my religion in Poland.

  My mother and I were walking towards the Glowny Rynek one fresh spring morning in 1946 when shots rang out. People were screaming, shouting, running. Without saying a word, she grabbed my hand and pulled me along the cobbled street until we came to a church. She swung the door open and we sank into the nearest pew, gasping for breath, our hearts almost jumping out of our chests. I leaned against her, trembling as I listened to the shots and yells.

  Long after the tumult had subsided, we crept out of the church. Quickening her step, my mother tightened her grip on my hand. We hurried home along empty streets which echoed with our footsteps. It was May Day, and a demonstration of workers’ solidarity had turned into a riot as rabble-rousers stirred up the crowd with a call to get the communists and the Jews.

  In July, along with the other pupils at the convent, I spent the summer holidays at Jordanow. It was the first time I’d been separated from my parents and I clung to my mother like a limpet, but she insisted that the country air and wholesome food would build me up. I think the holiday also had another motive. After the trauma of the past six years, my parents must have longed to have time to themselves.

  It was the longest month of my life. Each afternoon after our nap, we had to slurp down a raw egg. The slime slipping slowly down my throat made me gag. ‘Raw eggs will give you a beautiful singing voice,’ the nuns used to say. It didn’t work. Every evening we had to line up for a dose of cod-liver oil whose fishy flavour and thickly viscous consistency I can taste to this day. But the worst thing of all was our daily cup of goat’s milk. In the mornings we walked in pairs to a barn where a plump girl planted on a low stool pulled on the long teats of the tethered goat, squirting milk rhythmically into a bucket. The goat stank, the liquid was hot and frothy, and its rank odour and musty taste made my stomach heave.

  When winter came round again, my parents took me to Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. Bundled up in my thick woollen coat and knitted hood, I breathed in air which stabbed my lungs like shards of crystal, and crunched thick snow under my little boots. I awoke to the sound of cocks crowing and the guesthouse owner calling to her chickens. In the distance, saw-toothed peaks zigzagged the sky. It was an Alpine world of untouched beauty and tranquillity where cruelty, violence and hate seemed far away.

  My father and I were strolling through the hamlet on our usual afternoon walk when I tugged at his hand and pointed. On an ornate pine fence someone had scrawled an ugly-looking word I’d never seen before. Jude. ‘That’s the German word for Jew,’ my father explained. ‘Somebody wrote that because they don’t like Jews.’ For some reason I felt uneasy, but neither of us said any more about it.

  Letters began to arrive with unfamiliar stamps. The uninteresting ones with the head of the English king came from Aunty Mania who’d recently migrated to Australia when Uncle Misko’s cousin had sent them a permit. Write to Aunty, my mother used to say. ‘When I grow up I’m going to be an author,’ I wrote one day. Looking back, I realise that even at the age of seven I was already silently observing, interpreting and assessing, detecting the mood behind the expressions and the meaning behind the words.

  Although over a year had passed since the war had ended, people were still searching for lost relatives. Occasionally a Jewish child would be found at a convent or a lone boy would emerge from the forest. Such reunions were becoming increasingly rare, so my mother couldn’t understand the reaction of my father’s cousin Hela when she was told that her niece Polusia had been located at an orphanage not far from Krakow. Instead of being overjoyed at the possibility that her dead sister’s child might still be alive, Hela showed no interest in seeing her. ‘My niece died along with my sister Stefa and the rest of the family,’ she insisted.

  Hela had lost most of her family during the war. Her father Ignacy had been bashed by thugs who broke into his office and demanded money and typewriters. Ignacy, who’d been a supply officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, had insisted on a receipt. In reply, they beat him so savagely that he died. Of Ignacy’s five children, only Hela and her brother Jakub had survived. Hela’s sister Ludwika had perished with her husband and small daughter, and only their son Olek had managed to survive by hiding in the forests. Her other sister Stefa had been killed together with her husband and little son, and she assumed that their daughter Polusia had perished with them. On the memorial that she and her husband Jozek erected in the Jewish cemetery in Krakow, they’d included Polusia’s name.

  Even after her friends had prevailed on her to visit the child, Hela maintained that she couldn’t tell whether it was her niece or not. My mother was shocked. ‘It was terrible that it took her so long to acknowledge her sister’s child,’ she tells me. ‘I don’t think she wanted the responsibility.’ Then she becomes pensive. ‘But you shouldn’t judge. After what people went through during the Holocaust, it’s a wonder that anyone was nor
mal.’

  Like my father, Hela’s husband Jozek had also left Krakow for Lwow as soon as war was declared, while Hela and their five-year-old son Marian had remained in Krakow. From the Krakow ghetto they were sent to Plaszow Concentration Camp from which Hela had managed to escape by bribing a German guard with a piece of jewellery. With her little son she fled to Lwow to join Jozek, who in the meantime had been interned in the dreaded Janowska Camp. By the time they arrived, he’d escaped, been recaptured, and had escaped again.

  As soon as they reached Lwow, Hela placed Marian in the care of her housekeeper Janina Mikolajewicz who was Catholic, and she told him to call her ‘mother’. Janina became the housekeeper of a high-ranking German officer in charge of the Wehrmacht’s fleet of armoured cars in Lwow. Marian was a sweet-natured child with a mop of brown hair and melting brown eyes and he soon became a favourite with the German soldiers at 10 Kopernika Street who had no idea that he was Jewish. ‘They treated me as if I was their own child, gave me sweets, and let me sit behind the wheel of their cars and pretend to drive them,’ he emails me from his home in New York.

  The good times ended when a Gestapo officer arrived looking for Marian. A neighbour reported that Janina was keeping a Jewish child but her boss sent the policeman away, refusing even to discuss the matter. Several weeks later, however, the Gestapo returned with a warrant for Janina and Marian’s arrest issued by the Governor of Lwow.

  Marian and Janina were taken to Lwow’s Lackiego Prison, where my father and grandfather had been beaten the previous year. In his quiet, understated but chilling way, my cousin Marian describes his recollections of his ten-month stay in jail as ‘slides’ which have been engraved in his mind forever. ‘As soon as we arrived, the German guards tried to separate me from Janina. I was terrified and clutched her with all my might, I cried and kicked and screamed, “Mother! I want to stay with my mother!” until a man in a white coat came out, the prison doctor I suppose, and talked the guards into letting me stay with her.’