by R. D. Rosen
A week later, when her friend Wacka’s parents wrote from Busko-Zdrój to ask for Zofia’s help in obtaining antibiotics, she was too ashamed to answer; in fact, she stopped writing Wacka entirely. Zofia hated having deceived everyone she knew in Poland—however unintentionally. She also stopped speaking Polish with strangers. On the rare occasions when her mother tried to talk to her about Judaism, Zofia wouldn’t listen. When Laura made the mistake of asking her daughter whether she now wanted to be called “Selma” again, Zofia yelled, “Go away! My name is Zofia Tymejko and I am a Catholic, not a Jew!” Her habit of curtaining off the past—both the Catholic past she embraced or the Jewish past that was being foisted on her now—prevailed. Zofia was determined to forget everything, to move ahead. She wanted to be English.
Soon after arriving in London, Zofia was placed in primary school. Although still far from fluent in English, she was thrown in the deep end with all the native-born children preparing for the exam that would determine their secondary-school track. Zofia’s English rapidly improved, thanks partly to Helen Ardmore, the girl who was assigned to look after her. Helen was an outsider too—a talented, artistic girl from a poor family. She was the only student who invited Zofia over to play, but even her very modest flat made Rosa and Emil’s apartment seem depressing by comparison.
Helen, who had done well on the exam, was accepted by the highly regarded Paddington and Maida Vale High School. Zofia was, of course, allowed to skip the exam, but she was already showing signs of promise. After a few months in England, she was no longer at the bottom of the class, which the headmistress considered an achievement, even if the ambitious Zofia did not. The headmistress arranged for Zofia to start with Helen at Paddington and Maida Vale on a trial basis. Zofia immediately liked her new headmistress there, Miss Spong, a very attractive, soft-spoken woman in her forties who came from an upper-class background and wore tweed suits. She administered a quiz to Zofia, whose performance on it convinced Miss Spong to let Zofia join Helen’s incoming class for the year, at the end of which they would see if she could continue.
That left one sensitive matter to decide, said Miss Spong: was Zofia Jewish or not? Miss Spong called Zofia and Laura in for a meeting. Paddington and Maida Vale provided its Jewish children with Jewish instruction once a week. For morning prayers Jews went separately to the school library while the Protestants and Roman Catholics went elsewhere before everyone, even the Jews, convened for an Our Father.
Miss Spong reasoned that since Zofia once had been Jewish and, despite her six years as a Catholic, apparently still was, then she was Jewish.
And so a girl who had no idea until recently that she’d ever been Jewish, began spending every weekday morning in the library, praying with her Jewish classmates, a tiny minority—fifteen or twenty in all—of the school’s population. Zofia, to put it mildly, did not feel at home in this group, and not only because its members were Jewish. They were among the brightest girls at Paddington—as well as the most spoiled. They wore pretty dresses and ballet slippers that were all the fashion. They excelled in class, as Zofia had in Busko-Zdrój, and they stuck together. Every morning in the library, she sat with these girls and listened to them pray in two languages, neither of which was her first tongue, one of which—Hebrew—she had been taught to associate with people so vile that they were not quite human. It wasn’t surprising that one of Zofia’s very best friends was a Christian girl named Elphis Christopher.
Was it because Miss Spong was aware of Zofia’s state of religious limbo that she soon appointed her to the important position of Senior Jewess during morning prayers? To ease her reentry into Judaism? Or did Miss Spong thrust the responsibility on her to bolster the young immigrant’s confidence and facilitate her integration into the social life of the school? Whatever the headmistress’s motivation, the title meant that Zofia chose those prayers. But she knew only one, and not that well either. So day after day, the girls under her leadership recited the same words, “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord let His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord look kindly upon you and give you peace.”
Meanwhile her mother enrolled Zofia in Hebrew school, which was held every Sunday at a nearby synagogue, and it was Zofia who won a scholarship prize over the other children, all of whom had been Jews their whole lives. Her academic achievement wasn’t the only way in which she stood out there, and the other children didn’t try very hard to make Zofia feel at home. Despite her sudden immersion in Judaism, Zofia avoided making Jewish friends. When a boy in Hebrew school took an interest in her, she rejected him outright.
Zofia still didn’t feel the least bit Jewish—and she didn’t want to either. The only Jews that intrigued her were Israelis. She’d seen Zionist literature for the first time in Hebrew school, and the Jews in the photographs didn’t look Jewish. They were young, tan, and muscular, breaking rocks in the fields, clearing the land. Zofia, who was beginning to realize how much living she had missed in the struggle to have a life at all, and how hard her mother had worked to ensure their survival, felt a bond with these Jews. Zofia knew that many others, including her Uncle Edek, had gone to Israel before and after the war, and now she lamented the fact that she, Laura, and Putzi had ended up in England.
Putzi remained a big part of their lives. She was now working as a domestic for a second Jewish family in Golders Green—still unhappily, as she was constantly underestimated by her more poorly educated employers. Fortunately, the job was only a bus ride away, so all three of them stayed in constant touch, although rarely by the luxury of a telephone. In 1950 Laura, Putzi, and Zofia did manage to take a week’s holiday together on the Isle of Wight, where Putzi, ever the clever seamstress and dressmaker, fashioned a ballerina outfit out of tissue paper so Zofia could enter a costume competition. In Zofia’s view, it was by far the best costume, and she thought she would have won had she not been a foreigner. She was so heartbroken that her mother and aunt, who knew a few things about standing up for themselves and Zofia, complained to the organizers, and she received a prize after all.
At Laura’s insistence, Putzi joined the Polish-Jewish Servicemen’s Club, where she fell in love with a Polish Jew named Kazimierz Rozycki who was working toward an engineering degree. He had served in Anders’ Army, led by the Polish general Wladyslaw Anders, which had fought alongside the Allies toward the end of the war. V-E Day had found him in Casablanca, from which he had been flown to Scotland before making his way to London. Laura and Zofia adored Kazimierz and welcomed him into the family when he and Putzi decided to marry. Putzi’s second employers, initially upset that she was quitting, quickly came to see her in a more appreciative light and gave the couple a generous wedding gift. For Putzi, Laura, and Zofia, the wedding ceremony seemed a miraculous outcome after Putzi’s—and their—long journey to freedom.
However, Laura and Zofia both were devastated when Putzi and Kazik decided to immigrate to Canada in 1951.
Laura hadn’t been so fortunate in meeting men. Her life with the Hoenigs was dreary. She resented Rosa’s resentment of her, felt guilt for imposing on her, and was ashamed at not being able to afford her own place. She was stuck with her obligations to Rosa in an apartment that itself was hopelessly stuck in the past. Rosa and Emil fought constantly. There was no attempt to brighten their home. They rarely had guests over.
Zofia took refuge in her schoolwork. Laura pushed her to excel in every subject, and Zofia’s academic reports reflected both of their ambitions.
“Her conduct is always good,” her teacher had written at the end of her very first term at Paddington. A year later, the same teacher reported that “Zofia works well and her progress has been good.” In the fall of 1949, her new form mistress wrote that “Zofia is a most enthusiastic and helpful member of the class.” At fourteen, in 1951, she “had the makings of a first-class scholar” and had “excellent ability in languages, and works most conscientiously in all subjects.”
By 1953, however,
she was no longer listed as Zofia Tymejko, the name she had continued to use in England and that the British found virtually impossible to pronounce. After five years of statelessness, Laura and Zofia qualified for British citizenship and so were free to change their names. Laura chose the name of one of her favorite British painters as their own and became Laura Turner. And by the summer of 1953, Zofia was Sophie Turner.
With her new name, Sophie had completed a torturous journey from Selma Schwarzwald, Jew, to Zofia Tymejko, Catholic, to Sophie Turner, who didn’t quite know who she was.
By now Sophie’s relationship with Laura had largely recovered from the shock of the wartime deception. However, having spent her formative childhood years alone with a mysteriously anxious mother who, among other strict instructions, cautioned Sophie about speaking to strangers, Sophie knew little about boys, even at sixteen. The only friend who ever came to the house was Helen, who now had renounced handstands and somersaults for the opposite sex. Although Helen could easily have gone on to university, she drifted away from Sophie into a world that consisted of roughly equal parts boys, smoking, movie stars, and makeup. Watching Helen’s experiments in love and sex, Sophie felt like a clueless child. In a few years, Helen would already be married to a butcher and raising a couple of kids.
Meanwhile the once fiercely independent and audacious Laura was becoming a passive victim of circumstance. Between her household chores and unofficial job helping Emil in his store, she had no time to socialize or hunt for a new job, and few prospects for a good one. Her Polish credentials wouldn’t get her far, anyway, in Britain’s postwar economy. Some money, however, began to dribble in. First, both Laura and Sophie received monthly pensions from the German government as part of reparations for their losses. In 1951, Sophie and her mother could finally afford to rent their own apartment.
They didn’t go far, moving into the dark street-level apartment just below Emil and Rosa’s. They were hardly beyond Rosa’s reach—she complained constantly that they monopolized the single phone line they shared—but Laura and Sophie bought some modern midcentury furniture and made it as cheery as possible. They each began to invite their few friends over.
University loomed, and Sophie, who by now wanted to choose a career that would allow her to help others, applied to a six-year medical school program. It wasn’t that she was a genius at science—she was a much stronger student in history and languages, and had some noticeable difficulty with physics—but a career in medicine would also provide security, which had been not so much in short supply as utterly missing in their lives so far. A career in medicine had the added benefit of providing Laura, who had studied economics and once set her sights on medicine in a country where even Jewish men were not welcome in the profession, with a vicarious victory. Sophie applied to several schools and was accepted as a scholarship student at two, choosing University College Hospital, which had a strong liberal arts program—and the advantage of having accepted one of Sophie’s best high school friends, Elphis Christopher.
At university one of the first-year students who wanted to be her friend was a Polish woman, but Sophie pretended that she didn’t speak Polish. However little she wanted to be Jewish, she wanted to be Polish even less. She could claim no Jews yet among her friends, and she remained silent in the presence of the occasional anti-Semitic remarks made by friends, on whose casual prejudices the annihilation of the Jews during the war had had little effect. Yet she joined Hillel House, whose members for the most part wore their Judaism very lightly and socially, not like the more observant Jewish students. It bothered her that the Orthodox Jews walked around in yarmulkes. At least, she thought, they should have the decency to confine their kipa-wearing to indoors.
But Hillel soon posed its own difficulties for a girl who had grown up in silent secrecy. There were Israelis at Hillel, argumentative ones who seemed so different from the handsome, hardworking, muscular ones she had envied in the Zionist brochures.
A young English law student named Monty, who was active in Hillel, gradually became Sophie’s first bona fide Jewish friend. He was very smart, very funny, and also very devoted to his younger brother, whom he had taken care of during the war years when their parents had sent them to the safety of the countryside. Nothing serious developed between them, but she had broken the ice; seven years after learning she was Jewish, she could finally let another Jew into her life.
While Sophie made friends, however few, and attended to her own evolving ambitions, her mother was largely alone and increasingly dependent on Sophie’s companionship. Their roles were gradually reversing. There were times her mother wanted to go for a walk, but Sophie now had better things to do. The conflict was growing between what she felt was her duty to her mother and her need for greater independence. There was no conflict, however, over the issue of the importance of Sophie’s achievements. They both felt she had to do well because she had nothing else to fall back on. Her religious conflicts took a backseat to the gospel of success: you had to lead your life constructively and do some good; you had to leave some kind of positive mark, saying that you were here, that you did something and you helped somebody. “My mother pushed me a great deal and was very ambitious for me,” she would recall when she reached her midthirties. “I felt this tremendous pressure to achieve, not to waste time, to bring something to some conclusion. But with time I became convinced of this myself, and I’ve carried it on in a way and I think she was right.”
Medical school represented financial and emotional security. “I would have a profession,” she’d recall, “and in our family it was always considered very important to have a profession in case you had to flee for your life. You’d be able to earn a living somewhere else. Medicine is pretty universal.”
Through a medical school student organization, Sophie traveled to Germany with a group that slept in schools and other people’s modest homes. What made the most impression on her was how well the Germans seemed to be living. When she would think back later on the trip, she couldn’t fathom why on earth she had agreed to go, except that she felt very forgiving at the time. That it might have anything to do with her revulsion at being Jewish seems far-fetched, but she would recall feeling that “whatever had happened during the war had happened.” On her next visit, twenty years later, the numbness had worn off; this time, as she walked down German streets, she looked at men of a certain age and wondered where they had been during the war, and whether one of them had been the man who murdered her father.
Sophie still had trouble accepting the fact that, on the day before her fifth birthday, her father, Daniel Schwarzwald, had been killed by the Germans. During the few years she and her mother shared the Hoenigs’ grim apartment, sometimes she dreamed of her father returning from Russia to save her and her mother, this time from their little ghetto on Belsize Road. Sometimes she could say to herself that the Nazis had killed him; most of the time, though, her father was neither alive nor dead. He just inhabited a different realm—one that was getting farther and farther away, and in which a little girl she used to know, named Zofia Tymejko, awaited his return.
She had only a few possessions from that other world. There was her Christian prayer book, her rosary, and her little bear, Refugee, still wearing the tiny coat that Aunt Putzi—Nusia—had made for him. And there was one other thing that remained from those years in Poland: silence. Time had erected a wall between her and those years, no more passable than the walls of the ghettoes of Lvov or Warsaw or Kraków. She knew that every Jewish refugee she saw in North London had his or her own story, protected by the barbed wire of forgetting, and that for all of them everything was better left unsaid.
The past was their secret. Not once did Sophie talk about the past with her mother. Not once. And they quickly learned to keep it even from themselves.
In 1963, after completing a rotating internship at a couple of suburban London hospitals and falling in love with several specialties, Sophie settled, at least for the time being, on
obstetrics and gynecology. With the encouragement of one of her professors, she decided to work in the United States, where there was a shortage of doctors. Her New York cousin-by-marriage Alice Herb (Emil and Rosa’s niece, who had immigrated to America with her family after Kristallnacht) contacted a successful plastic surgeon named Lou Feit, who was able to arrange a permanent visa and get her a job at his hospital, New York Polyclinic Hospital in Manhattan.
Sophie’s mother would have to remain in London where, freed of her original work restrictions, she was hired to teach accounting at a secretarial school. It would be the first time she and Sophie had ever been apart for any length of time. Laura, who had watched most of her own family be destroyed twenty years before, and her sister Putzi move to Canada a dozen years before, would now be separated by an ocean from the little girl, now a twenty-six-year-old doctor, she had single-handedly saved from the fires of the Holocaust. It felt every bit as painful as all the other, and more permanent, losses in her life. But what could she do? Laura knew that Sophie had to leave even this nest.
Shortly before she left London, Sophie was preoccupied with the impending marriage of one of her closest medical school friends, Avril Sillitoe, in an Anglican Church in East Anglia. Sophie was asked to be one of the bridesmaids—the only Jewish one. When told that she would have to kneel during the ceremony, Sophie’s emerging Jewish consciousness surprised her. She told Avril she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had never discussed her split identity with Avril or even discussed her years in Busko-Zdrój—it was simply not a subject that ever came up with anybody—yet kneeling in a church didn’t seem right. Remarkably, Avril didn’t argue, and it was decided that if one of the bridesmaids couldn’t kneel, then none of them would have to kneel.