Journeys with My Mother (11 page)

Jacqueline and I have no way of knowing when Janina discovered her pregnancy. Perhaps out of pride, or to spare José yet another dilemma, she kept it to herself. By the time she did, it was too late. José was in Chile.

When the baby was born Janina was alone, with Poland already under occupation. A few months later, when the Germans entered Paris, she joined the exodus south to the Free Zone. A few more years had to pass before Jacqueline, who was that baby, and I would sit at the same wooden desk at the primary school in Warsaw, and even more before we'd sit comfortably in a café by the lake, talking about the strange lives of our parents – their political imbroglios and choices, the all-too-frequent necessity to flee, or to fight.

Janina and Jacqueline's escape to the Free Zone was not the end of the story. Both mother and child would suffer the terrible conditions of an internment camp from which – because they were Jewish – Auschwitz was the only destination. Amazingly, Janina managed to escape interment twice. Neutral, peaceful Switzerland, seemingly so close beyond the Alps, was the closest and the only country where they could seek shelter. Unfortunately, Janina's fate was of no concern to the Swiss. Refugees were barred from entry, sent back if they succeeded in crossing the magic line of the border.

The second attempt, however, brought her luck. Perhaps someone, an official, felt compassion towards the emaciated woman and her sick child.

Of course, Jacqueline remembers nothing of these first years of her life, nor of being left with a stranger, who took her in and loved as her own, as Janina went back to France to join the Resistance. And even this is not the conclusion to the story. These stories might not be long in the telling, and the child knows how they end, but it takes a lifetime to tease them out and puzzle over their meaning. Jacqueline carries the deep pain of a child who knows that she played only a minor part in the saga of her mother's life.

I wonder if my mother would have left me in similar circumstances and, if so, would I carry the hurt for the rest of my life?

Ola never made that crossing into Spain, just as Władek never got past Czechoslovakia.

Stalin ordered all the Comintern
¹⁷
parties to withdraw their support for the Spanish republic and stop sending volunteers. From then on, those fighting Franco would be on their own.

Did my parents perceive this abandonment of their Spanish comrades as a betrayal or merely a change of tactics? My parents' political ideals gave sense to their lives. The party was all they had and it had to be supported even when it made ‘mistakes'. And where would they be in the late thirties without the Soviet Union?

The fall of the republic, its pain, was their personal tragedy and, like a congenital condition, some of their grief was passed on to me, too. The three years of the Spanish Civil War pitted left against right, anti-clericals against the church, workers against factory owners, republicans against monarchists, communists against anarchists, brothers against brothers. Villages were pillaged; the once cosmopolitan streets of Barcelona and Madrid turned into battlefields and dust. Nearly one million people were killed.

PART TWO

10

September 1939

The world is never ready
for a child's birth.

—Wisława Szymborska

Not many things delighted Ola as much as the anticipation of motherhood. As with her trip to Paris, she would remember every detail of her preparations. She told me how she bought the best produce, describing exquisite berries, pears and apples – her favourite fruit. I was to be a strong, robust baby. Nor did she economise on baby paraphernalia. My first cocoon-like bedding was made of white Swiss cotton filled with down, trimmed with lace and ribbons, definitely on the frivolous side. And there was nothing sensible about her peach-coloured négligée.

In telling me all these details, Ola wanted me to know how much I was wanted. Apparently, I was a planned baby. Some plan. For all Władek's political astuteness and Ola's careful calculations, between them, they arrived at a perfect mistiming. When Ola was preparing for motherhood, she should have been preparing for war.

On the very day Ola took herself to the maternity clinic on Żelazna Street – where she'd worked for many years – Stalin signed a pact of nonaggression with Hitler. Poland was divided and a second world war was looming.

My mother was placed in the operating theatre which was no longer in use. There she was, alone, anxious, unnerved by the stomping of the soldiers' boots hitting the pavement. The odd fragment of a poem kept running through her head:

I can hear a new deluge rising

and the pounding of millions of steps

it is for me to choose

the words, the deeds, and the ways.
¹⁸

The threat of war hung over Warsaw. Everybody talked about it, thought about it. Everybody hoped that somehow it would not come to the worst, because it was summer, ‘and the summer was beautiful that year'.
¹⁹
People were still enjoying their holidays or were busy preparing their children for another school year: new books and pencils had to be bought. Also because life can never be put on hold, and because war is impossible to fathom. And yet, there was no end to the speculations; some theories were even calming: that the German army was short on fuel and ammunition, that Hitler was merely posturing and, yes, we were strong and well prepared.

And yet, long strips of paper were glued across every window, for protection against shattering glass; and everybody, especially those who remembered the previous war, was stocking up on essentials. Military authorities commandeered civilians to dig ditches, to set tank traps and to shore up fortifications. My father joined in. A maze of deep trenches appeared in parks, city squares and gardens. Sandbags were stacked against shop windows and those who could afford them bought gas masks.

The usually calm, composed Ola – nicknamed ‘Panzer A'
²⁰
for her strength – was frightened. The war could not have come at a worse time. Furthermore, her three long days of labour were excruciatingly painful and distressing.

On the morning of 27 August, Władek came to the hospital early. He wanted to tell Ola the latest, before rushing back to his new duties. I was born later that day, so when he returned to the hospital the following morning, my mother had already planted a little ribbon in my hair. I looked cute. My father held me in his arms and cried, overwhelmed as much by happiness as dread. He had no illusions about the impending war.

In the evening, Ewa came to see her little sister. She gave Ola a long warm bath, a gesture my mother would never forget. Never before had she felt so isolated as then, in this huge, spacious, chrome-gleaming operating theatre. This day should have brought her nothing but happiness. But instead she was alone, preoccupied by the ominous threats outside. Apparently, somewhere in the heart of city, theatres and cinemas were still open, people were going to cafés. But all around Ola, everything was unsettlingly quiet. The blinded windows muted all sound, the streets were blanketed by silence. No one walked without a reason any more. Life was held in suspense.

Her room was full of roses. Afterwards, she could not recall who else had visited her and who'd delivered the flowers. We were still in that hospital room when the war began four days later, when the real bombs started falling on Warsaw, when people were killed, buildings ablaze from incendiary bombs.

A few days later our hospital, too, was on fire. As the flames and smoke spread, screaming terrified women ran out of the wards. Some, in haste, left their babies behind and were now howling for help to retrieve them.

According to family legend, my father carried the two of us out of the burning hospital. As wonderful as this tale is, it is wide of the mark. I am certain he would have tried, had he been there, and had he been able to lift my not-toolight mother and me at the same time. A Herculean task.

As it happened, Ola, torch in hand, holding me tightly, grasped her little case already packed for such an emergency and went out into the street unaided. The descending darkness was illuminated only by searchlights, fires and her torch. Someone directed her to the nearest shelter.

The basement in Twarda Street was packed with people, with still more pouring in all the time. Every new blast brought cries, curses and prayers. It was suffocating, with nowhere to sit down. After a few minutes, Ola left me in someone's arms and went out in search of something better. ‘You left me with a stranger?' I ask, risking a joke to ease her pain. But my mother, engrossed in remembering, cannot be diverted or consoled.

She ran upstairs, knocking at doors. One of them opened slightly, enough to reveal a young couple: a man and a woman in advanced pregnancy, the woman's eyes wide with fear. Ola, short of breath, asked if she and her baby could stay, if only for the rest of the night. She desperately wanted to call home, to let them know we were alive but, receiver in hand, staring at the dialling disk, she could not recall her mother's phone number. She remained forever grateful to these two strangers who took her in, because they understood her distress and her need for shelter.

Most importantly, she remembered to retrieve me.

Rushing along the dark staircase she collided with someone. It happened to be Władek, his face and clothes covered in grime. He'd been looking for us in the hospital and in here, in Twarda Street. For a short, precious moment they were together, ecstatically happy, so relieved to have found each other. But they could not stay together for long. Ola was in a hurry to pick me up, and Władek to return to the burning hospital. A peaceful night with both adoring parents beatifically leaning over my cradle was not my fate.

My mother and I remained in the same location for three days. Ola had nothing to offer to reciprocate the kindness of the strangers. Instead, as exhausted as she was, she washed the floors in gratitude. Then, at night, once the air alarm had ceased, baby in one arm, pack on her back, Ola began her walk home. She was still very weak and moved slowly through the dust-heavy air. My grandmother's place was not far but she felt as though she would never reach it. The streets, once so familiar since childhood, looked alien, the grotesquely deformed houses beyond recognition. Afraid of getting lost, she tried to walk in a straight line. Yet everything blocked her progress – the ruins of houses, their innards spilling onto the pavements; shards of glass; bomb craters and dead horses. For all her effort, she did not seem to be moving any closer to her destination. I hope I was not crying.

The relief of getting home in one piece, the joy of being with her family, did not last long. The shelling and bombardments did not stop and Brana's apartment was full. Jankiel, my great-grandfather, had risked travelling from Grodzisk, believing Warsaw to be a safer place to outlast the danger. At some stage, there must have been ten of us living there. It felt better to be together. Though much was made of the beauty of the new addition to the family – ‘Look at her blue eyes!' – everybody had something more pressing to do. Ewa was away most of the time. The number of wounded was growing every day and babies still had to be delivered. Only my mother – catatonic, listless, tearful – could not face the reality that was September 1939. She'd used all her strength and will to bring me to safety and could do no more. Even when the air-raid alert sounded and everyone sought shelter in the basement, Ola refused to move. She was still there when Brana's porcelain trinkets shook and fell, when the roar of explosions was deafening.

Władek tried to bring her back from her stupor, to coax her back to life. Now that she had a child, she had to live. And she did, after a fashion. Some atavistic reflex made her feed me and keep me close, but everything else was done by the others. It was my father who changed and washed my nappies, which I dirtied regardless of the shortage of water and even when there was no water at all.

For a long time I was perplexed by my mother's narrative, how she was moved almost to tears when telling me how lovingly my father had looked after me. Was it because, back then, it was not a man's job? Only when writing about it have I grasped the logistics of nappy-washing. On some days, water had to be fetched in buckets from one of the few old pumps still in existence; the queues, winding around the block, had to disperse as soon as the alarms whined, only to reform once it was over. Tempers were frayed. Many people lost their lives in these and other queues.