Journeys with My Mother

by Halina Rubin

  During the German occupation, Warsaw consisted of three zones: the walled ghetto whose limits roughly corresponded with the area where Jews used to live; the well-guarded quarters reserved exclusively for the Germans; and a zone where Poles carried on their ‘normal’, if precarious, existence. We moved into what had been an enclave of high-ranking German officers. That is why our shelled building had remained standing.

  Ours was a spacious two-bedroom flat. The opportunity to live in a modern apartment, in the utterly ruined left side of the city,40 was rare, and clearly due to my father’s rank as major. It is strange to think that not long before, our apartment had belonged to a Nazi.

  I try to imagine the presence of that man. I am sure it was a man. I can picture his daily routine: shaving before breakfast in front of the same bathroom mirror my father later used; breakfasting in the same dining room where we did, before getting into his shiny black car parked in our cul-de-sac street. I will never know what part our Nazi played in the destruction of the city, in the murder of our family, in the indiscriminate pillaging of old libraries. But I do know – unless he kept books for decoration – that he liked reading. Especially books on the art of warfare. I wonder which of these volumes had been brought from Germany and which had been stolen from a private or public Warsaw collection. Volumes of Talleyrand’s writing on Napoleon, Clausewitz’s On War, Schiller’s poetry (was he a romantic at heart?), at least one book in French by Victor Hugo, the 1872 Paris edition of Notre Dame de Paris. This last gilt-edged book with delicate engravings by Perrichon is still on my bookshelves.

  It was years earlier, in Łódz, when my mother, without a moment to catch her breath, became a student at the Medical Academy. Father was not in favour, not then and not later when she decided to specialise in paediatrics. As a rule, he tried to reign in his wife’s aspirations, his progressive principles at odds with the traditionalism he’d left behind; he seemed to be unaware of the contradiction. Later, when she began to practise, he was proud of her. Thinking about all this makes me smile, because my mother had a resolve of steel. No less was required in postwar Poland, first with one, then two children. Despite the trauma of the war years, and doubts about her memory, she aimed high in tackling medicine. A daunting task, even at the best of times.

  She had two wonderful study companions. I knew not to enter the room when the three of them, surrounded by a pile of books, tested each other. I was in awe of the solemnity of her aspiration and persistence, learning many mysterious words: auditorium, vade mecum, colloquium. The last was my favourite. I liked repeating it to myself, though it always meant no access to mama. I still have my mother’s Index Lectionum, Universitatas Varsoviensis, a small, tan-coloured book containing a record of her exams. That’s how I know she sat an exam on the anatomy and physiology of the eye the day before Andrzej was born. I also have her Medical Degree Certificate with a copy of the Hippocratic Oath she kept tucked inside. Do no harm. She knew it well, ever since she’d become a nurse, and never strayed from it. Even during the war when her patients were Germans.

  Her medical internship, with its day and night duties, brought no relief. Photographs from that period show my mother aged and worn out. She never refused the neighbours’ call to see their sick children. Sometimes I kept her company on these home visits. She’d climb the stairs slowly, out of breath; accepting money was out of the question.

  Just as she demanded so much of herself, she expected almost the same of me. At times it felt that no matter what I did, it was never good enough. She seemed always on hand to make corrections, either in person or by what she had etched into my psyche. More than anything, I had to be stoic. When my appendix had to be removed, I was admitted into the hospital where she worked. Minutes before the operation, she came to see me: white-coated, stethoscope around her neck, half-doctor, half-mother. She leaned close to me and said, ‘Remember, no whinging, no crying’ (read: what would my colleagues think?). I did not disappoint, although under the anaesthetic I swore like a trooper.

  Our new life became incomparably better. We still marvelled at running water, cold and hot; clean linen; food. My mother never took these things for granted and neither did I.

  At first there were food rations. In fact, there was a shortage of everything: food, clothing, paper. The shop windows displayed solitary bottles of vinegar or multiple jars of the same mustard. This situation lasted for years. All our clothes were second-hand and my early school lunches consisted of buttered bread sprinkled with sugar. This standard fare was enlivened, when, for a short while, the UNRRA41 sent us some basic provisions. What I remember best is the chocolate. It came in thick blocks and, because it must have been well past its better days, no one could possibly bite into it. My mother shredded it and – a real treat – put it on my bread. When something special arrived in the shops, be it cheese, fish or meat, queues formed immediately and one had to wait for hours. With time, it became my and Andrzej’s duty to line up.

  I was still undernourished and it irked my mother that I refused to eat; apart from bread and eggs, and, yes, chocolate, the very thought of food made me nauseous. I remember Ola fuming when, at some children’s party, abundant with pastry and sweets, I had none. She pinched my thigh painfully, pointing at Basia, Zosia or Marysia stuffing themselves without restraint. My parents tried everything, from reasoning and pleading to bribery and locking me up until my meal was finished. It rarely happened. Even my parents had neither the time nor the inclination to sit and watch me fiddling with my food. I looked at the sky, heard children’s voices in the street and schemed how to escape my predicament. Soon a generation of cats and dogs grew stronger at my expense.

  The war remained our daily companion for a long time. For years it greeted us first thing in the morning, with Red Cross announcements on the radio: such and such searching for a father, mother, aunt, cousin or friend. We always stopped whatever we were doing so as not to miss any of it. The war was also present in the films we saw, the books we read and, above all, in the daily conversations of the adults around us. When, after school, we messed around the mulberry tree, the most common game was playing at war. Some of us were the Poles, the other the Germans. Nobody volunteered to be a German since eventually one of the Poles would command Hände hoch! and the German would be ‘killed’ and out of the game. We were hateful. It took us a while to get tired of it.

  My way to school was another daily reminder of wartime, but I think of it fondly and dream of it sometimes. The first stretch between Plac Zbawiciela and Unii Lubelskiej, then a canyon of ruins punctuated by warning signs of unexploded bombs and mines, seemed long. Past the roundabout of Unii Lubelskiej; then Sadowa Street, skirting an expanse of unused, weed-infested land, made its way down, almost reaching my school. Although inclined to do all sorts of stupid things, like playing chicken with trams or getting a ride on one which was just as risky, I was never tempted to explore the ruins. In warmer months, on the way home, a bunch of us would linger on a vacant lot where a solitary locomotive, carriages and rails long gone, lay half-buried in a jumble of weeds.

  The Royal Park of Łazienki offered us another, if longer, way home from school. We’d walk the entire length of it, playing hide and seek, collecting acorns or chestnuts, feeding squirrels. It was enough to stretch out one’s hand and softly call ‘basia, basia, basia’, and a squirrel would come running, snatching a nut and lingering for a bit to see if there was more to come.

  Once we were locked inside the park. It was getting dark and it took us some time to find a space with bent metal railings. We were still flat-chested then so, one by one, without too much effort, we managed to squeeze through to the other side. Only one girl, who had the bosom of a mature woman, got stuck.

  With our parents at work we were feral, latchkey children, glad to be free of supervision. None of us felt neglected – at least that is the way I, and later Andrzej, felt. We were proud of our mother, free to roam, visit friends or bring them home for dinner.

 
; Even so, there were limits to my freedom and overstepping the mark led to unpleasant consequences. Once, I took the three-year-old Andrzej to a friend of mine. By the time we returned at nine in the evening, my parents had already phoned every hospital in Warsaw as well as the Milicja.42 Instead of being pleased not to have lost both of their children at the same time, they were terribly angry. My mother screamed at me but left the physical punishment to my dad, who whacked me hard. As if I needed reinforcement to know I was wrong.

  I was one of those lucky Jewish children whose parents had survived the war. Other children I knew had spent months in ghettos before being smuggled to the Aryan side, never to see their mothers and fathers again. Each of us had a story to tell, but we did not talk about our experiences, not until we were much older.

  Every child in Europe was undernourished and sickly. In the first years of primary school we had to line up to get a tablespoon of tran, a fish oil. A nurse dispensed the vile liquid directly into our mouths with the same greasy aluminium spoon; only a piece of bread, generously sprinkled with salt, stopped us from retching.

  My school was one of the first secular schools in Warsaw, attracting the children of Party luminaries and intelligentsia, many of them Jewish. Years later, one of the alumni ventured a joke: that our parents could have formed almost the entire Politburo,43 if not the government. None of it earned us any kudos, of course. On the contrary, we were the most disliked school in Warsaw.

  Today it seems incomprehensible that once upon a time, in my teens, I wore the uniform of the communist youth: navy pleated skirt, white blouse and properly knotted red tie – and attended meetings and demonstrations, chanting slogans. Before the XIX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we had to learn its theses. I tried to do the homework but my eyes glazed over the moment I read the first sentence; my brain refused to absorb it. I was thirteen. Students who lagged behind, whose political awareness was found wanting, were publicly criticised and condemned, just as adults were at Party meetings.

  Convinced that our form of socialism was the only way forward, I was concerned about the plight of children in Africa and the workers of Panama, convinced that in our socialist country, we were progressing towards a brighter future.

  My parents had a difficult time on their own political roller-coaster. I was not included in their conversations but I do remember the atmosphere, their strained voices and despondency. They must have worried that my careless remarks could implicate them as enemies of the people or flunkeys of western powers: spies. This pattern was repeated in the other families I knew. How could I forget those gloomy years in the early fifties, of the silences and fear, when some fathers, and even mothers, of my classmates were imprisoned on charges of espionage, capital punishment pending. For their children, it was a catastrophe from which they would never recover. For the rest of us, there were only whispers, sinister party announcements parroted by our principal, and the chill of something beyond our comprehension. During these years my father developed seemingly incurable insomnia. The remedy – a cocktail of sedatives and sleeping tablets – nearly drove him to insanity. Only much later could I make sense of what I then considered to be their exaggerated bouts of caution.

  In the late fifties, there was a short period of political ‘thaw’. Censorship eased off, ushering in diverse voices in art and literature. It did not last long, but we gradually began to leave behind our uncritical belief in the system.

  Outside this grotesquery we had, what was for us, a normal life. Compared to our western counterparts, there were very few material comforts. We became readers of books, theatre-goers and film aficionados. Our desire to see films, especially the ‘over 18’ ones, was a challenge which we rose to magnificently – sometimes with comic effects. I remember climbing through a small toilet window into the Klub cinema to see The Wages of Fear starring Yves Montand. Getting inside the cinema was almost as thrilling as the film itself. Ours was a puritanical society. Today a child of fourteen would be allowed to see the film without parental guidance. While we missed out on Hollywood movies, we could feast on those made by Marcel Carné, neo-realist Italian directors, French New Wave films, not to mention the genius of Kurosawa and Bergman. Then, there was matriculation to worry about and, not least, we were busy falling in love.

  By the time I went to university, ours was considered to be ‘the most joyous barrack in the camp’. Indeed, we were granted some freedoms unheard of in other socialist countries: mockingly witty cabarets, smoke-filled jazz-clubs, plays that sharply held a mirror to our reality. Our thirst for satire, double meaning and subversion was such that even stories like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ carried a message of defiance. How inventive were our ‘uses of adversity’!

  Back then we were convinced that the system would go on forever.

  23

  Migration

  The events of 1968 had many consequences. It was the year that tore apart families and friends, scattering us over various countries and continents. Our family was one of them.

  My parents and Andrzej, who was just out of school, went to Israel; the town of Rehovot, just south of Tel Aviv, became their new home. They liked their small city: the night look of the milky, globe-shaped street lights in Herzel Street; the Weizmann Institute and its park with flame trees and oleanders; the open market; even the noisy and dusty streets lined with small businesses.

  In spring, the scent of orange flowers from the neighbouring Schiller kibbutz plantations wafted through the town.

  In Australia I missed them terribly. My mother wrote to me diligently about their new life. I accumulated hundreds of these loving blue dispatches, each reminding me to look after myself, eat vegetables and fruit. She must have felt that without these weekly reminders, year after year, she would be failing her maternal duties, knowing that my diet was woefully lacking.

  They took with them our dog from Warsaw, Żaba, known in Rehovot as ola hadasha, a new immigrant. We used to quip that her dark soulful eyes expressed the millennia of Jewish suffering. In truth, she was a smart and lovable mongrel. By the time I came to see them, she was bilingual.

  Despite my dire predictions, we were able to see each other regularly, either in Israel or, less often, in Australia. It was a pleasure to walk with my parents in Rehovot. People greeted them or stopped them for a chat. I could see they were well liked and respected. As in Warsaw, friends came over for dinners. My mother radiated the pleasure of having guests while my father regaled them with his overblown stories and anecdotes.

  Ola worked in a paediatric clinic, but the four-hour siesta seemed to make our days longer.

  At times, it was my father who guided me through Israel; he loved showing me around. He took me to a few kibbutzim that he’d helped establish in his Palestine days. Eventually, I had to continue my explorations without him. Putting up with hot, rattling buses was beyond this old warrior’s strength.

  Between them, they spoke Polish. In many respects, Israel felt like Poland. Maybe because so many Israelis came from the same region of Europe, where people spoke their mind and offered their advice freely. Polish books, new and old, were available at Neustein’s bookshop-cum-library in Tel Aviv. It became a meeting place for like-minded people as all kinds of treasures – including those prohibited by the communist regime – could be found there, in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish. The habitués were mainly Polish Jews who wanted to remain in touch with the culture and language of their earlier lives. Ironically, they were most often the same people who’d been exiled from Poland; their loyalty deemed to be questionable.

  In Israel, there is no stigma in being a Jew. This is not to say that the country is free of fault-lines. They are just different. A multitude of ethnicities, customs, languages and religions have not created a melting pot but a mosaic of groups, existing next to and sometimes against each other. Israeli politics are at least as complex as that of Poland, and for any two Jews there are at least three opinions. It would be impossible not to have s
ome of your own. Władek and Ola were very comfortable in this world. My father, especially, had a knack for dealing with potentially inflammatory situations. Nothing worked as well as humour.

  Next door to them on the same floor lived a religious Moroccan family. Concerned with the absence of a mezuzah on my parents’ front doorframe, they offered to affix one. My father, in his most cordial way, assured them that one mezuzah would do for both doors.

  There were many things, however, that my parents could not tolerate: the contemptuous attitude towards Palestinians, forced displacements, and the building of new settlements in the West Bank. Appalled by the massacres in Sabra and Shatila, they became vocal critics of the Israeli government. Untroubled peace is hard to find – but how many wars could my parents endure in their lifetime? I asked myself during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. My father sounded almost jolly over the phone, reassuring me that the situation did not compare with 1939; they were safe in a shelter. Some consolation! That said, his strong voice did comfort me a little. At least until the next call, when I needed another dose of the same.

  When Annette was about to be born, my mother came to Melbourne. As always, she was with me when I needed her. When I woke up from anaesthesia, she was the first to tell me, ‘Halinko, you have a beautiful daughter.’ And Annette, who I spoke to in Polish from the day she was born, had a common language with her grandparents.

  But no matter how special our reunions were, they always ended in farewells. The older my parents got, the harder it became to leave them. My father, by then smaller and frailer, his mop of thick hair replaced by the delicate white plumage of an old man, suffered a series of heart attacks. I understood that each one could have been his last. Tel Aviv airport must be the hardest place on earth to say goodbye. No one shies away from emotion, no stiff upper lip there. Our last embraces were full of sorrow, as if every separation was final. We tried not to be overwhelmed by the sadness of our parting, though Ola always had tears in her eyes. Once I’d lost sight of them, I allowed myself to weep.