Journeys with My Mother (25 page)

I had been waiting for him for a long time. No longer remembering how he looked, I peered into the face of every uniformed man. There were many soldiers walking the streets and I was on the alert all the time. Sometimes I would run after a uniformed man, calling: ‘Daaaady, Dad!' my heart full of anticipation. The soldiers understood it. Many of them, too, hoped to find their children, perhaps somewhere in the crowd, in any city or small village they happened to be passing through. They had no homes to return to, no keys, no mementos. Of their previous lives, they only had what they could remember and, if they were lucky, their loved ones.

When some normality returned, when they had a bed to sleep in, they still tried to find their families and friends, searching through the Red Cross, placing handwritten notes in visible locations. What optimism, what hope resided in these flimsy pieces of paper displayed in public places. What trust that the wind, rain or some careless person would not destroy this most ardent of questions: ‘Where are you?'

In the end, I did not run into my father in the street. As it had happened years before, he was waiting for us in Białystok, where he was stationed. I was asleep when he came. Władek lifted me from my bed, hugging and kissing me. He was dressed in a green army tunic over cavalry breeches, leather straps running up and down and across his body, with the insignia of an officer. When he embraced me, his body was unexpectedly hard and unyielding. I would like to say that I was overwhelmed by a wave of love for him, but that is not how it was.

He was a stranger. Our renewed acquaintance did not start well. I spoke Russian and he talked to me in Polish. The more he persisted, the more I resented his didactic efforts and refused to listen.

I heard him say to Ola that I looked wizened. The little woman in me resented it and, in my treacherous heart, I wanted another man for a father. Gurgen, most likely. Most importantly, I was used to having my mother all to myself; now, I sensed, things were going to be different: my mother's attention would be divided, at best.

The way my parents were pulled apart, and then reunited, was dramatic enough, but their initial steps together were cautious. I cannot be certain what was going through my father's mind. Whether, with the great joy of finding us alive, came hope, even certainty, that their feelings would remain the same as before.

And what was Ola thinking, leaving Lida without taking leave of her various responsibilities or our chattels? I mulled over it, wondering if my mother was hesitant about her future with my father. In her account of their first meeting, she could have painted it however she wanted. Yet she told me that it took time to rediscover their former intimacy. They felt awkward, even shy, as though they hardly knew each other. Their war experiences had changed them. They carried inside them the knowledge of what human beings are capable of; they perceived the world with different eyes.

The first night after their long separation, my father asked Ola to take off his boots. It was a blunder, and badly timed. My mother, taken aback, refused – she was nobody's servant. He hastily explained that without a
suka
,
³⁸
he could not remove his tight boots by himself.

I can see both of them that night, close to each other in the dark, talking about what each had experienced during their long years of separation. It was as if these two people – my parents – had to rediscover each other and start again.

Soon, I had to stay alone with my father while Ola returned to Lida to collect our things and do what she thought necessary. One of them was to see Gurgen. They must have been preparing for the moment of parting, if only because Ola had begun to search for my father. How could she not? Regardless, it must have been painful. It was then he gave my mother the much treasured photograph of the three of us, and the volume of Russian poetry, inscribed: ‘For Ola, our meeting – like Victoria Regia
³⁹
– seldom flowers.'

The war had ended but my father was still in the army. By then he was a captain in charge of a large military unit while single-handedly looking after me. For a while I was the pet of the regiment, enjoying the centre of attention. My father looked after me in his own, inimitable, way. A military man, he wanted me to be strong and enduring. I suspect I was nothing of the sort. Occasionally, he would take me to military exercises, attempting to teach me how to shoot at a target. He also wanted me to share his affection for animals, and tried to teach me to ride a horse.

But it was not to be. Back in the forest, I'd witnessed sixteen-year-old Marusia kicked by a horse and since then I had been terrified of their tempers; high above the ground, it was the abyss I saw. In the evenings, while he was sitting behind a desk, briefing or perhaps debriefing his officers, I would curl up cat-like on his lap and go to sleep. It must have been easier to command a military unit where insubordination was out of the question than it was to look after me. I was already rebellious.

When Ola returned to Białystok, she learned that my father had been moved to Koszalin, a small town on the Baltic coast. Waiting for her was Władek's adjutant. Contemplating another journey from hell – standing in a train corridor, another civilian squashed between the multitudes and their bundles for an unknown number of hours – the two hit on a solution. In Władek's wardrobe was his captain-major tunic, with all the required paraphernalia. She tried it on with her short skirt; it fit perfectly.

The following morning the new captain-major went to the station. An enormous crowd was already surging towards the carriages with the zeal of storming the barricades. It was always the same; there was no point waiting for another train. For once, Ola did not have to face the crowd alone. Father's adjutant kept her company and carried her suitcases. When she was noticed by her ‘fellow officers', many hands stretched out to help and, before long, she was sitting in the compartment, surrounded by men eager to impress. The conversation revolved around war exploits while cigarettes, drinks and food were shared. She was nearly sprung when her companions inquired where the captain was serving. Stuck for an answer, she hid behind the confidentiality of operations.

Ola arrived in Koszalin quite pleased with herself. My father, however, was far from amused, claiming that she'd risked his career.

In later years, one of the wardrobes in our Warsaw home was filled with military ‘treasures' – revolvers and rifles, ammunition, horse spurs, even a few cavalry swords. Andrzej and I were entranced and curious about our father's war. Though I knew that he had taken part in prolonged, bloody battles, the accounts of his army experience were aimed to entertain rather than inform us.

Władek's photograph, taken in 1942, shows his tired and achingly sad face.

22

And After

The war was over but in Poland fighting continued. The newly defined country was reduced in size, its borders shifted to the west. Savage force was used to expel native Germans, where they'd lived for centuries, revenge meted out to innocent people. It was justice, postwar-style.

The eastern borders were also pushed west, leaving behind the inhabitants of what used to be Poland. Here, as in the new Poland, the Ukrainian nationalists carried out ethnic cleansing, massacring minorities: Poles, Jews and Armenians. As if there was not enough bloodletting, the Poles fought Poles over the political future of the country: the patriotic, anti-Communist partisan groups took arms against the new government and its proponents. Amid privation and chaos, banditry flourished. Jews, emerging from the camps, hiding or exile, were met with hostilities.

In small towns in particular, they were chased away, even murdered, for fear that they would reclaim their properties. It appeared that everyone was fighting everyone else.

Poland was a dangerous place to begin anew. Most surviving Jews left Poland immediately, sometimes on foot. They left out of fear of anti-Semitism and further pogroms, an unwillingness to accept the new communist regime, or a reluctance to live in what appeared to be one enormous cemetery. Future years would bring recurrent waves of anti-Semitism and even more departures.

Ola and Władek never considered leaving. They were on the side of the victors and the prospect of doing something positive appeared more tangible than ever. So we kept moving from one town to another, shadowing my father's postings. Our immediate return to the devastated Warsaw was out of the question and for a time we settled in Łódz. Eventually, almost three years after the war, we returned to Warsaw.

We entered from the east, crossing the Vistula along a temporary pontoon bridge, one of the few available connections between the two sides of the city. Though the traffic moved slowly, the bridge wobbled and shifted, the water terrifyingly close. Father covered my eyes and held me tight. On that day my parents could see with their own eyes what had happened to their city. On Hitler's orders, Warsaw had been razed to the ground, to serve as an example to other great cities. Himmler, directly responsible for the carnage, had ordered: ‘The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.'

When, in the winter of 1945, the Red Army entered Warsaw, it was empty of people, but within days its citizenry began to return, to embrace their city as it was: uninhabitable, bleak, open to the elements, without running water, with a profusion of unexploded bombs. While the powers that be equivocated about the future of Warsaw, the Varsovians had already decided its destiny.

When we arrived, the streets had been largely cleared of rubble, but there was hardly anything left standing that my parents could recognise. The area where they'd lived before the war had been burned down and levelled. Of Nowolipki Street, where my mother's family used to live, a solitary survivor – the Church of St Augustus, the place where the Germans had stored their looted wealth, weapons and ammunition – remained upright. And if, over the years, my parents went to investigate what had happened to the houses of their youth, where they'd lived before the war, to see the streets that endured only in their memories, where they'd last seen their parents, siblings, friends; if they ever attended the Remembrance of the Ghetto Uprising … I was not included.

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.