Oles suggests a stroll around the city but I’m impatient to visit the state archives. We only have five days in Lviv, and I’m determined to find out whatever I can about my mother’s family. Sasha and Oles lead us through a shady park, along streets lined with lime and chestnut trees, and stop to show us the ruins of the Temple of the Golden Rose, a medieval synagogue. To save her community from death, the rabbi’s beautiful daughter married the ruler of the town, but three hundred and sixty years later no-one was able to save the Jews of Lwow. Not even the intercession of Metropolitan Sheptitsky, the head of the Ukrainian Church, was able to stop the savagery of the militia gangs. The synagogue was burned down in the summer of 1942, at about the time when my parents and I fled to Piszczac.
‘Life is not good in Lviv,’ Oles explains in his earnest, halting English. ‘Since independence, we have a lot of unemployment and crime. You can tell that it is bad here because there are not many Jews. My father says, when things are bad, Jews leave. They go to places where they can live better and make money.’
After all that the Jews have been through here, Ukrainians think that they have left simply to look for better pastures. Through clenched teeth, I ask, ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, I just know it is so,’ he replies.
‘Do you know any Jews?’
‘Only one,’ he says. ‘My science professor. Nice man.’ Suddenly he asks, ‘Why are you so interested in Jewish things?’
‘My family were murdered in Lviv because they were Jewish,’ I tell him. ‘My grandparents, an uncle who was about your age, and my young aunty, together with her husband and baby daughter. I don’t know where, when or how most of them died, and I don’t even have a photograph to remember them by. It’s as if they never existed. That’s why I’ve come to find some trace of them.’
Oles looks upset. ‘I am sorry,’ he blurts. ‘I am very sorry.’
I’m certain that he has no idea that 60 000 of his compatriots volunteered to join the militia who speeded up the Nazi carnage, but I don’t want to give him a history lesson in the street, and anyway he probably wouldn’t believe me. ‘It isn’t your fault,’ I say gently. ‘I just wanted you to understand why I’ve come.’ By now a friend of his has joined us, and while we sit in an arcaded cafe sipping small cups of freshly roasted black coffee, Oles tells him why we’ve come to Lviv.
Through a weathered oak portal we all enter a medieval building which houses the state archives. I’ve brought a letter from my local mayor in Sydney, translated into Ukrainian, asking for permission to access information about my family. Climbing up a curved staircase of wooden steps sagging from centuries of use, we enter the archive office. Our three young companions are fired up with zeal and so keen to help us that they push past the couple sitting there, wave my letter of introduction at the director, and all talk at once, explaining why we’ve come.
Orest Matschiuk has thick grey hair which rests on the collar of his short-sleeved check shirt. After scanning the letter, he leans towards me. ‘Are you the Armstrong who went to the moon, or the one who played…’ He puts an imaginary trumpet to his lips and laughs, showing silver teeth. Then he becomes serious. ‘We have thousands of ledgers, kilometres of records here. You don’t have enough time to research them and you don’t read Ukrainian. You cannot do it alone.’ He calls out, and a slender young woman with glossy brown hair and a tip-tilted nose comes into his office. ‘Galina will be your researcher,’ says Mr Matschiuk. ‘Tell her what you are looking for and come back in two days’ time.’ I feel heartened by the helpful attitude of our young companions and the director’s co-operative manner. For the first time since leaving home I feel that there may be a chance of finding some traces of the relatives I never knew.
Now that business is over for the day, Oles wants to show us around Lviv. As we stroll along avenues lined with lime trees with their dense canopy of dark, heart-shaped leaves, I can see why Aunty Mania and my mother used to talk about their beautiful city. Like an impoverished duchess, Lviv retains traces of its Habsburg grandeur. Its opera house wouldn’t look out of place in Paris or Vienna, nor would the city buildings with their elaborate plasterwork, carvings of mythical figures, and graceful iron balconies overlooking leafy streets.
Oles suggests a hike to Castle Hill. Towards the summit, as the path grows steeper, Sasha slings my camera bag over his shoulder. From the summit we look down on a city of green cupolas, square towers and baroque domes surrounded by tracts of dark forest. Standing on the parapet, Justine and I put our arms around each other while Oles clicks the shutter. It’s a lovely moment.
Next morning, when the trees in Kosciuszko Park shimmer with sunlight and swallows twitter in the branches, I explore Lviv on my own, but the phantoms of the past are never far away. Students mill around the university which refused to admit my mother’s brother Izio. The town hall over there, facing the pretty square where statues of Neptune and Diana spout jets of water, was where my father was taken for questioning. Two attractive Bratter sisters, Bronia and Mania, used to meet their friends in cafes along this avenue leading to the opera house. For an instant briefer than thought, I imagine the thrill of telling Bronia that I’ve visited her city and walked along the streets she knew so well. There are so many ways of feeling the loss of a mother.
Sasha and our new interpreter Dan can’t wait to show us the countryside and suggest an excursion to the Carpathian Mountains. With his clean-cut features and knee-length shorts, Dan could be an Ivy League student, but Sasha has donned electric blue lycra shorts, iridescent hexagonal sunglasses, a T-shirt advertising World Freestyle skiing, and a baseball cap back to front on his blond hair. He brings a box of pirated cassettes, and as the car lurches, bumps and grinds over ruts and potholes, Dan, Sasha and Justine tap their feet and sing the chorus of the Sting song ‘I’m a Legal Alien’.
While Sasha hurtles along, overtaking everything on the narrow winding road, Dan tries to teach me the Cyrillic alphabet so that I can read the road signs. We discover that we have something in common. His father is also a dentist who wanted him to follow in his footsteps, but Dan chose economics instead.
As we approach the mountains, the air becomes cooler and forests of spruce, fir and pine replace stands of beech and ash. Our destination is Tessovets, a ski resort which Sasha often visited when he was an international cross-crountry skier. It’s deserted now, and the two ski lifts are idle. The sporting complex consists of dim corridors with crumbling walls, broken flooring and desolate spaces. Loud crackling music blares from a defective loudspeaker.
While we eat pickled cabbage and veal with mushrooms in the cavernous dining room, Dan says proudly, ‘For the first time in five hundred years Ukraine is a free nation.’ Later he tells us that Ukrainians do not like Jews. When I ask why, his eyes harden. ‘In Ukraine people should speak Ukrainian, don’t you think? The Jews speak Russian.’ A feeling of despair washes over me. It’s as if a malignant gene has entered these people’s bloodstream. Anti-Semitism seems to be a free-floating cancer in search of a cause. Since they can no longer accuse Jews of being communists, the patriots have come up with a new reason for hatred: language.
‘After all that’s happened here, it’s distressing for us to hear anti-Semitic comments,’ Justine says. ‘Most of my family were killed here. It seems that not many people in Lviv actually know what happened. I think it’s important for all of us to know our history—or herstory—even if it is uncomfortable.’
But Dan doesn’t want to hear about it and changes the subject to the famine of the thirties. He tells us that several million Ukrainians died. I don’t want to compete with him for pain and suffering and I should commiserate about his loss, but how can I feel his pain when he doesn’t want to know about mine? All it would take to heal my wounds, and enable me to hear his, is for him to acknowledge what happened instead of dismissing it. The four of us sit in uncomfortable silence while Dan seems to be struggling with something. Then he says slowly, ‘There has be
en so much killing in this country for so long. Perhaps we are so used to violence that we are no longer sensitive to it.’ I feel as if a burden has dropped off my back.
After this heavy interchange, it’s a relief to leave the oppressive hotel and start hiking up the mountain. As the sun beats on our heads, Dan wades waist-high in a grove of frilly leaves as big as dinner plates, and picks them for us. Justine and I wear them like bonnets and double up with laughter whenever we catch a glimpse of each other. Sasha has stripped down to a skimpy scarlet swimsuit and marches ahead of us, toting my bag as usual, while Dan picks wildflowers to take home for his girlfriend.
At the summit we stretch out on soft grass sprinkled with buttercups and daisies, and lift up small round leaves to pick blueberries which resemble swelling drops of dark ink. I feel like a child again as I eat the fleshy little globules which leave a blue-black coating on my teeth and a bittersweet taste on my palate. For the first time since we arrived in Lwiw, I feel light and free, and I’m grateful to Dan and Sasha for the gift of this beautiful day.
After this interlude I’m anxious to return to my search. To help me find my way around the Lwiw of the past, I contact Leon Plager, whose name I was given in Sydney. Mr Plager was born in Lwow and was one of the few Jews who returned after the war. He is a stocky man of seventy-four with tufts of white hair springing out on either side of his bald head, pouchy eyes, a fleshy protruding lower lip and some teeth capped with silver. Although it’s early when he arrives at our hotel, the sun is already hot, and he mops his brow with a big handkerchief.
As we walk towards the state archives, he tells me his story. ‘I lost two hundred relatives during the war,’ he says in his Russian-Polish accent. ‘I joined the Russian army as a volunteer when the Nazis occupied Lwow in 1941. When I returned after the war, there was no-one left. My brother, sisters, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties, in-laws, cousins, all dead. I decided to stay. Someone had to become a guardian of the past, a witness of what happened to the Jews of Lwow.’
Upstairs in her office, Galina, the archive researcher, holds out a sheet of paper. It’s a page from Lwow’s 1930 business directory, with one entry underlined. My heart leaps when I read: ‘Bernard Bratter, wholesale steel merchant, Sloneczna Street.’ It’s the first time in my life that I have seen my grandfather’s name recorded anywhere. I’m so overcome with joy that I don’t realise until later that the listing gives no street number, so I won’t be able to find the house.
Out in the street, Leon Plager whispers, ‘I’ll take you to another office.’ We cross a courtyard, climb a few steps and already on the staircase I can smell the woody odour of old paper. Mr Plager tells us to wait, but returns a few minutes later, puffing from exertion and excitement. ‘Come! The researcher has already found your grandparents’ address!’ Even if I don’t find anything else in Lviv, it will have been worth coming. Now I’ll be able to see my grandparents’ house, where my mother grew up.
My heart is pounding as the car noses into Sloneczna Street. And here it is, as sunny as its name, a wide street planted with lime trees, just as my mother always described it. ‘This was the best house in the street,’ Mr Plager says as we stand outside number forty-three, a handsome three-storey building faced with stone with pediments over the windows and a graceful balcony.
In the entrance my heart is pounding with such excitement that it’s hard to focus on the details. I’m actually standing in the house that my mother used to talk about. An old-fashioned black and white tile floor leads to the wooden staircase that I must have climbed so many years ago. These are the stairs that resounded with the boots of the Ukrainian guards when they came to take my grandfather to his death. Inside that flat, a two-year-old called Danusia used to place a warning finger on her nose when she heard someone at the door and whisper, ‘Shh. Germs!’ It was here that I thrilled my father by naming all the animals in my picture book in Polish and Latin, while my grandparents, Uncle Izio and Aunty Hania, all ran around me, anticipating my every wish. It was the second year of my life and the last year of theirs.
Two doors down, past an entrance wide enough for a truck to drive through, we stand in a large yard with a long row of sheds on one side. This is where my grandfather had his storeroom. I visualise this gentle man with the shiny bald head, who preferred playing billiards to running a business, hurrying outside to check on deliveries and dispatches. ‘It was a big steel business,’ recalls Mr Plager. He remembers the place because, as a seventeen-year-old, he was in love with the daughter of my grandfather’s partner and used to come here to see her. ‘The sheds used to be piled high with sheets and bars of metal, some thin and others weighing half a tonne. Cranes lifted the heavy ones onto heavy waggons pulled by teams of strong horses, carters loaded the others onto their backs,’ he reminisces. In one of the downstairs offices, my mother kept the books and extended credit to customers in trouble.
When I mention my mother’s first husband Sammy Wechsler, Mr Plager nods excitedly. ‘I remember Sammy, he was my brother’s friend, a lovely chap.’ He racks his brains for details. ‘He was solidly built and had receding hair. A good-natured fellow. They were always teasing each other.’ Sammy sounds like a dependable fellow, the kind who might have married a young woman to rescue her from an overpossessive boyfriend.
Around the corner from Sloneczna Street we come to the site of the Lwow ghetto where tens of thousands of men, women and children were crowded into tiny dwellings until there was no room for some of them to lie down. Starved, emaciated and ill, they were systematically deported to Belzec and Treblinka. The memorial to the dead is elongated and angular, its tortured shape has one hand raised to the sky for vengeance, the other turned to God in supplication. An inscription underneath from Ezekiel 37 says, ‘Here I open your graves and I will lead you my people from your graves and I will give you my spirit and you will become alive again.’ Leon Plager is proud of this memorial which he helped to erect and the present Ukrainian government helped to fund.
Sasha looks at the memorial. ‘How many people died here?’ he asks.
‘136 000,’ Leon replies. As usual, Sasha’s face gives nothing away but he stands there for a long time.
In the garden beds around the statue, small plaques have been set into the wall in memory of Jewish families who were murdered in this city. These are also Leon’s work. I arrange for a plaque to be placed in memory of the Bratter family so that Toni and Bernard, Izio, Hania, Dolek and their nameless baby will be commemorated together with all the other innocent victims of genocide.
That night, while the world is still plunged in darkness, my mind awakes with one thought imprinted on it, each word as clear as a neon sign on a black highway. I survived when most did not. I survived. It’s as if the miracle of my survival has just struck me. In spite of the murder squads, the round-ups, the deportations, the transportations, the cattle trucks, the death camps, the gas chambers and the crematoria, my parents had pitted their strength against the evil raging all around us and they had triumphed. I survived.
It was as if a bolt of lightning had illuminated a darkened room and unexpectedly lit up hidden treasures. I wonder why it took me so long to feel so intensely something that I had always known. Maybe that’s how long I needed to stand back from the extraordinary fact of my survival, maybe I had to return to Lviv to grasp its meaning. I fall asleep with another thought emblazoned in my mind. How beautiful and how terrible the world is.
There are few cars on the road to Zolkwa and Sasha pelts along past toothless women in thick woollen stockings tending their cows by the roadside, and apple-cheeked girls on bicycles with milk churns hanging from the handlebars. Flat fields of wheat stretch across the horizon.
I’ve come to Zolkwa because my mother’s father, Bernard Bratter, was born here. My contact, Zygmunt Lainer, an energetic man in his seventies with a shock of grey hair, ushers us inside his family home, to which he alone returned. As he describes his wartime adventures, which include a succe
ssion of daring escapes like tunnelling his way under the electrified perimeter fence of the Janowska Camp, and being brutally beaten by the Germans, Dan and I are on the edge of our chairs. It’s not just the story that’s so extraordinary, or his indomitable courage, it’s the cheerful way he tells it, his eyes twinkling with wonder at his own audacity.
He’s proud that, after the war, his evidence helped convict Heinen, the commandant of Janowska Camp who got a life sentence. For once Mr Lanier’s face darkens. ‘He was a monster. He trained dogs to tear people to pieces and said he couldn’t have breakfast if he hadn’t seen blood.’
Although Mr Lainer didn’t know my relatives, he paints a vivid picture of life in Zolkwa before the war, when 5000 Jews lived in the town. Many of them were furriers, and he recalls one called Bratter who was probably related to my grandfather. ‘The Jews here were so poor that at Pesach time American relatives used to send them money for matzohs. It was a very devout community. My father would have killed me if I hadn’t gone to synagogue every Saturday morning!’
He leads the way to the only synagogue still standing, a solid sixteenth century building which was built like a fortress with metre-thick buttressed walls. Inside, Sasha, Dan and I duck to avoid the pigeons as they flap between the crumbling columns and brush against faded Hebrew letters and fragments of carvings. The synagogue is being restored into a Jewish and Ukrainian museum. Pointing to the blackened paintings on the walls, Mr Lainer recalls the day the Nazis arrived in town. ‘They brought kegs of petrol and rounded up the Jews into the synagogue to burn them alive, but some of the Jews spoke German and bribed them to let them go. But they didn’t survive for long. Most of them were deported to Belzec.’ Today there are only three Jews left in Zolkwa.
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