Uncle Izio chuckles at the recollection. ‘Naturally I jumped at the opportunity. It saved me from getting a belting at home!’ He stares into the distance and sighs. ‘Father didn’t show us any affection,’ he recalls. ‘Mother was warmer but she was rushed off her feet. Only once in my entire life I can remember Father patting my hand for a moment. We were in shule and he leaned forward and patted my hand. That was the only time.’ He looks at me with his intense gaze. ‘Do you have any idea what that means?’
As I feel his pain and think about his words, it strikes me that my father wasn’t demonstrative either. He revealed his love in caring, considerate actions, but apart from a peck on the cheek for greetings, goodbyes and special occasions, I can’t recall any show of affection. I wonder whether that was because he inherited Daniel’s reserved nature, or because he had never received affection from his parents.
The new school didn’t turn Izio into a better scholar. According to him, it only confused him and made things worse. ‘I learnt nothing that year,’ he recalls in his sardonic way. ‘I didn’t understand Hungarian, I forgot my Polish, didn’t improve my German and learnt no French. Your father managed much better, but he was much brighter and had a much stronger character than me.’
But going to Hungary had one unexpected benefit: it created a close bond between the two brothers which lasted throughout their lives, probably the only close bond my father ever had with any of his siblings. At the end of his second year in Hungary, when Daniel arrived to take both boys home, my father was sorry to return to the repressive, grey world of Krakow.
His oldest brother Avner, who was working for his father on the railways in Oderberg at the time, joined them on the train and, as usual, had a store of entertaining anecdotes. His father smiled and nodded, while Izio listened enthralled, but Hesiu kept wriggling. He couldn’t get his left leg comfortable. Perhaps he’d hurt his knee while playing soccer. The clackety-clack of the locomotive and the peaceful landscape of wheatfields and pine forests speeding past the windows finally lulled him to sleep.
When he awoke, the train was pulling into Krakow’s central station and his left knee felt as though it had been speared with a long shard of glass. The pain transfixed him so that he could neither speak nor stand, and it took the three of them to help him off the train and bundle him into a dorosky to go home.
Excitement at his homecoming turned to gloom. His father looked worried, and his mother put the new baby in her crib to place a compress on his swollen knee and feel his burning forehead. While he’d been away at school, Lieba had given birth to another baby, Freide, who became known as Fridzia. Her name means joy, but Lieba didn’t feel elated after her eleventh confinement and she took a long time to recover.
Hesiu winced with pain when the baby screamed in her cradle. Whenever somebody shouted or slammed a door, he felt as though his leg was going to explode. His brothers and sisters often came to peer at his distended knee, but being the centre of his family’s attention for once in his life didn’t comfort him. His knee had swollen like a balloon and the mercury on the thermometer rose to forty degrees. The doctor was called. After placing the ends of his wooden stethoscope into his ears and listening to Hesiu’s chest, he examined the knee and slowly placed his instruments back in his pouchy leather bag. The knee was severely infected. This was a case for the surgeon.
Professor Rutkowski was a tall thin man with a long dour face and an English overcoat with a sable collar. He peered at my father’s knee through his shiny pince-nez. ‘Your son has acute inflammation of the bone marrow,’ he pronounced. ‘It’s dangerous because the infection could spread. He must be operated on as soon as possible.’ Before leaving the house, the professor informed them that they owed him thirty crowns for the visit and another five for his transport. Daniel’s courteous manner did not betray his shock. The usual fee was two or three crowns. Apart from this exorbitant sum, he was shocked at being charged for transport as well, especially when he looked out of the front window and watched the professor climb into his own carriage and drive away.
As Hesiu lay in bed, writhing from side to side feeling as though red-hot pincers were squeezing his knee joint, he heard his parents discussing his illness. The words operation and hospital were often mentioned, and his father paced around the house. The following day Daniel set off to Nowy Sacz to consult his rebbe. The rebbes were regarded as miracle workers, blessed with extraordinary insight and wisdom, and whenever their followers got together, they boasted about their miraculous deeds. After a word from the rebbe, barren women became pregnant, dying men recovered, and disastrous businesses prospered. The Sanzer Rebbe had predicted the birth of Avner. He’d know what should be done about Hesiu’s knee.
On the way to Nowy Sacz, my grandfather turned his dilemma over in his mind. Firstly there was the vexing issue of an operation. When he was young, hospitals were places where people died. This was in pre-Lister times, before the introduction of antiseptics, and was no longer true in 1914 when hospitals were scrubbed, swabbed and disinfected, but fear of hospitals was still deeply ingrained in his mind.
On the other hand, he knew that Hesiu’s condition was serious. In the days before antibiotics, people often died from blood poisoning. Then there was the problem of finance. If the professor charged thirty-five crowns for one house visit, he’d demand a fortune for an operation in a private clinic. And apart from medical and financial considerations, there was a religious problem as well. Food in hospitals was treif, not kosher. He’d have to ask the rebbe not only whether Hesiu should have the operation, but whether it would be a sin for him to eat nonkosher food during his stay.
At the rebbe’s modest court his devout followers sat around a scrubbed oak table in an austere room with bare walls. Aron Halberstamm stroked the two points of his long grey beard as he considered Daniel’s dilemma. Finally the rebbe pronounced that my father could go into hospital as long as he said the viddui before he was admitted. This was the prayer devout Jews said just before death which absolved them of all their sins. It wasn’t a promising portent, but Hesiu was in too much pain to dwell on the sinister significance of the prayer which he mumbled through fever-scabbed lips.
When he opened his eyes after the operation, the chloroform hadn’t yet worn off and its penetrating odour made him feel queasy. He was lying in a large ward of the public hospital where ten iron beds stood on each side of a long room with a well-polished grey linoleum floor. The sharp smell of disinfectant bit his throat. A sister in a long veil and stern expression walked up and down the aisle shaking thermometers and carrying bedpans.
Suddenly a searing pain almost hurled Hesiu into the air. He wanted to scream to the sister that someone was tearing his leg out of his hip socket. When he could unclench his eyes again, he saw that his left leg was suspended from a peculiar contraption with weights slung over the end. His leg was in traction to stop the tissues in his knee from knitting together but he didn’t care if his knee knitted together or not. He would have gladly chopped it off to stop the torture.
Although the pain was excruciating, he was given nothing to relieve it. The only painkiller was morphine, and they were reluctant to administer it in case patients became addicted. Hesiu gripped the iron frame of the bed, tossed his head from side to side, and sobbed until he was exhausted. He begged the other patients in the ward to take some of the weights off the pulley when the sister was out of the ward.
Upset by the boy’s anguish, a patient on the other side of the ward crept over to him. Looking over his shoulder to make sure the sister’s laced-up shoes weren’t striding down the linoleum corridor, he unfastened some of the weights and placed them at the bottom of a tin bucket in the corridor. A long sigh escaped from Hesiu’s chest and he almost wept with relief.
While he lay in hospital, he heard people discussing strange names and distant places. The words Sarajevo and Archduke Ferdinand kept cropping up. It was August 1914. World War I had begun. As hospital beds were now needed f
or wounded soldiers, they sent him home before his leg had healed.
Back in Sebastiana Street, Hesiu waited impatiently for his knee to bend again, checking it anxiously every morning. Months passed and his leg remained as stiff as a block of granite. The knee joint had knitted together and would never bend again. The boy who had just discovered the joy of sport and the fun of living had become a cripple who hobbled like an old man, dragging a stiff leg behind him. Life had tricked him.
When he was able to walk without pain, he returned to the boarding school in Hungary. This time he travelled alone. It was winter, and the bare brown fields looked desolate under leaden skies. Because he arrived in Hungary in the middle of the school year, he didn’t get a certificate. Daniel was upset with the rabbi for not letting him know beforehand that this year wouldn’t be counted. He’d paid the train fare, tuition and boarding fees for nothing.
Hesiu became moody and withdrawn. Throughout his angry adolescence he blamed his lameness on the war and his own stupidity. He thought that if they hadn’t sent him home too soon, if he hadn’t taken the weights off the pulley, his knee joint wouldn’t have knitted together.
For the rest of his life, my father was self-conscious about his disability. ‘You know he has a complex because of his leg,’ my mother sometimes said to defuse an argument. It was awkward for him to travel by plane, and even a visit to the movies was fraught with tension. As people were about to squeeze past him, he’d point to his outstretched limb and say to each one in turn, ‘Please step over my leg.’
During a family reunion in 1966, my father was amazed to hear that Avner, Izio, Lunia and Andzia all blamed Daniel for his misfortune. They maintained that Daniel was an affluent man who owned several houses in Krakow and Vienna and could have afforded the best treatment for his son. If the operation had been performed at a private clinic, they said, the outcome would have been different. But their opinion didn’t affect my father who steadfastly refused to blame his father who, he said, had done his best.
Not being able to play sport, run or kick a ball was a huge loss, but as he got older, he discovered a more agonising aspect of his handicap. From early adolescence my father had an eye for a pretty face and shapely figure, but now whenever his friends talked about meeting girls, he looked away so that they wouldn’t see how distressed he was. Girls liked good-looking active boys, not cripples.
Just once, he summoned up the courage to approach a girl who lived across the road. She had a blotchy complexion and greasy hair so he figured that she wouldn’t turn him down. When he saw her outside her gate, he brushed his thick brown hair back from his forehead feverishly, grabbed a few sprigs of lily-of-the-valley out of his mother’s vase and hobbled over to her house.
Holding out the fragrant little bells towards her, he stammered, ‘These are for you,’ and flushed to the roots of his hair. The girl just stood there staring at him, not saying a word or taking the flowers. Bright red with embarrassment, he let the flowers drop to the ground and limped home.
CHAPTER 5
While my father was an unhappy teenager battling with his disability, a battle on a much greater scale was being waged in Europe. World War I had begun, and on 13 September 1914, Avner was called up to fight in Kaiser Franz Jozef’s Imperial Austrian Army.
On a warm Sunday in August when dark roses perfumed the Planty Gardens and spiky green pods swung from the boughs of the chestnut trees, Daniel took Avner by the arm and tried to persuade him not to be in a hurry to report for duty.
Krakow was a garrison city, and the park swarmed with soldiers in their gold-embroidered Austrian uniforms and stiff shakos adorned with plumes. Everyone was buzzing with the exploits of a heroic young Pole, Jozef Pilsudski, whose band of riflemen had advanced against Russia even before hostilities had officially commenced. Although the assault had ended in a fiasco, reports of his audacity inspired the patriotic youths who swaggered around boasting that they’d soon show the Tsar who was boss.
Along the dappled paths of the park, housemaids on their day off wore their best white collars and adoring glances as they clung onto the arms of their soldier sweethearts. In the bandstand, regimental bands struck up stirring Souza marches. Drums beat, cymbals clashed, trumpets blared, and young couples looked yearningly into each other’s eyes. Sombre in his well-cut overcoat and homburg, Daniel argued about army life with his eldest son who rarely agreed with him about anything. Daniel’s heart sank at the thought that his favourite son was going to risk his life to further the ambitions of two old kaisers whose war-mongering threatened to engulf the whole of Europe.
Daniel, who had been a soldier back in the days of compulsory conscription, wanted to give Avner the benefit of his experience, but while his father talked, Avner’s eyes kept darting to look at the delicious young women who returned his openly admiring gaze with flirtatious smiles under their large gauzy hats. Unlike his lame brother Hesiu, Avner didn’t doubt his ability to charm women. Despite Daniel’s efforts to delay his departure, he refused to wait. At nineteen he was carried away by the stirring talk about patriotism, gallantry and heroic deeds. Somewhere outside Krakow, life was waiting for him and like everyone else, he couldn’t wait to be part of this carnival called war.
After the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, things happened so fast that people hardly had time to digest one shocking event before another one followed. In rapid succession Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Serbia asked for Russian help, the Russians mobilised, the Imperial War Council of Germany declared war on Russia and its ally France, and England came in on the side of the western allies. Global war had begun. The Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey—were aligned against Russia, France and England. The strongest nation among the Central Powers was Germany with its modern, well-disciplined troops armed with heavy howitzers, flaming patriotism, and a sense of national destiny which twenty years later was to lead to another, deadlier conflict. Meanwhile, the ally of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Kaiser Franz Jozef, ruled an anachronistic, declining empire peopled by a mishmash of ethnic groups seething to throw off the Austro-Hungarian yoke.
Ever since the first partition of Poland in 1772, the country had been divided up between Russia, Prussia and Austria and had ceased to exist as a sovereign state. Although the imperial aspirations and rivalries of the great powers had nothing to do with Poland, Polish soldiers in the three partitioned regions ended up fighting on different sides. As Krakow was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Avner was conscripted into the Austrian army.
By now Daniel Baldinger was a prosperous plumbing contractor with eleven children, several apartment houses in Krakow and Vienna, and a lucrative government contract. Krakow was linked with Vienna by the Kaiserferdnandnordbahn, one of the first railways ever built in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to transport salt from the mines in Wieliczka. Before the war Daniel had won a highly profitable contract with the Imperial Austrian Railways. He kept meticulous records and accounts in his neat, firm handwriting, and listed the cost of every nail and the name of every labourer he employed, including the plumber’s mate who carried the tools. Every Monday morning the mate brought a list of materials that were needed, and the railway master had to authorise their issue. Daniel was responsible for maintenance work on the station buildings and for water and gas on the trains. He also won the concession to supply teams of labourers for government jobs. In keeping with his religious beliefs, Daniel did not allow any of his employees to work on the Sabbath, even though he paid their wages for that day’s work.
Aunty Lunia told me several years ago that by 1914 the name Baldinger, inscribed in powder blue letters on cream porcelain sinks, had become familiar to tens of thousands who washed their hands on trains and in private homes. Daniel’s sinks displayed the prestigious sign ‘Contrahend’. By Royal Appointment. Being connected with the Kaiser in this tenuous way was the only thing that ever impressed Aunty Lunia about her father’s business. Even at the age of ninety-
three, her eyes gleam with pride as she repeats, ‘Tatunciu’s sinks had “Contrahend” written on them. “Contrahend”!’
Before the outbreak of war Avner, who had refused to become a rabbi, had become apprenticed to his father as a gasfitter instead. The son who had been destined to minister to men’s souls began to install gas and water pipes for their homes, and soon discovered that he had more aptitude for business than religion. Daniel recorded Avner’s four-year apprenticeship in an employment book which Avner kept all his life. Writing in German, in his fine, assertive hand, Daniel certified that Avner had begun his apprenticeship in 1909 and completed it to his satisfaction in 1912. Then he sent his son to Oderberg in Austria to supervise his business there.
War, which brings so much misery, initially brought my grandfather good fortune. As the Austrian army needed copper to boost its armaments, the Imperial Metal Authority gave him the contract for confiscating every fragment of brass and copper in Galicia. This involved tearing out copper pipes as well as the copper tanks and cylinder heaters which heated water for people’s baths. All the copper was sent back to Austria and melted down for arms, and Daniel began installing steel pipes instead. Carrying out this order didn’t make him popular but it was extremely lucrative.
Avner had only been in the army for a short time when he heard his name called out. He couldn’t believe his ears. ‘You have permission to go home,’ the sergeant barked. It was Rosh Hashana, Jewish New Year, and Daniel had arranged for his favourite son to come home for lunch.
Avner’s eyes lit up at the thought of getting away from the austere army fare and of sitting at the festive table covered with the white cloth, drinking his father’s fruity raisin wine and eating his mother’s goose broth, carrot tzimmes and brisket braised with onions.
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