Journeys with My Mother

by Halina Rubin

  The women worried about the lack of provisions; hunger was widespread throughout the vast regions of the Soviet Union. They resented the delays in clearing their names of pending charges of collaboration. These one-time forced labourers were at best treated with suspicion, at worst could be sent to gulags. Their correspondence was carefully read, limiting what they could write. Censorship was efficient. No matter how much I try to work out what is hidden under the erasures, it leads me nowhere.

  I wonder what happened to the letters Ola wrote. Whether someone, somewhere in Russia or indeed in Melbourne, puzzles over what had been written to their mother or grandmother, just as I do. As it is, I can only guess some of her problems, see that her gaze was already turned towards Poland and Warsaw, to family and friends.

  Once back in Lida, Ola began her search for Władek. She wrote to Moscow, to the Union of Polish Patriots. Bernard Mark, a friend of my parents, replied.

  Moscow, 13 March 1945

  Dear Ola!

  I thought you were in Grodno and sent a telegram there.

  Regarding Ze’ev, I only know that he is in the Polish Army. I don’t have his address but will try to find it for you. I saw him in Moscow several times, he was wounded seven times,35 was made a lieutenant and commanded a column of motorised armoured vehicles. He spoke a lot about you and the child. He was certain you were both killed.

  I’d like to know how you survived, about your experience. What happened to the child? What are you doing in Lida? Write about everything in detail. So few of us survived. What are your plans? What do you need? How can I help you? Have you seen any of our friends?

  I am here with my wife. We were in the workers’ battalion near Stalingrad. Together with other comrades, we are going to return to Poland, though the news from there is worrying.

  Write soon,

  Warm regards from Ester,

  Bernard

  Ola must have cried reading it, leaving a few stains on the page. I, too, shed copious tears while poring over it. Her hands must have trembled, just as mine did, when I read it the first time. In those years, many tears were shed – for the joy of finding each other and for the sadness of loss. They were yet to discover the enormity of these losses on their return to Poland.

  So many of us had died …

  Our family members, those who survived, come full circle, meeting again in Białystok. Haneczka and Leon returned soon after the Germans left; Jerzyk, sick and exhausted, made his way from Siberia; and Władek was already stationed in Białystok. It is not clear how and when Ola learned Haneczka’s address. But I have a letter Haneczka wrote in return.

  7 February 1945

  Dear Ola,

  I don’t want you to think that I have forgotten you. It has been wonderful to read your letter, this first letter from you. I got it on 6 II 45.

  Believe me, I went crazy when I got it, I jumped and danced, not knowing whom to thank. Ola, I won’t send you a photo because I don’t have it. I want to tell you that Henia, daddy’s sister and her son are alive. Daddy went to Warsaw.

  I will tell you what happened to mummy. Mummy was taken by the Germans in 1942,36 soon after they came. A woman informed on her for being a communist and they took her.

  I am in fourth grade, I am a good pupil. What a good-looking daughter you have. Halinka is very pretty, how old is she?

  My warm regards for you and Halinka. Goodbye, I am sending you two hundred and two kisses.

  Your niece, Hanka

  This letter, too, is stained with tears.

  Later, probably in May, my father learned that we were alive. As he wrote in his memoirs:

  Over the years, I steeled myself for the worst, so convinced was I of their deaths in Oryol. The news of their survival was so unexpected as if they were already buried in some unknown, unmarked grave.

  Left alone in my office I cried, giving in to my emotions for the first time. I was so unbelievably happy. Having no idea what to do, I turned around the room dancing. Then I could not keep the news to myself any longer. I ran out of my office, telling everyone, perhaps shouting: my wife and my daughter are alive! Yesterday I was a widower, today I am a husband, a father!

  Lucky man! everybody said, embracing me, slapping my shoulders with tears in their eyes.

  Then I wrote a letter, dispatching it together with chocolate and cans of food to Ola’s address in Lida.

  Many things happened while we were in Lida, yet I remember nothing of it. Between the picnic in the forest on the day the German occupation ended and Victory Day the following year, there is a void. I can recall nothing – none of my mother’s friends, not Gurgen, not the house we lived in, no other children, and only the name of my kindergarten teacher, Faina Vukolovna, which, like a homeless moth, knocks around uselessly inside my head. Nothing left a trace in my memory.

  I had hoped that going to Lida would jolt my memory, or that a few treasured items – books given to me by Gurgen, one or two photographs, the bukvar (the Russian reader that witnessed my early efforts in reading and writing) – would awaken something in me, but nothing does.

  The bukvar is still useful. Aside from reminding me of the sequence of letters in the Russian alphabet, it documents the times, when the faces of Lenin, Stalin and Molotov were everywhere; when everybody knew that batushka37 Stalin loved children. My book shows a picture of him, accepting with a benevolent smile, flowers from children just like me.

  At first, the Red Army moved swiftly toward Berlin. Ola anxiously followed its progress. Only a month after our return to Lida it reached Warsaw’s east side of the Vistula, the river we had crossed in 1939 when fleeing in the opposite direction. It seemed that it was only a matter of days, weeks at most, before the army would make its last assault and enter the heart of the city. This did not happen. Across the river, on the western side, a popular uprising against the Germans began and the Red Army halted its progress. It would be another seven months before Warsaw was free of Germans. By then, the city had all but ceased to exist.

  On Victory Day we were still in Lida. All day and all night, there was shooting – one volley of shots after another, the sky alight. I had yet to learn that victories are celebrated by the use of ammunition; I was frightened. My mother calmed me down and we stood together at the window, watching flares moving across the sky. She must have felt very much alone on that day. I sensed her mood. Why are you sad? I wanted to know.

  ‘Tęsknię,’ she said in Polish – a word I did not understand. And though she said the same in Russian, what she longed for on the day that formally ended the war, she did not say.

  Gurgen was restless. His wife and two children had returned to Moscow from their place of evacuation. He went to see them, but it was the end of their marriage. He searched for work and soon took a teaching post in the Pedagogical Institute in Grodno. From then on he moved between Grodno and Lida, until the day Ola went back to Poland.

  Who could have predicted that peacetime would be so difficult?

  The Yalta Conference, set up to decide the shape of postwar Europe, took place in February 1945. The future of our country was the first one on the agenda. General Zukov’s forces were sixty-five kilometres from Berlin and Stalin felt powerful enough to dictate his terms. The Soviet Union would keep much of the eastern part of Poland, annexed in 1939, relinquishing swathes of Germany in the west as compensation. Churchill and Roosevelt agreed. Thousands of people would be on the move, forcefully relocated, like inanimate chess pieces.

  21

  The End of the War

  At the beginning of September 1945, Ola and I took a train from Lida to Białystok.

  I had not seen my father since the day our truck, filled with wounded soldiers, was stopped by the Red Army patrol near Mogilev, our separation hastened by soldiers urging us to move on.

  I had been waiting for him for a long time. No longer remembering how he looked, I peered into the face of every uniformed man. There were many soldiers walking the streets and I was on the alert
all the time. Sometimes I would run after a uniformed man, calling: ‘Daaaady, Dad!’ my heart full of anticipation. The soldiers understood it. Many of them, too, hoped to find their children, perhaps somewhere in the crowd, in any city or small village they happened to be passing through. They had no homes to return to, no keys, no mementos. Of their previous lives, they only had what they could remember and, if they were lucky, their loved ones.

  When some normality returned, when they had a bed to sleep in, they still tried to find their families and friends, searching through the Red Cross, placing handwritten notes in visible locations. What optimism, what hope resided in these flimsy pieces of paper displayed in public places. What trust that the wind, rain or some careless person would not destroy this most ardent of questions: ‘Where are you?’

  In the end, I did not run into my father in the street. As it had happened years before, he was waiting for us in Białystok, where he was stationed. I was asleep when he came. Władek lifted me from my bed, hugging and kissing me. He was dressed in a green army tunic over cavalry breeches, leather straps running up and down and across his body, with the insignia of an officer. When he embraced me, his body was unexpectedly hard and unyielding. I would like to say that I was overwhelmed by a wave of love for him, but that is not how it was.

  He was a stranger. Our renewed acquaintance did not start well. I spoke Russian and he talked to me in Polish. The more he persisted, the more I resented his didactic efforts and refused to listen.

  I heard him say to Ola that I looked wizened. The little woman in me resented it and, in my treacherous heart, I wanted another man for a father. Gurgen, most likely. Most importantly, I was used to having my mother all to myself; now, I sensed, things were going to be different: my mother’s attention would be divided, at best.

  The way my parents were pulled apart, and then reunited, was dramatic enough, but their initial steps together were cautious. I cannot be certain what was going through my father’s mind. Whether, with the great joy of finding us alive, came hope, even certainty, that their feelings would remain the same as before.

  And what was Ola thinking, leaving Lida without taking leave of her various responsibilities or our chattels? I mulled over it, wondering if my mother was hesitant about her future with my father. In her account of their first meeting, she could have painted it however she wanted. Yet she told me that it took time to rediscover their former intimacy. They felt awkward, even shy, as though they hardly knew each other. Their war experiences had changed them. They carried inside them the knowledge of what human beings are capable of; they perceived the world with different eyes.

  The first night after their long separation, my father asked Ola to take off his boots. It was a blunder, and badly timed. My mother, taken aback, refused – she was nobody’s servant. He hastily explained that without a suka,38 he could not remove his tight boots by himself.

  I can see both of them that night, close to each other in the dark, talking about what each had experienced during their long years of separation. It was as if these two people – my parents – had to rediscover each other and start again.

  Soon, I had to stay alone with my father while Ola returned to Lida to collect our things and do what she thought necessary. One of them was to see Gurgen. They must have been preparing for the moment of parting, if only because Ola had begun to search for my father. How could she not? Regardless, it must have been painful. It was then he gave my mother the much treasured photograph of the three of us, and the volume of Russian poetry, inscribed: ‘For Ola, our meeting – like Victoria Regia39 – seldom flowers.’

  The war had ended but my father was still in the army. By then he was a captain in charge of a large military unit while single-handedly looking after me. For a while I was the pet of the regiment, enjoying the centre of attention. My father looked after me in his own, inimitable, way. A military man, he wanted me to be strong and enduring. I suspect I was nothing of the sort. Occasionally, he would take me to military exercises, attempting to teach me how to shoot at a target. He also wanted me to share his affection for animals, and tried to teach me to ride a horse.

  But it was not to be. Back in the forest, I’d witnessed sixteen-year-old Marusia kicked by a horse and since then I had been terrified of their tempers; high above the ground, it was the abyss I saw. In the evenings, while he was sitting behind a desk, briefing or perhaps debriefing his officers, I would curl up cat-like on his lap and go to sleep. It must have been easier to command a military unit where insubordination was out of the question than it was to look after me. I was already rebellious.

  When Ola returned to Białystok, she learned that my father had been moved to Koszalin, a small town on the Baltic coast. Waiting for her was Władek’s adjutant. Contemplating another journey from hell – standing in a train corridor, another civilian squashed between the multitudes and their bundles for an unknown number of hours – the two hit on a solution. In Władek’s wardrobe was his captain-major tunic, with all the required paraphernalia. She tried it on with her short skirt; it fit perfectly.

  The following morning the new captain-major went to the station. An enormous crowd was already surging towards the carriages with the zeal of storming the barricades. It was always the same; there was no point waiting for another train. For once, Ola did not have to face the crowd alone. Father’s adjutant kept her company and carried her suitcases. When she was noticed by her ‘fellow officers’, many hands stretched out to help and, before long, she was sitting in the compartment, surrounded by men eager to impress. The conversation revolved around war exploits while cigarettes, drinks and food were shared. She was nearly sprung when her companions inquired where the captain was serving. Stuck for an answer, she hid behind the confidentiality of operations.

  Ola arrived in Koszalin quite pleased with herself. My father, however, was far from amused, claiming that she’d risked his career.

  In later years, one of the wardrobes in our Warsaw home was filled with military ‘treasures’ – revolvers and rifles, ammunition, horse spurs, even a few cavalry swords. Andrzej and I were entranced and curious about our father’s war. Though I knew that he had taken part in prolonged, bloody battles, the accounts of his army experience were aimed to entertain rather than inform us.

  Władek’s photograph, taken in 1942, shows his tired and achingly sad face.

  22

  And After

  The war was over but in Poland fighting continued. The newly defined country was reduced in size, its borders shifted to the west. Savage force was used to expel native Germans, where they’d lived for centuries, revenge meted out to innocent people. It was justice, postwar-style.

  The eastern borders were also pushed west, leaving behind the inhabitants of what used to be Poland. Here, as in the new Poland, the Ukrainian nationalists carried out ethnic cleansing, massacring minorities: Poles, Jews and Armenians. As if there was not enough bloodletting, the Poles fought Poles over the political future of the country: the patriotic, anti-Communist partisan groups took arms against the new government and its proponents. Amid privation and chaos, banditry flourished. Jews, emerging from the camps, hiding or exile, were met with hostilities.

  In small towns in particular, they were chased away, even murdered, for fear that they would reclaim their properties. It appeared that everyone was fighting everyone else.

  Poland was a dangerous place to begin anew. Most surviving Jews left Poland immediately, sometimes on foot. They left out of fear of anti-Semitism and further pogroms, an unwillingness to accept the new communist regime, or a reluctance to live in what appeared to be one enormous cemetery. Future years would bring recurrent waves of anti-Semitism and even more departures.

  Ola and Władek never considered leaving. They were on the side of the victors and the prospect of doing something positive appeared more tangible than ever. So we kept moving from one town to another, shadowing my father’s postings. Our immediate return to the devastated Warsaw was
out of the question and for a time we settled in Łódz. Eventually, almost three years after the war, we returned to Warsaw.

  We entered from the east, crossing the Vistula along a temporary pontoon bridge, one of the few available connections between the two sides of the city. Though the traffic moved slowly, the bridge wobbled and shifted, the water terrifyingly close. Father covered my eyes and held me tight. On that day my parents could see with their own eyes what had happened to their city. On Hitler’s orders, Warsaw had been razed to the ground, to serve as an example to other great cities. Himmler, directly responsible for the carnage, had ordered: ‘The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.’

  When, in the winter of 1945, the Red Army entered Warsaw, it was empty of people, but within days its citizenry began to return, to embrace their city as it was: uninhabitable, bleak, open to the elements, without running water, with a profusion of unexploded bombs. While the powers that be equivocated about the future of Warsaw, the Varsovians had already decided its destiny.

  When we arrived, the streets had been largely cleared of rubble, but there was hardly anything left standing that my parents could recognise. The area where they’d lived before the war had been burned down and levelled. Of Nowolipki Street, where my mother’s family used to live, a solitary survivor – the Church of St Augustus, the place where the Germans had stored their looted wealth, weapons and ammunition – remained upright. And if, over the years, my parents went to investigate what had happened to the houses of their youth, where they’d lived before the war, to see the streets that endured only in their memories, where they’d last seen their parents, siblings, friends; if they ever attended the Remembrance of the Ghetto Uprising … I was not included.