Journeys with My Mother (24 page)

Parting with the nurses was sad and painful. We'd spent years living together, through hardship and bleakness, risky missions and close calls. They'd always doted on me as though I were one of their own.

Now, I have their letters. These blue triangles – the way the pages, origami-like, fold into envelopes – take me back to those years. I'd never read them, not until I went through my mother's boxes after her death. It felt like trespassing. Everything I know about them is from their correspondence.

Peace, for which they had been waiting so impatiently, making plans for the future, soon turned bittersweet, initial exultation giving way to rancour. The war had brought them together but in freedom they were alone. They had to look squarely at their losses. Most had lost someone dear: a husband, brothers, fathers – killed in battles or starved in prisoners' camps. Reunion with their families brought no consolation since nothing could match the intensity of their experience; there was no one to understand what they'd been through, nobody to replace the camaraderie. ‘How precious to me now is our friendship, our evenings together,' wrote Vala. She went on:

Vala, who'd experienced prisoners' camps and forced labour, the dangers of a partisan's life, came to believe that a life without friends was not worth living. The war tested them all. After years of being separated from their spouses, men walked out on their marriages as if they had to begin their lives anew.

Vala continues:

And from Tania:

The letters show their age, though some of the writing is almost as legible as on the day they were written. They are well travelled – from Belorussia through countless places in Poland – I clearly remember their presence in Warsaw – and Israel, before coming to rest with me in Melbourne. I have read them many times since, always hoping to find something I'd previously missed.

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.

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.

This letter, too, is stained with tears.

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

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
batushka
³⁷
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.