The Girl in the Green Sweater (4 page)

Of course, the Russians were not such a good choice, either, as we would come to know. The Communist ideal sounded wonderful in theory, but in practice it could also be cruel and ruthless. And harsh. No, they had not built concentration camps to exterminate the Jews, but they sent a great many people to Siberia, and a great many people died there, too. Jews, Christians . . . it did not matter to them. If you had money, if you owned a business, if you did not work, you were of no use to the Russians. And if you were of no use, they sent you away. That was the Russian way. They confiscated material possessions, moved people from their homes, kept people from pursuing the freedoms they had only recently enjoyed. There was no good choice, the people were saying, and yet among the Jews of Lvov there was the feeling that with the Russians we had been spared an even more terrible fate.

My father considered our situation with a sense of humor, which was how he and my mother tried to approach our ordeal. He called the Russians “our uninvited guests,” because they had come to spoil our party. He wrote, “They call themselves our liberators, because they liberate us from everything.”

The first change I noticed under the Soviets was that we no longer had a nanny or a housekeeper. We were now part of Communist Russia, and as Communists everyone was treated equally. We were all working class. We would all suffer, and struggle, and starve. These women would no longer work for my family in a subservient role. At first, I thought it meant that these women did not like our family or that they felt they had been mistreated. In any case,
it meant that my mother could no longer work, because she now had to stay at home to take care of me and my brother. Actually, this was a welcome change for me. I liked having my mother around all day. She used to tell me stories at the kitchen table. She would make them up as she went along, but by the next day she would forget what she had told the day before. I would say, “What happened to the wolf?” Or, “What happened to the little girl?” I wanted to know what was going on, and she had already forgotten.

The other big change was that I started kindergarten that September, just after the bombing ended, during the transition to Russian rule. The school was two or three blocks from our apartment, and I did not want to go that first day. I cried when we arrived at the school, but my mother convinced me to stay. I held on to her for those first few hours, I could not bear to see her go, but eventually she did go, as did all of the other mothers. I can still picture the classroom, where I had to hang my coat, where the teacher was showing us the toys, the faces of all the other children. The next day it was a little bit easier. We developed a routine. My mother would walk me to school and my father would pick me up in the afternoon, except on one afternoon when my father could not make it, my mother picked me up instead. When my father came home later that evening, he was very upset. He walked in the door and I could see he had been crying. “That’s it,” he said, handing over the key to the store. “We’ve lost everything. This is all that is left.”

His sense of humor was gone. I looked and looked, but I could not find his smile. My father had known this day would come, but now that it was here he was not prepared for it. On some level, yes; on some other level, no. I listened to him tell my mother what had
happened. Some Russian officials had come in and had told him to turn everything over to them. Already, my father had seen other private business owners sent to Siberia, for the crime of being bourgeois, and if he had been thinking clearly, he would have counted himself lucky for merely being sent home. But he was not thinking clearly.

A few days before, the Russians had taken my grandparents’ business. They had employed about fifteen people, and what was especially upsetting to my grandparents and to my father was the way these workers responded to the change in ownership. It showed how quickly the people could be brainwashed by the Russians, how Soviet propaganda could poison not only our way of life, but our relationships as well. By coincidence, my father was present when the Russian officials demanded control of my grandparents’ business, and my father could not believe how these workers turned on my grandparents. They had all been very well treated, very well paid. They had all been to dinner in my grandparents’ home. It was like a family. Yet when the business was taken from my grandparents, the workers seemed happy about it. When the Russian inspectors came in, they told everybody to put their hands up. All of the workers were searched. One of the workers, an educated woman, pointed to my father and said, “Why don’t you search him?” For some reason, my father had been overlooked during the first inspection. He was frozen with fear, because he was carrying a gun. For some other reason, the Russian inspectors overlooked the woman’s comment and failed to search my father a second time, and it was a lucky thing because if they had found the gun, they could have said my father was a spy and sent him to prison.

I did not know my father carried a gun, but he said he began
doing so to protect himself from the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians had a deep-seated hatred for the Jews. The Russians simply hated the upper class. The one was bad enough without the other.

My parents had only a few workers in their store, and none of them turned on my mother or father the way my grandparents’ employees turned on them. Almost all of the workers stayed on in my parents’ store after it was requisitioned by the government, but my father was forced to look for another job, because in Communist Russia if you do not work, you are a drain on society. He got a job in a bakery that happened to be on the ground floor of our apartment building, which was very helpful when the Russians started to ration our food. There were long lines just to get a loaf of bread or some sugar, and my father used his job so we would not have to wait. Sometimes he would trade an extra loaf of bread for something else we might need. Quite often he would pinch an extra loaf for a friend or family member, as a kindness. Once, there was an extra shipment of sugar and eggs and other foods and supplies, and my father arranged to hide the overage in the apartment of the concierge, Galewski—Danusha’s father. Because of this, the two men had something extra to sell or to trade. My father made only about 400 rubles per month at the bakery, which was not enough for us to live on, so he soon took another job. This second job paid about 300 rubles per month. Together, this was almost enough to get by, except we hardly ever saw my father. He was working fourteen hours a day.

In a matter of weeks, the Russians had reorganized all of eastern Poland. In Lvov, all private businesses were nationalized. It was amazing to my father how swiftly the Russian bureaucracy managed to move, how they were able to turn capitalist Poland into Communist Russia in just a few weeks. It was like a trick of
black magic. Everything was run by the NKVD—the precursor to the KGB—and the Polish people were terrified of these agents. The Russians, too, lived in fear of the NKVD. They knew everything about us, tracked our coming and going, decided who would stay in the city and who would be sent away. One moment the merchants were running their stores and businesses; the next they were out on the street or in prison. Everybody had to work or risk being sent off to Siberia. You had to wait on long lines and meet with the Russian officials and discuss what kind of work you were qualified to do. My father was always afraid that my mother would be sent away, because she did not work. She had to stay at home to take care of two small children—a logical reason not to work, but the Russians did not always agree with logical reasoning.

As a little girl, however, I did not have any of these worries. Also, I did not mind any of these changes. Most of them I did not even notice. Of course, I did not like the tension in our family, the uncertainty that had crept into our lives, the unhappiness I could sometimes read on my mother’s face, but all I really cared about was that I had my mother with me most of the time. I had my imaginary friend, Melek, for company. I had my baby brother and my beautiful French pinscher.

From time to time, when his work schedule allowed, my father would meet me at school and walk me home. Once, he came to pick me up, and I suggested we take a different route back to our apartment. “It will be shorter,” I said. My father smiled. He liked that I had figured out a shortcut. He said that this was the problem under Russian rule. Everybody does as they are told. Nobody thinks for themselves. Nobody considers a better way.

Outside of school, I spent most of my time with my mother and brother. My mother would take us on long walks. There was a
beautiful park up in the hills just outside of town, and we used to hike there. Wysoki Zamek, this place was called.
High Castle
. From these hills, you could see all the way into town. My aunt would join us, with her children. You would not know we were living in a city in turmoil, on a continent at war, to look at us cousins romping and playing on those hillside trails. I was happy. I ran around with my cousins, smiling and laughing.

It was during the Russian occupation that my mother took me to see my first movie,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. There was a movie theater not far from our apartment, and it was a special outing, just the two of us. I can still remember looking up at the screen, with all those bright colors, all those cheerful songs, marveling at this new type of storytelling. I had never heard of such a thing as moving pictures, but there it was, and as I watched I never once thought about the tension or uncertainty I could sense at home and all around. For me, from the narrow point of view of a child, this was a happy time.

Sometimes we would go with my mother to visit my father for dinner. We did not see him much, because of the two jobs (sometimes three). He worked in the afternoon and evening at a health club across town. He had always been a strong athlete—he was a volleyball player and a soccer player—and had somehow managed to secure a position at the club. This was considered an important job to the Russians, who placed special emphasis on fitness and physical activity. The health club was a large facility, like a YMCA, with a gymnasium and a swimming pool, although maybe it only appeared so big to me because I was so little. I think I had a chance to go swimming there on just one occasion. It was difficult, with my baby brother, to make the arrangements. Usually, we had only a short visit with my father while he ate a hot meal my mother
prepared at home, and then we collected the dirty dishes and walked back to our apartment.

Probably the first I noticed the Russian occupation was when we had to share our apartment. Our landlord had been sent away, but we were allowed to continue living in our grand apartment at Kopernika 12. For some weeks, we stayed on in the apartment with our routines relatively unchanged, except for my father’s busy work schedule and reduced income. But then it was announced that the rationing by the Soviets would extend to our living quarters. They set a limit that no individual be entitled to live in a space greater than seven square meters, which meant that our family of four could not exceed twenty-eight square meters. This was now the law, and it meant we could live in only one or two rooms in our big apartment. Rather than wait for the Russians to assign our apartment to a group of strangers, my father reached out through the Jewish community to take in individuals and families in particular need. They would still be strangers to us, but at least we would choose. Soon, we were joined in the apartment by a father and two sons who had escaped to Lvov from Krakow, and by a husband and wife named Bodner. This was a big adjustment. We shared the kitchen, but each family took its own meals. Once in a while,
Bodnerova
would sit with us at the kitchen table over tea and biscuits, and sometimes she baby-sat for me and my brother while my mother went across the street to visit with her sister. Bodnerova would be in her room, but if we called to her, she would come and sit with us until my mother came home.

I had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night. I would call to my mother, and she would come to me and whisper,
“Cicho, cicho, cicho.”
Ssshhh, ssshhh, ssshhh. Over and over and over. In Polish and English, it sounded much the same:
‘chi-sho, chi-sho,
chi-sho.’
Somehow, the sound of her voice, the warmth of her touch, the gentle rhythm of her whisper, made me feel better, and soon I would fall back asleep. One night, I awoke and called out to my mother, but Bodnerova came to my room instead. I was half-asleep. She took me in her arms and whispered,
“Cicho, cicho, cicho.”
Over and over and over. Ssshhh, ssshhh, ssshhh. My mother had told her what to do to comfort me, but I recognized this was not my mother’s voice and shook myself fully awake. I started to cry. At the same time, I was afraid that if I cried, I would be punished, but then I decided that if my brother also cried, maybe they would forget about my crying. So I stood next to Pawel’s crib and cried. Louder and louder, I cried. Finally, Pawel woke up and he started to cry as well.

Poor Bodnerova, she did not know what to do.

It was a big difference to how we lived before the Russians, but not so big after all. When you are little, you can get used to anything, and here I got so quickly used to these other families that it was as though they had always been a part of our household. I got used to all the different foods, and to not having so much money, and to no longer taking summer vacations in the country. I even got used to the language and started to speak a little bit of Russian. Yes, our family business was gone. Yes, there were strangers living in our apartment. Yes, our movements were endlessly tracked by the NKVD. Yes, my parents were in constant fear of being sent away to Siberia. And yet at four and then five years old, my world was little changed. I was no longer a princess, but still I had everything I could possibly want. Not so many fine things as before, but more than enough. I could not be greedy, because in Communist Russia everything was meant to be shared equally. I had my mother, who was with me constantly. I had my father, who smiled with such great pride when I did so little as come up with a shortcut home. He
was busy, of course, moving from job to job—for a time, he worked as a medical assistant in a doctor’s office!—but he always made time for me. I had my little brother. I had my puppy, and my canaries, and my cousins. I had friends. And so I had my fill.