by Halina Rubin
JOURNEYS WITH MY MOTHER
Halina Rubin was born in Warsaw just as Germany invaded Poland. Her family fled to the Soviet Union where she and her mother survived together, against all odds. In 1968, in response to government-instigated anti-Semitism, she emigrated to Australia and settled in Melbourne. She qualified as a microbiologist, specialising in virology. In 2001, moved to action by the plight of asylum seekers, she started writing to young people incarcerated in Nauru. Since then Rubin has been an active advocate for refugees.
For Anetka
In memory of my parents, Ola and Władek
and for all those people who still have to cross borders
to escape wars or persecution
JOURNEYS WITH MY MOTHER
Halina Rubin
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
© Halina Rubin 2015
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to The Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, VIC 3204.
www.hybridpublishers.com.au
First published 2015
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Rubin, Halina, 1939- author.
Title: Journeys with my mother / Halina Rubin.
ISBN: 9781925272093 (paperback)
9781925280432 (ebook)
Subjects: Jews – Poland – Biography.
Jews, Polish – Australia – Biography.
World War, 1939-1945 – Jews – Poland – Biography.
World War, 1939-1945 – Personal narratives, Polish.
World War, 1939-1945 – Underground movements.
Anti-Nazi movement.
Life change events.
Human behaviour.
Dewey Number: 940.5336092
Cover design by Art On Order
Every attempt has been made to seek permission for copyright material used in this book. However, if we have inadvertently used copyright material without permission, we will make the necessary correction at the first opportunity. Permission has been granted for the author to translate lines of poems used.
There were historical situations in which no decisions were innocent ones, in which all significant action was a betrayal of someone or something, in which all possible choices caused suffering. Nonetheless one had to choose.
In twentieth-century eastern Europe tragedy was endemic.
—Marci Shore
Contents
Map of Escape Routes
Family Tree
PART ONE
Prologue
1 March 1968
2 Nowolipki, Nalewki
3 Back to the Past: Grodzisk
4 Zakroczym
5 Ze’ev
6 The Thirties
7 Bereza
8 How to Be Stoic
9 Towards Spain
PART TWO
10 September 1939
11 Some People
12 Reprieve
13 Six Days and Nights
14 The Short Lives of My Aunts
15 Oryol
16 Gurgen Map of Lida 1940
17 Lida
18 Breakout
19 Partisans
20 What Now?
21 The End of the War
22 And After
23 Migration
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Select Bibliography
Endnotes
PART ONE
Prologue
For years following my mother’s death – and my father’s a good fifteen years before her – two boxes filled with papers, photographs, letters, notebooks and correspondence remained untouched.
As they sat there gathering dust, I looked at them with increasing trepidation. Something had to be done about their contents and I did not know what. So much of my parents’ lives was in those boxes; the mere thought of unpacking them made me anxious.
It’s not that I expected to uncover any terrible secrets. After all, I was the one who, soon after my mother’s funeral, had emptied her many drawers and cupboards and stuffed everything into these boxes. Back then, I did not look, trying – not very successfully – to avoid emotion. Only when my daughter Annette dropped in with an offer to help did I give in. She planted herself on the floor, pulling out one thing after another, messing everything up. She had a myriad of questions and, before long, we were sitting next to each other, doing something I had tried hard to avoid. I felt relieved when she left and I could go back to packing; there was much to be done.
My interest in my family’s past has always been somewhat selective, varying from lukewarm to intense. There were years when books about the war and the Shoah, bought or given to me by friends, sat unread, despite weighing heavily on my mind and on my bookshelves. My visit to the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem ended with the first exhibit: a photograph of a young woman standing in a barren field, using her body to protect her child from an SS soldier whose rifle is poised to shoot. The moment before execution. I burst into uncontrollable sobbing.
During my numerous trips to Poland, I did not dwell on things Jewish. But the story of my parents’ lives – especially my mother’s story – was never far from my thoughts.
I remember how easily she was frightened by ordinary things. When the two of us walked along the dark and empty streets of Warsaw, she was scared of drunks – even though, as everyone knew, they only beat their own wives and children and fought with each other. Later, in Australia, she was afraid of rose-eating ringtail possums.
My father was brave in a way that is beyond my comprehension. However, when I think about my mother’s courage, I see a woman forced by circumstances to act bravely. But more than her tenacity, courage, reliability – more than anything – I admired her uncomplicated humanity in her ability to put herself in other people’s shoes; nothing human was alien to her. I wondered, too, about the choices she had to make; how she sustained both of us during the war and, later, under a dictatorial regime.
Yet despite these many preoccupations, the idea of writing had never crossed my mind. That is, not until I recently started translating the memoir of my first cousin Haneczka, the only one of my family members who remained, and managed to survive, on Polish territory during the war.
My mother had told me the story. But reading Haneczka’s recollections from the Białystok ghetto, the details of everyday life as she remembered them, the fate of our family, was an altogether different experience. Suddenly I grasped that if I wanted my mother’s life to be remembered, I was the one who had to write about it.
Eight years after my mother’s death, I started going through the boxes. It took a long time and, even now, some papers that I considered to be of lesser importance remain unexamined. It felt strange to organise my parents’ papers: ordinary, familiar objects turning into historical documentation in my hands.
When sorting out the contents, I attempted to introduce some order by placing my mother’s papers on one pile, my father’s on the other. But I shouldn’t have bothered; their documents were bound together, just as their lives were. And here, between the photographs, the documents, postcards and letters – some of them mine – was my own life, melded tightly with theirs.
Writing increased my curiosity, urged me to find out more by going back to Poland, Belorussia, Russia and France. That’s how this book started to take shape.
Halina Rubin, July 2015
1
March 1968
A native of a small country,
Born recklessly on
the edge of Europe,
Called to think about freedom
[…]
What should he choose – he asked himself
A lesser absurdity
Or a still bigger problem?
—Ewa Lipska
Many years had passed since I last grappled with the reasons for our expulsion from Poland.
New events replaced old ones, and in Australia almost no one was interested in what had brought me here, to the lucky country. This lack of curiosity spared me from talking about things that I myself only half understood, let alone could explain to someone free of similar experience. I have been reluctant to return to that year, which we call ‘March 1968’. Not that it is easy to forget being rejected by the country I considered my own. But that, too, is part of the story.
September 1968. With hundreds of others, my husband and I are standing on the platform of Gdański Train Station, waiting for the train that will take us to Vienna. Four days earlier my parents and my brother Andrzej had left from the same platform, on their way to Israel. Instead of a passport, I have a travel document that states what I am not. I am no longer a Polish citizen. Granted eleven days earlier, the document is valid for three more days. I have been given less than a fortnight to deal with my whole life here: to dispose of most of my earthly possessions, to take leave of everything familiar and close to my heart.
But saying goodbye to friends, most of whom I have known since childhood, seems beyond my strength; the hardest part of leaving. There is nothing much to say in the little time we have left. How we feel can only be expressed in our eyes and embraces. We try not to cry.
Once in the compartment, panic sets in. I realise that what I have done is irreversible. This is a one-way journey. When the train finally takes off, the familiar faces move away, as if it is they who are leaving me. The moment I close the window, I begin to cry.
I cry for hours. There is no one in the world who could possibly comfort me now. Not even my husband, his empathy notwithstanding. For him, this is just the first step in our big adventure. We are on our way to Australia. Why Australia, of all places? In Australia – my husband’s dream destination – I have cousins on my father’s side.
The train passes through Czechoslovakia. New passengers enter our compartment. We are all refugees but their hostility hangs in the air, unspoken. I don’t have it in me to talk, to explain how much I deplore the invasion of their country, or that I, too, had hopes for Dubček’s socialism with a human face. The best I can do is to stop sobbing, suspend feeling sorry for myself, for the Czechs, and for the homeless dog I saw the other day whose misery I now seem to share.
One would imagine I have been banished from Paradise. Yet, for all that, crossing into Austria brings relief.
In Poland, the phrase ‘March ’68’ is understood to be a period that lasted about a year, beginning in June 1967. March, however, turned out to be the most significant and, almost instantaneously, the most symbolic time. The month itself was damp and dreary, but as the discontent of students and intellectuals rose to surface, the weather was the last thing on anybody’s mind.
The communist regime that had been entrenched in power since the end of the war was cracking down on the opposition. The first news of the events in Warsaw, of police brutality and arrests, reached me during a holiday break at the skiing lodge in the Tatra Mountains. I loved these mountains: their outline against the sky, the contour of peaks, the frosty air and a promise of adventure. Warsaw seemed far away. The protestors were demanding the right to free speech, freedom of assembly, the abolition of censorship. All this mattered to me. I was no longer a student but agreed with their demands and feared for their safety.
There was something else that made me uneasy, though I tried not to make too much of it: official reports denounced the protests’ leaders as a small group of privileged youth, their Jewish names writ large. My initial reaction to this racial overtone was dismissive: why would anybody buy into this nonsense? Warsaw was my home, yet coming back from the mountains this time I was overcome by a sense of foreboding.
I found the city changed. Even the familiar streets seemed hostile. We lived close to the Polytechnic. There was a great deal of activity around the campus: countless meetings and demonstrations, plus one spectacular occupational strike. The militia and paramilitary blocked some areas and combed the streets in search of students or anything suspicious, surging forward and then withdrawing, only to come back again to resume arrests and beatings. The campus in which the students barricaded themselves was surrounded by an iron-grille fence and no one, other than students, was let in. Outside, a crowd of supporters milled around, passing food, flowers and letters of support across the railings. We, too, went there to deliver our offerings, read new banners and freshly printed leaflets. These were good days of newfound solidarity and goodwill, of expectation that the workers would help, of exhilaration mixed with fear.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the confrontation with the authorities would come to no good. The odds were hopeless: the party apparatus had total control of the media and means to discredit and terrorise dissidents. Some of my friends and people I knew were imprisoned on trumped-up charges, judged by summary courts. Working-class party activists, either out of conviction or coercion, turned increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to the idea of supporting the rebels. To walk through the city was to hear their chants, see the placards and banners: Students to Study, Writers to Writing, Zionists to Zion, even Zionists to Siam. All this was intimidating and perversely amusing.
If the word ‘Jews’ had not yet been spelled out, the address of the First Secretary of the Workers’ Party – the most powerful man in the Communist system – to party activists clarified any lingering doubts. The speech was brutal. He personally attacked the writers who publicly demanded freedom of expression. Then he turned his attention to ‘certain people of Jewish origin’, whom he accused of harbouring Zionist ideology and thus sabotaging national interests. ‘You cannot have two fatherlands,’ he thundered, while the audience roared in response, urging him on. ‘They are free to leave,’ the leader intoned. ‘Right away!’ the crowd shouted back.
I felt the eyes of the collective on me. Their voices sounded menacing.
To stop the protests spreading beyond the universities, the campaign aimed to alienate the dissident students and intellectuals from the ‘ordinary people’ by configuring them as a minority of stirrers, enemies of Polish nationhood, arrogant and self-indulgent members of the privileged establishment. The myth of Judeo-bolshevism was resurrected, the stereotypes refreshed. It was not lost on us that our parents were punished for our rebellion and we, their rebellious children, were in turn punished for opposing the system they’d built and supported. Invariably, the accused were of Jewish origin, even if wrongly attributed. In response, hundreds of jokes were making the rounds: ‘What is the difference between anti-Semitism today and that before the war? Back then, it was not compulsory.’
The weather turned gentle and warm, more arrests were made, more people perceived as ‘not with us’ lost their jobs. Many university professors were dismissed from their positions when their faculties closed midway through the academic year. It spawned another quip: ‘I am only half-Jewish. Can I, at least, have a part-time position?’ The difference between the Zionist and the Jew was blurred, anti-Semitism no longer hidden. One day when listening to the news, I heard the roar of the crowds chanting: ‘Jews go home, Jews go home, Jews go home!’ It felt like a witch-hunt, and it was.
My sister-in-law came from Poznań to stay with us for a few days. She looked around, commenting that for the oppressed, we were doing remarkably well. What could I say? The table, the chairs, the bed, all stood unmoved as before. We had enough to eat – only the view from the windows changed with the seasons. Yet, for me, everything had changed and could never be the same again.
At the immunology department where I worked, things were less subtle. The usual banter no longer included me,
my arguments turned into justifications, my words were deliberately misconstrued and used against me. Soon, the conversations froze and most of my colleagues kept their distance. I became invisible. When I was sacked two months later, I would have not been more astonished had a mighty hand appeared from the sky to strike me down. But, in truth, there was nothing spectacular in my dismissal. It was a shabby affair: a piece of paper from the personnel department informed me that I was no longer in the institute’s employment. My position no longer existed. Full stop.
I remember standing in the neutral space of the staircase’s landing, reading the dismissal note over and over, shaking, failing to take it in. Professor R., the head of the department – a short and sly-looking man – promptly assured me that the decision was out of his hands and, at any rate, he knew nothing about it.
Later, however, sitting with him in his office, he spoke to me in a low voice, choosing his words with care as though I were a child, but his cigarette-holding hand was trembling. ‘You must know that the research carried out in our institute is of national importance and confidential …’
I waited.
He cleared his throat and continued searching for words. ‘I hope you understand that loyalty to our country is paramount …’
As a junior research assistant, I was expected to defer to those in professorial positions, but I had nothing to lose, my anger made me reckless and, for a moment, my indignation overruled convention. ‘What other country do you think I am loyal to?’ I sounded aggressive.
‘Well, considering your ties with Israel …’
The rest of the conversation no longer interested me. My satisfaction in forcing him to admit the true reason behind my dismissal did not last long. I could taste my own bile.
I was about eighteen when it finally dawned on me that, like some of my friends, I was Jewish. I was in France at the time, visiting my mother’s relatives. They were so obviously Jewish that it did not leave any doubt in my mind that I was Jewish too. Somehow it did not surprise me. Nothing much changed, though I did become more guarded, wondering if my face betrayed me. It did not. Yet, meeting new people, I had the urge to confront the problem head on by talking about my origins, as if putting them through an entry test. Only later, in less threatening times, did I recognise the pathology of those years, and of my own actions.