Journeys with My Mother

by Halina Rubin

  Ours had been a secular household, free from traditions, above all Jewish traditions. Growing up among nonbelievers in Catholic Poland, I knew more about Easter than Pesach, more about Christmas than Hanukah, and of Yom Kippur I knew nothing at all. I knew about the Holocaust, which had swallowed most of my family, but I believed that the horrible past could not be repeated. I thought of myself as Polish. For who could have imagined that the new postwar world could possibly dust off the Nuremberg Laws?

  At the beginning of May 1968, at one of our family dinners, I told my parents about my decision to leave. They understood; their minds, too, were already made up: they would go to Israel. There was nothing more that they could do in Poland, it was not the model of communism they were fighting for.

  The summer that followed the spring was beautiful and, on the surface at least, everything went on as before. But nothing preoccupied me more than my new situation. With no work, waiting for permission to emigrate, I had plenty of time to churn through my thoughts. I went to the open-air swimming pool almost daily and met friends, but the atmosphere of my city was suffocating me.

  Those of my friends who were not behind bars would come to our small flat on the eighth floor. We were all young professionals. I had known most of them since primary school, through to high school and then university. These were intimate and melancholy evenings. Over a few savouries and Egri Bikaver – one of the two red wines available on the market – we shared the latest jokes and laughed a lot, planned our future, considered possibilities. Looking at the imaginary globe, we wished for another one. There was much bravado in our conversations but little was under our control. Some of us still equivocated while others, for one reason or another, decided to sit it out. As for me, if I could no longer stay in Poland, my preference was to stay in Europe, closer to everything dear to me.

  The authorities, however, did not open the borders without conditions attached, without underscoring how disloyal we – the Jews – were. The first step towards obtaining permission to leave was to renounce our citizenship; then, at least officially, we had to declare Israel as our destination. Hence, the authorities would not have to provide us with information on how to emigrate to other countries.1 It felt as if we were exiled already.

  My parents’ youth fell between the two world wars; it was a time of Poland’s newly gained independence, much hope and political unrest. Compressed on one side by the Soviet Union and Germany on the other, the emerging Polish parliamentary democracy turned into rule by decree. Although not officially sanctioned, casual or violent anti-Semitism flourished. Many roads were closed to Jews. They could not take part in public works projects, nor be employed as civil servants. No government office, school or hospital would willingly hire Jews; hence Jews were restricted in their employment to private, mostly Jewish, businesses.

  Growing up in an area where unemployment and poverty were palpable – basements with no sanitation or light, often housing more than one family – my parents Ola and Władek were radicalised early. They had a choice: to avert their eyes or to defy the existing order. The ideals of communism offered a way to solve the twin problem of unemployment and poverty, and put an end to racial hatred. Back then, the Communist Party was illegal and there was no kudos to be gained from taking part in illicit activities. All this changed after the Second World War. The Communist Party dominated its rivals, and it wasn’t long before their leaders assumed absolute power.

  When did my parents wake up to the injustice done in their names? When did they learn about Stalin’s excesses, of the great number of innocent people murdered during the Great Terror? How attuned were they to power abuse in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary?

  All these years later I ask my friends whose parents had followed the same path, only to find that they are grappling with the same questions. To turn against the Party’s dogmas was inconceivable, not to say suicidal. It must have been terrifying to be part of machinery that was outside their control.

  It seemed that it was the events of 1968, the manipulation of anti-Semitism in the struggle for political power, that finally discredited the Party in my parents’ eyes. The edifice of their beliefs collapsed, as if they finally grasped that the heavens were empty of God and they could no longer believe. The pain was excruciating. Because it was their Party, they too – rightly or wrongly – felt tainted. I think about their hopes for progress, the courage of their convictions for which they had suffered. It had all come to nothing.

  One day when boarding a bus I saw my mother. She looked tense and not altogether well.

  The heaviness of her mood weighed on my shoulders. I sat down next to her and together – we could not help it – we stared at the street banners, at the messages of derision and hatred, one slogan after another, while the bus carried us home.

  August of that year turned out to be the last month of our life in Poland, the last we lived together as a family, in the same city, in the same country where our predecessors were born and where they had died. My mother was fifty-seven, my father five years her senior – both younger than I am now. Yet I thought them ancient and worried that they might not have long to live. They were both very dear to me but what I shared with my mother ran especially deep; we’d been together during the most harrowing years of the war. I knew every part of her face: its oval shape and perfect nose, her gentle brown eyes and every line around them. I admired her steadfastness and open, all-understanding heart. I was proud of her as a person; her beauty, an added gift.

  I was not a perfect daughter but her trust in me was absolute.

  Not long before she died – years later, in Australia – I asked her if she would like to go with me for a picnic. She answered as if we were about to set off for a long voyage together. ‘I would go to the end of the world with you,’ she said. It took my breath away.

  It seems a long time ago when she said these words, half turning towards me, smiling. Maybe because of that trust I feel able to take her on a journey through the complicated, precarious journey through her twentieth-century life.

  2

  Nowolipki, Nalewki

  I was thrilled. Haneczka, who still lives in Warsaw, ferreted out my mother’s original birth certificate. Now I know that one day in January my grandmother, Brana Szlang, travelled from Warsaw to Grodzisk Mazowiecki and made her way to the civil registry office, not far from the railway station. She was there at ten in the morning, reporting the birth of a baby named Sura.

  There wasn’t anything extraordinary about this – except that the year was 1937 and Sura was already twenty-six years old. Brana could have procrastinated a bit longer but my mother, whose birth was then recorded, needed a passport.

  Looking at the document, I imagine the clerk at the civil registry office taking a deep breath when writing the long, convoluted sentences with scarcely any commas. The poetic prose, inscribed in elegant copperplate, occupies the entire folio.

  While at the office, Brana also registered the birth of another daughter, twenty-eight-year-old Tosia. The clerk appears to be displeased; the last sentences in both documents are stern: The delay in preparation of the certificate is caused by parental negligence.

  Until then, I had no idea that my mother was born in Chrzanów, just outside the town of Grodzisk Mazowiecki; I did not know she was named Sura, because everyone called her Ola, a diminutive of Aleksandra, her formal name.

  At the time, that part of Poland was under the reign of Tsar Nicholas II; in this antediluvian era, Chrzanów was a small village of a few unmade roads and no electricity. In 1911, the year my mother was born, Pyotr Stolypin, the Russian Prime Minister, ‘the butcher’ of the 1905 revolutionary uprising, was assassinated, and a Jew named Mendel Beilis was accused of the ritual blood killing of a Ukrainian boy. Such events cast a long shadow over Jewish existence, stirring up hostilities and pogroms.

  No photographs of Brana or my grandfather, Hersz, survived the war, so I have only my mother’s description to rely on. Hence, Hersz – tall
, brown-eyed, his pointed beard neatly trimmed – seems better-looking than my paternal grandfather, Henoch, whose photograph I have. Hersz wore suits and, not counting religious events, covered his head for protection or style. Brana did not wear a wig; her long black hair was coiled at the back without being covered. Everyone in the family of eight was dark. Only my mother, Ola – as if she were dropped by a cuckoo – was blonde. Because of her looks, she was often mistaken for a shiksa.2 How heaven-sent this was during the war.

  Brana and Hersz Szlang must have been quite prosperous when they moved to Warsaw. The entrance to their building in Nalewki Street – wide, with light shining through the stained glass – had an airy, cheerful, look. The teenage Ola quickly developed a taste for sliding down the staircase banister. One day, she lost her balance and ended up hanging above the stairwell. Clutching the rail with desperation, she screamed in alarm. Fortunately, someone was on the way up. Instead of helping her, the man offered her a wry smile and a little sermon: ‘Well, well, that should teach you to know better, young lady.’ It was possibly her first lesson in fortitude: she had to manage by herself.

  The Szlangs’ spacious third-floor apartment had a semicircular balcony. Every room was heated by a tiled stove and a coal-operated oven. No proper middle-class home was without a massive sideboard displaying crystal carafes, silver candlesticks and fragile porcelain figurines as well as dinner sets and cutlery, all reserved for special occasions. I am not sure I would have liked their taste: the Regency upholstered sofas and the heavy velour curtains, the carpet runners with two red stripes, all of them in the same shade of pale green, including tropical Monsteras in pots on wooden pedestals. Later, my mother, too, kept a few doilies and crystals, the latter still in fashion. Sometimes I tried to remove them out of sight but my mother protested. And now I am like her, keeping mementos no matter how trivial they are.

  In keeping with the house decor, the family was conventional with clearly defined roles for husband and wife. Hence, Hersz concentrated on managing the dyeing business and Brana on running the household. Every Friday, their heads covered, they observed the shabbes. Six children – five girls and the youngest, the one and only son – stood around a table covered with white damask, the light of candles illuminating their faces. It must have been heartwarming to receive parental blessings, a custom I never experienced in my parents’ house because my communist parents abandoned religion early.

  Back then though, there were numerous injunctions my religious predecessors chose to observe. Cooking had to be kosher. No work could be done on the Sabbath. Even if they went to visit Sara, Brana’s sister, who, with her husband and two sons, lived in Praga – on the right side of Vistula River, practically the other end of town – they did not take a tram. Instead, they walked along the long bridge, regardless of the weather, Hersz and Brana coaxing the little ones along.

  Hersz went to synagogue every week. Brana was not expected to understand Talmud or pray as often as he did. The day of Yom Kippur was marked with due solemnity. Hersz spent the entire day in the synagogue and all of them fasted. It was the Passover my mother remembered most fondly. How everything had to be spotlessly clean, and how special sets of fine porcelain and silver were retrieved from the depths of the cupboards; how every child was given a new set of clothes. Tosia and Ola, born only two years apart, were always identically dressed.

  I am struck by the changes in each of the three generations preceding mine. My great-grandparents were orthodox Jews, while my grandparents’ traditional way of life was followed by my secular parents. I cannot believe that these radical turns went on without bitter conflict.

  Hersz could not resist new inventions and was quick to buy them. When Ola was little he bought a gramophone, a mysterious and strange object the children were not allowed to touch.

  She tiptoed around it, looking into the tuba to see where the voices were coming from. They had two telephones, one at home and another one in the office. Though no longer a novelty, it was still a rarity worth mentioning.

  After work, especially on Friday nights, Hersz carefully read the newspapers. He liked it when Brana sat next to him so they could share the most interesting articles and jokes. Of more than a hundred Jewish publications published in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish in Warsaw alone, Hersz chose two of the most popular – and competing – dailies, Haynt (Today) and Der Moment. The first reflected the views of the Zionist left, the other navigated between extremes. Reading went together with smoking and drinking hot, strong black tea. Hersz would drink several glasses, one after another. The daughters took turns to indulge him. Occasionally, slightly apologetic, he would fetch one himself. Except for Jerzyk, the youngest son and a spoiled brat, everyone helped around the house; but the thought that the head of family would carry out any household duties such as buying food, cooking or cleaning did not enter anyone’s mind.

  On the other side of the landing, they owned another apartment where Hersz had his workshop. It was filled with bales of cloth shelved right up to the ceiling, as well as several long tables for unfurling fabric to be imprinted with flowery patterns before it was cut to size. A small office, fitted with a large roll-top desk and matching leather armchair, was Hersz’s domain. He prayed and worked there, and read his much-treasured leather-bound books.

  My grandpa travelled frequently, especially to Łódz, a centre of textile manufacturing. He consulted chemists before buying fabrics and dyes. Out of necessity, he spoke Yiddish, Polish and German, as well as some Russian and Hebrew. He liked to spoil his children and every time he went away he would bring something for everyone, even if only small presents. Once he returned empty-handed, pale and shaken, his beard crudely cut off and face bloodied.

  Various details of my mother’s life surfaced on different occasions. As she aged, I became concerned that there might not be enough time, that I might not remember everything she’d told me earlier. I decided to record our conversations. Getting started was not easy; she had to be in the mood for talking. As always, whenever remembering her parents or sisters or the years of the war, eventually her voice would turn into a whisper and tears would well up her eyes. In the very last tape, I hear her say, ‘That’s enough, I cannot go on.’ The tape is still recording when I say, ‘Let’s have tea.’ The conversation was never resumed. I did not have the heart to put her through that ordeal again.

  Every time I listen to that tape, I am reminded that my daughter Annette was with us in my small study, sitting on the floor. I hear myself begging Annette, who is confused about the wars and the places, not to interrupt, always thinking that without her questions my mother’s voice would tell me more. Yet it always remains as recorded: too short.

  Evidently my maternal grandparents were not stuck in their ways. They took the radical step of sending Tosia and Ola to a progressive, secular school where teaching was in Polish. The gymnasium of Fryda Mirlas in Nalewki Street was one of the best private Jewish high schools.

  The twenties were years of expansive dreams and great expectations, and the gymnasium offered a well-rounded education. What could not be covered by the curriculum was offered in the after-hours lectures and discussions. The school’s philosophy, rooted in Romantic and Positivist ideals, aspired to nurture emancipated, independent human beings, encouraged to work for the benefit of society. Its motto was Seek the bright flames of truth, seek the new undiscovered path.

  I find a few pages on the internet and learn that the students published a school newspaper, called Flames. The girls’ contributions were written with panache: amusing, critical and irreverent. I believe my mother took the school’s motto to heart. She certainly wanted to follow new, undiscovered paths.

  One of the school photos shows a handful of teachers with a group of students on a summer excursion to Vilnius. The girls, dressed in pleated navy skirts and white sailors’ tops, their white berets askew, some smiling and others just squinting, look towards the camera as if divining the future. Unlike them, I know what is to fol
low. How could they have guessed that the war was less than three months away and that only very few, if any, would live beyond their youth?

  Later, in the ghetto, Fryda Mirlas continued to run the school illegally until her deportation.

  It has been said that even in Oświęcim3 she asked her students to recite ‘Kochanowski’s Laments’, a much-loved 16th-century threnody, for the loss of the poet’s four-yearold daughter. In the camp, it became a requiem for them all.

  In 1527, in response to a petition from Warsaw inhabitants, the lawmakers granted the right of the city to enjoy the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. It prohibited Jews from so much as entering the city, except on market days, let alone to live there.

  This changed with the Tsarist edict in 1862, and the number of Jews in the city kept increasing. By the time my grandparents made their way to Warsaw, the Jewish community there had become the largest in Europe.

  The Jewish area in Warsaw – large, crowded, diverse – formed a city within a city, and Nalewki Street was its main artery. There were hundreds of little businesses, on top of and next to each other. It seemed that one could buy anything humanity had ever produced, local or imported, only much cheaper than anywhere else. There was nothing that could not be made or mended: clothes, shoes, an old iron or a twisted bicycle. The workshops were small, dark and dusty – the smallest could accommodate only one person – yet people lived and worked in them and customers had to negotiate from the doorstep. Their signboards, in Yiddish, Polish, occasionally Hebrew, even Russian, competed for attention while street hawkers sold everything imaginable, from lemonade and bagels to shoelaces and daily papers. This chaotic abundance – the smell of herrings, dill cucumbers, pickled cabbage wrapped in paper and sold straight from the barrel – gave Nalewki a bazaar-like feel. Everybody had to make a living and everybody was looking for a bargain.