Journeys with My Mother

by Halina Rubin

  It was a man’s world. The highest currency was courage, physical strength and stamina. There weren’t many women in the partisan forces, and fewer still took part in armed missions. Assigned to cooking, cleaning and other supporting jobs, with no say in matters of importance, they held the lowest place in the partisan hierarchy and were vulnerable to predators. None more so than those without a man.

  Although rape was punishable by death, coercion was common as many fellow partisans expected consent. It must have been easier for Ola who, averse to duress by nature, enjoyed a nurse’s status. No matter that she and Gurgen saw each other only rarely; the fact that they were considered husband and wife shielded her from harassment.

  On the night of our arrival, my mother and I were sent to Bielski’s otryad. This few-hundred-strong Jewish group of survivors of massacres and ghetto runaways was sheltering women, children and old men. But my mother felt out of sorts there. She missed her old companions and wanted to do what she knew best: to attend to the sick and the injured. She asked to be transferred and, a few weeks later, we were part of the Iskra detachment. I must have been the only child in a sea of adults.

  Since the outbreak of typhus the previous year, a spacious zemlyanka had been turned into an isolation ward; other ones were assigned for general admissions and outpatients. For such a primitive setup, it was grandly called a hospital. And that’s what it was, despite the shortage of everything: anaesthetics and scalpels, painkillers and syringes. Every procedure was a challenge. But there was a doctor, a physician who’d fled the ghetto in Lida, and several nurses, my mother one of them. Ola spent days, and sometimes nights, working in the field hospital. It never occurred to me to ask her where I was when she was on duty. When Doctor Gordon decided to carry out a trepanation – drilling a hole in the patient’s skull to remove a haemorrhage, a procedure not without serious risks even in peace-time, let alone in primitive conditions – he himself designed the instruments required, and the only one who could make them was the local blacksmith. The operation was carried out on the kitchen table of the village hut. Gordon was assisted by a nurse who happened to be his wife. The patient was held in place by his brother and a party commissar.

  The seasons in the forests came and went, and each presented its own challenges. While the winter was frosty and the deep snow of December grew thicker, the spring brought no relief: the rains and melting snow mired us in thick, impossible-to-remove mud. Only when the warmth of long summer days followed, could I run around barefooted and free.

  But what has stayed with me was not the fear or the hunger but the eternal cold.

  It was in winter that my indestructible mother succumbed to typhus. She was very ill and had to be taken to the field hospital. I was left alone with strangers. No one troubled with me much. Without shoes, reluctant to leave my burrow, I spent most of my days lying down, conserving the little heat I had. But in the evenings, when the attention of drunken men was focused on me, my life became wretched. My attempts to stay invisible lest someone get angry did not work.

  ‘Would you like to see Moscow?’ A pair of hands grasped my head and lifted me up towards the roof. I cried in pain, my naivety amusing to them. But the men, so easily diverted, were just as easily angered, and it was then that they started beating me.

  The high and slippery threshold of the zemlyanka was a major obstacle to my venturing outside. I was too frightened to ask any of the men for help. Once – I do not remember why – I did not get up at all and used my ushanka, my Russian hat, as a potty, remaining in the same position for as long as I could, waiting for something to happen.

  I was sprung, of course. The men decided I was nyenormalnaya, abnormal. As a cure, I got more beatings and the ushanka, my precious warm hat, was tossed far away.

  Weeks passed before I saw my mother again. I remember how strange she looked when she came back from the hospital without her hair. We scrutinised each other, both shocked by our horrible appearance, feeling sorrow and happiness at the same time.

  ‘Mama, ty lysaya!’ I cried in surprise.

  ‘But look at you, you are also bald,’ she said while holding me tight and trying to smile. She found a mirror so we could see our faces together: two shaved heads, two ghosts with large eyes on grey faces, two scarlet scars on each side of my mother’s neck.

  I wonder what instrument was used and whether there was any anaesthetic available while her lymph nodes were removed. Eventually the scars were no longer inflamed and their colour faded but when examined closely, they were always crooked. Later, I would no longer notice them.

  The men complained about me. Ola dug up my snow-buried ushanka and washed it. The whole episode made her furious. I do not know what she told them, or if she complained about them higher up, but from then on no one hit me again.

  Safety was the first consideration but food came a close second. There was never enough of it. Our staple was stale soy beans – not enough to live on, but enough not to die of hunger. After the war, under no circumstances would my mother have them, and I have yet to find out what they taste like.

  Every so often, a group of partisans would venture out on bambioshka, a food mission. In peace time it would be called a robbery. They targeted small villages and isolated farms scattered around the puszcza. The peasants did not want to part with food, livestock, tools or clothing, yet they were in no position to refuse. All partisans, whether Soviet, Polish or Jewish, were armed. Equally harassed by the Germans, the villagers were caught between opposing forces. Whatever they did could be seen as collaboration by one side or the other. At some stage demarcation lines were established between the partisan groups, and the mutual accusations of banditry came to a temporary halt.

  The spoils, however, were not evenly distributed. The hierarchy ensured that the higher echelons of officers were well provided for and little, if anything, remained for the rest of us.

  By the beginning of 1944, the peasants were all but ruined. Had the war lasted a few more months, a famine would have been inevitable.

  Once, after another successful bambioshka, a small miracle happened. I woke up to find next to me a few unfamiliar, wondrous things. My mother explained what they were. The two smooth oval objects were eggs and the small cube was butter. Gurgen must have come earlier in the morning, while I was still asleep, to leave these offerings. I do not remember eating any of it; what has stayed with me was my pitiful astonishment.

  The man I remember was called Grycko. He was quite old, I thought, and, because he was Ukrainian, I imagine him with a moustache. He told me old Russian fairytales while carving soft, creamy-white pine wood to make me toys. I thought they were enchanting, delicate and beautiful.

  The toys he made were miniature models of the tools he must have used in everyday life: axes, saws, spades, carts, horses and barrels, rakes even. I played with them all the time, but small and brittle as they were, none of them lasted. Neither did Grycko. He was killed in the last days of the war.

  I liked the nights when a few people gathered in the zemlyanka to talk, or to remain silent, the potbelly stove glowing in the dark. Companionship made the primitive conditions bearable, as did intimacy and affection. Any day could have been our last. The adults spoke in hushed voices or sang about the partisan’s life and hardship; about love and longing. In the quietness of the night it was comforting to listen, half asleep, to conversations I could not understand. The names Smolensk, Wolkovysk, Mogilev or Lida, spoken in melodious Russian, sounded evocative and somehow reassuring. My head would get heavier and heavier, until I fell asleep. I was like a young animal, clinging to my mother’s fur for food and comfort, not yet able to make sense of the events around me. I thought my mother had mastery of everything and could always make things better, yet there was one event that she did not see coming.

  It was an unusually warm and cheerful summer morning. I was still naked, sitting on a camouflage-green blanket, fresh air against my skin, eating semolina. I remember it clearly because it deli
ghted my mother; she was just about to cook me some more. Suddenly, we were startled by the rattle of machine guns. Perhaps it was only an echo, but sharp and loud shots seemed to be coming from every direction. My mother dropped everything, wrapped me in the blanket and ran out of the zemlyanka. She stopped by a huge fir tree and put me behind low-growing, dense branches. Then, with a finger at her mouth, she gestured not to make a sound, and was gone.

  I sat without moving under the sheltering branches. I heard more shots. Something was set on fire, someone was running there and back, shouting. Then, everything went quiet. I tried not to move, too frightened to make a noise. Time went slowly.

  When my mother returned, she found me sitting where she’d left me, still wrapped in the blanket. She held me in her arms and wept. I wanted to know why she was crying; after all, we were together again, but she never explained.

  For a long time, I assumed we’d been attacked by Germans. Now and then their planes flew over on reconnaissance or assault missions. Our dispersed bases, however, were deliberately kept small. The low roofs of our shelters – blanketed by snow in winter, sprouting grass in spring and flowers in summer, their appearance changing with every season – made them invisible from the air. Sometimes, despite all precautions, Iskra had to move to another place.

  In the first years of the war, the Germans invested much energy in getting rid of the partisans. Their armed incursions into the forest were frequent, occasionally long-lasting and fierce.

  But in the spring and early summer of 1944, things were different. Now, the Germans’ first priority was to stay alive and evacuate fast.

  After talking to Valerii, I am convinced that we were attacked by a group of Polish partisans, who could, one way or another, find our location.

  Ever since the Soviets were held responsible for the murder of thousands Polish POWs in Katyn, Moscow had broken all diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile. Now the Poles were even more suspicious of Stalin’s intentions towards Poland. They were convinced that there was a plan to retain Polish territories annexed in 1939, and keep Poland under the Soviet sphere of influence. All this resonated in the forest of Puszcza Nalibocka. Cooperation between the Red and the White partisans – previously united in the fight against the Germans – deteriorated, developing into bitter and bloody conflict.

  The Red Army arrived on a warm summer day which, for me, turned into a picnic in a forest clearing. That’s how I remember it: soldiers in their green field caps and tunics spilled out of their vehicles and mingled with the partisans. Everyone was hugging, laughing out of relief and great joy. When my mother eventually found me, I was seated on a soldier’s lap, my arms up to the elbows in his canteen filled with macaroni and spam, my face smeared. Food had never tasted so good. For us, the war was over.

  The green blanket my mother had wrapped me in that day, though damaged by some forest creature, survived; I still have a piece my mother kept.

  20

  What Now?

  There is another surprise waiting for us in Lida – an exhibition largely devoted to the partisans of Iskra. Had we arrived a few weeks earlier we would have missed it. As exhibitions go, this is a very modest one: one room of photographs and objects belonging to the partisans, including one accordion and a single balalaika.32 The photographs are old, of course. I can see some of the faces, whose names I am familiar with. Those advanced in years, as well as young high school students with childlike faces, gaze at me across the enormous divide of time and events. It is heart-rending to see them, since so many were executed for resistance or killed in battles. Prominent place is given to Dr Kalman Gordon, who escaped from the ghetto of Lida and joined the partisans. As luck would have it, he managed to bring his tools of trade. He turned out to be one of the more extraordinary people Ola met.

  Inside the glass cabinets, carefully arranged, are corroded scissors, shavers, misshapen razors without their grit, pocket knives, oxidised coins, bullets, and the keys to houses which had long lost their owners. What interests me most are the medical instruments. The stethoscopes include tube models, which even then were museum pieces. Delicate glass syringes were sensibly stored in a metal cigar box of Polski Monopol Tytoniowy.33 I remember watching, fascinated, as Ola used to sterilise the medical instruments the old-fashioned way – in boiling water. The needles, like scalpels, were blunt from endless use. Nothing much could be done about it, I suppose. There are also a few forceps, spatulas and nurses’ bags made of canvas marked with red crosses; also, threads for suturing, thick as cord, and not much more. I cringe at the thought that sutures exactly like these were used to stitch the incisions on my mother’s neck. It perturbs me that her operation was carried out without anaesthetic; perhaps a few shots of vodka. Stolen ether or chloroform were saved for amputations and the like.

  All these items, whether made by a blacksmith, pilfered from Germans or bought on the black market, have a personal story. I feel affectionate towards these relics of what is, by now, an ancient civilisation.

  When we emerged from the forest in July 1944, we found Lida destroyed. I must be reading too much about it, because in my dream I walk with my brother from one ruin to another, looking for a place to live. But my brother Andrzej hadn’t been born yet, and my mother and I were not homeless. We lived with Gurgen in a timber cottage at 22 Morgi Street, a short distance from the hospital from which we escaped eight months earlier.

  At first, all the partisan friends were in Lida. Yet gradually, one by one, they went their own way. The war was not yet over and many one-time partisans joined the army. The women, many of them nurses with whom my mother had worked since the beginning of the war, set off on their long journeys home, to reunite with their families somewhere in Russia: in Perm, Novosibirsk, Moscow. My mother and I had nowhere to go so we stayed and waited.

  Parting with the nurses was sad and painful. We’d spent years living together, through hardship and bleakness, risky missions and close calls. They’d always doted on me as though I were one of their own.

  Now, I have their letters. These blue triangles – the way the pages, origami-like, fold into envelopes – take me back to those years. I’d never read them, not until I went through my mother’s boxes after her death. It felt like trespassing. Everything I know about them is from their correspondence.

  Peace, for which they had been waiting so impatiently, making plans for the future, soon turned bittersweet, initial exultation giving way to rancour. The war had brought them together but in freedom they were alone. They had to look squarely at their losses. Most had lost someone dear: a husband, brothers, fathers – killed in battles or starved in prisoners’ camps. Reunion with their families brought no consolation since nothing could match the intensity of their experience; there was no one to understand what they’d been through, nobody to replace the camaraderie. ‘How precious to me now is our friendship, our evenings together,’ wrote Vala. She went on:

  How dear to me is now Lida, the place of my dearest memories … How we shared the last piece of bread, all the more special because given from the purest heart. It is awful to be without friends, worse than hunger and execution.

  Vala, who’d experienced prisoners’ camps and forced labour, the dangers of a partisan’s life, came to believe that a life without friends was not worth living. The war tested them all. After years of being separated from their spouses, men walked out on their marriages as if they had to begin their lives anew.

  Vala continues:

  How terrible it is to be alone. I am alone now. Siemion remained in Lida. I didn’t think it would be so hard to separate. We lived together through so much … I can’t fill the emptiness inside me. How hard it is. You wouldn’t recognise me now, I have lost much weight and grown old, I don’t know what to do here; can’t deal with the red tape, it stops me from getting the documents … I am thinking of going back [to Lida]; mother cries, I feel sorry for her but what is left for me: a broken, soulless life, no will to live. I don’t know
what to do, how I regret leaving. I will stop now, tears are running down my eyes. Ola, give my regards to everyone. Do not forget me, Ola.

  Do write, regards, Vala

  And from Tania:

  Dear Ola, it’s so wonderful to get letters from friends with whom we went through so many roads, through captivity and life in the forest, especially through our experience in the partisan’s hospital …

  Ola, write what’s new in Lida, especially about the food situation; is there any improvement or are things the same as they were? Write about everyone. Write everything about yourself, about Galochka.34 She must have grown up. Tell her if she doesn’t eat, I won’t bring her any presents from Moscow …

  At present I don’t know when and where I am going to be. You know my situation. Meanwhile, I sit by the sea and watch the weather…

  Ola, how awful that the White Polish scoundrels killed Fedya Bobikov. You know Galickin, the husband of the Black Zina, he still lives here in Moscow.

  This is it, no more news. Moscow is getting ready for the return of spring though outside, strong frost is still holding fast.

  Goodbye, I kiss you with all my might. Also Galochka. I hope she won’t be sick anymore.

  Regards to all the kids, to Gurgen.

  Always your friend, Tania.

  The letters show their age, though some of the writing is almost as legible as on the day they were written. They are well travelled – from Belorussia through countless places in Poland – I clearly remember their presence in Warsaw – and Israel, before coming to rest with me in Melbourne. I have read them many times since, always hoping to find something I’d previously missed.