by Ann Charney
VII
When my aunt left Dobryd with her son to hide, it was not expected that anyone else from the family would join her. However, conditions in Dobryd deteriorated quickly. It soon became necessary for my mother to seek refuge too.
My mother was now living with her parents. My father had left Dobryd to join the Russian army before the Germans had confined Jews to their ghetto. There was no one else to look after her parents, and so she found herself in the ghetto in charge of a household consisting of two elderly sick people and an infant.
There were still a few people outside the ghetto with whom she maintained contact. At night, risking death, she would make her way to an isolated point in the barbed wire fence to exchange a few words with someone from the outside world. In this way she learned what the Germans had in store for us in the next few days.
Their plan was to liquidate the entire Jewish community. In a day or so, when the necessary transport cars arrived, they would evacuate all those still able to work. They were to be sent to concentration camps. The others, the old, the sick and infants, were to be killed.
My mother realized that she had to make an, attempt to escape from the ghetto before its destruction. She knew this meant she would have to abandon her parents; they were both resigned to dying and had no desire to save themselves. My grandmother prayed daily for death. There was very little hope, my mother knew, of getting out of the ghetto alive or of making her way to my aunt’s hide-out. Still, she preferred this slim hope to sitting and waiting for the blow to fall.
She had little time to plan and no time to hesitate. All exits were being closed around her. The very next night, with me in her arms, and some small supplies, she made her escape. Fortunately, it was a dark night. She managed to cut through the barbed wire and get through to the other side without being seen by the guards. Once outside, she heard shots coming from inside the ghetto. For a moment she was terrified, convinced they were shooting at her. She hid in a doorway and as the shooting intensified, now accompanied by screams, she realized the destruction of the ghetto had begun.
She headed for a house nearby where one of her Christian friends awaited her with a change of clothing. Disguised as a peasant woman she began her journey towards Manya’s shelter. Soon she found herself in the open countryside. For the next two weeks she continued to make her way to Manya’s village, moving only at night, travelling in the shelter of wooded areas. She had grown up on this land and now she used her familiarity with it to help her survive. She found enclosures for us to sleep in, and herbs and leaves to nourish us.
Twice she was spotted and stopped. Once a German patrol intercepted us. She managed to get away by convincing them that she was indeed a peasant woman taking her child to a doctor. The second time a group of partisans stopped her. She could not fool them as she had the Germans, and this time she bought her freedom and even some food with the money she had taken from my grandfather’s house.
At last she found herself outside Manya’s village, and when it grew dark she made her way to the farmhouse.
The loft was by then well filled. The week before, however, someone had died of typhus. Manya could certainly have found a wealthier replacement than my mother. Also, she had previously excluded all children from her shelter. They were too troublesome, she felt, and they could not be relied upon to keep quiet during the searches by the German patrols. Nevertheless, there we were, the granddaughter and daughter of the one man to whom she felt any loyalty. She knew it meant certain death for us if she refused us, so she relented and took us in.
Our acceptance in the shelter was still not assured. Its first occupants, like any early settlers, closed ranks amongst themselves and were scornful and hostile to those who came after. Most of all they were wary of accepting a child, who so obviously could endanger their lives.
While my mother and my aunt waited, and comforted each other, the argument about our fate raged around them. Luckily for us, the man who had become a kind of unofficial leader of the group was a close friend of my father’s. The others finally gave way before his insistence. In a symbolic gesture of acceptance he led my mother and me up to the loft and pulled the ladder up behind us. A place was made for us among the twenty or so people who already lay there. We were given enough space in which to sit or stretch out. The slant of the roof was such that it did not permit any normal-sized adult to stand upright. We spent the next two and a half years there.
VIII
I remember that period with the vagueness of a half-forgotten dream, but I am convinced that I was often happy as a small child. When I try to picture what my life was like, I always see myself surrounded by people who gave me much attention and affection. Their presence protected me from the physical restrictions and hardships I experienced.
At first it was only my mother, my aunt and my cousin Alexander who took turns amusing me. Then the others, a few at a time, became involved with my activities. They had, after all, little else with which to distract themselves from the constant hunger and boredom. I suppose they also felt that if I were kept happy and amused there would be less danger of my giving them away with my cries. I was the greatest threat in their midst, but ironically, I was their principal source of distraction and joy as well.
Few children have ever had so many adults at their disposal as I did during my years in the loft. Soon they began to differentiate themselves for me, according to some specific skill that each one of them practised with me. Hania sang well, and knew by heart the words of many songs and poems I never tired of hearing. Misha became my favourite storyteller. In his repertoire there was one story in particular that always fascinated me. This was the story of Baba Yaga, a form of the primeval bad spirit whom all children in Poland are taught to fear. I was sure Manya was an incarnation of that spirit. Baba Yaga was a very clever sorceress, but since in our stories she was always beaten eventually, I felt confident that one day we would be free of Manya.
The woman I called Granny had the idea and the patience to teach me how to knit. The wool came from an old stocking that was ripped and rewound, and the needles had been whittled out of twigs. I knitted and reknitted the same piece of wool in all sorts of different ways, each time imagining a different purpose that it was to serve.
My cousin Alexander taught me to read and write. A pencil and paper were provided for this from other people’s possessions. Someone, Alexander I think, wrote out a primer for me between the lines of a used exercise book. No child ever had a more appreciative or encouraging audience than I, when I exhibited my new skills before my many teachers.
We had no news of the outside. Our only contact with the world beyond the loft was Manya, who came each night to bring us fresh water and bread. There were, of course, frequent patrols, coming so close sometimes that we were certain they could hear our heartbeats through the thin layer of straw that separated them from us. Once I remember bayonets being thrust up through the straw, but we were never discovered. The patrols, dangerous as they were, provided almost our sole excitement. After each search there would be a mood of rejoicing in the loft, and I would be praised and hugged for knowing so well how to keep quiet and still.
At night, those with any strength left went down from the hayloft into the barn for some exercise. Once, when I stood at the edge of the loft watching the others below, I experienced a dizzy spell and fell, breaking my arm. A splint was made for me and the bones grew together very quickly, but after this incident I was restricted even more in my movements since my mother feared another accident.
Another time I remember being ill with typhoid fever, a disease that plagued every member of our hide-out. Someone gave my mother two lumps of sugar for me, a treasure they had been hoarding against some extreme need of their own. My mother accepted the precious gift and cried.
After being cut off from the rest of the world for many months, the people in the shelter began to think less and less of the outside. At the beginning, there was much anxiety for relatives left b
ehind, but slowly the hold of these ties loosened and an almost unreal spirit of happiness seemed to permeate our hiding place. A new kind of peace settled over everyone. There was little agitation or complaining. The adults spent their time sleeping, daydreaming, reliving the past, occasionally talking when their strength permitted. We lost all track of time; days disappeared into weeks, into months. Only the seasons, with their changes in climate, forced themselves into our consciousness.
Immobility and malnutrition had altered the people in the loft to something less than human, yet they scarcely seemed to notice or to regret their transformation. They had been forced to withdraw from the human race, slowly becoming more detached from it, until they felt only a vague nostalgia for their former lives. Death in these circumstances would have seemed very natural. External events, however, roused them eventually from this trance and reawakened the appetites of life.
No one told us the war was coming to an end. Manya would certainly not give us any information which might loosen her hold on us. Still, there were signs that could be read. The sounds of war were now within earshot, and this meant that the Russians were driving the Germans back to their own territories. The only firing we had heard until now had been that of the Germans executing the hostages in the village. Now the big Russian cannon were firing at the Germans. Every night we could hear their thunder as they shelled the German encampments. In the loft, each shell was greeted with elation. It didn’t matter that one of these could have hit our barn as easily as the German fortifications. It was worth the risk to imagine our invincible tormentors fleeing from the barrage. Planes were soon heard as well, and then there was a daily exchange of bombing and the firing of antiaircraft guns. We also heard the noise of the Germans retreating, and one terrible day we listened to the village people screaming with pain and terror as the Germans took their last revenge.
The lassitude of the past months gave way to a growing impatience. After all this time, would we live to see our liberators? One of the adults, the strongest in our group, began to venture out of the shelter at night to gauge the progress of the battle, but the people outside seemed to know as little as we did. They, too, were relying on the sounds of war for their information. One thing we did learn, however, was that gangs of Germans were roaming about dressed in Russian uniform pretending to be Russians. In this way they tricked some of the surviving Jews and partisans into betraying themselves. Soon the occasional sorties from the loft became more and more dangerous. The closer the end of the war seemed, the more vicious the Germans and their collaborators became.
As the possibility of freedom grew increasingly plausible, our situation in the loft was becoming ever more desperate. Manya had realized that her flow of gold would soon be cut off. The inevitable end of her rule over us drove her greed beyond its former limits. She was determined to extract every trace of wealth before she lost us forever. She announced to us that her food supplies had run out. After the daily plunder of the retreating Germans, the peasants had nothing left to sell. From now on, we must expect to pay dearly for every bit of food, and the rate increased with the approach of the Russian army.
No one dared venture out to look for food. Soon there were those in the shelter who no longer had money to give. Manya told them to leave, but she could not really drive them out. She lacked the physical force to remove them herself, and she could not betray them without also betraying those who still had some money left and putting herself in jeopardy for sheltering Jews. She decided to starve them out. Those who still had some means had to balance out the hunger of their companions with their own quickly diminishing funds.
The promise of freedom had resurrected the people in the loft. Everyone now wanted to live. They felt a hunger for life that they would never experience again with such intensity. The mood of peace and contentment was lost in this new frenzy.
Who can say what acts we might have witnessed in our shelter had this situation lasted longer than it did? As it was, these last weeks managed to erase most of the feelings of kinship and camaraderie that had developed among the inhabitants of the loft. In later years, these people who had once formed an entire universe amongst themselves avoided all contact with one another. None of them wanted to be reminded how far they had been driven by the extremity of their situation from the level of civilized human beings. They had no desire to remember how eager they had been to sacrifice one another to save their own lives.
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.
