Although this greatly relieved my mind, it only occurred to me after I had finally recovered the plate that perhaps it was a far greater sin to be secretly ‘stealing’ bread and wine from the church and deceiving my aunt every Sunday than to ask for the plate back.
There were many days when I did go and play with Kasia and coming home one afternoon after school I let myself into the flat and called out, ‘Kasia’s asked me to tea. I said you wouldn’t mind. Is that all right?’
Usually Aunt Zuzia would come out of the kitchen, hug me, tell me to behave myself nicely at Kasia’s and let me go. But today, she rushed into the hall, grabbed me and hugged me tight.
‘Where have you been? You should have been home ten minutes ago.’
‘I came straight home. Kasia’s invited me to tea. I said I’d tell you and go straight back.’
‘You must go to her house and explain that you can’t come today.’ Aunt Zuzia was acting very strangely. ‘Run and apologise. Say something has happened and that you are very sorry but you must come straight back home.’
‘But why? What’s happened?’
‘I’ll tell you as soon as you’re back. Or rather, Uncle Julek will. He’s taken the afternoon off especially to tell you, so come back immediately.’
‘I hate you,’ I shouted, stamping my foot, frustrated that she wasn’t budging. ‘You’re being so mean. You never want me to have any fun.’
‘Darling –’ Aunt Zuzia began.
Just then Uncle Julek appeared in the kitchen doorway.
‘Go and do what your aunt says, immediately!’ he roared.
Coming back, I was expecting my uncle and aunt to be very angry with me but instead I found Aunt Zuzia waiting for me smiling but with tears pouring down her cheeks. She gave me a big hug, calling out, ‘She’s back.’
Uncle Julek was sitting at the kitchen table reading. He didn’t look up.
‘Tell her, Julek.’
‘Don’t rush me, Zuzia,’ Uncle Julek said, then looking at me, ‘We’ve had a letter today all the way from England. It’s from your father … He’s safe and well.’
‘My father? Tatuś is coming home?’ I cried. ‘At last. Now he’s finished in Europe he can come and live with us again. Now everyone has to believe me when I say I’m not an orphan. When’s he coming? Does he ask about me in the letter?’
‘Yes, but he’s not coming home. He wants you to go to Scotland, to join him as soon as possible.’
I was startled. What did they mean? Go to Scotland? Leave my friends? My school? Start all over again somewhere else?
‘But I would far rather he came here, so all my friends could see him and he could talk to Father Pawel about letting me become a Catholic so that I won’t be damned when I die. You could look after him too. He can have my bedroom.’
‘I would far rather he came here too –’ Aunt Zuzia began, but she stopped when Uncle Julek waved his hand at her.
‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘You are to go to Britain to join him just as soon as it can be arranged. I will contact Frederika immediately and she will make all the arrangements. She knows the right people.’
I grabbed my aunt’s hands and danced her around the kitchen.
‘I’m going to England to see my Tatuś,’ I sang out. ‘You wait till I tell Kasia and the others. Can I go and tell her now?’
‘No,’ said Aunt Zuzia.
‘Yes,’ said Uncle Julek. ‘Go and tell your friend, but come back at once. Your aunt, of course, will not let you out of her sight from now on.’
I rushed into the hall but hearing a loud sob come from my aunt I peeped back through the crack in the door. I saw Uncle Julek get up from his chair and go over to where Aunt Zuzia was sitting, crying into her handkerchief. He bent down and put his arms around her.
‘I shall miss her so much,’ Aunt Zuzia sobbed. ‘She’s the only thing in my life. There’ll be no point in living after she leaves.’
‘It’s me you married, not her, remember,’ he said gently, trying to make her smile. ‘Yes, we will miss her, but we are too old for her. She needs her father and we must thank God that Erwin’s still alive and that his letters have finally got through.’
‘He’s got Renata back and we are left with nothing. Jerzyk and Fredzio have both been taken away from us and now we’ve got to give up Renata too. I can’t go through all this again.’
‘Of course you can, you silly hysterical woman. Pull yourself together and be happy for the child. It will be hard enough for her to go and live in a foreign country without you making it worse.’
‘I know. I’ll try.’ Aunt Zuzia wept into her apron.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now how about some sort of a celebration tea for us all? Renata will be back at any moment.’
And on hearing that, I flew down the stairs to tell Kasia my wonderful news.
Chapter Seventeen
October 1945–March 1946
My dearest darling Renata, my father wrote. I still can’t believe I have found you after all this time. I can’t wait to see you again – to hug you and kiss you … and at the end he would sign off, Until we meet. Your ever-loving Tatuś.
His letters came full of happiness and plans. I heard from my father nearly every day now.
I showed the letters to Kasia.
‘It doesn’t matter so much that you don’t have a mother any more,’ she said, ‘because you have a father. Not everyone in the class has a father. In fact a lot of them died in the war.’
Kasia’s words made me feel so much better. I wasn’t different from the other girls any more. I still had one parent and, even though I wasn’t living with him, it didn’t matter because he was alive and soon we would be together again. I read and reread his letters. With each letter, my father and my new life became clearer. He wrote in detail about his friends who were all so very anxious to meet me, especially Mr Horowicz and his young wife Audrey who had heard how much I liked to read and were eager to meet this mysterious ‘lost’ daughter from Poland.
He wrote about the special plans he had made for my arrival.
You will have to travel by aeroplane across Poland and then take a ship across the sea that separates Poland from England. After your arrival we will stay in London, the capital of this wonderful country where policemen are friendly, will always help you, and don’t carry guns …
‘That’s impossible,’ I said to Aunt Zuzia. ‘Policemen always carry guns.’
‘The Gestapo did, that’s for sure,’ Aunt Zuzia replied, laughing. ‘But not all policemen do.’
Then we will head north through England to Scotland …
‘Where’s Scotland?’ I said.
We opened the atlas from the library and looked through the pages until we found a map with a pink blob labelled England and a blue blob, Scotland, stuck on top.
‘I didn’t know Scotland was a different country,’ I said. ‘I thought all of this was England.’ I pointed to the island that looked like a funny old lady with a big skirt and tall hat, holding a basket.
‘That island is England and Scotland and Wales all together,’ Uncle Julek informed me. ‘It’s a long and complicated history.’
I was amazed. This little pink blob seemed so small that it was hard to believe that it could have won a war against the mighty Germany.
We will travel on a train and the journey will be a long one. But don’t worry, my sweetheart, it won’t be like the wagons you travelled in with Frederika. Here the engines pull carriages with two rows of padded seats that face each other. Each carriage can hold up to eight people and their luggage quite comfortably. In fact our cases sit in racks above our heads …
‘On trains in England,’ I told a wide-eyed Kasia, ‘even the luggage has somewhere to sit.’
We laughed at the thought of all the bags and boxes and chickens and rabbits sitting in seats above our heads.
From the window (each carriage has its own window that opens) we will be able to see all the towns and the fields rushing
past. The church spires …
‘Are they Catholic in England?’ I asked Uncle Julek hopefully.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Mostly Church of England. Now, let’s not go into this again. As I said before it is your father’s decision now.’
And people going to and from their work in cars or on bicycles …
So these people still drove cars. Maybe like the cars that had disappeared from Poland and were now just stories just as the fiacre driver had told me.
We will see hills becoming higher and higher as we head north and finally in the Lake District, just before we reach the border with Scotland, the hills become mountains …
‘The Lake District. But that’s where John and Titty live,’ I exclaimed.
You will love Scotland, my father wrote, I live in a castle, a fairy-tale castle just like the ones in Mamusia’s stories that you loved so much.
‘Aunt Zuzia, he lives in a castle,’ I cried.
‘He actually lives next door to a castle,’ said Uncle Julek. ‘He works in the grounds of a castle, Dupplin Castle. They set up a Polish hospital there during the war and your father’s been working there as a doctor for a couple of years now.’
Even better, I thought, I will be able to look at a real castle every morning when I wake and every night before I go to sleep.
The castle is very old and turreted and belongs to Lord Forteviot. Inside there are thick tapestries and hunting trophies (heads of stags) hang on stone walls, and on the floor in front of one of the fires lies a tiger rug complete with head and claws. In glass cases you can see huge fish that have been caught in local lochs and rivers and every room is filled with very old beautifully carved furniture … and here the men wear skirts and carry daggers in their long knee-high socks …
This was unbelievable but my father had included a picture of a fierce-looking man with a beard, wearing a checked skirt, knee socks and a beret.
‘Look, the men wear skirts!’ I exclaimed.
I showed the picture to Uncle Julek who snorted loudly and told me the skirts were called kilts.
‘And the women wear the trousers,’ Aunt Zuzia said laughing, and for a moment I wondered whether they were all playing a big joke on me or whether it really was true all that my father had written.
And you will be able to play in the grounds of the castle, walk through the rose garden, watch the red squirrels leaping from tree to tree, smell the pine trees and swim in the loch. It is such a wonderfully quiet place, so tranquil. It’s the ideal place for the soldiers to get well again …
I tried to imagine what this beautiful Scotland looked like with its mountains and deer, forests and squirrels, rivers and lakes – called lochs – and enormous fish that leapt from the water. It sounded like a story book. But in the end I gave up and resorted to leafing through the books on the library shelves to find what I was looking for. I could only find a few pen-and-ink sketches that didn’t help much.
‘I can’t wait to go and live with Tatuś in Scotland,’ I said, about a hundred times a day.
One day my uncle said, ‘Renata, make sure you tell your aunt how much you love her and how much you will miss her. It will make her so happy.’
‘But I do love her … ever so much,’ I said. ‘How can I tell her that I will miss her? I don’t know if I will.’
‘Assume that you will,’ he said in a crisp voice.
In one letter Tatuś included a small photograph of himself in military uniform, looking tall and distinguished. The photo was a bit blurry so it was difficult to see his face clearly, but he was smiling. I was so proud of the photo that I showed it to all my friends. I read his letters again and again and thought of little else except the wonderful new country far away over the sea and the magical time I would have when I finally got there.
One day I turned to Aunt Zuzia. ‘Does Tatuś know about Mamusia and Babcia? Does he know that they were taken away and they are dead? Does he know that he will never see them again? Does he know that you and Uncle Julek and Frederika are the only ones left alive in our family?’
Aunt Zuzia stopped what she was doing and turned to face me.
‘He does,’ she said. ‘We have told him everything. He has been distraught but he has you and that makes up for everything.’
Every week Aunt Zuzia helped me write a letter to my father.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said. ‘I have told him everything already. If only I could talk to him. Perhaps I’ll wait until I get to England and then we can talk all the time. I’ll tell him everything then.’
‘But you like getting letters from your father, don’t you?’ Aunt Zuzia asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Well he likes getting them from you too. He hasn’t seen you for so many years and he wants to know all about you.’
‘What shall I write about? Shall I tell him about the orphanage and how much I hated it?’
‘No, I don’t think that is a good idea.’
‘But he does know about it, doesn’t he?’ I said. ‘You told me you’ve told him everything.’
‘Yes, but all that is in the past, so why make him unhappy? Better to write and tell him how much you love him and how happy you are at school.’
‘I’ve told him everything about school and anyway I don’t know if I do love him,’ I retorted. ‘I don’t really remember him. Perhaps I won’t love him, so isn’t it better to wait till I see him? Father Pawel would be very upset if I was to tell a lie.’
Uncle Julek chuckled out loud.
‘That girl’s got more brains than I give her credit for,’ he remarked, but Aunt Zuzia would not let it go.
‘Of course you love your father and you are going to tell him so. I will dictate what you must write.’
So my stiff little notes were sent off weekly. I wasn’t sure what my father would think. Even though I wrote the letters, the words weren’t really my own and I worried that Tatuś would see straight through the not-quite-truths that I had written.
One of Renata’s letters written to her father from Przemyśl, found amongst her father’s belongings many years later
It was not only me who received letters. Uncle Julek poured over endless communications.
‘They are from Frederika, mainly,’ Aunt Zuzia explained. ‘They’re to do with the arrangements for you to leave Poland and get to England. Thankfully Frederika knows who to contact. It makes it a bit easier but there is still an awful lot of paperwork.’
As the weeks turned into months I began to worry that I would never get to England. Perhaps another promise would be broken. Perhaps my fairy-tale ending wasn’t going to happen after all and I wouldn’t be living happily ever after.
To begin with my schoolfriends had envied my good fortune and were always eager for me to read out loud the latest letter from my father. But now they were beginning to grow tired of my talk of this huge adventure that might never take place. So I began to tell them exaggerated tales of this wonderful new place called Scotland and, as I made up more and more stories, soon everyone wanted to listen.
At home, Aunt Zuzia was growing sadder and sadder. Every time a letter came, Aunt Zuzia and I read it together and every time my aunt would start to cry and cling to me.
‘Oh my darling,’ she sobbed. ‘I love you so much. I am going to miss you more than you know. Will you miss me too? My darling, tell me you will.’
I began to feel sorry for my aunt. I knew what it was like to be separated from the ones you loved. I could still feel the terror of being separated from Mamusia and Babcia, Aunt Adela and Zazula; of not being able to do anything, of being left behind and not knowing. I hugged and kissed Aunt Zuzia a lot, telling her, ‘I love you, of course I love you. I will come back and visit and I will write every day.’
But as time went on I found it more and more difficult to keep this up. All I could think about was starting my new life in this fairy-tale land and I felt so happy and excited that it was difficult to pretend to be sad, and why should I? Th
en I began to find it hard to look at Aunt Zuzia as her eyes were always puffy and red and this made her look tired and old. Sometimes when she thought no one was looking, I would see her weeping into her apron. One day when I watched her crying, I thought to myself that I didn’t think I was going to miss her at all and the sooner I went, the better. But then I felt guilty and tried hard to pretend that the separation was going to be as painful for me as it was going to be for her.
Uncle Julek could see that I was pretending; he didn’t say anything but the more I pretended the more worried I became because lying was sinning in the eyes of God as Father Pawel reminded us every week: ‘Lying is one of the deadliest sins,’ he shouted every Sunday from the pulpit, his voice rising and filling the church.
I began to feel his stare on me and, as I lowered my head, I would see the eyes of Jesus watching me and knowing the sin that lay heavy in my heart. I carried this feeling around with me all week until the following Sunday. Then, with a lighter step, I would join Kasia and her parents as they walked to church where I could confess everything and be absolved of my sin – until the arrival of the next letter which would spark another wave of guilt and I would have to pick up my lie and carry it wherever I went, all over again.
Finally the letter from Frederika that finalised the date for my departure arrived, 20 March 1946.
Kasia wanted to know all about the arrangements.
‘Where are you going to live? Is the castle as big as Sleeping Beauty’s? How are you going to get to England?’
I answered her as best I could and what I didn’t know I invented. I said that I would be travelling with my cousin Frederika, she was going to take me to my father. We were going on the big ship full of children.
‘Tell us about the ship,’ said my friends in chorus. ‘We have never seen a ship before.’
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