Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  This is the name that Aunty Lunia is repeating now in her cramped bedroom at the Beth Hadekel Nursing Home near Tel-Aviv when I show her a family photograph taken in Krakow in 1934. ‘Tusiek! There’s my Tusiek in the flesh!’ she exclaims. She kisses the photograph and fondles it with her arthritic hands. ‘Look! Look! They are all there!’ she cries, tracing outlines with her crooked forefinger. ‘Tatunciu and Mamuncia, and there’s Avner.’ In a calmer voice she says, ‘We took that photo because Avner had come to visit us. And look, there’s Rozia and Jerzy, there’s your father and Izio and, oh, here’s Karola, see how beautiful she was? And look, here’s my dear Tusiek. They’re as real as if they were here in this room with me now!’

  She’s in that photograph too, self-possessed as ever with her upswept hair. Standing in front of Berus, Tusiek has that self-conscious look of teenagers being photographed, uncertain what expression to assume. Avner looks portly and successful. I hardly recognise my father without a moustache; his brown hair brushed back and a half smile that reminds me of my son Jonathan. He stands shyly at the back, as he does in so many prewar family photographs. There’s Fridzia, with her sweet smile and full-moon face, and Andzia, attractive and sharp-eyed. Sitting in the front holding their little granddaughter Krysia, Daniel and Lieba have that complacent look of parents who have successfully navigated the vicissitudes of family life.

  Past and present vanish, decades roll away, and half a century is concentrated in that moment frozen by the click of a camera at a time when life was still predictable and neighbours could be relied on. Tears stream down Aunty Lunia’s wrinkled face as she stares at the ghosts of her past. Holding the photograph towards the light, she peers closely into the beloved faces, as if willpower and close scrutiny might breathe life into those so long dead, captured at a moment when they were so intensely alive and oblivious of what was to befall them.

  Four years after that photograph was taken, Lunia had her first intimation of impending war. Hundreds of destitute Jews who had been expelled from Germany arrived in Krakow bewildered at being thrown out of the country they regarded as home. Although Lieba was still stunned by Daniel’s death, the plight of these refugees touched her. As she and Rozia now lived alone in the large apartment in Sebastiana Street, she decided to take in one of these homeless families. Winter had begun, and as she rode in a dorosky to Krakow’s central station where trains disgorged these homeless people, she pulled her fur collar over her ears and watched large white flakes dissolve in front of the horse’s hooves. How terrible to be thrown out of your comfortable home, forced to leave everything you own behind, and be thrown on the mercy of strangers. She brought home a couple with three adult children.

  As they described the pogrom euphemistically referred to as Kristallnacht, Lunia could visualise the thud of staves smashing down Jewish doors, the sound of shattering glass, the screams of old men being bashed in the streets, the smell of fire, the sight of flames rising up from 192 synagogues torched by hate. She held her hand against her mouth as they described the mass hysteria of the Third Reich, the rallies that evoked primitive Teutonic legends and medieval witch-hunts, the cold-eyed schoolboys marching under crimson banners with crooked black crosses, the high-stepping jackboots, the inflamed crowds screaming for Jewish blood.

  But that was Germany. In Krakow life went on as usual. Several months later Lunia was strolling through the Planty Gardens, breathing in the fragrance of a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley she’d just bought, when she bumped into Izio’s wife Lola. Sweeping her eyes up and down her sister-in-law’s tailored suit and sturdy shoes, she said sweetly, ‘I’ve just been to my dressmaker’s for a fitting. She’s making me such an elegant suit, a Paris model…’

  Lola cut her short. She’d just returned from her father’s funeral in Berlin and was still shaken by what she’d witnessed during Hitler’s birthday celebrations. ‘You should see the war preparations in Germany—they staged a military parade with thousands and thousands of the most terrifying soldiers, all marching like machines. And their armaments! The tanks just kept coming. The people even have coupons ready for coffee and imported goods. Lunia, you can smell war in the air of Berlin.’ Lola was usually cool and unemotional, but for once there was anxiety in her voice. In her German-accented Polish and incorrect grammar, she fumbled for words to convey the gravity of the situation.

  Lunia forced a smile. ‘Don’t get carried away by all that Germanic posturing, Lolschen,’ she said. ‘Whatever Hitler does, we’ll be ready for him.’ When Lola persisted, Lunia sounded annoyed. ‘I don’t think it’s wise, carrying on like this. You’ll create a panic. I can assure you, we’re not so backward here that we don’t understand what’s happening in the world,’ she snapped. ‘I read all the best papers, and I can assure you that our army will protect us.’

  Half an hour later, over iced coffee at the Pavilon Cafe, Lunia was saying to her sister Andzia, ‘Lola’s such a yecker,’ using the insulting term that denoted the meticulous Germanic personality. ‘So heavy-going. She gave me a headache with all her prophesies of doom. And you won’t believe it, she’s still wearing that brown suit!’

  But several weeks later she recalled Lola’s words when two visitors came to see her. One of them was Leo, their father’s relative from Nowy Targ who used to visit the family during World War I. She remembered how her teenage heart used to flutter whenever she saw him in his officer’s shako and braided jacket, a long sabre hanging in his tasselled scabbard. Now, twenty-five years later, he was no longer a dashing officer in the Austro-Hungarian army but a middle-aged engineer with a worried face. ‘I’m leaving for England and you should leave too,’ he told her. ‘Hitler is a madman but he’s a dangerous madman and it’s only a matter of time before he invades. And you know what will happen to the Jews when he does.’ Until that moment his companion hadn’t spoken a word, but now he spoke in a slow, prophetic way that was chilling. ‘In three weeks Hitler will be in Poland. And then there will be hell on earth.’

  Haunted by his words, Lunia began to consider the situation. In 1939 she was living in the style to which she’d always wished to be accustomed. When Avner had left Poland, Berus had taken over the sausage casings business, and with her shrewd help they’d built it up so well that she’d been able to buy a beautiful apartment on Szlak Street, some diamonds, and a block of flats for investment.

  My aunt’s apartment was palatial. The floors wouldn’t have looked out of place in Wawel Castle. Lunia had engaged the finest parquetry specialist in Krakow, but when he ran out of the timber she’d selected and had to finish off the entrance with an inferior wood, she was distraught and bought a richly patterned Turkish kilim to cover the hated floor. Her drapes, of the finest French silk, were ordered from the most exclusive curtain-maker in Krakow. There was oak panelling in the lounge room, with a rail for exquisite little knick-knacks. As a wide-eyed little girl, Lunia had stared covetously at her grandmother Ryfka Spira’s carved Biedemeier sideboard with its Sevres porcelain. Now she had a house that was the envy of everyone she knew.

  The only thing that hadn’t gone according to Lunia’s plans was her son Tusiek who’d fallen madly in love with a sixteen-year-old called Lula. The intensity of his feelings worried her. Although he was only eighteen, he was impetuous and romantic. The jaundiced baby she’d covered up in his pram so that no-one would see how ugly he was had grown into a good-looking young man with fair hair, a twinkle in his blue eyes and an irrepressible sense of fun.

  His uncles adored him. My father had invited him to Hel on holiday and two years later, when he matriculated, Uncle Izio gave him a magnificent watch, a snappy style with a mesh cover to protect the glass. Tusiek couldn’t stop looking at it on his suntanned wrist and checked the time every few minutes. ‘I’ll never take it off as long as I live,’ he said. Everyone laughed at his boyish enthusiasm, little suspecting that he would keep his word.

  Determined to break up Tusiek’s love affair, Lunia convinced Berus that they must get
him away from Lula and out of the country as fast as possible. They would send him to study at a textile college in Manchester. With new friends in another country, in no time he’d forget this girl. Berus, who always did whatever Lunia wanted, wrote to Avner in Antwerp asking him to arrange the enrolment. But before Avner received a reply from England, a second letter arrived from Berus, asking him to cancel the arrangements. ‘As Tusiek has enlisted in the Polish army, he won’t be attending the college in Manchester after all,’ he wrote.

  My mother always maintained that if Lunia hadn’t meddled to break up the relationship, Tusiek wouldn’t have joined the army because he only enlisted so that he could stay in Poland. So in that fateful summer of 1939, Tusiek entered cadet school with his best friend. As in the universities, there was also a numerus clausus in the army, limiting the number of Jews, but thanks to his friend’s father, Professor Taubenschlag, Tusiek was accepted into the officers’ school.

  I have a photo of Tusiek taken in the winter of 1939, just before he enlisted. He’s slightly built, not very tall, and wears a striped suit with wide lapels and a jaunty polka-dot tie. His fair hair is smoothly brushed to the side, and he has a nicely shaped mouth with a full lower lip. He has his arm around Lula, a pleasant looking girl with a placid face who is taller than him and looks much older than sixteen.

  While in the army Tusiek fretted in case Lula found another boyfriend. Aunty Lunia heaves a sigh. ‘He was so infatuated with that girl that when he heard that she was going to a ball with someone else, he was beside himself. I tried to make him see reason. “Tusiu,” I said, “don’t get so upset. The girl can’t go to the ball on her own, but it doesn’t mean anything.” But he wouldn’t listen and sneaked out without permission because he couldn’t stand the thought of her dancing with someone else. And who knows, maybe because of his disobedience, they sent him straight to the front soon afterwards,’ she laments.

  Avner’s son Adam, who loves to gossip, supplies an ironic postscript to Tusiek’s love story. ‘Decades later, in New York, at a New Year’s party, I meet this Polish guy, a stamp dealer from Krakow. We get talking about old times, and it turns out that he knew our cousin Tusiek.’ Adam’s bright blue eyes are gleaming as he leans forward with another revelation. ‘Then he starts reminiscing about a girl he was madly in love with, called Lula! No wonder Tusiek refused to go to Manchester. He knew he had a rival!’

  Aunty Lunia and I sit in silence as she broods about her son. Then her trembling hands fly to her mouth and her eyes widen with distress. ‘Several weeks later, that must have been in late August, we received a card from Tusiek from cadet school. He asked us to send him one hundred zlotys, because he didn’t know what would happen and thought he might need some cash. He wrote, “Please take care of my Lula because she and you are my dearest ones in the whole world.” Of course he wasn’t allowed to reveal where he was being sent, but I saw that the postmark was Radom, close to Warsaw.’

  Tusiek’s letter galvanised Lunia into action. It was time to pack up, leave Krakow and travel east, as far away from the German border as possible. But first they’d go to Radom to say goodbye to Tusiek. Feverishly they packed their clothes, silver and eiderdowns, took banknotes, gold and diamonds out of the safe, hired a car, and set off.

  They arrived too late. Tusiek’s regiment had just left for the field. When she realised what this meant, Lunia began to tremble. ‘Berus and I stumbled into a cafe, sank onto the nearest chairs, covered our heads in our hands and wept,’ she tells me.

  War broke out while Lunia and Berus were fleeing eastwards, without any news of Tusiek. ‘I remember being in some small Polish town when suddenly I stopped walking and the blood seemed to freeze in my veins,’ she tells me. ‘At that moment I knew in my heart that my son was dead. I just knew it. Tusiek was dead. I sank to my knees on the street and started screaming and tearing clumps of hair out of my head. “Tusiek! My only son! I’ve lost him forever.”’ Tears roll down her furrowed cheeks.

  ‘Did you know that Tusiek died at Ozarow?’ asks Uncle Izio when we talk about his nephew several weeks later. ‘He died in one of the first battles between the Polish army and the Wehrmacht. His entire regiment was wiped out, every single one of them.’ There was a mass grave at Ozarow, and in 1945, along with the relatives of other soldiers, Izio was granted permission to have the grave opened up so that he could have his nephew buried in Krakow’s Jewish cemetery beside his grandfather Daniel.

  Standing on the edge of that mass grave where so many young men lay, Izio wondered how he’d be able to identify Tusiek. Suddenly he spotted something which sent a tremor of recognition through his body. A watch with an unusual mesh cover. Tusiek had kept his promise.

  When I was looking through my father’s papers after he had passed away, a small card, discoloured with age, fluttered out of an envelope. The kind of card that might have accompanied a bouquet of flowers. On one side someone had written in an impatient boyish scrawl: ‘Dear Uncle Henek and Aunty Bronia, Congratulations on your marriage. Sorry I haven’t written sooner.’ The date was May 1936. The name on the other side was Tusiek Selinger. All through the war years, all through his life, my father had kept this memento of the nephew he loved.

  Lunia’s thin shoulders are shaking and she sobs with noisy gulps. ‘My poor Tusiek! I only hit him once when he was little. Only once. Because he’d broken my best pink vase.’ Now she’s weeping softly. ‘I wanted him to have the best of everything. But whenever I think about him I console myself that life never gives you any peace. And life with all its problems and all its pain has passed him by.’ Looking at me beseechingly, she says, ‘Every night I pray for eternal sleep but God refuses to answer my prayers. I just vegetate and suffer in this horrible nursing home.’

  Then she glances around and drops her voice to a whisper. ‘I don’t talk about my son here because I don’t want them to know how old I am. I tell them that he died in Europe, that he was with relatives at the time.’ I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this ninety-three-year-old woman who is too vain to admit that in 1939 she had an eighteen-year-old son who died fighting for his country.

  CHAPTER 14

  Looking out of the window of their black Skoda convertible, Krysia could feel the car being pressed and pushed by the throngs moving along the road like one monstrous body with thousands of legs. They reminded her of the marionettes she’d seen at the Planty Gardens, stiff and unreal, as if someone in the sky was pulling the strings that kept their legs moving. The hum of voices rose above the dusty road, became dense and solid, and suddenly she tasted something sour in her throat.

  ‘Mummy, quick, I’m going to vomit!’

  Andzia turned around and saw her daughter’s hand across her mouth, her face the colour of pea soup. ‘Zygmunt! Stop the car!’ she shouted, and as Krysia tumbled out, her head bent forward in successive spasms, spewing bits of undigested bread and sausage, Andzia stood over her impatiently. ‘This is a fine time to get sick, when we have to get away from Krakow as fast as possible. I told you not to eat so much. Look at all these people, how are we ever going to get past them?’

  Zygmunt patted his daughter’s heaving shoulders. ‘Feel better now?’ he asked smiling into her face. ‘That was a good idea, getting rid of all that food. Now we’ll have more room in the car!’

  In spite of the bitter taste in her mouth, Krysia managed a smile. Her father always knew how to cheer her up. Every evening at home when he started playing jolly tunes on his small mouth organ, the tip of his duck’s-bill nose moving in time to the music, she forgot all about her mother’s biting comments.

  Right now, however, home seemed very far away. Like her older sister Lunia, Andzia was also fleeing eastwards. The last few days had been very confusing for Krysia. She’d been on holidays with her mother and little brother Fredzio at the seaside at Zawoja, when suddenly her mother started packing up their buckets, spades and swimming costumes and they rushed back to Krakow. All the adults looked nervous and sounded
worried but she couldn’t see that anything had changed.

  Back in their flat she’d watched her mother rushing around, opening drawers, pulling out clothes, stacking pillows. With decisive movements, she piled up two eiderdowns and four pillows, wrapped all the silver cutlery and laid out the children’s best outfits, many of which she’d knitted herself. Her fingers flew as she placed everything on tarpaulins and roped them into neat bundles. The following day Krysia’s father, handsome in his Polish army uniform, had picked them up in the Skoda and soon they were speeding away from Krakow with their valuables tied on the roof.

  Krysia looked out of the car window at the throngs choking the road, coats caked with dust and faces streaked with sweat. Some people swayed on carts piled to the sky with bedding and bundles, while others pushed rickety barrows, dragged children and lugged suitcases or carried cages with their pet canaries. Krysia clutched her doll. If only she was still at home among the people and places she knew.

  She always looked forward to the mornings when she trotted beside her mother to visit Aunty Lunia who was usually still sipping coffee in bed when they arrived. Aunty Lunia was tall and important, and when she spoke everybody listened, even her mother who didn’t think much of anyone. Without hurrying, Lunia would finish the last drop of her coffee, put down the fluted gold-edged cup delicately on her bedside table, and hold out her arms while Gizia the maid laced up her corset.

  ‘Lunia lives like a duchess, she’s done well for herself marrying Berus,’ she sometimes overheard her mother saying. Her mother didn’t consider herself nearly as lucky, but to Krysia, her father was the most wonderful person in the whole world.