Dobryd (15 page)

Manya's desperation matched that of her victims. Relentlessly she hunted down every piece of gold in the shelter. When people pleaded that they had nothing left to give, she reminded them of the wedding band they were wearing or the earrings placed in their ears at birth, or any other valuable memento which had not escaped her eye.

At the end, when nothing remained, she abandoned us to our fate. We were left with no news, no food or water, while outside the fierce fighting continued day and night.

When Yuri and his battalion reached Manya's farm, they found her crazed with fear, barricaded with her daughter. The Germans, in their retreat, had raped the two of them. They feared the same treatment from the new invaders. Yet Manya was still sufficiently alert to suspect that the act of hiding Jews from the Germans might win her some favour with the Russians. She confided her secret to them. Our ordeal was over.

Although that day when my life really began, at the age of five, and the day of Manya's visit to Bylau were only three years apart, they seemed to me to have happened in different worlds, to different people. It was only by deliberately separating my present life from the first one that I could even bear to think of these events. It was also a way of trying to understand Manya's transformation and my own since our days in the loft. It seemed necessary for me to pretend I had nothing to do with that other child, or the other Manya. The world of terror and cruelty that had brought them together had never happened. The fact that I could listen to stories about the times in the loft, and even enjoy them, proved to me they had nothing to do with me.

I had expected to find Manya gone the next morning but she was still there. In the end my mother relented. Manya's misfortunes had softened her anger.

Manya's money was all gone. Her property had been taken over by the Russians, and the village turned into a collective. She worked from morning till night, and her daughter shared the same life. Carlsbad was now a government-run resort. Its clientele consisted of workers who had surpassed their production quotas.

My mother sent her back to the village the next day. Thereafter, she began to write us letters full of bitterness and complaints. They followed us to Canada when we moved there. Eventually they stopped, and in time, her daughter informed us of her death.

PART FIVE

I

We lived in Bylau for four years. Like most children when they are happy in a particular place, I had expected to live there forever. It seemed to me we had at last found a home where we belonged. Dobryd became more and more removed, and its presence in our lives appeared less important. Still, it was sufficiently close to us in time and in space so that it had not yet been surrounded by an aura of nostalgic seductiveness.

Most people in Bylau were, like us, immigrants from other parts of Poland. We were all building new lives, starting on the same basis. Old distinctions and divisions seemed not to count.

Perhaps because of its recent past, Bylau was a fiercely patriotic town. Traces of its German origins were being replaced by the symbols of Polish nationalism. The new inhabitants were all very patriotic. In government schools the children were drilled in national pride, and even in private schools we were taught to regard all other Slavic nations with disdain. It seemed inconceivable to me that we would ever leave.

Our family was much like the others. Externally, at least, we had adapted and become involved in our new community. In actual fact, our place in that society was doubtful. The older I became, the more I was aware that the adults around me lived with a sense of foreboding. They regarded their surroundings with the uneasiness of people who live at the foot of a volcano. There had been slight rumblings in the last four years, but these were on a small scale and they could be explained in such a way as to make them seem harmless. It required a common crisis, shared by all the Jews in the town, to crystallize an awareness of how precarious our position in that society was.

One morning we noticed that our house had been marked during the night by a large red cross over the entrance. Soon afterwards we noticed this same cross in varying sizes painted outside other houses. What was ominous about it was that only the homes of Jews had been singled out in this way. Various interpretations of this fact were not long in coming, and the hearts of the survivors were once again gripped by terror.

They remembered, without anyone's mentioning it, that during the war it had been common practice for the Germans to mark certain houses with crosses. They would do this the night before a new transport was to leave for the concentration camps, and in this way the removal of those selected was facilitated.

New crosses were discovered all that day. With each one the evidence seemed more threatening. Meeting one another, each person confirmed what the other feared: the Poles were about to practise their traditional rite, the terrorizing and murder of Jews. Jews sought each other out, hoping that one of them would know more than the others, but they found no reassurances. The eyes of all the survivors mirrored the same image of dread. Everything they imagined was only too likely to happen.

In our house the mystery of the red crosses also evoked fear and dread. My mother and my uncle stayed away from work; if anything was to happen, we would at least be together. In the evening when Yuri arrived, he found the house dark and his friends filled with foreboding. For a moment he stood astonished, unable to understand the difference he saw in us. Then his expression changed to one of fear. Something dreadful must have occurred. “What is it? What happened? Is anyone ill?” he asked.

My mother told him the story of the crosses and described her fears. To our amazement, after he heard her out, he smiled in a way that seemed totally incongruous. He was too kind to tease us about our misunderstanding as he quickly explained it. The red crosses that had terrified us were nothing more than a way of distributing food parcels to war victims. The shipment which had just arrived was from an American Jewish relief agency. It was reserved for Jewish survivors. Since there were still no numbers on the houses, red crosses were painted to help identify the recipients.

That evening we laughed with Yuri, at ourselves, euphoric with the relief of people reprieved from reliving their worst nightmare. The effect of that incident however, was more profound than any of us suspected.

For a while it seemed the incident of the crosses was forgotten, but slowly it insinuated itself back in our lives. I began to hear my family talk of leaving Bylau, and my sense of belonging was shaken. My mother and my aunt returned to the subject daily, arguing with each other, trying to convince themselves. It was becoming impossible for them to stay in Poland, but it was equally difficult to leave.

If it was harder for them to leave than for other Jews, it was because of the way they had been brought up. Their father had seen to it that all his children knew their native land well and felt at home in it. He had travelled widely in Austria, Germany and England and he had observed that in those countries the Jews were well treated and respected. He was impressed by how well they were integrated into the ways and habits of their Christian neighbours. The Jews in Poland, he felt, were much to blame for their less enviable position. If after centuries of living side by side they continued to be hated by their Polish neighbours, it was because they persisted in leading their lives without any recognition of the language, customs and culture of the country which had been their home for hundreds of years.

His cousins in Hamburg or Vienna had not ceased to consider themselves as Jews. Nevertheless, when they walked the streets of their towns, they looked and acted like other passers-by. They lived in integrated communities, they were educated in subjects other than the sacred texts, and they did not restrict their friendship to Jews. It was this kind of life that my grandfather wanted for his children.

He realized that his actions would scandalize most of the Jewish community and that he had no hope of convincing his wife. The marriage had been arranged by their parents when they were very young. He had first seen her at the betrothal ceremony. She had been very beautiful, the daughter of a rich and noble rabbinical family who counted amongst their ancestors great Talmudic scholars and a miracle rabbi. But after the first enchantment of living with her had worn off, he found her ignorant, superstitious and full of prejudices. She, for her part, suffered all her life from the fear that she had been married to a heretic who would drag her down with him to eternal condemnation. My grandfather concentrated all his hopes on his four children.

It was my grandfather's work that had first taken him out of the ghetto. He had started in the grain trade, buying from Polish landowners and selling to the rest of Europe. By the time his first child, my uncle Samuel, was born, he himself had become a landowner. From then on, he chose to live in the country. One of his partners took over the grain trade, and he occupied himself with every detail of running a large country estate which included several villages of peasants. My aunt remembered that as a small child she would ride with him in the morning, and every person they met would greet him with the greatest reverence. As a little girl, she was certain he was a king.

It was unusual for Jews to own large estates in Poland. For a great many years the laws had restricted this privilege to the Catholic aristocracy. My grandfather's estate had belonged for centuries to a family of Polish counts. They, like many Polish aristocrats, considered their own country a primitive, boorish place from which they wished to dissociate themselves. Some went so far as to refuse to teach their children their native language, considering it no better than a peasant dialect. French was the language of civilized people. They were hopeless Francophiles, and exile, to them, meant an enforced stay in Poland. The only binding tie they maintained with their country was the revenue they extracted from it, often in such a careless manner that in the end their mortgaged and neglected estates ceased to yield anything.

The Count H., who owned the estate my grandfather acquired, spent most of his time in Monte Carlo and Deauville. Through extravagant living and gambling he had ruined his inheritance. The idea of returning to Poland and working to improve the damage he had brought about bored him. The only acceptable solution that he saw was to sell the estate. The Count and my grandfather met in Warsaw, in what was to be the Count's last visit to Poland. The Count promised to arrange all the legal matters and my grandfather agreed to pay him an allowance for the rest of his life. The villages continued to bear his name, in suffix or prefix, while he enjoyed the more temperate climate of southern France.

In this country setting, distant from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the small-town ghetto, my grandfather was able to live as he pleased. Above all, he sought to give his children the best preparation for their life as Polish citizens. The children spoke Polish as their first language. They were sent to Polish schools and encouraged to bring home their classmates. Yet at home they were taught to have pride in their ancestry.

The children seemed to thrive in this atmosphere. They grew up confident and at ease with their environment. The boy, more than the others, seemed to have taken his patriotism to an extreme. When he graduated from secondary school he refused to continue his studies, since it would have meant going away to Switzerland for several years. He showed no real interest in anything except farming. As a child, he had often bribed the peasants who drove him to school to turn their carriages around and drive him back home with them. There he would follow them around all day, learning how to plough and helping them with the chores.

My mother and my aunt shared their brother's attachment to the land. This set them apart from other members of the Jewish community in Dobryd. They had some friends within this group, but more of their friends were Christian Poles. In fact, the family belonged neither to the Jewish nor the Christian community and these two groups regarded the family with some suspicion because of their unconventional ways.

The feeling of isolation and separateness which marked their upbringing was not the goal their father had sought for them. Yet they did not mind their singular position. In fact, it became a source of family pride. Years later, when my mother spoke of her family, she always concluded, “Your grandfather was a man ahead of his time.”

The war had introduced them to another set of experiences which mocked my grandfather's ideals and the family's patriotism. They had loved the land, but the land had betrayed them. The neighbours and friends in whose trust they had placed their safety remained, at best, indifferent. Some had even collaborated with the invaders in hunting them down. In the end it was these memories, evoked by fresh incidents such as that of the crosses, which finally made them decide to leave Poland.

II

After many years away from Poland, my mother, like so many exiles, became a victim of nostalgia. The greater the distance between her and her home, the more she thought of it as the lost land of her youth, where she had been happy as she never would be again.

Polish culture became the standard by which she judged all others. She rarely missed any film or theatre company that came from Poland to Canada. She continued to read and reread the classic literature of Poland, especially its poetry, much of which she could recite by heart.

Side by side with this past, which she loved, the horrors of the war continued to haunt her. She relived these memories at night in terrifying, recurring nightmares. I heard the sounds of the nightmares before I knew what they meant, and they frightened me more than any of my private monsters. That low persistent moaning, the occasional screams of fear—what had they to do with my mother as I knew her? Later, when I understood what her nightmares were about and I learned what brought them on, I could still not reconcile the confident person she was in the daytime, with the sounds that came out of her bedroom at night.