Magda's Daughter (36 page)

Anna closed her eyes. ‘But then we grew up.'

Helena had heard all this from Magda a hundred times and more, but she sat quietly as she had promised and waited. Anna sensed her thoughts.

‘I'm boring you. Magda must have told you all these stories. We wrote more about the old days than our new lives in our letters. Perhaps Magda, like me, clung to her past because she preferred it to her present. I know I did. From an early age we knew our destinies would be different, but we thought we would carry on living here together, if not in the village then the town, close enough to visit and keep our friendship.

‘Weronika was the sophisticated one. Money meant little to us as children; there has only ever been one shop in this village and all you could buy in it before the war were things that weren't produced on the farms or sold in the weekly market, like paraffin oil, candles, sewing thread, needles and, occasionally, magazines and comics. Occasionally, because the grown-ups told us that magazines and comics were a waste of money. But our mothers bought them when they thought no one was watching. How else would they have known what was fashionable and what was not? And if our fathers complained, they used to say, “What else can we use to line the kitchen drawers?Ë®

‘The Janeks were the richest family in the area. If any farmer was in trouble because his animals were ill or his crops had failed, he went to Weronika's father to borrow money. Mr Janek never refused. And twice a year, in spring and autumn, Weronika and her brothers and sisters would visit Cracow with their mother to stay with their cousins and shop.

‘They had furniture, clothes, jewellery and household goods like no one else. Some – the few things Wiktor left when he ransacked this house – are still here. But they never boasted about their money or possessions. And every time Weronika returned from the city she brought Magda and I dress-lengths of beautiful material, the same quality as the ones she bought for herself. Magda's were always red, and mine were blue – our favourite colours.

The greatest tragedy of our childhood was the diphtheria epidemic that swept through the country in the winter of 1934. Weronika's parents and all her brothers and sisters except Adam died, as did many of the young and old people in the village.

Adam was only sixteen, but he took over his father's business and looked after Weronika. On her seventeenth birthday Weronika became engaged to the son of the doctor who lived in town. Some said it was a match arranged by their fathers when they were children. Maybe it was, but Weronika had stars in her eyes whenever she looked at the doctor's son. Just like Magda with Adam.'

Anna paused briefly, then continued. ‘So Magda married her Adam. Weronika lived with them while her doctor's son went to Warsaw to study at the university. She kept the business books for Adam, as well as embroidering her future married monogram on table and bed linen. With Magda married and Weronika dreaming about her wedding, which was planned for the spring of 1940, I felt out of step with my friends for the first time in my life. Then my father invited the eldest son of one of the farmers to our house. I didn't discover until much later that he had asked my father if he could call on me. We were far more formal in our courting in those days.

‘I knew what my parents hoped would happen. The bar didn't bring in much money. My mother tried to help by cooking and selling food, but few people bought her meals because everyone ate at home except the village's two widowers, one bachelor and the travellers who went from village to village selling animal feeds and cures.

‘We girls were a burden. There was nowhere for us to work where we could earn money while we continued to live at home, and my father wouldn't hear of any of us going to the town, let alone the cities. The farms were run by families, and no farmer would pay wages when he could make his son or daughter work for bed and board. My mother wanted the three of us to marry well so we would never have to worry about money, as she'd had to do all of her married life.

‘My parents had a sitting room behind the bar. We use it to store the empty bottles now. There was a couch there where my brother slept before he went to the seminary. Upstairs were two bedrooms; my sisters and I shared one, and my parents slept in the other. It was crowded, and the bar downstairs was always noisy. But Adam and Weronika allowed us to play in their yard and use the library in their house whenever we wanted to study.'

Anna's bloodshot watery eyes grew misty. ‘I was telling you about my young man. I had known him all my life, but only really noticed him when he asked me to dance at a harvest supper in 1938. His family's farm was large and they owned it outright. The house was beautiful and in time it would be his, as would all the land, because his family followed the tradition of handing their wealth down to the eldest son. He was a fine catch for the daughter of a poor bar-keeper.

‘As well as the farmhouse, the family had a little house not far from the farm. His widowed grandmother lived in it. She was frail and the time was coming for her to move in with his parents. It was the way then. The little house would have been free for the farmer's oldest son to set up home there with his bride. Then, in time, when the young couple had a family, the son's parents grew old, and the rest of their children had left the farm, the cycle would begin all over again.

‘My parents were happy for me when he asked my father for my hand. They thought my life was mapped out, and so did I. I wasn't a farmer's daughter but I wasn't afraid of hard work. My fiancé's mother offered to train me. I used to walk to the farm early every morning to help with the milking. Afterwards I would work in the dairy or the fields, and my young man would drive me home in the cart in the evening.

‘When Germany declared war and the Russians and Germans invaded Poland, the Polish army called on all men to fight for their country. Every man in the village went. Some didn't return. Weronika lost her fiancé, but Adam, Magda's brothers and my young man returned when it was clear that we had lost the war, days after the first German troops crossed the border.

‘Adam called a meeting in the bar. It was decided that he should stay in the village to protect it as best he could. He was a gentleman farmer. The invaders needed food; he could oversee production. My fiancé …' Anna clamped her hand over her mouth for a moment. ‘He took his father's old hunting rifle, went into the forest and joined the partisans along with Wiktor. Brave but foolish young men. As if it were possible to fight tanks and machine guns with old hunting rifles.

‘We tried to carry on as before. My eldest sister helped my father in the bar, and Matylda …' Anna's voice broke. ‘Matylda was very beautiful. She could have had any man in the village, but she fell in love with a poor boy, a farm labourer. His family could offer her nothing and my father was furious. For a year she and my father didn't speak a word to one another. It broke my mother's heart.'

Helena saw Anna's love for her sister etched into every line on her face.

‘Our lives changed. The Nazis gave every Pole a ration card, which entitled us to nine hundred and thirty calories a day, half of what we needed to stay healthy. They were like locusts. They would turn up in the village without warning, at any time of the day or night, order us into the square, and search our houses for partisans, weapons and hoarded food. They took whatever they wanted, silver, jewellery, paintings, linen. If we objected they would set fire to the house. Anyone – man, woman, or child – suspected of helping the partisans or hoarding food would be hanged and we would be forced to watch.

‘The first time it happened, the priest and my brother, who had returned here as a curate, appealed to the officers. They were both taken away. When they returned a year later we didn't recognise them. They were so changed, thin and broken. It was the beginning of the end for Stefan. His spirit had been crushed. The beatings the Germans gave him later only finished what they had begun when they took him in 1941.'

Anna tensed. ‘We fought back every way we could. My father would harness the cart with our one remaining old horse and pick up barrels of beer from the farmers – in those days we had no large breweries. He would hide guns smuggled in from Russia amongst the kegs, and move hunted men from one village to another. He took Jews who'd been in hiding as close to the Russian border as he dared, and distributed food, which the farmers had risked their lives to hoard, among the partisans.

Someone informed on him. I never found out who. The Germans offered food, money and favours as rewards to anyone who betrayed a Pole working for the underground. I don't even blame the traitor, unless he or she sold my father for money. Perhaps they hoped to buy the life of a son or a husband. When the soldiers came for him they took my mother and older sister as well. I was left to look after the bar and Matylda.

‘I did what I knew my father would have wanted me to: fight the Nazis every way I could. The next day I harnessed the horse and cart and carried on smuggling for the partisans. I went to my fiancé's camp as often as I could, using the excuse that I was taking him news of his family, but we both knew I went only to see him.

‘In the summer of 1942, I was driving the cart through the forest with my sister Matylda when a group of German soldiers stopped us. They were drunk …'

Helena gripped the edge of the window seat.

‘I was terrified. I had heard stories about what the Germans did to young girls, and not just stories. I had seen their corpses abandoned at the side of the road.' She raised her bloodshot eyes. ‘It was different between young men and women in those days. Matylda and I were virgins. All of us faced death every day under the Germans, but our young men wouldn't make love to us, no matter how much they wanted to, because they thought it would demean us in the eyes of the Church and decent society.'

‘You wanted to?' Helena asked when she could bear Anna's silence no longer.

‘I was frightened. I didn't know what to expect. I had been brought up a strict Catholic and knew nothing. No one talked about what love between a man and woman could be like in those days, not even mothers and daughters. Sex was something that went on in the fields between animals. We had seen the results when cows calved and horses foaled. But every Sunday in church we were told that men and women were different from beasts. The church preached that sex before marriage was a mortal sin, and we were terrified of going to hell. So, my fiancé never did more than kiss me.

‘But when Matylda and I were trapped on that cart by those foul, drunken pigs – which is too good a word for them; no pig would have done to another pig what they did to us – I wished that he and I had never listened to the priest. I wished that we had made love every time we had been alone together. But it was too late. I looked at Matylda, and the expression on her face will haunt me until the day I die.

‘They pulled us down from the cart, tore our clothes off, stripped us naked – hit us when we screamed and …'

Helena felt sick to the pit of her stomach. She had never seen such self-loathing and disgust on anyone's face. ‘You don't have to tell me any more.'

‘Yes, I do. I have lived a lie for so long I was in danger of believing it. It is time for the truth. And I am telling you this for my sake not yours. What I am about to say, I have never said outside of the confessional. The old priest who gave me absolution is dead. Now I need absolution again – from the one person who had the right to expect me to protect her, the one person I have failed most in my life.'

‘My father was a drunken German rapist.'

Silence closed in, thick, suffocating. Anna whispered, ‘They took Matylda first. They did unspeakable things to her, and all the time she screamed, pleading with them to kill her, they laughed. I begged them to take me instead, but they laughed. She was prettier. That was why they took her first. She was prettier.'

Chapter Twenty

Helena felt as though time and everything else in the room, including Anna, had been frozen, as though she were in a painting, brushed into a comer, fixed and immobile. The staccato tick of the alarm clock on the table next to the bed seemed to shatter the silence. The room whirled around her. Anna was dry-eyed. Beyond tears.

‘When they finished with Matylda they threw her to the side of the road. She was covered in blood. I didn't know whether she was alive or dead. One of them grabbed my arm. I could smell the sour herrings and beer on his breath …'

Helena braced herself. A part of her wanted to tell Anna to stop. Yet she couldn't. She needed to hear the truth about her parents. Wasn't that what she had told Ned? No matter how terrible, she would learn to live with the knowledge of who she was, if she could be certain that it was the truth. She looked up and saw Anna watching her intently, an odd expression on her face. Then she continued.

‘A car drove up and stopped. Two German officers climbed out and walked over to us. The soldiers stopped beating me and jumped to attention. I fell to my knees and asked the officers to kill Matylda and me quickly, to put us out of our misery.

‘They were kind, gentle. They picked up our clothes and took two coats from the soldiers. They covered Matylda with one and gave me the other. They asked me where we lived.

‘I was terrified that they would go to the village and kill everyone there, so I wouldn't tell them. They sent the soldiers away, put us in their car and took us to a doctor, who stitched Matylda's wounds and warned me that the worst injuries were the ones that couldn't be seen: the ones in her mind. He was right. When he had finished treating Matylda, the officers drove us back to the cart. I asked them to go away. They did. Fortunately the horse knew the way home. We returned here and I put Matylda to bed. She didn't say a word that night, or for almost a year afterwards.

‘Somehow, one of the officers found out who we were and where we lived. The next morning he came to the bar. He brought food and medicine and apologised for what the soldiers had done to Matylda. He wanted me to go to the authorities to complain. That is how naive he was. I thanked him but told him not to come near us again, because if the people in the village saw a German officer visiting me they would think that I had become a collaborator. He asked if he could meet me again – and I looked into his eyes and knew. I thought he did, too.

‘I told him that I couldn't risk being seen with him but I would try to go to the lake on Sunday. I went. He was there. He told me that he wasn't really a soldier but a scientist, an archaeologist. He had been drafted into an SS unit that excavated ancient burial grounds and villages in Poland and Russia to look for signs of early Germanic settlements. It was part of the Nazis' plan to claim that the whole of Eastern Europe had been settled by German tribes.

‘He was a German, one of the enemy, yet I knew that he was the one for me, just as Adam had been the one for Magda. I thought about my fiancé and realised my feelings for him were childish infatuation. This was love – the real thing. We arranged to meet at the lake twice a week. We met ten times in all. And the first time we met we made love. Not because he forced me, but because I knew it was the right thing for us to do, that the Church was wrong. There was no sin in what we did.

‘My time had come. I finally understood what Magda and Weronika had been trying to tell me when we had talked about love. The officer wanted to make plans for us for after the war. He told me how delighted his mother would be when he introduced us. But all I wanted to talk about was what was happening to us now. We never had much time. Matylda was ill and I couldn't leave her for long.

‘One night, as I was walking back to the village from the lake, I heard gunfire and men shouting in German and Polish. I hid until it was quiet, then crept back here. The next morning I heard that the partisans had attacked a convoy of SS as they left the archaeological dig.

‘He did not meet me the next Sunday. I was devastated because I thought he'd been hurt, or worse. What I didn't know for a week was that my fiancé had been killed that night. A month later I discovered that I was pregnant. I confessed to the priest and told him who the father of my child was, but no one else knew or suspected the truth. My fiancé's mother and father, like everyone in the village, assumed the child I was carrying was his.'

‘Your fiancé never knew about you and the German officer?'

‘No, Jerzy never knew about us.'

‘His name was Jerzy.' Because Anna hadn't mentioned his name until now, Helena had been wondering if he was related to someone she'd met in the village.

‘Jerzy Leman. His parents insisted that you be given his name when you were christened. One more lie that I went along with. Before you were born I was terrified that people would find out that the child I was carrying wasn't Jerzy's, although, logically, there was no reason for anyone to do so. I knew the priest would keep my secret because the confessional is sacred. Like my German lover, I had blonde hair and blue eyes, so the chances were that my child would be blonde and blue-eyed, too. Jerzy's hair had been light brown, his eyes grey, so no one's suspicions would be aroused if the child was fair.

‘I had been careful, so had my German. We had never written a letter to one another. We met on Sunday and Wednesday evenings at the lake at seven o'clock in the evening. If one of us didn't turn up it would be seven o'clock the next Sunday or Wednesday. I never told anyone about him, not even Matylda, and he swore that he never told anyone about me. I believed him.

‘It was almost as dangerous for my German as it was for me. The Nazis regarded us Poles as sub-humans. It was a crime for an Aryan to degrade his blood by having relations with a Pole. Rape was accepted. Polish women could be used and abused, but not loved. And marriage between a Polish woman and a German man was out of the question. That would have been a race crime.

‘I was sick the whole time I carried you. I couldn't keep food down. Magda and Weronika cared for me, and Matylda tried to help. I had to close the bar. There was no more beer to be had, or spare food, so I had no excuse to take out the horse and cart even if I had been well. And all the time I carried you, I loved you and looked forward to your birth, because I believed that you would be born out of love and a living reminder of all that my German lover had been.

‘One evening, two weeks before you were born, I saw my German. He came into the village with a convoy that was looking for partisans. He wasn't dead at all. As usual, we were ordered into the square. He saw me, looked at my stomach and winked at me – then he winked at another girl. A girl who was rumoured to have taken to walking in the woods in the evening.

‘I understood. The Germans who had raped Matylda and almost raped me were more honest. They took what they wanted by force. My German lover – the man I believed had been destined for me – had only been pretending. There had been no great tragic love affair. He had fooled me and I had fooled myself. I had been used, just as Matylda had, only more gently.

‘You were born at two o'clock in the morning on 7 April 1943. Magda helped the midwife, and when Matylda heard you cry she came into my room and spoke for the first time in nearly a year.

‘I couldn't bear to look at you. You were a reminder not of my love but my stupidity. I was too sick to feed you or look after you. Now I think I made myself ill so I wouldn't have to look after you. I can't remember a single thing that happened during the month after you were born. And all that time, my sister Matylda nursed you, fed you, bathed you and took care of you.

‘It was Matylda who carried you to the church for your baptism and named you Lena after my mother and Matylda at my insistence. As she had taken it upon herself to look after you, I think in some twisted way I wanted to believe you were hers. She was a better mother to you than I could ever have been.

‘Jerzy's mother and father went to your baptism. They assumed you were their grandchild, but their kindness was more than I could bear. The villagers were kind also, especially considering that you had been born a bastard. Because Jerzy had been killed fighting the Germans I was almost accorded the status of a widow.

‘Two nights before the massacre, German soldiers burned down Jerzy's farm and killed all his family. I don't have to tell you what happened on the twenty-sixth of June.'

‘The day of the massacre,' Helena murmured.

‘The soldiers assembled us in the square. As usual, Matylda was carrying you. The Brown Sisters took all the blonde blue-eyed babies, including you. Like Adam Janek, Matylda fought to keep you. And the soldiers shot Matylda, just as they shot Adam Janek. I wished then, as I wish now, that they had shot me.'

Anna took a deep breath and began to speak more quickly. It was as though she couldn't wait to tell the rest of her story.

‘The Brown Sisters passed the children and babies they had taken to the people they had picked out. The way I describe it you might think it was orderly. It wasn't. It was all noise and confusion. The German officers were barking orders, the soldiers were firing guns, people were shouting, babies were screaming. It was chaos. And I stood calmly in the middle of it, with Matylda lying dead at my feet, watching as you, Magda and Weronika were marched out of the village at gunpoint.

‘It was the last time I saw you before you walked into the yard with Ned. One of the young girls was carrying you, a tiny baby wrapped in a shawl. Magda tried to take you, but her left arm was hanging limp at her side. I think the Germans had broken it when she tried to stop them from killing Adam and Helena. I was crying, but my tears were for Matylda, Magda and Weronika. All I felt as I watched you go was relief. Relief that I wouldn't have to look on the living face of my stupidity and foolishness again.

‘If the priest hadn't brought me Josef that night I would have killed myself. I had already laid out the kitchen knives and was choosing one to cut my wrists with. The old priest couldn't be with everyone, so he tried to give each one of us a reason to live. Every single house had lost someone, either killed or taken. And we all knew that being taken was practically a death sentence.

‘Josef needed me, and to be needed by someone meant every­ thing to me at that time. I couldn't do anything for Matylda, Magda, Weronika, my parents, my oldest sister or you, but I could look after Josef, poor Stefan and the priest. And the priest kept reminding me that nothing is for ever. That one day the war would end and you would find your way back to me. Little did he know that was the last thing I wanted.'

‘But I have found my way back to you,' Helena said softly.

‘Not as my child. As Magda's. I didn't hear from her until after the war ended. A month after Wiktor hounded Weronika out of the village, I received a letter from Magda. Weronika had written to tell her that everyone in Poland believed that the girls who had been taken by the Nazis had been used only for one purpose, and that they were all regarded as whores.

Magda told me that a miracle had happened. She had managed to keep you safe and with her. It hadn't been easy. But by changing your records for newcomers into the home, and pretending that you had a temperature or diarrhoea whenever it was your turn to be adopted, she kept you so she could return you to me at the end of the war.

‘I wrote back to her but I didn't tell her the truth. I made excuses. I said that I didn't have enough food to feed Josef and myself. I was ill. It was as much as I could do to look after Josef. It would be best if she didn't return to the village for her own sake because she would be treated the same way that Weronika had been. Magda replied and said she couldn't understand any mother not wanting her own daughter, which was understandable given what had happened to her Helena. She enclosed a photograph of you, the first of many. You looked just like your father and, so help me God, I still didn't want to see you. I never answered the letter. How could I even begin to tell Magda the truth without admitting that I'd had an affair with one of the enemy?

‘The next time I heard from Magda she said that she'd had an offer of marriage and was going to make a new life for herself and you in Great Britain. From the little Weronika had said when she'd returned, I knew she hadn't recognised you in the Displaced Persons' camp. There was no reason for Weronika to suspect that you were anything other than a Lebensborn child Magda had picked up to replace the child that had been killed. And Magda hadn't enlightened her.'

‘Why not?' Helena asked, momentarily forgetting her promise not to ask questions.

‘Because Magda wanted to write to me and break what she thought was marvellous news herself. I didn't hear from Magda for over two years. When she was settled in Britain she started sending me parcels and photographs of you. I was pleased. I had proof that she was giving you a better life than I could have given you in Poland. It seemed right and made me feel less guilty. I had Josef; Magda had you. Neither Magda nor I were truly happy because we couldn't forget those we had loved and lost during the war, but we got on with our lives.

‘The Cold War began, you and I were the wrong sides of it, and I thought that I would never see Magda or you again.' Anna fell back on the pillows. ‘Now you know everything. You were born to a mother who was not only a traitor to her country but too much of a coward to love you. You had a father who was a good­looking, charming philanderer, and a Nazi. A young aunt who loved you enough to sacrifice her life trying to protect you. And a foster mother who loved you enough to risk her life in the Lebensborn home to keep you with her. A foster mother who would have given you up to a mother who didn't want you at the end of the war, simply because she thought it was the right thing to do, even though it would have hurt her unbearably. I know from her letters just how much Magda loved you. She never understood why I didn't want you back.'