by Ramona Koval
I may not have the right to ask that question. But to whom should I be directing it?
Mama, what about me?
In my pursuit of Max, I had taken my eyes off another player in the drama. And while I was waiting for Max’s testimony to arrive and searching through Holocaust stories, I came upon interviews with people who had survived using false identities, as Mama did in Warsaw.
What did I really know of her story? I knew what she had let slip, augmented by things I had learned since her death. She said she had fair hair and blue eyes, and she had been chosen by her mother as the one most likely to be able to pass for a Polish Catholic girl. Her fifteen-year-old brother had dark hair and brown eyes. According to a story Bern told me, on the night before the ghetto was to be ‘liquidated’ and all the inmates sent to their deaths at Treblinka my grandmother gave her daughter a potato, the last of their food. She told Mama that where they were going they would have no need to eat.
When I visited the hamlet of Wyrozęby during my trip to Poland I learned that two of Mama’s neighbours, brother and sister Joseph and Josepha Krzyzanowski, still lived across the road from her old house in a small wooden cottage in which a tap had just been connected after two hundred years of having to draw water from a well. They remembered Mama, were surprised that she had survived the war. ‘She disappeared like camphor,’ Joseph told me. They said that a woman named Wanda Bujalska, a member of a minor Polish aristocratic family who were local landowners in the region where Mama’s family had a small farm holding, was most likely the one who had arranged Mama’s false identity papers.
I found the Bujalska house high on a hill overlooking the valley; by then it had been turned into a school, but it was summer and the place was deserted. I sat in the garden in the shade of birch and poplars and fragrant Polish jasmine, imagining the secret visits here of underground couriers as the plans for Mama’s false documents were hatched.
Recently I found a reference to Wanda Bujalska in a weekly paper published in Sokołów Podlaski. It was an interview with her nephew about his recollection of wartime activities in the local district. After the death of her husband in 1927 in Wyrozęby, Wanda Bujalska rarely mixed with the locals. She was highly educated and had a circle of worldly artists—actors, popular singers, opera stars; names which are still recognised in Poland: Nina Andrycz, Janusz Popławski, Mieczysław Fogg. Fogg was a member of the Polish underground.
Members of the underground visited Wanda Bujalska in her house, and it was there that she hid several Jews from Warsaw through the war. When it was all over, she lost control of the estate to another family member and a group of survivors organised for her to stay in a flat in Warsaw, to repay her. I see she died in the city in 1976, aged eighty-six.
Most likely Wanda Bujalska had given Mama contacts in Warsaw, and Mama slipped out of view to walk by herself, a fourteen-year-old girl, the nearly one hundred kilometres to Warsaw to find shelter with a Polish family. They had agreed to put her up; she paid someone for the false identity papers with a small blue-stoned ring that her mother had given her; and she lived in the basement of their home, looking after Rolf, their large German shepherd, and learning to be a Catholic—how to pray properly and what was expected of her in church.
She was from a rural Orthodox Jewish family: her first language was Yiddish and she’d learned Polish at the village school. Suddenly she was living in a sophisticated metropolis, using her second language, and she was barely a teenager. Her papers said that she was seven years older than she was.
I knew that after Mama had spent about six months in the Warsaw basement, one of the family members, a brother-in-law or son-in-law who was a journalist, became rattled by the possibility that they would be discovered hiding a Jewish girl, and Mama had to leave. Where she went after that, how she disappeared as a young teenager into the Nazi-occupied city, is a mystery, but I knew that somehow she got a job as a waitress in a canteen for German soldiers.
Just as I had pursued Max by tracking the group of men who testified with him and who were tattooed in the same transport arrival from Mława, I searched for stories like Mama’s.
I was trying to understand how it was possible for her to live her life in Australia in the 1950s, with children from two different fathers, and how she managed to keep her secrets till the day she died, despite having ample time to speak to me while I nursed her at home every day of her last six months. What was the hold on her heart and her mind that made her lock her story away so securely? As I cooked for her and talked with her, as my baby played at the foot of her bed, as I washed her and tended to her body, fed her, medicated her, didn’t she ever want to say: Sit down here, my darling. I have something to tell you.
But then, there are ways and ways of telling.
Mama’s favourite film actor was Ingrid Bergman. The mysterious Swedish beauty was a star of her generation, and Mama looked a bit like her. I imagine now that her lovers may have compared her to the enchanting lead in 1940s movies such as Casablanca, Notorious and Joan of Arc.
In the 1950s Bergman ruffled feathers when, already married, she not only had an affair with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini but had a son with him. She divorced her first husband (a Swedish dentist turned neurosurgeon who stalled the divorce, thereby making Bergman give birth to a bastard child); married Rossellini, had twin daughters, and in 1957 divorced him; then married the scion of a wealthy Swedish shipping family. All this made her persona non grata in Hollywood, but of great interest to Mama.
I fancy Mama thought that she and Ingrid Bergman would hit it off if they ever had a chance meeting. But that wasn’t on the cards. I always knew that Bergman had an unconventional personal life, because Mama had alerted me to it. It meant little to me at the time, but now I was beginning to understand why she may have been trying to get me thinking.
I was enjoying reading about the life of Bergman and discovering that she really was thought of as evil, a corrupter of American womanhood. She was in a position to carry it off but a woman like Mama, a survivor, poor, uneducated and in a lowly position in a foreign country, might well have thought twice about blatantly doing the same thing.
It was distracting fun to watch Bergman in interviews on YouTube, to imagine what Mama saw in her. It took me away from the sadness of the Holocaust testimonies in the Shoah Archive—but I knew I had to get back to watching them, in order to further my quest.
I had discovered Vladka Meed. She survived the war by posing as a Catholic outside the walls of the Warsaw ghetto. Older than Mama, Meed was in a good position to move between the ghetto and the occupied city, as she later wrote in her memoir of the time, On Both Sides of the Wall.
She described how looking more like a Polish Catholic child than a Jewish one had always given her a feeling of security, as had the ability to speak Polish fluently and mingle with her neighbours. By the time the ghetto was established in Warsaw, in 1940, Meed was taking risks, sneaking through holes in the wall with stockings and other merchandise from her parents’ former business, to trade on the outside for food and other necessities. Later, as a member of the Jewish underground, she smuggled a map of Treblinka out of the ghetto and sticks of gelignite back in on the return journey.
She watched the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 from the outside. Mama told me once that she tried to enter the ghetto when she heard that the Jews were fighting back, because she was tired of living under the strain of her false identity and wanted to die. But the soldiers guarding the gates turned her away, saying it wasn’t for people like her, just for Jews.
Here is Vladka Meed’s memory of that night:
At night I saw the flames of the ghetto. And I saw also certain pictures which were seared in my mind. Some Jews running from one place to the other and also seeing Jews jumping from buildings, but I was observing this from a window and I couldn’t do anything. And then the flames burst into the ghetto. The Germans couldn’t take over the streets, they start putting block after block on fire.
They start burning the ghettos…the buildings, and this was the uprising which we…the small group on the Aryan side, we tried to get through. We tried to communicate. We decided even to go into the ghetto to be with them but it was, everything was in vain. We didn’t have any communication. We saw only tanks coming in, tanks going out, or some ambulances going in and we’re listening to the shooting…we have to let the outside know what is going on.
It was unnerving to read an account of the same moment that had been related to me by Mama long ago. But, more than that, Meed revealed the behaviours and attitudes that she and Mama and all those with false identities had to cultivate for their survival.
Vladka Meed said she had to be careful that her eyes didn’t betray her identity. Jews trying to pass as non-Jews often revealed themselves unwittingly by the sadness in their eyes, she said, by seeing things that other Poles had long since ceased to notice. She taught herself to give a deep, joyous belly laugh which suggested a freedom and nonchalance that no Jew could possibly possess.
Meed would size up a situation quickly. She could get people to talk about themselves and could quickly establish rapport, revealing little of herself but absorbing essential information from others. She was strong and resolute. She was persistent, even stubborn.
Work by the Polish sociologist Małgorzata Melchior on other survivors in the same situation reveals that concealing their identity required people to suppress their fear, despair and doubts. As a result, some survivors suffered depression and other psychological disorders for years after the war ended.
‘At the heart of the experience of the Jews who survived owing to false documents,’ Melchior writes, ‘was the strategy of camouflage, mimicry and dissolution in their social environment, so as not to be recognised as a Jew. Uncertainty, loneliness, fear and continuous lying—these were the elements of the adopted survival method and its inevitable costs.’
Camouflage; mimicry; refraining from showing fear, despair and doubts; and continuous lying. This is what Mama learned to do. So it is probably no surprise that she was capable of masking the fact of her children having different fathers. How easy must that have been, after living for three years with the constant threat of exposure in one of the deadliest places in the world.
In my first year of high school, when I got into trouble for passing notes to other students in geography, Mama was called in to speak to the headmaster. I was worried for her. She hadn’t been to high school herself and I thought she would feel out of place. Her English was accented, her clothes were modest, and she might be confused about what the rules were and how I had contravened them.
I knew she had an appointment before recess, and when the bell rang I was full of dread.
I saw her across the yard, and she winked at me and smiled. She had brazened her way through the meeting, noting that she was the only mother called to the school when several other kids had also been in on the plot. She asked if it was because we were Jewish. The headmaster buckled under the strain.
I was impressed. I had no idea then that this was the least of her accomplishments.
The historian Nechama Tec also survived in Warsaw. She said in video testimony that in a big city you could get lost in the crowd: there was less chance of being recognised by someone who’d lived in a town where your family was known. She too remarked on Jews being known for the sadness in their eyes. ‘Warsaw became a hunting ground for Jews; many people had a business out of finding them and providing them to the Germans,’ she said. ‘After many of the ghettos of Poland were liquidated, people had the same idea as us [about pretending not to be Jewish].’ She didn’t talk about her experiences for thirty years.
My quest had started with a hunt for a mysterious father but it had morphed into a hunt for a mysterious mother, too. It took Nechama Tec three decades to talk, but after three decades Mama was busy dying. She was unable to speak to us about that, either. From what I saw in the Tec interview, there were ways of being that were important to maintaining a false identity. How could I write about my identity without investigating a mother whose own identity was tied up in questions of survival?
For her book Resilience and Courage, Tec interviewed the concentration-camp survivor Karla Szajewicz-Frist, who compared her lot to those like Mama on the Aryan side.
We were fatalists; we were all together; those who were on the Aryan side didn’t have anyone to lean on; they were constantly on guard, constantly afraid they’d be discovered. All the time a person had to think, How do I walk? How do I look? What do they think? And so on. One was always tense. But we in the camp, we became robots…I got some comfort from thinking that I was in the same boat as everyone else.
Tec also spoke to those who, like her, got by on the outside under a false identity. Dvora Rosenbaum-Fogel, a Hungarian survivor, said: ‘When they arrested us…I was glad. Why? Because to be in hiding, your heart beats fast all the time. You are always scared.’
Zwia Rechtman-Schwartz said: ‘From the moment I parted from my mother, I was very much alone until the end of the war. I did not trust anybody; I did not talk to anybody; I was not ready to open up for anybody. I had a wall inside me.’
Leah Silverstein said:
With nobody to console you, with nobody to tell you it’s okay, it will be better, hold on, then you are in total isolation. Total loneliness. You know you are among people, and you are like an island. You have to make life-threatening decisions all by yourself…It is like playing Russian roulette with your life…Day after day.
These survivors spoke about the pressure of having to lie all the time and of the wish to ‘be oneself’, to tell someone who they were, to inform their families about what had happened to them should they die; even to be found out and therefore able to stop pretending, though it might mean death. This surely was Mama’s mental state when she tried to get into the Warsaw ghetto, and was turned away.
She once told me that she’d forgotten how to speak Yiddish by the time the war ended, such was the repression she’d endured in order not to give herself away. She said she was worried that she might shout out Yiddish words in her dreams when, at one point, she was sharing a room with two other women.
I thought of Mama’s silence over the identity of my father, and of her adherence—albeit inconsistently—to the Orthodox habits of her childhood in the shtetl. Why, I thought again, would such an expert evader tell a truth so profound, so destructive?
A poem came to mind, by my favourite poet, the Polish Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska. ‘Autotomy’ describes the way a sea cucumber divides itself in two when it senses danger. One part is offered to its fate and, with the other, an escape is made: ‘To die as much as necessary, without going too far. / To grow back as much as needed, from the remnant that survives.’
18
Stranger on a train
SOME days as I sat alone listening to people’s horrific recollections in a variety of languages, which required a lot of concentration, I worried that I was getting too swept up in the multitude of stories instead of following the ones I had set out to find. When I read Gunnar S. Paulsson’s Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 I could feel myself breathing shallowly and it seemed to be more than just the bronchitis I’d contracted that winter, which was hard to shake. I thought I might have been breathing like that because I was casting myself back to Mama’s early life, trying to be her, toughing it out brazenly while terrified of being unmasked.
I have a photo of her taken after the war in which she is looking over one shoulder and laughing. How could she laugh? I was always puzzled by this. She knew by then that all of her family had been killed; she was an orphan, a stateless minor with no money and no education. Now I see the laugh as her disguise. This was how she evaded the interest of the Gestapo. She looked like she couldn’t possibly be a Jewish girl hiding her identity. I remembered Vladka Meed’s comment about learning to give a deep and joyous belly laugh.
Looking at the photo reminded me o
f a meeting with the writer Hanna Krall on that trip to Poland in the 1990s. I was introduced through a Polish cultural attaché to Krall, who met me for lunch at the Hotel Europejski in Warsaw, from the outset seeming reluctant and mysterious. Her area of interest was Polish–Jewish–German relations and she might have been tired of being wheeled out by the cultural bureaucrats, or maybe she was just tired. She had survived the war as a child, her Jewish origins hidden by a series of Polish families. After the war she was placed in an orphanage.
Krall was now in her sixties, direct and charming but vulnerable and sharp as glass, and just as ready to wound. She was as I imagined Mama might have been at that age, had she lived.
She’d brought me an English translation of one of her books to read. ‘I will never come to Australia,’ she said. ‘It is too far.’
But, I said, there are many people who would love to hear you and to read your books.
‘They will survive without me,’ she said, with finality.
We talked about her work, which she said was like my trip to the villages and the towns in the backblocks. She did this all the time, she explained—went to places where Jews used to live and asked questions.
Then she said: ‘I decided today on the way to the hotel to end my marriage of thirty-seven years and leave my husband.’
‘Today? On the way? Do you have another man?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But my organism tells me it’s enough.’
This sat between us like a cloud. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I thought of the word ‘supposed’, because it felt like Krall’s alarming conversational gambit invited me to follow a script.
‘Why today?’
‘See,’ she said, ‘I am telling all these interesting stories about Jews and what happened to me, and all you can think about is if I will leave my husband today.’
