Let Me Tell You a Story

  ‘Not for a long time, darling. I’ll tell you when she comes back and you can see her then.’

  ‘Where has she gone? Can I write to her? When she knows where I am she will come to see me. I know she will. She promised.’

  Aunt Zuzia said nothing. Something wasn’t quite right.

  ‘You know where she is. I can tell. Has something happened to her? Please tell me.’

  Aunt Zuzia sighed.

  ‘Marynia’s in prison,’ Aunt Zuzia said. ‘That’s why she can’t come and see you.’

  ‘In prison? But why? Who put her there?’

  ‘It’s a long story but Marynia was caught by the Nazis trying to help a little Jewish boy. He had been left all alone by his mother. When they caught her the Germans put her in prison – she was lucky not to have been shot.’

  The world seemed to stop. I started to shiver uncontrollably and it took all my strength to ask, ‘Was the boy called Jan?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s move on. I’ll show you the Rynek, do you remember the market square where we bought the melon?’

  ‘It was Jan. I know it was. And he wasn’t left alone by his mother, he was thrown out by Maciej because his mother couldn’t pay for him. When Marynia heard that, she promised me she would look for him. It’s not her fault. It’s mine. We must tell the Gestapo and get her out of prison. They will let her go if I tell them what really happened and that it’s all my fault.’

  I was so upset that suddenly I was shouting at the top of my voice and crying at the same time.

  ‘Stop it. Stop it at once,’ Aunt Zuzia hissed angrily, gripping my shoulders tightly. ‘We’re going home this minute and don’t you dare utter another word or sound till we get there.’

  She grabbed my wrist tightly and started pulling me back along the road from where we had come. Surprised at my aunt’s harsh behaviour, I did as I was told, but I couldn’t stop myself sobbing at the thought of Marynia locked up in a dark, damp prison all alone. Aunt Zuzia dragged me all the way and, as soon as we were back in the apartment, she couldn’t stop crying as she tried to explain what would happen to me, to them, to Frederika and Marynia if I were to tell anyone about Jan. Uncle Julek who had come out of his consulting room to see what all the noise was about agreed with my aunt.

  ‘You owe it to Marynia to keep your mouth shut,’ he said. ‘How do you think she will feel if the Nazis arrest you, or us, after all she has sacrificed? She will come out of prison one day, but you would be shot or worse and so would we because we are Jewish too. If you tell anyone, you will murder us all. You are a clever girl and I know you understand what we are saying. You’ve been through too much not to. Don’t waste your precious life and ours. Marynia wouldn’t thank you. It is not your responsibility that she decided to help the boy. It was her decision. She knew the risk she was taking and she was glad to do it. She will survive, I promise you.’

  Uncle Julek was talking quietly, trying to make me feel better. His words soothed me and I began to calm down.

  ‘I promise, Uncle Julek,’ I said, ‘I promise I will never mention Jan again, or Marynia, and I have never told anyone I am a Jew.’

  But silently I promised myself that one day I would rescue Marynia. My father would get Marynia out of prison when he came back and then we would go and find Jan. And it wouldn’t be long now before Tatuś was back – hadn’t I heard Božena tell my aunt that the war would soon be over? Soon everything would be all right again.

  After this incident, Aunt Zuzia was very careful when she took me out in case other memories might upset me. It was obvious that Aunt Zuzia was happy to have me living with them but she was also frightened that something bad might happen to me, so she didn’t let me out of her sight for a moment. For this reason, it took many days to explore Przemyśl; we only took short walks and we never went very far. Przemyśl had been heavily bombed and buildings had fallen down into piles of rubble that lay on the ground. I remembered some of the buildings that had survived the bombs – there was the Greek Orthodox church, with its columns and flights of steps, and the main market square. But all the cafés and most of the shops were shut.

  But in a corner of the main square there was a small shop that was still open and every time we passed it there was a long, snake-like queue of people that went from the shop’s front door right across the square.

  ‘Why are there so many people queuing outside that shop?’ I asked Aunt Zuzia on one of our trips.

  ‘It’s a bread shop,’ she replied. ‘The bread is better there than anywhere else.’

  ‘Why don’t the people come back when it is less busy?’ I asked. ‘Then they wouldn’t have to stand outside in a queue.’

  ‘There’s not enough bread to go round and the Poles can only buy what the Nazis don’t want. The soldiers get to buy whatever they want and however much they want. We can have what’s left over.’

  ‘But that’s not fair. They should be sharing with the rest of us if there is not enough bread to go round. Why doesn’t the baker bake more?’

  ‘It’s not as easy as that,’ Aunt Zuzia replied. ‘There’s not enough of anything any more.’

  I never minded queuing for bread. The baker was so clever that he had made a wonderful display for the window. He had collected all the stale bits of leftover bread, small pieces of dough and crumbs, and using some water had moulded them together to make a small village with houses, cows, horses and even people. There were stalks of corn in a small field and on the roof of one of the cottages a stork nested on a cart-wheel base. Every bit of this magical model was a soft golden brown because, as Aunt Zuzia explained, he had first baked it hard and then glued it together.

  ‘It’s like the witch’s cottage in “Hansel and Gretel” that is made of gingerbread and all sorts of lovely things to eat. It would be a shame to spoil this by nibbling bits off,’ I exclaimed when I saw it for the first time.

  ‘It wouldn’t taste very nice because the baker told me that he added lots of salt to the mixture,’ said Aunt Zuzia.

  ‘Why did he do that? To stop greedy people having a nibble?’

  ‘That might be part of the reason,’ she laughed, ‘but the real purpose is to stop it going mouldy. Salt is a preservative.’

  I couldn’t get enough of this wonderful model and we had to stop and examine it each time we passed, even when we weren’t queuing for bread. I saw the village as it was, a place of comfort and peace, showing a happy and simple way of life. I invented people for every cottage and a name for every animal. Whenever we went in to buy bread, the baker, Mr Malewski, would talk about his village to me as if it was real. He was proud of his creation and delighted that I loved it so much too.

  ‘You’re so clever,’ I told him one day, ‘to think of using the crumbs and stale bits of bread instead of throwing them away. I bet you are the first person in the world to have done this.’

  Mr Malewski laughed. ‘I would be telling you a lie, little girl, if I said I was. Two or three hundred years ago French prisoners of war used to amuse themselves by turning bits of bread into wonderful models, far better than mine. And some of the models are still around today.’

  ‘Has the war really lasted two or three hundred years?’ I was flabbergasted. Maybe Frederika and Božena were wrong after all and it would never end – not in my lifetime anyway.

  ‘No, not the same war, not the one we are in now. There have been lots of wars. People are always at war.’

  ‘Why are we at war? Why are the Germans fighting us?’ I wanted to know.

  Mr Malewski laughed again but sadly this time. ‘I wish I knew the answer to that one. Get your aunty to explain it to you. She’s a clever lady.’

  But Aunt Zuzia didn’t explain. Every time I asked her questions about the war, about Germans or Jews, she quickly changed the subject.

  ‘It’s better not to talk about these things,’ she would say. ‘You never know who’s listening.’

  But I wanted answers to the questions that bubbled up ins
ide. Questions that wouldn’t go away: why were my mother and grandmother taken away? Where were they now? Why was Marynia in prison when all she wanted to do was help Jan? Why had my father been away for so long and never written to me? Why did the Nazis hate Jews? But no one would help me and so I decided that I would have to be patient and wait until my father came home. He would answer my questions. I never for a moment doubted that he would.

  The bakery wasn’t the only shop to have stayed open on the square. A few doors down was a clothes shop that, Aunt Zuzia told me, before the war had been full of elegant and expensive dresses.

  ‘All the richest ladies from miles around used to buy clothes here,’ Aunt Zuzia told me as we stood hand in hand peering through the window into the darkness beyond.

  ‘Did you buy your clothes here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I did, but I also had a dressmaker. Ah, those were the days.’ Aunt Zuzia sighed and glanced at the shabby coat she was wearing over a shapeless brown skirt.

  ‘I think you still look beautiful and smart,’ I said, and Aunt Zuzia smiled.

  ‘And over there,’ she pointed to the furthest corner of the square, ‘was a wonderful coffee shop. My friends and I used to meet there every morning at eleven for coffee and cakes, and a good gossip. It was a very smart place called Wedel’s and the cakes and pastries they sold were wonderful. Their speciality was millefeuille – puff pastry layered with chocolate and a dark glossy icing over the top. They put a curly “W” on the top of each slice.’

  ‘It must have been lovely. I’ve never tasted chocolate – is it sweet?’

  ‘You tasted chocolate when you were younger,’ Aunt Zuzia reminded me. ‘I remember buying you lots. But of course you’ve forgotten. You were so small. You’ll taste chocolate again one day, when the war’s over.’

  ‘Everyone keeps promising me things when the war’s over. I wish it would hurry up and be over.’

  ‘We all wish the same,’ Aunt Zuzia said.

  We crossed over the square and I glimpsed a statue of a man with a moustache dressed in a long cape and high boots and standing high up on a block of stone.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘That was one of our great kings. He lived a long time ago when Poland was a rich and strong country. Ah, here’s the shop I want. Come on, let’s go in.’ Aunt Zuzia pushed open the door and walked into a stationery shop. She greeted the shopkeeper warmly. He smiled and looking at me started to fumble around under the counter. After much searching the shopkeeper finally produced what Aunt Zuzia had asked for and placed it on the counter.

  ‘These are for you,’ she told me. ‘They are dolls to cut out. And look, there are lots of clothes for them to wear when you have cut them out too. I’ll teach you how to do it carefully. I tried to get a proper doll for you, but there aren’t any. But these will be fun to dress up.’ I looked at the dolls and their outfits in delight. ‘Now we must go home and cook supper for your uncle.’

  ‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ I said. ‘Can’t we see some more shops?’

  ‘No, we must get back. It’s going to get dark soon and we’re not allowed to be out in the streets after dark. We might get arrested.’

  Uncle Julek was in the kitchen when we got back and he was looking cross.

  ‘Where have you been all this time? You know how dangerous it is to make yourself conspicuous.’

  ‘I was only showing Renata the town. She’s never seen shops before. She loves Mr Malewski’s bread model and so we had to stop and look at that and I also managed to find some paper dolls for her to play with.’

  ‘Sometimes I really believe you’re going soft in the head,’ he snarled. ‘Fancy risking everything for the sake of amusing a child. She’s going to have to learn that life isn’t all a big game and everything geared towards her.’

  ‘I think she learned that a very long time ago,’ Aunt Zuzia said crossly. ‘What she needs to learn now is that life is not always unhappy, loveless and dangerous and I mean to do my best to give her a little normality. You ought to be ashamed of your attitude to the child. It’s you who’s a big spoiled baby unable to cope with what’s happened.’

  Uncle Julek did not reply. He got up from the table and walked out of the room slamming the door hard behind him.

  Quickly I came to understand that I could do no wrong in the eyes of Aunt Zuzia. She gave me the best bits of food, never scolded me, waited on me hand and foot and protected me from Uncle Julek’s sharp tongue. I enjoyed it. But the more she did for me, the more I began to demand and the more Uncle Julek would look at me crossly and either leave the room to go and hide in his consulting room (a place I was never allowed to enter) or start to behave in a childish way that annoyed Aunt Zuzia. I didn’t like my uncle and was afraid of him so I enjoyed seeing my aunt get cross with him. Then he started to sulk whenever Aunt Zuzia fussed over me, fighting with me over second helpings, complaining to Aunt Zuzia that she was spoiling me. But I didn’t care. I just loved the attention.

  Aunt Zuzia was a wonderful cook and even without a lot of different ingredients she managed to make a meal taste lovely. She would make delicious soup with water and a few vegetables, and even without eggs, butter and much sugar she managed to bake cakes. She always let me lick the bowl and this made Uncle Julek angry. Like the baker, she never wasted anything but, unlike most people, we were never hungry. Barek, the only person to visit Aunt Zuzia and Uncle Julek other than the odd patient, said that my aunt could create a feast from an old piece of leather – or even a simple potato.

  Aunt Zuzia and Uncle Julek were very private. They never went out unless it was to do some shopping or Uncle Julek was called to see a patient. So that meant that I didn’t see many people either. Therefore I would look forward to the visits from Barek, who was a very old friend of my aunt and uncle. He told me that he was their family lawyer before the war but he wasn’t a Jew so when Aunt Zuzia and Uncle Julek had to ‘disappear’ he had moved into their apartment to try and keep it safe. I grew very fond of Barek with his smiling eyes and sticky-up grey hair; he always had time for me. He sat me on his knee and told me stories about life before the war and I would bombard him with questions about my father, my mother and Marynia whom he had known well. He’d tell me tales about their lives, what they were like and how they looked. I wanted to know everything. Although Barek was also fond of me and spent time telling stories and answering my questions, Uncle Julek didn’t seem to mind. It was only Aunt Zuzia’s fussing that irritated him, and he asked her over and over again to stop.

  ‘I’m just trying to protect her,’ Aunt Zuzia protested in a low voice, after they argued. ‘She has had so much unhappiness and I want her to have a normal life.’

  ‘This life is not normal and it is certainly not normal to spoil the child,’ Uncle Julek replied. ‘She is totally wrapped up in herself, can’t you see what you’re doing?’

  ‘You have changed, Julek,’ Aunt Zuzia said, ‘ever since the boys died. There’s nothing we can do. We can’t bring them back. Let me take care of Renata as I want. I know life isn’t normal but we have to do the best we can. I love having her here. It takes my mind off all that has happened.’

  Uncle Julek harrumphed and left the room.

  Chapter Fourteen

  July 1944

  Things had begun to change. Now when we went out, people were talking more, they were more lively, and sometimes even smiled at one another. I decided to ask Aunt Zuzia why.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  Aunt Zuzia didn’t reply but looked at Uncle Julek across the table.

  ‘They say the Russians are coming,’ he said.

  ‘The Russians?’ I said. ‘Why are they coming?’

  ‘To save us,’ said Aunt Zuzia. Then Uncle Julek told her to be quiet and not say anything more about the Russians.

  Then I heard different sounds. The distant hum of aeroplanes and then thunder.

  ‘The bombing has started,’ Uncle Julek said to Barek, who
now visited us more often. Barek nodded and his mouth as well as his eyes smiled in reply.

  Not long after that Barek arrived at the apartment much earlier than usual.

  ‘What a day! What a day!’ He was trembling all over and panting because he had run all the way up the stairs. ‘I never thought I would live to see it for myself.’ He grabbed Aunt Zuzia, twirled her round the kitchen and hugged her, then he slapped Uncle Julek on the back and lifted me into the air. Tears began running down his cheeks.

  ‘Renata has to be witness to this,’ he cried. ‘She is the next generation and it’s her generation and the generations that follow that will want to know the truth. Let’s take her and show her history in the making.’

  ‘Barek, no,’ said Aunt Zuzia. ‘She’s much too young and completely unused to hordes of people. She will be so frightened by the noise and the crowds and besides, she won’t understand what is going on. It might even reawaken memories that are best forgotten and what if we lost her?’

  ‘Barek’s right,’ Uncle Julek interrupted. ‘This is a momentous occasion. Let him take her, if she wants to go. No harm can come to her. No one will take any notice of her. She will be one face in a sea of people. Let her go and experience this for herself.’

  So not understanding what was happening, I went out into the street with Barek, perched high on his shoulders with a marvellous view over the heads of everyone heading in the same direction. People were coming out of every house into the morning sun. I had never seen a place so alive, so full of people, old and young, children too. There was noise and laughter and then singing and shouting. People shook hands and hugged each other. A man came forward and he and Barek shook hands with great force.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked Barek as the man turned away towards someone else.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Barek laughed as we were swept forward into the market square.

  From high up on Barek’s shoulders I looked around for the German soldiers in their grey-green uniform with their guns and dogs but I couldn’t see a single one. Where were they? I couldn’t see any of the horrible red swastikas in the windows or hanging from flagpoles. Instead people were waving a different red flag with a yellow hammer and curly moon thing and a star above. Barek pointed and laughed.