Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  The next slide shows him in a small cell with about forty women, standing beside the small window covered by a heavy iron grille. ‘The window is level with the ground and outside I see a huge yard. The yard is a stage where different things happen every day. Sometimes the guards arrange people into groups, they separate the men from the women, the women from their children. Then they load them all onto big trucks and drive away. The women in my cell say they’ve been taken to Piaskowa Gora to be shot with machine guns. Sometimes the people resist. I hear their screams while the guards are beating them. Sometimes they beat them to death. Sometimes they shoot them on the spot. I see hundreds of people being shot in that yard. This is a bloody and unforgettable entertainment.’

  During the interrogations, his nanny insisted that she was an Austrian Catholic and that he was her own son. She concocted a story to explain why the boy had been circumcised, similar to the story my father had invented in his ‘document’. She said that her husband had been Jewish, and when she’d left Marian with him as a baby, he’d had him circumcised without telling her. In their determination not to leave a single Jewish woman or child alive, the Gestapo continued their thorough investigations in Vienna. When Janina’s sister corroborated the story, Marian and his nanny were released. ‘He was one of the few Jewish children who ever left Lackiego Prison alive,’ his mother Hela tells me.

  While Marian was in prison, his parents were being hidden by a brave Catholic woman whom Jozek had found after his second escape from the Janowska Camp. My mother’s eyes sparkle when she describes Jozek. ‘He was such a good-looker! Better looking than the film actor Tyrone Power, and so charming. He swept women off their feet.’ His new-found landlady was no exception and within a short time she fell passionately in love with him. When Hela arrived in Lwow, the landlady agreed to hide her too, on condition that her relationship with Jozek continue.

  ‘It must have been unbearable for Hela to sleep in the same room as her husband and their landlady until the war ended, but what could they do? It was a choice between life and death,’ my mother clucks her tongue. ‘No wonder she had a nervous breakdown after the war. But when it was all over, she still had her husband and her son, and I just couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to acknowledge her niece. I went to see the child myself and was amazed by the resemblance to her dead mother. Polusia clung to Hela’s side like a puppy at a pet shop who longs to be taken home. “I don’t know how you can be so hesitant,” I told Hela. “She even has Stefa’s rounded forehead!”’

  Hela was finally persuaded to take the child home for a trial period. From the way she tells me about it in Tel-Aviv fifty years later, it’s obvious that although she gave Polusia a roof over her head, she had little feeling for her. When I come to visit them, Jozek is waiting for me in the street, his eyes moist with nostalgia as he wraps me in a long hug. His handsome features have blurred with age, but the warmth and charisma are still there.

  Inside their European-style apartment with its polished floor, bookshelves and porcelain, Hela’s unlined face and carefully groomed blonde hair show that she is still proud of her appearance. Her words flow easily and evenly but without emotion, as if she is telling an interesting story about somebody else. ‘How could I know it was Polusia? I hadn’t seen her since she was a baby. She was terribly neglected when we brought her home,’ Hela recalls. ‘Her hands were rough. And she was plain. A very plain child. I took her straight to Michalewska’s shop and bought her some decent clothes.’

  As Hela still wasn’t convinced that Polusia was her niece, someone suggested she should go and see a fortune-teller. ‘As soon as I sat down, the clairvoyant said, “You have a problem surrounding a child, you’re wondering who she is. She is related to you.”’ Hela sat stunned. ‘Bit by bit I saw that she did resemble my sister Stefa. She certainly had her father’s flair for maths. At school in Krakow she won medals and prizes and her teacher used to say, “If Polusia doesn’t know the answer, then nobody does.” She’s been a top student everywhere and ended up with enough gold medals to make a bracelet!’

  ‘And she’s been a marvellous daughter,’ Jozek adds softly. His are the first words which show any feeling for the girl they brought up.

  One year later, I meet my second cousin Polusia for the first time, in San Francisco. She has reverted to her original name, Tamara, and is a prominent tax consultant in California. I wonder what she’ll be like, this woman with the painful history of abandonment, isolation and rejection. Tamara has short black hair cropped over her rounded forehead, jet-black eyes which shine with intelligence, and a strong voice. She’s warm and forthright, and I feel as if I’ve known her all my life.

  Polusia’s mother, Stefa Richter, was my father’s cousin, one of Ignancy Spira’s five children. Stefa had fled with her family from Krakow to the township of Strij in 1939 when Polusia was one year old. When the Germans occupied Strij, Polusia was sent to live with one Polish couple while another Polish family, Mr and Mrs Jarosinski, hid her parents and little brother in a recess under the house. Her father paid the Jarosinskis for doing this, and arranged for them to pass on money each week to the couple looking after Polusia.

  Although she missed her family, Polusia felt safe with her foster parents until the night she overheard them arguing. ‘You have to get rid of her,’ the man was saying. ‘They’re not paying us any more, the money’s stopped, so the devil take her, we’re not going to throw good food away on a Jewish brat for nothing.’ Now the woman was talking. ‘Well, what do you expect me to do, cut her throat?’ Polusia almost stopped breathing, terrified of making a sound. The man cleared his voice and spat. ‘The Gestapo are searching for Jews everywhere. Do you want to get us killed on account of a lousy Jew? Kill her or take her to the Germans, but I don’t want to find her here tomorrow when I get home.’

  The following morning, before dawn, Polusia’s teeth chattered while the woman bundled her up in her coat and knitted stockings and pulled a woollen cap low over her curved forehead so that her huge black eyes glowed in her white face. Taking the child’s mittened hand, she took her to the convent. ‘Don’t move from here until morning,’ she said and, turning on her heel, walked away, leaving Polusia shivering outside the convent gate.

  Sister Michaela, the director of the convent, took her in and called her Michasia. Nazi regulations required that each child admitted to the convent had to be reported to the authorities, and the Gestapo checked out each child to make sure that no Jewish children were given refuge.

  When the Gestapo officer arrived, he questioned Polusia for several hours, asking about her mother, father, where she used to live, and whether she used to go to church or synagogue. To every question she replied that she didn’t know or couldn’t remember, but the policeman still wasn’t convinced. He wanted the child taken to Lwow for further interrogation and a blood sample to prove whether she was Jewish, but the principal managed to talk him out of it.

  Although Polusia felt secure at the convent and liked the nuns, she guarded her secret and kept mostly to herself. She’d been at the convent for several months when two new girls arrived who kept staring at her and whispering. ‘She’s not Michasia at all. Her real name is Polusia and she comes from Strij,’ they told the headmistress. ‘Her father’s name was Jozef Richter, he was a Jew. He used to show us photos of her.’

  By a chilling coincidence, it was their parents who had hidden Polusia’s family until the day when someone reported that there were Jews living in their house. The Germans arrived and killed everybody—the Richters, their little son, and the Jarosinskis as well, for hiding Jews.

  Despite the girls’ insistence, Polusia maintained that she was Catholic for the rest of her stay at the convent. After the war had ended, when a Jewish woman came searching for Jewish children to reunite with their families and questioned Polusia about her parents, the little girl was still too frightened to admit that she was Jewish. After hearing Polusia’s story from the nuns, however, the woman began m
aking inquiries which led her to Hela and Jozek.

  My cousin Tamara has been telling me the story of her childhood in a strong voice, without any trace of sentimentality, but in the depths of her large dark eyes, I see a five-year-old girl in thick woollen stockings, heavy coat and woollen cap stamping on the iced-up doorstep outside the convent gate where her foster mother had abandoned her on a dark, deserted street.

  When I ask about her life with her aunt and uncle, she hesitates. It’s clear that she doesn’t want to criticise them or dwell on past hurts, but it’s equally clear that she wasn’t overwhelmed by love and warmth. ‘I’ve always been grateful to Hela for taking care of me,’ she says, ‘but as far as she was concerned, I was never a daughter. Jozek was much warmer. But I accepted that’s how it was. My childhood has made me tough and self-reliant because I learned from an early age that I couldn’t expect anything from anyone, I had to rely on myself. Until I met Arieh.’ And she smiles at her husband who has been looking at her with love and empathy while she tells me her story.

  This is a Cinderella story. The painfully shy, withdrawn little girl who was orphaned so young and rejected so often, and who learned that nobody could be trusted, became an outstanding student, received a scholarship to study in the United States and won enough gold medals to make that bracelet Hela was so proud of. At eighteen she found out that she had inherited some money which her father had deposited in an American bank before the war. While studying in the States, she met Arieh Zahavi, a handsome, caring man who still adores her. ‘When our children Shirley and Joseph were born, I tried to give them the warmth and security I never had,’ she says.

  One afternoon my mother came home from Hela’s place, where she’d gone to see how little Polusia was settling in, to find my father and me sorting chestnuts and arranging them in rows. While she was preparing dinner, my father sat down on the edge of my narrow iron bed and looked into my face. ‘Do you remember your grandparents?’ he asked. When I shook my head, he said, ‘You know, my father was Jewish.’ I looked up. ‘My mother was Jewish too,’ he continued. ‘So were Mummy’s parents.’

  We sat in silence while I processed this, aware of my mother hovering around in the background. Finally I spoke. ‘If your parents were Jewish, then you and Mummy are Jewish. So I must be Jewish too.’

  My father braced himself for my reaction but I wasn’t even surprised. It was as though I’d always known, as though one corner of my seven-year-old mind had always sensed that there was something different about us. A missing fragment of the puzzle had neatly dropped into place.

  As reports of violence against Jews increased, my father read Mania’s glowing reports about religious tolerance in Australia with ever-increasing interest. But it was the comment of a Catholic friend that was the deciding factor. Whenever they’d discussed the situation in the past, Mr Wrablec had always insisted that these attacks were isolated incidents which didn’t mean anything. ‘You’re lecturing at the dental school, you’ve got such a good reputation in Krakow, you shouldn’t think of leaving,’ he used to say. But when my mother ran into him in the Glowny Rynek one afternoon, his words shocked her. ‘It makes me sad me to say this, Pani Bronia, but I really don’t see any future for you here. I think you’d be better off making a new life for yourselves elsewhere.’

  When my father’s cousin Janek Spira sent my parents a permit for England, they were tempted to accept. England recognised my father’s degree, so he could have started working immediately, but something held him back. England was too close to Europe with its prejudices, blood-stained past and uncertain future.

  The solution to their dilemma came in the form of a telegram from Australia. ‘Misko gravely ill,’ it said in English. Not long after their arrival in Brisbane, Uncle Misko had contracted kidney disease and had undergone emergency surgery. I couldn’t understand why my parents looked so sad. ‘It only says he’s ill, he’ll probably get better,’ I said, but my father shook his head.

  ‘We decided to go to Australia because Mania was left alone after Misko died,’ my mother used to explain, and often added that our life would have been much easier in England. But I know that Australia appealed to my father far more. At our small table in our Florianska Street flat, my father would open the Romer Atlas, flick past Europe, South America and Africa, and point to the strangely-shaped pink blob called Australia. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ my mother used to sigh. ‘That’s why I like it,’ he used to retort.

  My father knew that if he wanted to practise his profession, he’d have to study all over again. But as he was forty-seven years old, had no money and spoke no English, he felt that studying was out of the question. He’d have to go into some kind of business. Someone must have told him that Australia was short of buttons because he bought a special machine, ready to embark on a button-manufacturing career in Australia.

  We weren’t the only members of the Baldinger family planning to leave Poland. Andzia had recently married Idek Cyzer whose wife and children had been killed in the Holocaust, and they’d decided to emigrate to Israel where Lunia and Berus had already settled. Izio and Zosia were migrating to Canada. Of all the Baldingers, only Slawa remained in Poland to watch over their father’s grave in an ancient cemetery of broken tombstones.

  CHAPTER 31

  My little cousin Aline, a roly-poly three-year-old, is jumping up and down, her beguiling brown eyes brimming with excitement as she tugs at my arm and repeats words I don’t understand. I can’t understand her mother, Tante Rolande, either, although she speaks French slowly and looks as though she understands how embarrassing it is to be eight years old and not understand what a baby is saying. My father’s brother Janek, whom everyone now calls Jean, gives me a reassuring smile. ‘Aline wants you to go to the park with her,’ he says in Polish.

  It was March 1948 and my father, mother and I had recently arrived in Paris where we were staying with my aunt and uncle, waiting for a passage to Australia. Bored and lonely in their high-ceilinged apartment near the Champs Elysees, I couldn’t wait for our occasional trips to Neuville where Aline’s older sister lived with her grandparents in their old gabled farmhouse. I envied Danielle’s carefree existence in the country among farm animals, rolling meadows and cherry orchards, unaware that she was at the centre of a storm raging around her.

  When France had capitulated in 1940, and Nazi uniforms had darkened the boulevards of Paris, Jean and Rolande had left Danielle with Rolande’s parents, the Guyots, and fled south to Rodez. They knew that their daughter would be safe with her Catholic grandparents. When Rodez also became dangerous for Jews, my aunt and uncle escaped to Andorra, but the Nazis were never far behind, and when they occupied the tiny mountain state, Jean and Rolande returned to France and hid in the farming valley of Le Puy until the war ended.

  Five years had passed by the time they returned to Neuville, eager to be reunited with their little daughter, but they met with an unexpected obstacle. Rolande’s parents refused to hand back the six-year-old they’d brought up since she was a baby, and Danielle didn’t want to leave their side.

  To complicate matters even further, Rolande, who’d converted to Judaism to marry Jean and who took her conversion seriously, found that the Guyots had baptised her daughter who now wore a cross around her neck and prayed to Jesus. While the tug-of-war continued, to increase the pressure on them, an anonymous letter arrived which threatened that if they took Danielle away, it would kill Madame Guyot.

  My cousin Danielle and I are back in Neuville the day she tells me about her confused childhood in this farming village. On this summer afternoon the meadows are splashed with scarlet poppies and big dark cherries hang lusciously in the orchards. Danielle has Rolande’s features and tawny coloured hair, as well as her vivacious though rather detached manner, and her Gallic matter-of-factness. Independent and entrepreneurial, she deals in pianos in Paris, but today she’s left her business, her husband Jean-Pierre and children Anne and Julien to spend time with me in Neuv
ille. About the custody battle which raged around her as a child she says little. ‘It was a difficult part of my life so I forgot it. Perhaps we forget things that are painful for us to remember. But I do remember my grandmother telling me, “Your mother was so beautiful, so clever, she could have married anyone she wanted, why did she choose a little Jew from Krakow?”’

  The Guyots won. Seeing that Danielle didn’t want to leave her grandparents, my aunt and uncle decided to leave her in Neuville for the time being. While Jean found work and Rolande looked after their new baby, Aline, they visited Danielle frequently and brought her home for the holidays, hoping to win her over.

  From the moment she was born, Aline lived with her parents in Paris as if she was an only child, although she knew that her older sister lived in Neuville. Aline was a bubbly child who brightened their lives with her ceaseless chatter. In looks and temperament she took after the Baldinger side of the family.

  When at the age of eleven Danielle finally came to live with her parents in Paris, she and Aline became very close. ‘But I think that the problems my sister and I are having now probably originated when she came to live with us,’ muses Aline, who is more emotional and more introspective than her sister. At the time of my visit, the two sisters had been feuding ever since their mother’s death several years earlier.

  During our six-month stay in Paris with Uncle Jean and Tante Rolande in 1948, we also spent a great deal of time with my other uncle, Marcel. Unlike Uncle Jean, who had a trenchant wit, a quiet twinkle, and a reserved manner, Uncle Marcel filled the room with his booming voice and high spirits, but he had a short fuse and scared me with his sudden outbursts of anger. Marcel had a Gallic passion for good food and thought nothing of trundling to the other side of Paris for the ripest brie or the most buttery croissants. He had no patience with the listless way my mother and I picked at our meals and used to badger us to taste some slimy shellfish or sloppy cheese whose smell turned my stomach. These reluctant attempts usually ended, to his disgust, with me rushing to the bathroom, hand clamped over my mouth. ‘Marcel has a heart of gold,’ my mother used to say. ‘He’d give you the shirt off his back.’ I just wished he wouldn’t insist on giving me oysters and camembert.