Dobryd (16 page)

I never really understood how all the love and hate she felt for Poland could continue to co-exist within her. She loved the language and hated those who spoke it. She refused any contact with the large Polish community in Montreal. She would never speak to any Pole who had been more than a child at the time of the war. This was to avoid the possibility, she explained, of talking to someone who had contributed to the betrayal of anyone she had loved. Her dislike of adult Germans never reached the proportions of her hatred of Poles her own age. These were her people, a generation she had once belonged to. She would never forget what they had done to her.

There were certain incidents she recalled more than others. Her mind returned to them again and again, as if her existence defined itself through the pain of those memories, and she reassured herself by probing to see if it was still there. When I was growing up and listening to her, it seemed to me often that in the background of my life there was a constant chorus of mourners. The steady and monotonous dirge of their lament gave me no peace. Perhaps it was intended that I should pick up and carry on the complaint of the betrayed. But at a certain age I saw myself as an offering on a memorial of hate, and I refused to have anything to do with it. I did not know then how powerful my mother's words had been, nor how deeply these stories of what had happened to the members of our family had penetrated my mind.

When the war broke out, my uncle Samuel, my mother's only brother, was living the kind of life he had always wanted to live, as a prosperous landowner, on good terms with his neighbours and his friends. He was certain they would protect him when the Germans came in search of Jews. In appearance, and in every other way, he resembled the Christian landowners of the district. There was no way the Germans could single him out.

In the winter of 1939 the German army reached the region where my uncle and his family lived. This was the beginning of the German occupation. They had not yet consolidated their hold on the countryside; the efficient grouping of victims for the purposes of destruction had not yet been set up. As they marched deeper into the country, their selection of victims was haphazard, and they were forced to rely to a great extent on the co-operation of the local population in rooting out “undesirables”.

When they reached my uncle's village, they camped overnight in the mayor's office. The next morning a small patrol left the mayor's building and headed for my uncle's farm. There was a local guide with them, and they seemed to be informed of every detail that would facilitate their work.

The first thing they did when they arrived at the farm was to kill the dogs. My uncle and his wife, still lingering over their breakfast, were taken entirely by surprise. But their destruction was not as simple as the soldiers had anticipated. Samuel and his wife struggled fiercely. They called to their servants, but no one appeared. They continued to resist alone as long as they could. The Germans had intended to hang them in public. This was the custom at the outset of the war, in dealing with important local personages. But because of the fierce struggle they encountered, they were obliged to shoot their victims first. Only then were they able to carry out their plan.

They were hung in the town square, but because of the resistance they had shown, the Germans hung them by their feet and forbade anyone to cut them down for a week. They remained like this for the prescribed period, and the peasants, after they had gotten used to the horror of this sight, came regularly in the evening to gaze at them and to gossip near their swaying shadows. Small children ran beneath them and used them as targets for their stone-throwing. Eventually they were cut down and buried in an unmarked grave.

Their only daughter, Olga, was away at school, and managed to survive the rest of the war. After the war, when she and my mother first heard the story of her parents' death, they decided to hunt down those responsible for it. They set out together for my uncle's farm. When the peasants learned that my mother and my cousin were willing to pay for information, the response was overwhelming. All sorts of names were proposed to them as the possible informers. My mother and my cousin realized despairingly that because of the peasants' cupidity they would never be certain who had committed the betrayal. Thus, the attempt at revenge ended in frustration, and they left the village without even finding the place of burial.

My mother was also haunted by the death of cousin Alexander. The partisan group he had joined included several Ukrainians who were more notorious than the Poles for their hatred of Jews. They must have been hostile to him from the start because he was a Jew; however, they managed to conceal their hatred until it would be useful to them.

Then a member of the group was captured by the Germans and destined to be shipped off for hard labour. His comrades arranged his release by handing over my cousin in his place. One night they sent him out on a small sabotage mission in the railroad yard. The Germans were alerted. Alexander was caught and executed. One month later the war was over.

After the incident of the crosses, the voices of the betrayed began to haunt my mother more than ever.

She felt they were urging her to leave the land where she had suffered. In the end she accepted their counsel.

III

The hardest part about leaving was our separation from Yuri, a separation that in all probability would be final.

Soon after our arrival in Bylau, Yuri had gone back to his village. When he returned, after an absence of a few weeks, he was so changed no one dared ask him what had happened. Eventually he was able to tell us that his village had fallen victim to a German reprisal attack. The Germans had burned the village to the ground. The few young people who remained were sent to labour camps; the old were made to dig their own mass grave, and fell into it as they were shot.

My mother and my aunt knew what Yuri was feeling. They waited, and helped him through the familiar cycle of numbness, self-pity, rage and hatred. In the end, when he was consoled as much as he would ever be, they were his family and he was theirs.

Now they were talking of emigrating and leaving him behind. The closer they came to a decision, the harder it was for them to tell him. But at last he had to be told. His reaction was one of total incomprehension. It seemed incredible to him that a misunderstanding as trivial as the one of the crosses could lead us to such a decision. For him the war was over, the enemy vanquished. Now was the time to rebuild, to forget the past, to live with confidence in the future. They were mad to run away now.

“What will you do alone in a strange land?” he asked in bewilderment. “How will you live? Why leave now when your country is free?”

Night after night I heard them talking, my mother explaining what it meant to be a Jew in Poland: the betrayals, the fear, the enemy within that would never be driven out. History was clear-cut; its patterns seemed inevitable, yet each generation of Jews in Poland had to learn it anew. She had only just understood that. She couldn't remain, knowing that I would probably have to live through the same disillusionment and betrayals she had experienced.

Yuri had only one answer; what she said was true about the past, but things were different now. Everyone had changed, just as she had. It would be entirely different for me. If we stayed, I would belong here as much as anyone else. Did she really think I would feel more at home in some strange land where we knew no one, and whose language I couldn't even speak? No, it was precisely because of me that she must stay. For the children of communism, the future would be glorious.

I listened as they argued about my future and my heart was with Yuri. I loved him, I was happy with our life in Bylau, I liked my school, my friends. I didn't want to leave.

But my mother's voice told me there was little hope. Her bitterness was so overwhelming that often I did not even hear her words. It brushed aside Yuri's reassurances, his optimism, his political faith. The weight of my mother's experience was such that his words never touched its core. The more I listened to them, the more hopeless I felt. I knew nothing Yuri said could stand up against the hatred that possessed my mother. The betrayals she had experienced cut so deep that only total separation could ease the wound.

My own feelings about Poland made the matter worse. My very reluctance to leave was reason enough for my mother to precipitate our departure. She saw my attachment as a trap. It prevented me from seeing my exclusion. I was blind, as she had been, and equally vulnerable to the blows the future had in store for me. The only way she could protect me was to take me away.

My mother's will overrode everyone's objections. In the end my aunt and my uncle agreed with her. My cousin, however, had just graduated from medical school and could not be convinced to accompany us. She was to make the journey ten years later, for the very reasons my mother had anticipated.

It was decided that we would move to Warsaw, where it would be easier for us to wage the long battle for an exit visa.

Yuri saw us off. He helped us onto the train and loaded our belongings into our compartment. Then came those last few moments when there is nothing left to do except say good-bye to someone you love and will probably never see again. That too, passed. The train pulled away. I leaned out, waving madly at a figure that reflected my motions back to me. Under the lights of the station, his hair and his military decorations gleamed as brilliantly as they had when I first saw him.

PART SIX

I

We came to a section of Warsaw near the foreign embassies. My mother felt this would give us a better chance of obtaining an exit visa. We didn't expect to be in Warsaw for any great length of time, and so we moved into a hotel. As it turned out, we remained there for a whole year.

The Hotel Bristol in 1949 was a world in itself. Outside, the city of Warsaw seemed vague and menacing. I was constantly warned not to venture from the hotel alone. From the window of my room I could see streets still in ruins, like those we had left behind in Dobryd. Here there was, in addition, the danger of unexploded bombs. The newspapers carried frequent stories and warnings about the threats to safety still lurking in the city.

At first I was made to go along with my family to the various waiting rooms where they spent their days. I found the confinement and boredom of these rooms sheer torture, and ended up making such a nuisance of myself that they agreed to leave me behind in the care of one of the hotel chambermaids.

My mother, my aunt and my uncle went off each morning as if to work, carrying envelopes stuffed with documents and testimonials contrived to prove our desirability as immigrants. Each would head for a different embassy to spend the rest of the day waiting, often not daring to leave to eat for fear of missing a turn.

In the waiting rooms and in the hotel rooms the conversation of the hopeful emigrants always returned to the same theme—how to obtain proper documents. Most people were in the same position. All their legal records had been lost or destroyed during the war. Yet without these documents, life in the post-war world was impossible. One couldn't do anything or go anywhere without them. Each day government officials insisted on demanding papers they knew no longer existed, and so the only recourse was to turn to forgers and false witnesses. It was an endless process. In our family, for example, we were asked almost every day to produce yet another kind of record without which, it was explained, our case could not be considered. In the evening, someone would be found who, at a price, would supply us with the papers we needed. Forging papers was certainly the most flourishing industry of the time in Warsaw.

My family spent their days in the waiting rooms of embassies, and in the evenings, like so many others, they sought out the intricate paths of the shadow bureaucracy. Every government official had his illicit counterpart somewhere in Warsaw—a person who earned his living by fulfilling the demands that the government official set. Everyone involved—the official, the forger, the emigrant—played his part, aware of one another's existence, yet publicly maintaining the charade that this symbiotic network did not exist.

The emigrants themselves, trapped in the web of the parasites who lived off them, developed their own information network. The veterans of the waiting rooms instructed the newly-arrived on the particular whims or preferences of each official, and on how these were best dealt with. They knew where to obtain a birth certificate, or a letter from a non-existent brother, living in the country of one's choice, who would guarantee one's maintenance there. They were acquainted with people who specialized in being witnesses and who were equipped for this work by a talent for disguise and an ability to testify with persuasive sincerity to whatever was required.

Yet the waiting period was not all bleak for the people involved. Almost everyone we met shared a similar mood of elation. We were intoxicated with the promise of our future. The Hotel Bristol had a constant air of excitement and festivity about it. The public rooms were crowded late into the night. Conversations, discussions and arguments went on all around us, and strangely enough, I discovered they were not based on the past. For most of its inhabitants the hotel was a way station, and their attention was focused on the journey that was about to resume.

The noises and activity of the hotel seemed to me wonderfully exciting. I was soon free to explore it as I wished. Since we might be called upon to leave any day, there seemed to be no point in making long-term arrangements for me. I no longer went to school. Instead, my family and other people took turns giving me some sort of instruction.

My mother took it upon herself to teach me English, a language she had studied in school and perfected through travel. The only English book she could find was a copy of Oscar Wilde's
Lady Windermere's Fan
, probably left behind by some pre-war visitor. It became the text for our study of the English language. Unfortunately, the world inhabited by Lord and Lady Windermere, the things they talked about and the idiom they preferred, had very little attraction for me at this age. I sat bored and restless as my mother read passages from the play, translated them for me, and then tried to have me repeat simple phrases. The lessons were mostly wasted on me, and their only noticeable result was a growing dislike on my part for the sound of this odd language my mother insisted I learn. It sounded ludicrous compared with the “normal” sounds of the languages I already spoke. In spite of my mother's warnings, it seemed inconceivable to me that I would soon live in a place where no one spoke any Polish or Russian.