Dobryd

by Ann Charney

  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 underst
ood 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.

  I never really understood how all the love and hate she felt for Poland could continue to co-exist within her. She loved the language and hated those who spoke it. She refused any contact with the large Polish community in Montreal. She would never speak to any Pole who had been more than a child at the time of the war. This was to avoid the possibility, she explained, of talking to someone who had contributed to the betrayal of anyone she had loved. Her dislike of adult Germans never reached the proportions of her hatred of Poles her own age. These were her people, a generation she had once belonged to. She would never forget what they had done to her.

  There were certain incidents she recalled more than others. Her mind returned to them again and again, as if her existence defined itself through the pain of those memories, and she reassured herself by probing to see if it was still there. When I was growing up and listening to her, it seemed to me often that in the background of my life there was a constant chorus of mourners. The steady and monotonous dirge of their lament gave me no peace. Perhaps it was intended that I should pick up and carry on the complaint of the betrayed. But at a certain age I saw myself as an offering on a memorial of hate, and I refused to have anything to do with it. I did not know then how powerful my mother’s words had been, nor how deeply these stories of what had happened to the members of our family had penetrated my mind.

  When the war broke out, my uncle Samuel, my mother’s only brother, was living the kind of life he had always wanted to live, as a prosperous landowner, on good terms with his neighbours and his friends. He was certain they would protect him when the Germans came in search of Jews. In appearance, and in every other way, he resembled the Christian landowners of the district. There was no way the Germans could single him out.

  In the winter of 1939 the German army reached the region where my uncle and his family lived. This was the beginning of the German occupation. They had not yet consolidated their hold on the countryside; the efficient grouping of victims for the purposes of destruction had not yet been set up. As they marched deeper into the country, their selection of victims was haphazard, and they were forced to rely to a great extent on the co-operation of the local population in rooting out “undesirables”.

  When they reached my uncle’s village, they camped overnight in the mayor’s office. The next morning a small patrol left the mayor’s building and headed for my uncle’s farm. There was a local guide with them, and they seemed to be informed of every detail that would facilitate their work.

  The first thing they did when they arrived at the farm was to kill the dogs. My uncle and his wife, still lingering over their breakfast, were taken entirely by surprise. But their destruction was not as simple as the soldiers had anticipated. Samuel and his wife struggled fiercely. They called to their servants, but no one appeared. They continued to resist alone as long as they could. The Germans had intended to hang them in public. This was the custom at the outset of the war, in dealing with important local personages. But because of the fierce struggle they encountered, they were obliged to shoot their victims first. Only then were they able to carry out their plan.

  They were hung in the town square, but because of the resistance they had shown, the Germans hung them by their feet and forbade anyone to cut them down for a week. They remained like this for the prescribed period, and the peasants, after they had gotten used to the horror of this sight, came regularly in the evening to gaze at them and to gossip near their swaying shadows. Small children ran beneath them and used them as targets for their stone-throwing. Eventually they were cut down and buried in an unmarked grave.

  Their only daughter, Olga, was away at school, and managed to survive the rest of the war. After the war, when she and my mother first heard the story of her parents’ death, they decided to hunt down those responsible for it. They set out together for my uncle’s farm. When the peasants learned that my mother and my cousin were willing to pay for information, the response was overwhelming. All sorts of names were proposed to them as the possible informers. My mother and my cousin realized despairingly that because of the peasants’ cupidity they would never be certain who had committed the betrayal. Thus, the attempt at revenge ended in frustration, and they left the village without even finding the place of burial.

  My mother was also haunted by the death of cousin Alexander. The partisan group he had joined included several Ukrainians who were more notorious than the Poles for their hatred of Jews. They must have been hostile to him from the start because he was a Jew; however, they managed to conceal their hatred until it would be useful to them.

  Then a member of the group was captured by the Germans and destined to be shipped off for hard labour. His comrades arranged his release by handing over my cousin in his place. One night they sent him out on a small sabotage mission in the railroad yard. The Germans were alerted. Alexander was caught and executed. One month later the war was over.

  After the incident of the crosses, the voices of the betrayed began to haunt my mother more than ever.

  She felt they were urging her to leave the land where she had suffered. In the end she accepted their counsel.

  III

  The hardest part about leaving was our separation from Yuri, a separation that in all probability would be final.

  Soon after our arrival in Bylau, Yuri had gone back to his village. When he returned, after an absence of a few weeks, he was so changed no one dared ask him what had happened. Eventually he was able to tell us that his village had fallen victim to a German reprisal attack. The Germans had burned the village to the ground. The few young people who remained were sent to labour camps; the old were made to dig their own mass grave, and fell into it as they were shot.

  My mother and my aunt knew what Yuri was feeling. They waited, and helped him through the familiar cycle of numbness, self-pity, rage and hatred. In the end, when he was consoled as much as he would ever be, they were his family and he was theirs.

  Now they were talking of emigrating and leaving him behind. The closer they came to a decision, the harder it was for them to tell him. But at last he had to be told. His reaction was one of total incomprehension. It seemed incredible to him that a misunderstanding as trivial as the one of the crosses could lead us to such a decision. For him the war was over, the enemy vanquished. Now was the time to rebuild, to forget the past, to live with confidence in the future. They were mad to run away now.

  “What will you do alone in a strange land?” he asked in bewilderment. “How will you live? Why leave now when your country is free?”

  Night after night I heard them talking, my mother explaining what it meant to be a Jew in Poland: the betrayals, the fear, the enemy within that would never be driven out. History was clear-cut; its patterns seemed inevitable, yet each generation of Jews in Poland had to learn it anew. She had only just understood that. She couldn’t remain, knowing that I would probably have to live through the same disillusionment and betrayals she had experienced.

  Yuri had only one answer; what she said was true about the past, but things were different now. Everyone had changed, just as she had. It would be entirely different for me. If we stayed, I would belong here as much as anyone else. Did she really think I would feel more at home in some strange land where we knew no one, and whose language I couldn’t even speak? No, it was precisely because of me that she must stay. For the children of communism, the future would be glorious.

  I listened as they argued about my future and my heart was with Yuri. I loved him, I was happy with our life in Bylau, I liked my school, my friends. I didn’t want to leave.

  But my mother’s voice told me there was little hope. Her bitterness was so overwhelming that often I did not even hear her words. It brushed aside Yuri’s reassurances, his optimism, his political faith. The weight of my mother’s expe
rience was such that his words never touched its core. The more I listened to them, the more hopeless I felt. I knew nothing Yuri said could stand up against the hatred that possessed my mother. The betrayals she had experienced cut so deep that only total separation could ease the wound.

  My own feelings about Poland made the matter worse. My very reluctance to leave was reason enough for my mother to precipitate our departure. She saw my attachment as a trap. It prevented me from seeing my exclusion. I was blind, as she had been, and equally vulnerable to the blows the future had in store for me. The only way she could protect me was to take me away.

  My mother’s will overrode everyone’s objections. In the end my aunt and my uncle agreed with her. My cousin, however, had just graduated from medical school and could not be convinced to accompany us. She was to make the journey ten years later, for the very reasons my mother had anticipated.

  It was decided that we would move to Warsaw, where it would be easier for us to wage the long battle for an exit visa.

  Yuri saw us off. He helped us onto the train and loaded our belongings into our compartment. Then came those last few moments when there is nothing left to do except say good-bye to someone you love and will probably never see again. That too, passed. The train pulled away. I leaned out, waving madly at a figure that reflected my motions back to me. Under the lights of the station, his hair and his military decorations gleamed as brilliantly as they had when I first saw him.