Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  I listen avidly to my mother’s recollections because I know so little about this young aunty. Suddenly she recalls something that makes me sit up. ‘My parents sent Hania away to the country for a long time and when she came back to Lwow, she spoke with a country accent. Mania used to make fun of her and make her cry.’ Perhaps now I’ll discover something about Hania, but we’ve come to a dead end. My mother can’t recall why her sister was sent away, or when she married Dolek Korner.

  Aunty Mania once told me that both she and her sister Hania had become pregnant in 1941 but although she herself had an abortion, Hania had not and she had given birth to a little girl. But years later, when I was desperate to know more about this young aunty of whom not even one photograph has remained, my mother could no longer remember anything. Or perhaps she remembered too much. Our deepest feelings are often revealed in silences and my mother’s silence screamed. By then Bronia looked as transparent as a Chinese porcelain saucer, the light had gone out of her cat-green eyes, and she clasped her small right hand in her left so that I wouldn’t see how much it shook.

  To each question I ask she stubbornly shakes her bouffant blonde head. She’s eighty-one, still feisty and spirited, and as immaculately dressed and groomed as ever. What did Hania call the baby? She shrugs. No idea. Did Hania have the baby at a clinic? Sitting in my sunlit room in Sydney, one of the least introspective and most tolerant cities in the world, it’s difficult to recreate a time when every doorknock meant death.

  But my last question ignites a spark. My mother gives me a look that could have drilled through basalt. ‘What clinic? How did Jews get to go to clinics?’ She waves an irritated hand in my direction. ‘Don’t you know? Jews weren’t people,’ she says bitterly. ‘Doctors and hospitals weren’t allowed to treat them.’

  Still I persist. ‘So did Hania have the baby at home?’ My mother stares out of the window but I know that she’s not looking at the palms and frangipanis in the garden but at some indescribable scene inside her mind. Slowly she turns her eyes back on me and repeats in a hollow voice, ‘At home. She had it at home. Don’t ask. I don’t want to think about it. I’ll have nightmares.’ I never asked about Hania again. On this occasion compassion triumphed over the tyranny of knowledge.

  When the Germans decided that the annihilation of the Jews was proceeding too slowly because too many Jews were staying indoors, they put pressure on the Judenrat to supply Jews for their killing squads. The Judenrat, a Jewish organisation set up by the Germans to liaise between the Jewish community and themselves, had its own policemen who were now ordered to enter Jewish homes and take the women away. Two of these policemen once came into my grandparents’ home for my mother and Mania. Fortunately Mania recognised one of them as a colleague of Misko’s from the polytechnic. She started chatting with him about old times and mutual friends, until he felt too embarrassed to carry out his order and left them alone.

  It wasn’t long before two burly Volksdeutsch guards banged on the door, demanding wine that they’d heard was kept in the cellar. ‘My father doesn’t have any wine,’ my mother said and offered to take them down there to see for themselves. One of them didn’t like her tone of voice and threatened to hit her. ‘Why don’t you, then?’ she taunted him, tilting her small chin. He stared at her, looked around the cellar and left. ‘I don’t know what got into me,’ she says, shaking her fair hair in wonder. ‘I must have been crazy. He could have killed me.’

  It was around this time that Mania’s husband Misko shot a German soldier. Everyone liked Misko, even his German employer who knew that he was Jewish. One morning the boss took Misko aside and told him that he kept a revolver in the top drawer of the desk and if he was ever in danger, he should use it.

  Not long afterwards a menacing German soldier strode into the office, revolver in hand, and ordered Misko outside at once. With shaking fingers Misko slid the drawer open, put his hand around the pistol grip and pressed the trigger. He was shocked when the German staggered and crashed to the floor. He couldn’t get over the fact that he’d killed someone. ‘If you hadn’t, he would have killed you and many others,’ Mania tried to reason with him, but Misko was in a state of shock for a long time.

  As it became increasingly difficult to evade the German soldiers, Ukrainian guards and Jewish police, my father and Hania’s husband Dolek created a recess behind the stove by stacking firewood in a way that enabled them to crawl in through an opening at the top. After pushing their way inside, they covered the opening with a large enamel wash tub. They practised this manoeuvre over and over and slept on the kitchen floor fully clothed, ready to jump into their hiding place at a moment’s notice.

  According to my father, seeing so much suffering desensitised many people who became callous to protect themselves from feeling pain. He never forgot the shock of hearing a young married woman say, ‘The Germans have taken Daddy away to make mincemeat out of him.’ Reflecting about her comment many years later, he wrote: ‘There was no time to cry over those who had perished because you had to think all the time of saving yourself. You had to become tough or you couldn’t go on living.’

  Shortly after Izio’s disappearance, on a warm summer evening in 1941, there was a gentle knock on the door of the Bratters’ home on Sloneczna Street. They lived in a handsome stone-faced block of flats decorated with ornamental balconies, pediments and plump cherubs carved above the entrance. But those angels didn’t do their work, they didn’t protect the owners of the building.

  By then the Bratters, like most Jews in Lwow, didn’t open the door to strangers any more because Ukrainian militia used to burst into Jewish homes and push the occupants into waiting trucks. On this particular day, 25 July, a rumour had spread that the Ukrainians were planning retaliation to avenge the murder of an anti-Semitic Ukrainian leader by a Jew. As the assassination had taken place in Paris in May 1926, this so-called anniversary was a thinly veiled pretext for a pogrom. But the gentle knock and the familiar voice on the other side of the door allayed the Bratters’ suspicion. ‘Panie Bratter, prosze pana, please open the door, I have something to tell you.’ It was the caretaker. My grandfather opened the door.

  In the doorway stood two Ukrainian guards with rifles, holding a list of names. ‘Bernard Bratter? Come with us!’ Glancing inside, they spotted my father. ‘You too!’ they snapped. Perhaps I watched them taking my father and grandfather away. I may have been looking at my animal picture book at the time, or chewing the precious Wedel chocolates Aunty Mania’s husband Misko sometimes brought for me. I probably saw my grandmother’s frozen face and heard her sobbing long after they had gone. It’s hard for me to realise that I was actually there, a rosy two-year-old learning the names of animals on my father’s knee while atrocities on a scale not seen in Europe since the days of Genghis Khan were being perpetrated all around me. For most of my life I’ve thought of the Holocaust as something that happened to my parents, not to me, so it’s an effort to place myself on that terrifying stage and see myself as being inside the poisonous web that was ensnaring us. With a toddler’s watchful gaze, I must have seen their frightened eyes darting towards the door and at each other, and sensed the terror in the words they couldn’t articulate. My mother told me that for a long time afterwards, whenever someone knocked on the door, I would place a finger on the tip of my nose and whisper, ‘Shh! Germs!’, and in spite of their grief they would smile at my mispronunciation.

  My father and grandfather were taken to the prison yard on Lackiego Street where about a hundred men were ordered to form two rows. A German officer with a thin mouth, hollow cheeks and a lantern jaw was surveying the prisoners while he caressed the truncheon he held in his right hand with long, loving strokes. He strode up to a man in the front row, raised his cudgel and with lightning speed struck his temple so hard that the man reeled and fell. While he lay on the ground, his head in his hands, the officer yelled at him to get up and kept beating the dazed man until he staggered to his feet.

  Saunteri
ng along the front row, the officer bored his colourless eyes into Henek’s face. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, and without waiting for a reply yelled with fury, ‘You’re a communist!’ and struck him across the forehead with his bamboo pole. The sound of that blow reverberated in Henek’s head like an echo chamber. ‘At that instant,’ my father writes in his memoirs, ‘I experienced a strange olfactory sensation. Suddenly I smelt the sweet grassy fragrance of meadows in autumn. Like the man before me, I also fell backwards, but when the German yelled “Get up!”, in spite of the pain and dizziness I leapt up like a marionette before he had time to beat me again.’

  After a while the German officer lost interest in this game and handed them over to the Ukrainians who started battering their captives with sticks and clubs. Each time he saw one of the Ukrainians approaching him with a raised stick, Henek psyched himself up for the coming blow, which made the pain more bearable. It occurred to him that their tormentors puffed and panted just like the women who used to beat their rugs in the courtyard of his parents’ home in Sebastiana Street. ‘I suppose they’d been hard at work bludgeoning Jews for hours, so they were tired out,’ he writes.

  When the militia finally ordered the detainees to go inside the prison building, my father heaved a sigh of relief, thinking that the beating was over. No way. Cracking whips, the guards started chasing the exhausted men up to the third floor like hounds lusting for blood. On each landing they had to run the gauntlet of Ukrainian guards who bashed them as they ran past. My father’s hands swelled and became bruised because he used them as a shield to ward off blows to his head.

  ‘When we finally got to the third floor,’ my father writes, ‘they crammed us into a long corridor, pushing us against those who were already up there. We could hear them moaning, begging us to move back because their bodies hurt so much. But this was impossible because a German was whipping us mercilessly to move forward. We were jammed together like sardines in a tin. They carried out one man, dead. The night was hot, we were thirsty, and we didn’t have enough air to breathe, but that German kept lashing out with his whip, yelling “Nasse säcke”, which meant “wet sacks”. No-one was allowed to leave the room, and some men had wet themselves. Things improved whenever this soldier went outside for a break, because the young officer who replaced him let us go to the toilet, have a drink of water and even sit down on the floor. He hadn’t had time to become corrupted by the bestiality of his colleagues. But as soon as the cruel one returned, we had to stand up again. And that’s how we spent the whole night.’

  In the morning their captors herded them out into the yard and beat them again. Sitting behind little tables in the yard, Gestapo officers called for any lawyers to come forward and made them load rocks into wheelbarrows and push them pointlessly backwards and forwards across the yard, just to torment and humiliate them.

  Next they called for the doctors to come forward. Thinking that doctors were more likely to be spared, Henek stepped forward too, but when they announced that this didn’t include dentists, he stepped back, though a hunch made him stand close to the doctors’ group. When the soldier ordered everyone to throw all their possessions, including their passports, onto a pile, Henek’s heart throbbed against his ears. ‘They obviously intend to bury us all in a mass grave, because that’s the only place where you don’t need any documents,’ he thought.

  A moment later, however, the doctors were ordered to pick up their documents and, without hesitating for a second, Henek rushed forward, grabbed his passport and came back to the doctors’ group. But the Ukrainians weren’t taking any chances and started checking all the passports. Henek noticed that whenever they came across one which said Doctor of Dentistry, they sent its owner back to the group destined for death, but by a stroke of amazing luck my father’s passport actually described him as a doctor. When applying for his passport during the Russian occupation, he’d said he was a doctor simply because he didn’t like the Russian word for dentist. He didn’t suspect that one day his life would hinge on his choice of words.

  There were only about fifteen men in the doctors’ group, and out of the hundreds of people gathered in the prison yard that day, they were the only ones whom the Germans released. All the others were loaded into trucks, driven to Piaskowa Gora and shot. On 25 July 1941, the Germans and their Ukrainian assistants killed over 5000 Jews. My grandfather Bernard Bratter was amongst them.

  CHAPTER 18

  In the village of Radlow north of Krakow, a stooped grey-haired woman tears opens a thick letter from Lwow with eager fingers. Lieba Baldinger’s face lights up as she pulls out a sepiatoned photograph with serrated edges and gazes at a little girl with a solemn face who is digging with her spade. My father has sent my photo to his mother and writes that Danusia already knows the names of all the animals in Polish and Latin even though she’s only two years old. But he doesn’t tell her that he has been arrested and beaten, that his brother-in-law went out one day and never returned, or that his father-in-law has just been murdered by a death squad.

  Lieba reads the letter over and over again, and then calls her daughter Rozia, who claps her hands with delight when she sees the photograph of her niece. ‘Dear little Danusia is the image of Bronia’s family, she doesn’t take after our side, does she, Mamuncia?’

  Tears spill out of Lieba’s brown eyes because she longs to cuddle her little granddaughter and wonders whether she’ll ever see her again. ‘Such a lovely child,’ she whispers while Rozia inserts the picture into the back of a double glass frame which already contains a photograph of Janek and Rolande’s baby daughter, Danielle. Rozia places the frame on their dressing table so that one little granddaughter looks out from the frame while the other is reflected in the mirror.

  I learned this from Rozia’s letters which I found in Paris recently among a trunkful of family memorabilia kept by my cousin Aline. It’s thrilling to hear this aunt’s own voice in her well-spaced, rounded handwriting and a lump comes to my throat when I learn how much she and Lieba loved me. All I’ve ever heard about Rozia was that she was deaf, highly strung, and difficult, but in these letters to her brother Janek and sister-in-law Rolande, I encounter a devoted soul who is so involved with the family that she rarely mentions her own problems.

  Even when she had been pistol-whipped by a German soldier in the streets of Krakow shortly before they’d moved to Radlow, Rozia had been more concerned about sparing her mother anxiety than about her own bruised face. That had happened just before Pesach, after they’d swept and scrubbed every nook and cranny in the house to make sure that not a crumb of bread or chometz remained. ‘That soldier shook me up to make sure there wasn’t any chometz left!’ she joked, holding her hand across her cheek so Lieba wouldn’t see the swelling.

  Shortly afterwards Lieba had started to pack her menorah and candelabra, the bedroom suite and ice chest, and treasured family photographs of happier times. She moved slowly and sighed as she sorted possessions she’d accumulated over a lifetime in readiness to leave Krakow. In May 1940, in accordance with his plan to turn Krakow into a cleansed German city that was Judenrein, Governor Hans Frank ordered all Jews to leave. Those who left before 15 August could go wherever they chose, but after that date they’d be forcibly deported. Only Jews who were fit enough to work and be useful to the Germans were given permission to remain in the city, and Lieba’s son Izio was amongst them.

  At the age of sixty-eight, my grandmother, who had pitied the Polish Jews in Germany when they were thrown out of their homes two years before, had become a refugee herself. For the first time in centuries the Jews of Krakow were forced to abandon their synagogues, shtibls, prayer houses, mikvehs, Talmud-Torah schools and the homes where the ghosts of their ancestors hovered above mezuzah scrolls on a thousand worn doorways.

  Lieba and Rozia had moved to Radlowa because they had family there and thought that they’d be safe in this village which was little more than a huddle of poor huts. Lieba’s brothers-in-law Ozjasz and Maks Kling
came from here. From Rozia’s letters, I learn that at this time my parents and Andzia and Zygmunt were in Lwow, Lunia and Berus were in Cyprus, Avner and Hela were waiting for a ship to Brazil, and Janek and Rolande were in Andorra.

  Some of Rozia’s letters are deceptively lively.

  Our Dear Mamuncia—along with the rest of us—couldn’t stop laughing at the story about Danielle doing weewee in bed. I’m not surprised that your in-laws are besotted with her, not because of the weewee, but because she sounds as though she has inherited Rolande’s charm, although it sounds as if she gets her appetite from our tribe. I’m surprised she doesn’t say: ‘Mummy, mummy, me eat thwee swices of bwead but me still hungwy!’ like Janek used to say! As for the olive oil, don’t worry about it, it’s not important, it was just a thought. On the whole, we have a lot to be thankful for. Let’s hope that others won’t forget us either. Henek and Andzia are with their families at the old address and Henek and Zygmunt are both working which makes us very happy.

  To each of Rozia’s letters, Lieba adds a brief postscript sending her love in handwriting which trembles with agitation. Reading their letters fifty years after they were written, it’s as though fictional characters have suddenly stepped out of their novels and begun speaking with their own voices.

  One of the few highlights of Lieba’s life in Radlowa was an unexpected visit from her daughter Fridzia who stayed with them in the room they rented in a villager’s hut. Ever since she had married Jerzyk Shapiro in November 1938, Fridzia had been unsettled. He was a philologist from Vilno whom she’d met at a holiday resort at a time in her life when her bruised ego needed a boost. She was already twenty-five, the man she was in love with didn’t want to make a commitment, and spinsterhood beckoned. There was no passion between her and Jerzyk but he said he loved her and she was impressed by his intellect. Many years later, looking back on her marriage, she comments, ‘I married him to spite my boyfriend, but I ended up spiting myself.’ It didn’t take long to realise that marrying Jerzyk had been a terrible mistake. He was as dry and inaccessible as his textbooks, and to her warm, giving nature it felt like living in emotional permafrost. They had nothing in common.