She loved visiting Uncle Henek and playing with his dog, Charush. ‘What kind of dog is it?’ she used to ask, and her uncle would say with a serious face, ‘A very special breed. A muttsbury.’ Charush was funny. Whenever he did anything naughty, Uncle Henek would say, ‘Charush, go to the corner!’ And the small brown dog would stand on his hind legs in the corner, like a child who has misbehaved.
Now, fidgeting on the back seat of the black Skoda whose low-slung bouncing motion and acrid leather upholstery was making her feel queasy again, Krysia thought about her shiny red scooter which she was sometimes allowed to ride to her grandmother’s house in Sebastiana Street. The only time she didn’t like going there was on Saturday mornings, when the Chassids walked past on their way to synagogue. They terrified her and even now the memory of the black-coated men with their big black fur hats and long beards made her shiver.
For her ninth birthday Uncle Izio and Aunty Lola had given her doll’s furniture painted cream and pink, and her mother had crocheted a satin blanket for the doll’s pram. Her best friend Tamara Fruchtlender would have done anything to have doll’s furniture like that. At her birthday party Krysia had stood on a chair to be pelted with sweets and raisins by Tamara, Ignac and the other children who lived in their building on Gancarska Street.
Lost in happy memories, Krysia had almost forgotten her nausea when she felt the car vibrate. First came the relentless grinding noise of warplanes, closer and closer, until they seemed to drill right into the raw nerve of the world. A high-pitched whine made her clamp her hands over her ears. ‘They’re German Stukas, probably bombing Krakow,’ her father said.
As she looked up she saw a pilot above them, his head encased in a tight brown leather helmet. He was grinning as if this was a carnival. Suddenly the earth began to explode all around them. German warplanes were shelling thousands of defenceless refugees, bearded old men, haggard women and exhausted children trudging along the country road.
‘Quick! Out of the car!’ her father shouted, and before she knew it, she’d leapt outside, raced to the edge of the road and flung herself into the ditch. Zygmunt covered Krysia’s trembling body, his soothing voice trying to calm her down while she pressed her hands even tighter over her ears. Lying on the ground, smelling the dry sweet odour of the barley sheaves standing on the stubbled field, she felt as if the shuddering earth was splitting open and would soon swallow her up.
Krysia tried to block out the shrieks of pain and the cries of lost children. She tried not to look at the mangled bodies lying on the road, or at the woman sitting motionless on the ground, staring with glazed eyes at the limp body of her baby. A man took off his dusty hat as he came up to the mother and asked in a soft voice, ‘Would you like me to say Kaddish for your baby?’ but the woman just stared at him and shook her head rhythmically from side to side like the pendulum of a clock.
When the bombardment was over and the black Stukas had become specks in the sky, they piled back into the car and drove on, too shaken to speak. As they passed through peaceful villages, smoke curled up from the chimneys and wheat stooks squatted on the fields, it was as if the bombardment had never happened. The sun was setting and the last swallows flitted against the darkening sky when they decided to stop for the night and Krysia sobbed with relief that their ordeal was over. But just as her mother started hauling the baggage off the car, the inexorable high-pitched whine started all over again.
As she lay trembling with terror in a ditch, eyes clenched, Krysia wondered how long they could keep dropping bombs on the world before it crumbled into fragments. It seemed as though the Luftwaffe was on a mission to destroy her, for no matter how far they travelled, the Stukas always caught up.
They were sitting in the car next morning, ready to drive on, when a warplane swooped so low that its wings lopped off the boughs overhead and showered them with russet maple leaves. A peasant standing in the doorway of his hut crossed himself. ‘Jesus Maria, that pilot didn’t need any bombs: he was so close, he could have lopped your heads off with a scythe!’
For the next fifteen days the road that stretched eastwards towards the Russian border was a river of refugees who looked more haggard and more haunted every day. They didn’t know where they would end up or whether they could survive the bombing. By now most of them had jettisoned their heavy cases and trudged on, clutching a few essentials and their exhausted children.
At Zamosc a wall of flames blocked their path. The whole city was on fire. The smoke choked Krysia’s throat and stung her eyes. Andzia’s voice sounded shaky. ‘How in heaven’s name are we going to get through?’ All around them poplars and birches blazed and foliage crackled. Only the ground was not burning.
‘We have to get through, we can’t go back,’ Zygmunt said and jammed his foot down on the accelerator until it almost went through the floor, while they bent down and covered their heads with a blanket. As the car tore through the blistering heat and pungent smoke, Krysia whispered into her doll’s porcelain ear, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll see, everything will be all right.’ They emerged on the other side of the inferno, all blackened with soot, her mother holding Fredzio tightly against her and Krysia clutching her doll.
Ten days later in a village close to the Russian border, Krysia awoke to see her father, now dressed in a peasant’s loose shirt and baggy trousers, digging a hole in the yard where hens scrabbled in the dirt. Standing beside him, the farmhouse owner kept looking around. ‘Quick! Be quick!’ he urged. ‘When the Russians see a Polish army uniform, they’ll shoot.’ During the night the Bolshevik army had occupied their town and other Polish towns to the east.
When they were ready to drive on, they went out to the car, and looked around bewildered. It had vanished. They were stranded. Strolling up to Andzia, a villager said, ‘Prosze pani, those thieving commies took your car last night.’ Not wasting a moment, Andzia grabbed Krysia’s hand, dragged her along the dusty road and marched into the Russian headquarters. She barged into a room where a thick-set soldier with lumpy features was smoking an aromatic cigarette, his legs sprawled out.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ she stormed, the air around her crackling with anger. ‘One of your people stole our car last night. That’s not the way for a civilised army to behave, it’s disgraceful. Communists should set people a good example, not rob them. How do you expect anyone to trust you if you steal their belongings? I demand that you find our car and return it to us at once.’
Through narrowed eyes the officer surveyed the fiery brunette with the angelic-looking daughter and continued puffing on his cigarette without saying a word. Krysia quailed at her mother’s audacity. There was nothing to stop the captain from arresting them both.
‘Krasnaja dziewiczka,’ he said, smiling at Krysia. ‘Pretty little girl.’ Then he stubbed out his cigarette, tossed the butt on the floor, clapped his hands together, called, ‘Sasha! Dawaj!’ and gave some instructions in Russian to a young soldier whose cap was nonchalantly perched on the back of his thick brown hair. A few minutes later he drove the Skoda up to the front of the building and handed Andzia the key.
They drove on until they reached Chrzemieniec where Zygmunt knew someone who offered him a job operating machinery in the local peat mine. In the narrow potholed streets of the Jewish quarter in whose rickety wooden huts impoverished Jews had lived for centuries, they found accommodation with one of the Russian families who had moved here in the wake of the Bolshevik occupation. Their fat, voluble landlady poured tchai all day from a samovar and sweetened it with thick raspberry jam which she spooned onto her saucer.
The Russians who had settled in Chrzemieniec had become the laughing stock of the town. Never having seen modern clothes before, they had no idea how to dress, and Krysia laughed to see the women wearing men’s longjohns instead of stockings, and nightdresses instead of ballgowns. Polish buildings puzzled the Russians as well. When the commissar built a grand house for his family, his wife was shocked at the sight of an indoor toilet. ‘No
way will I have such a filthy thing in my home! I’ve worked in mansions in Russia where tasselled tapestries hung on the walls, but they didn’t crap inside their homes!’ she raged. Andzia was appalled at the ignorance of these primitive people and wished she was back in the cultured world of Krakow, but Krysia liked the childlike spontaneity of the Russians.
Krysia went to school, made new friends, and played with her black Scotch terrier. But hardly had she started to enjoy life in Chrzemieniec when she watched dismayed as her mother started packing up their belongings once again. ‘Can’t I even take my toboggan or my dog?’ she pleaded, her large sea-green eyes swimming in tears. But Andzia was adamant. ‘At a time like this, she’s worrying about a dog, as if I haven’t got enough to think about!’ she scolded. ‘We’re going to Lwow to join up with Uncle Henek and Aunty Bronia.’
It’s 1990, and my cousin Krysia and I are sitting in an Arabic cafe in Jaffa, drinking rich black coffee and gazing out at the cobalt water of the Mediterranean, while we talk about life in a sad and distant land. Krysia, now a grandmother, still has the same luminous eyes, warm personality, and placid disposition, and in her slow, musical voice she reminisces about the time we spent together in Lwow so long ago.
‘I loved playing with you,’ she says with a nostalgic smile. ‘You were my favourite doll. By the time you were two years old you knew the names of all the animals in Polish and Latin and your father loved showing off how clever you were. But you had a temper. Once when you were crying, your grandmother Toni and I tried to calm you down. ‘It’s all right, Danusia, nothing happened,’ your grandmother said, but you stamped your little foot and shouted: ‘It did happen! It did happen!’ Sometimes I took you tobogganing. You were my favourite doll.’ She looks at me with a loving expression and my eyes fill with tears as I recover a fragment of my truncated childhood.
My mother and I had joined my father in Lwow at the end of 1939. We had remained in Krakow for the first few months of the war because my mother didn’t feel ready to undertake the long journey to her home town until I was five months old. In those first days of September 1939, living with her husband’s family in Krakow bothered my mother far more than the war itself, which still seemed far away. As Bronia bent over to bathe me, she sensed that her mother-in-law was watching her. ‘Always make sure that you test the water with your elbow first,’ Lieba said. ‘You don’t want to scald the baby.’ Bronia sighed. As soon as Henek had left Krakow, she’d moved to Sebastiana Street as she had promised, but she felt like a creature in a cage, under constant scrutiny.
An uneasy lull hung over Krakow as people waited to see what would happen. The broadcast of Walter von Brauchitsch, the commander of the German armed forces, comforted those who chose to believe his words. ‘We don’t regard the people of Poland as our enemies,’ he said in an ingratiating tone. ‘We will observe all international laws, and Jews have nothing to fear.’ Although disturbing reports of the massacre of Polish troops on battlefields around the country had already begun filtering in from neighbouring townships, in Krakow itself nothing was happening.
But within a few days the residents of Krakow were shaken out of their illusions. In the suburb of Podgorze, where my grandfather had once had his pram factory, long columns of trucks carrying triumphant soldiers armed with rifles began roaring along the streets, followed by heavy artillery which struck terror into the hearts of the silent onlookers. Soon fourteen divisions of the Wehrmacht had spread their tentacles over Krakow. The city was now ruled by cold-eyed men with harsh voices, gleaming boots, peaked hats with death’s-head insignia, and ominously immaculate uniforms which seemed to have been stitched onto their flesh.
It was no longer possible to ignore the shocking truth. It had taken Germany forty-eight hours to knock out the Polish air force, and seven days to annihilate its army. No-one yet knew the full extent of the carnage that had taken place in Polish fields and forests. There was still no news of Tusiek. The President of Krakow had left, taking most of his staff and secret documents with him. Warsaw was encircled, and President Moscicki’s government had fled to Lublin. The people of Krakow were left to the mercy of the invaders.
Sparks flew from the cobblestones as helmeted soldiers swaggered around the city as though they owned it. Army trucks rattled along Krakow’s cobbled medieval streets, then pulled up suddenly as soldiers jumped out and yelled orders in guttural voices. They took a special delight in humiliating defenceless old Jews whom they knocked down and kicked before pulling and cutting off their beards. Witnesses told terrifying stories of brutish soldiers who rounded up people in the street and pushed them into trucks, grabbed women’s rings and bracelets, smashed shops and looted merchandise. Those who tried to resist had their faces smashed with shiny rifle butts. Shots retorted in narrow streets and blood flowed over cobblestones.
Each day new decrees limiting people’s freedom were posted up around the city. The penalty for breaking each one was death. ‘You’ll never believe what I’ve just seen, you won’t believe what the Germans are doing,’ gasped Rozia who rushed home with the news two days after the Wehrmacht’s arrival. ‘Every Jewish shop, restaurant and cafe, even the market stalls, all have to display a Star of David! I saw the decrees posted all around the Glowny Rynek with my own eyes, signed by SS Brigadefuhrer Bruno Streckenbach!’
Bronia stopped rocking the baby for a moment and shook her head with disbelief. As she put the bottle into my mouth, Lieba shot her a warning look. ‘Are you sure you tested the milk properly?’ she asked.
Having brought up eleven children, Lieba dispensed child-rearing advice without being asked. The milk was too hot, it would burn poor little Danusia’s mouth, or it was too cold and would give the child a sore throat. The bath water was too hot, it would scald her, or it was too cold and would give her a chill. She wasn’t dressing the child warmly enough, surely she knew that autumn was treacherous. Why didn’t she wind a red thread around her little wrist to ward off the evil spirits? My mother was already like a coiled spring because of my father’s departure. As well as her mother-in-law’s constant advice, there were Rozia’s hysterical outbursts and her well-meant but wearying offers of help.
One day, irritated beyond endurance by this surfeit of well-meant assistance, my mother grabbed me and fled back to her own flat on Potockiego Street. It would be better to live alone than endure this interference. By then most of the family had left Krakow. Apart from Lunia and Berus, who’d fled before war had been declared, Andzia and Zygmunt had also fled east with the children, while Fridzia, who had recently married, was living in Vilno with her new husband Jerzyk Szapiro. Apart from Lieba, Rozia and my mother, the only ones still left in Krakow were Karola and Stasiek, Izio and Lola, and Jerzy and Rutka.
Every afternoon, after finishing work at the Skoda agency, Jerzy used to drop in to see whether my mother needed anything, and to play with me. Sometimes he brought a ring of Polish country sausage, smoky and spiced with garlic, a rare treat in those days. My mother loved Jerzy and his friendly, unpretentious wife Rutka. Some afternoons Izio’s wife came over to help her bath the baby, but Lola’s blunt manner had an unsettling effect on her. Whenever my mother talked about rejoining her family in Lwow, Lola’s comments weren’t comforting. ‘I don’t see how you’re going to get to Lwow with Danusia now that the Germans are here,’ she would say.
Life in Krakow became increasingly dangerous. The ancient capital of Poland had become the capital of Germany’s General Government and, like a latter-day monarch, Dr Hans Frank installed himself in the royal apartments of the city’s Wawel Castle and dispensed injustice under its medieval arcades and coffered ceilings. Decrees followed thick and fast, each one calculated to isolate, crush, ruin and demoralise the Jews.
By November, Jews were ordered to wear armbands in the street, for easy identification. ‘The Germans are very exact,’ Izio remarked. ‘They’ve specified how wide the white band has to be, and the size of the blue Star of David!’ No-one suspected that this
meticulous attention to detail would shortly ensure the methodical murder of millions.
One day a new order was issued. ‘Under a just system, every person must work for his daily bread,’ the proclamation began. ‘There will be no room for political dissidents, commercial hyenas or Jewish exploiters.’ It went on to say that all Jewish males aged between twelve and sixty had to labour in street gangs along with Polish males aged between eighteen and sixty. German soldiers soon turned this into a sport. It amused them to see frail old scholars, rabbis and professional men sweeping dirt, shovelling snow, and hauling bricks, and they spat, kicked and tormented them whenever they wanted a diversion, sometimes encouraged by jeering Polish by-standers. ‘Let them have it. Make the Jews work!’ they’d call out.
My grandmother Lieba, who idolised her son Izio, was determined to save him from this degradation, and managed to bribe someone to get his name off the list. But according to her niece, Rozia Johannes, she didn’t pay a bribe for her son-in-law Stasiek. Rozia tells me this when we meet in Tel-Aviv many years later. ‘Poor Karola was very upset that her mother hadn’t paid a bribe for Stasiek,’ she recalls. ‘By then no-one was allowed to employ Jews, and Jews weren’t even allowed to withdraw money from the bank, so Karola had no income and hated being financially dependent on her mother. She learned to knit sweaters and earned a few zloty from that.’
The brutality of the conquerors continually caught people off balance. No-one was safe. The whole city was stunned when German trucks pulled up outside the Jagellonian University and helmeted soldiers marched across the arcaded medieval campus where Kopernicus had once studied astronomy, arrested one hundred and eighty-three professors, pushed them into a waiting truck and deported them to concentration camps in Germany where many of them were killed.
No-one knew where the next blow was coming from. Early in December several parts of Kazimierz were cordoned off and residents were forbidden to leave their homes. Soldiers trained their rifles at these houses and fired at anyone looking out of the window. The goal of this blockade was armed robbery on a grand scale. While the residents were under siege, soldiers carried out brutal and thorough searches of the premises. They held screaming women down at gun-point and probed their vaginas in search of valuables.
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