Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  He sighs. ‘During the war, when Jews jumped off trains bound for Belzec, locals with staves were waiting to bludgeon them and knock the gold teeth out of their heads. Sometimes a three-year-old orphan would be found wandering among the corn, and the village children would point and call, ‘Zhid! Zhid!’ and people would turn the child over to the Germans. Dreadful. But you can’t generalise. Don’t forget that over 3000 Ukrainians hid Jews, and 1060 were shot for helping them.

  ‘Still, there were 60 000 Ukrainian militia who helped the Germans kill Jews. Life has always shown that there are more evil people than good. Our newspapers reported that after the war some Ukrainian war criminals found refuge in Canada and Australia.’

  The current upsurge of militant nationalism and the proliferation of anti-Semitic publications since Ukrainian independence worries him. ‘Their lies make my hair stand on end, blaming Jewish conspiracies for everything that’s wrong with Ukraine, and denying what happened at Auschwitz. Shocking.’

  As he shows us proudly around his historic little town with its ramparts and medieval castle, Mr Lainer gives a potted history lesson about the rulers and feudal lords of Zolkwa. Later, as we stroll around the old town square, I feel that I’m seeing the same shady arcades and dimly-lit narrow buildings where my great-grandparents once walked, where my grandfather Bernard went to cheder, and where Jewish craftsmen used to cut and stitch their pelts.

  A few minutes’ drive from the town centre, Mr Lainer leads us to a simple white monument in a woodland clearing, a memorial to the 3500 Jews of Zolkwa murdered by the Nazis in 1943. As I read the touching inscription, I realise that among the dead were some of my relatives. He designed this memorial himself, had it erected, and planted the bright little garden which he still tends.

  Dan, who has said little until now, looks at Zygmunt admiringly. ‘I like this man,’ he tells me. ‘He is very enthusiastic. And he speaks Ukrainian.’

  Just before we leave Zolkwa, Mr Lainer fills my arms with knobbly cucumbers and bulbous tomatoes which smell of country sunshine, and a jar of blueberries which he assures me will cure Justine’s upset stomach. ‘When I’m gone,’ he says, ‘There will be no-one left who saw what happened here.’ He presses a letter into my hands. ‘You’re writing about the Jews of Lwow. I want you to have my sister’s last letter from the Ghetto. She was twenty-nine years old and played the violin so beautifully.’

  On the drive back to Lviv, I read Genia’s letter.

  I didn’t intend to leave you a letter but Mama won’t leave me alone, I have to write a few words. I know that it will upset you even more because our situation is hopeless and it will make you cry. I never imagined when we parted before you went into the army, that instead of welcoming you back, I’d be saying goodbye.

  Our situation is hopeless. We are all condemned to death because we’re Jews. The only thing we don’t know is when the sentence will be carried out. We expect it any minute, any second. Their persecution doesn’t let up. They push us into graves, with such force and speed, and in some cases, while people are still alive. Can you imagine how terrible it is to live with the knowledge that any moment this will happen to me and those dearest to me, while we so desperately want to live and to see you again? Not long ago, we were so happy to receive news of you.

  It must be hard for you to understand why we somehow didn’t manage to get out of this predicament, but it was impossible. Only Aryan friends could have helped but as you well know, in times of misfortune, everyone abandoned us and everything failed. And if God has abandoned us, what right do we have to blame our friends who would have to risk their own lives to help us? In other words, there is no way out but to wait for our turn, our turn to die. Death will save us from this emotional torture, of witnessing tragedies every day. Because to see orphaned children wandering around the streets without a roof over their heads, barefoot, ragged and hungry, children who have seen their mother or father or brothers and sisters shot, or parents despairing and mad with grief because they don’t know where their children have gone, seeing those trains transporting thousands of Jews to their place of eternal rest. Seeing some jumping out of the train to try and save their lives and being shot on the spot. All this creates such confusion that we start wondering whether there is something wrong with us, whether we’ve gone insane. Even the strongest individuals collapse emotionally under these conditions.

  You know that our father was a remarkably energetic, enterprising, optimistic man, who saw the world through rose-coloured glasses. You wouldn’t recognise him. He has grown fearful, depressed, and tired of living. He only wants to die but the poor thing has to keep working hard because things are terribly expensive and we often go hungry, but we’re not the only ones.

  Mama has had a fight with God, because He refuses to perform any miracles so she is constantly on bad terms with Him. She is upset with him that he makes us suffer like this, and she weeps that maybe she’ll never see you again. She weeps about Zunio, too, what will become of him, and goes around in circles.

  Zunio [their brother] is also suffering terribly, he’s very nervous, but keeps quiet, too proud to complain or make a fool of himself, and anyway he has a very reserved nature. He is so beautiful and so good, you should see how the poor thing works as a glasscutter and gives Mama every cent he earns, my heart breaks when I look at him, so young, so talented, so noble and all this will be wasted. I can’t understand why my heart doesn’t literally burst with grief. He won’t be able to escape death but I’m sure that he will fight for his life, he won’t go to the altar like a sacrificial lamb.

  I, who had the weakest nerves, am today the most controlled, the most resistant to suffering because I have already suffered so much in my life that death does not frighten me as much as it does others. If only the stones on the road, the blades of grass could talk, what stories you would hear. Well, that’s enough of all this.

  The most important thing is what I’m going to say now. If we die, which I think is inevitable, I would like you at least to benefit by all these years of our work, so they won’t be in vain. I leave you all the most important documents, mortgage papers, our parents’ marriage certificate, maybe they’ll be useful, as well as an inventory of things which I left with some of our friends, your clothes among them, which you will certainly need. Olga, God willing, which I fervently pray, will give you exact details, and to her I entrust this mission.

  Apart from that, I have no more to add. I bid you goodbye with sorrow and an aching heart and hope that fate will be kinder to you, that our suffering will save you from all misfortune, and if God forbid, you don’t find us, don’t grieve, control yourself and try to live the rest of your life in peace. I advise you to sell everything and go far away from this accursed place.

  Be well, and don’t worry, time heals all wounds of the heart, and your pain will diminish with time. I send you my love,

  Genia

  Before we leave Lviv, there’s one more place I have to visit. When I mention Piaskowa Gora, Sasha and Dan shake their heads. They’ve never heard of it. But Leon Plager knows. My legs are unsteady as I climb out of the car and walk up the sandy path to a small clearing at the bottom of a squat hill. ‘In 1941, they used to bring Jews here by the truckload, shoot them, and either they buried them in shallow pits right here or took the bodies to the Lysienskiego Forest and threw them into mass graves there,’ Leon explains.

  This is the place my father mentioned in his memoirs. Concealed by trees on one side and the hill on the other, the slope must have been a perfect place for mass killings. I think of my grandfather Bernard standing here while some thug blasted his life away without a qualm. I sit on a tree stump and cry for this gentle man who loved me, whom I never got to know. I’d like Leon to say Kaddish for my grandfather but he shakes his head. ‘Not here. Later. At Janowska Camp.’

  A few minutes later we are standing outside Janowska Camp which has become a men’s prison. A small stone memorial mentions that 200 000 Jews were murde
red here. In the annals of man’s inhumanity to man, few places match the bestiality of this camp where naked prisoners were wrapped in barbed wire and left outside in barrels of cold water which turned to ice during the night, and where new arrivals had to run the gauntlet of snarling dogs whose razor-sharp teeth were trained to tear off men’s genitals and women’s breasts. The commandant’s favourite sport was throwing Jewish babies up in the air and shooting them like moving targets, to the glee of his three-year-old daughter. When I peer through the gate, I’m shocked to see prison guards training German shepherd dogs inside these grounds.

  As we stand beside the torpid stream which once ran red with blood, Leon takes out his handkerchief, knots each corner, places it on his head, and intones the Kaddish prayer for my grandfather. Tears stream down our faces. This is probably the first time that anyone has said Kaddish for my grandfather. He died so brutally and quicklime was his only shroud. No sign marks the place where he fell, no stone marks the place where he lies. It feels important to offer this prayer in gratitude for the gift of his life and to commit his soul to his forefathers.

  Back in the centre of Lviv, as we pass the lively flower market where babushkas in patterned kerchiefs gossip beside bright bunches of spicy carnations and yellow roses, Leon Plager points to a manhole beneath my feet. ‘This is where a group of Jews survived the war by hiding in the sewers,’ he says. Above us rises the bronze cupola of St Bernardine’s Church.

  I know the extraordinary story of those sewer survivors because one of them later married my second cousin, Marian Kwasniewski, Hela and Jozek’s son. Kristine was nine years old when she emerged from that manhole after fourteen months of hell. Kristine is a cosmetic dentist in Manhattan, an attractive woman in her fifties, who told me her story on a pleasant autumn evening in New York, on her way to a jazz club.

  Before she and her family descended into the sewers, they lived in the Lwiw ghetto. During the day, she had to look after her four-year-old brother. ‘Whenever I heard the soldiers approaching, I hid him in a suitcase, pushed it under the bed, and hid behind the door, under my mother’s dressing gown. I knew how long he could stay in the suitcase before suffocating, and counted the minutes in my head. I held my breath while they looked around. Luckily he never made a sound.’ She was seven years old at the time.

  Kristine remembered vividly the day when they squeezed into the narrow tunnel her father had helped dig, into the dark, terrifying subterranean world of the sewers. Most of their group died of drowning, starvation or disease, but Kristine’s family and eight others survived thanks to a Ukrainian sewer maintenance worker. Leopold Socha had made it his mission to keep them alive.

  My cousin will never forget the miraculous day in 1944, after fourteen months of this subhuman existence, when their saviour hoisted her up on his shoulders and carried her out of the sewer. ‘At first I couldn’t see anything at all,’ she says. ‘Everything looked crimson. I was blinded by the sun.’

  Leon Plager leads us to a cafeteria where a jolly woman in a sky-blue lace cap serves us Ukrainian borscht, cabbage rolls stuffed with kasha, potato pancakes with sour cream, and minced meat patties. But I can’t get the story of the sewers out of my mind. Every corner of this lovely city holds tragic memories.

  That evening the telephone rings in our hotel room. It’s Leon. The researcher has found more documents and we’re to go the archive office in the morning. I toss in bed for hours, restless in the warm summer air, too excited to sleep. That night Justine becomes violently ill. Something has upset her system, which seems to be attempting to expel everything she has ingested ever since we arrived. Considering what she has absorbed in the past few days, this isn’t surprising. Absorbed in my search and my pain, I haven’t paid enough attention to the emotional impact that our search is having on my daughter. It’s been draining and harrowing for me, but I realise now that it’s been devastating for the sensitive young woman who has been thrust into this maelstrom of hatred and violence.

  By early morning, she’s still sick, and I’m just about to pick up the receiver to call Michael in Australia for some medical advice when the phone shrills. By an amazing coincidence, it’s him. It’s comforting to hear his concerned, loving voice and reconnect with normal life for a few minutes.

  Leaving Justine to rest, I meet Leon Plager who can hardly wait to thrust a sheaf of documents into my hands. One is an application to the municipal council made by my grandfather in 1932, asking for permission to renovate his apartment in Sloneczna Street. It’s signed by him, and contains not only his date of birth but also the names of his parents. I hold this document as if it were a priceless heirloom, and read it over and over again. He was born Berish Bratter, in 1883, to Ester Stalmeister and Izrael Bratter in Zolkwa. I can’t believe my luck.

  Among these archival treasures is a plan of their apartment which shows how they combined two flats on the right side of the stairs. I remember my mother telling me that while everyone else had gone on holidays she had stayed behind to supervise the renovations. As usual, she was the responsible, unselfish one.

  ‘Wait, there’s something else for you!’ Leon cries, hardly able to contain his own excitement. It takes some time for the significance of this document to sink in. It says that Bernard Bratter owned this building together with Mrs Szwagron. I remember my mother mentioning this woman whom she didn’t like. Leon points to the stamp of the government archive office. ‘This is proof of ownership. If the Ukrainian government ever agrees to compensate the original owners who were dispossessed by the communists, then you’ll be able to make a claim,’ he explains. I didn’t come looking for proof of ownership and I’m not interested in making claims, but I’m thrilled to have this document because it proves something that’s far more important to me. It’s a sign that my grandparents once lived normal lives here, and it brings them much closer to me.

  On Friday night I walk to synagogue with a group of American visitors. The idea of a Shabbat service in Lviv sounds as far-fetched as morning tea on Mars. As we step outside the hotel, Valek, our Jewish guide, warns the men not to wear their kippahs until they are almost there. ‘It’s better not to attract attention. People might shout abuse or even throw stones.’

  From the women’s gallery, I gaze around. This used to be a progressive synagogue, so maybe my mother had her first wedding here. The restored ceiling is brightly painted with lions, birds and Star of David motifs on an azure background, but the ceiling is perforated by gaping holes made by Nazi bullets, in a stark reminder of the past. This house of prayer escaped the fate of most other synagogues because the Germans used it as their stables.

  Downstairs, about thirty men sit on simple wooden chairs in the centre of a big empty space. Most of them have recently come to Lviv from Russia, where religion was outlawed and persecuted, so they’re not familiar with the prayers, and Rabbi Bald walks amongst them, prompting and teaching. Moty Bald is a figure straight out of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Short and portly, with a bushy tar-black beard, he wears a long black satin capote and black circular fur hat which, from this angle, makes him look like a mushroom.

  As the service draws to a close, the rabbi links hands with the men who form a circle and sing traditional Sabbath songs. Suddenly everything blurs and I feel overwhelmed by all that I’ve experienced here. After the service, we walk around the corner to have Shabbat dinner with the rabbi. Two flights up a dark staircase, a door opens and Moty Bald is pumping the men’s hands and greeting us with his strong Bronx accent.

  This is his first rabbinical post, one that he euphemistically describes as a challenge. This tiny congregation is struggling. There is no kosher meat, no Chevra Kadisha and no consecrated Jewish cemetery. Moty never walks outside without a bodyguard. ‘One night, a gang of Ukrainian youths with swastikas on their armbands banged on the synagaogue door and threatened to knock the door down and and kill everyone inside. Luckily we had security guards to deal with them,’ he says.

  While Moty entertains us wi
th Talmudic stories and anecdotes, his hospitable wife Surele runs to and from the tiny kitchen, plying us with chicken soup, gefillte fish, chopped eggplant, pickled cucumbers, roast chicken, pears, apples, apricots, and strawberry mousse. When we’re ready to leave, Valek suggests walking back to the hotel by a different route. ‘In case someone saw us enter and is lying in wait,’ he says. As we turn into the darkened street, a car parked on the pavement begins to roll towards us and only stops at the last moment as we jump away. Was it deliberate, or are we becoming paranoid?

  Just before we leave Lviv, Dan and Sasha come to say goodbye. They’ve been obliging and caring companions, and we’ve grown fond of them both. There has been a glimmer of understanding between us, and I’m sorry that we have to leave just as the door has begun to open. When he bends down to kiss my cheek, Dan’s eyes are shining with tears.

  CHAPTER 42

  Back in Poland, Justine and I meet our Polish guide Waclaw who has the revved-up intensity of those consumed by an angry passion. In a secluded corner of south-west Poland, where the trees are barely fifty years old, we stand at the site of the extermination camp of Belzec while Waclaw points to the small memorial erected during the communist regime. ‘My God! It makes me furious that this plaque doesn’t mention Jews when 600 000 of the 601 500 people murdered here were Jews!’ Two of them were Uncle Stasiek and Aunty Karola, who scribbled her last note on the way to this death factory whose stench they must have smelt long before the cattle truck brought them to their final destination.

  Although Waclaw is Catholic, he’s more passionate about Polish anti-Semitism than most Jews. He became obsessed with the subject twenty years ago when he escorted a group of tourists to Auschwitz. ‘I was fascinated to learn about a people who had contributed so much to Poland over the ages, yet had no future in this country. Whenever you want to say something bad about somebody here, you say that he’s a Jew. When I wouldn’t go to religious classes at school, the other boys called me a Jew!’