Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  ‘I haven’t got a thing,’ she replied.

  ‘How come? Lwow people are rolling in it!’

  She tried to keep calm. It was devastating to be poor when money meant the difference between life and death. ‘Well, we don’t have any money, but Mr Koenigel said that he’d vouch for us.’ At the mention of the liaison officer’s name, the man nodded and, to her relief, added their names to the list.

  Over the next three weeks Mania’s bones ached from sleeping on the floor and she couldn’t wait to have a bath. How much longer would they have to stay there? One morning her thoughts were interrupted by a commotion downstairs. Out of the window she watched as five lorries roared through the wide entrance and screeched to a halt inside the yard.

  Out jumped a dozen German soldiers shouting out names. Straining to catch the names, she soon realised that those with South American passports were being summoned. They collected their belongings as fast as they could and rushed towards the waiting trucks. As they climbed eagerly inside, she caught sight of Mr Hening and his family amongst them. At last they were going to Vittel.

  For the past three weeks they had talked of nothing but going to Vittel where they would be met by the Red Cross and sent to Paraguay, Nicaragua or Costa Rica. As the last truck drove away, Mania wandered into the Henings’ empty room and slumped on the bed. All those lucky people were about to be transported to freedom while she and Misko had to stay behind in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Misko tried to cheer her up. ‘Perhaps the trucks will come back for those of us who are going to Palestine,’ he mused.

  About an hour later the trucks did come back. But this time she heard yelling in the courtyard and the sound of whips cracking. People were scattering, running in all directions to get away from the soldiers, but only a few managed to escape through the back gate. Watching from the Henings’ room on the fourth floor, Mania had a hollow feeling in her stomach. Turning towards her husband, she spoke in a strangely calm voice. ‘Let’s stay right here. There’s no way out. And if they come for us, let’s jump out of the window together.’ Misko nodded without speaking and put his arm around her slim shoulders.

  Suddenly everything became quiet. Mr Koenigel had appeared. Taking in the situation at a glance, he started chatting to the Germans in his jovial way and invited them for a drink at the bar. Within minutes the barman was pouring schnapps, whisky and lager, glasses clinked in jovial toasts, and the sound of men’s laughter resounded through the hotel. An hour later the Germans sauntered out of the bar with red faces and unsteady legs.

  Even though they’d been saved at the last moment, the future looked bleak. They’d been staying at the Hotel Polski for three weeks without setting foot outside. With so many people crammed into a small space with no bathing facilities, the place has become infested with lice. Wherever they would go from here, they’d need to buy food, and Mania’s money had almost run out. She wired Izio’s wife Lola in Krakow asking her to send the rest of her belongings, a few clothes, the last of Bronia’s sheets, and an eiderdown, but she knew that they couldn’t survive long on the proceeds.

  Several days later the lorries came back, but this time Mr Koeningel wasn’t there to intercede for them. Along with the last occupants of the Hotel Polski, Mania and Misko were taken to the Umschlagplatz. ‘We knew that this was the marshalling place from which trains took people to their deaths,’ Aunty Mania tells me, ‘but when we saw that these were normal trains with seats, and not sealed cattle trucks, we felt heartened. Perhaps they weren’t taking us to a concentration camp after all.’

  After chugging along regular railway tracks for about a day, the train turned off onto a single track surrounded by dense forests. A woman near Mania grabbed her arm. ‘These secret tracks through the woods lead to death camps,’ she said, her eyes wild with panic. ‘I escaped from one of these transports a few weeks ago and I’m not going to sit here and wait for them to push me into a gas chamber.’ Before Mania could speak, the woman snatched a capsule from her pocket, threw it into her mouth, tilted her head back and swallowed. Within minutes she slumped forward and they smelled the almond scent of cyanide. Some of the women broke down and sobbed but Mania felt a new strength course through her body. She was going to live through this.

  After what seemed like days, the train pulled in at a small country station, and as they craned their heads out of the window, Misko was saying, ‘If we’re met by the Wehrmacht, we’ll be all right, but if they’re SS men, we’re lost.’ When Mania looked outside, her blood froze. Two men with death’s-head insignias on their snappy peaked caps were awaiting them. The sign on the station said Bergen.

  CHAPTER 24

  While my parents were clinging to life by their fingernails in Piszczac, in other parts of Poland Jews were systematically being starved, tortured and killed. In a thousand birch woods and spruce forests, after the death squads had roared away, the ground heaved above hastily covered pits in which the desperate screams of the living were muffled by the suffocating shroud of earth and corpses, and the blood of grandmothers, mothers and babies stained the land.

  At Stalowa Wola, a forced labour camp near Tarnow, a man and woman creep past the guard who patrols the Stahlwerke Braunschweig armament firm where they’ve been working. In the ongoing conflict between the Nazi principles of extermination and the Wehrmacht’s need for exploitation, the Wehrmacht had won a temporary victory and was using Jewish labour to help the German war effort. Only a few days earlier, the man’s German boss had called him into the office and told him to close the door. Even though this quiet employee with the misshapen ear was a Jew, he liked him so much that he offered to hide him. Jerzy’s heart must have leapt at the prospect of being sheltered inside a German’s home. But what about his wife Rutka? His employer shook his head. He would only hide one person. Now it was Jerzy’s turn to shake his head. He wouldn’t abandon his wife to save himself. Somehow they’d stay together.

  Now, as they creep out of the compound gate, they’re praying that the guard hasn’t heard their ragged breathing. Only a few more steps and they’ll be around the corner, out of sight. A gunshot explodes in Rutka’s ear and Jerzy falls on the ground. Her scream hangs in the air long after the second shot has silenced it forever.

  ‘Jerzy and Rutka were such a lovely couple,’ my mother sighs. ‘Out of all of Henek’s family, I loved them most of all.’ She walks into the large sunny bedroom which she has abandoned since my father died, opens a drawer, and carefully lifts out an old tablecoth. It’s yellowed with age but the embroidered petals and intricate openwork are still intact. ‘Rutka made this for us when we got married,’ she says. As I hold it, I feel the love with which Rutka sewed these painstaking stitches. The tablecloth has outlived Rutka, the war, and the journey to the other end of the world.

  It was Aunty Andzia who told me how Jerzy and Rutka died. It happened just after she’d left Lwow and was wandering from place to place searching for some safe corner for herself and her children. She had intended to go to Iwonicz, thinking that a spa town would be safer than a large city, but the man sitting next to her on the train from Lwow had looked aghast when she mentioned Iwonicz. ‘Dear lady, what are you thinking of?’ he said. ‘The place is crawling with Germans!’ Andzia was shaken. She had no idea where to go. ‘My wife’s a teacher and I work on the railways, so we need someone to take care of the baby,’ the man had told her. ‘Why don’t you come and live with us? You’ll have a roof over your heads and food in your stomachs.’

  Andzia had been grateful for the offer but after a few weeks at his house she was worn out. By night she walked up and down rocking the baby, who bawled incessantly, and by day she cleaned, cooked, washed and ironed in return for their meagre food and lodging. She felt trapped until the day Mrs Skwara, an elderly neighbour, stopped her in the marketplace. ‘Pani Sulikowska, why are you letting these people exploit you? Come and work on my farm and I’ll pay you.’ Andzia didn’t need any prompting.

  At the Skwaras’ house she helped
with farm chores from sunrise till past sunset. At night, when she fell exhausted onto the straw bed she shared with Krysia and Fredzio, her lonely thoughts turned to Zygmunt and she wondered whether she’d ever see her husband again. Reading between the lines of his guarded letters, each of which showed a different address, she felt his desperation in every word. He wrote that he’d been seriously ill and begged for help, distraught that he hadn’t received a reply. ‘I’m recovering slowly but need money for food and medicine. The weather here is extremely bad for convalescence,’ he wrote in code from Lwow in October 1942. She knew he was referring to his slim chance of survival. That was the last letter Andzia ever received from him.

  Life would have been bearable at the Skwaras’ farm if not for their son who bullied Krysia and Fredzio mercilessly. Although Andzia knew that Zenek was always punching and bashing them when no-one was looking, the stakes were too high to place justice above survival. ‘Keep away from him but don’t ever hit back!’ she warned.

  At harvest time, when the golden fields shimmered and the farmhands were out scything the barley and tying it into sheaves, Andzia called Fredzio but couldn’t find him. ‘I saw him in Pani Skwara’s cart with some of the boys heading for the fields,’ one of the farmhands said. Andzia paced up and down. She knew that the village boys sometimes played games to see who could urinate the furthest, and she was terrified in case they saw Fredzio’s penis. As she paced up and down, another thought struck her. ‘What if Mr Skwara decides to check out whether Fredzio is Jewish?’

  Krysia watched her mother anxiously. ‘Let’s not wait, Mama,’ she said. ‘Let’s just go.’

  Andzia’s lips tightened. ‘We’re staying right here. If they turn Fredzio in, we’ll die with him.’ The hours dragged by until sundown when they heard voices and rushed outside. Sitting on top of a waggon piled with hay, Fredzio was holding the reins with Mr Skwara and jigging up and down with glee. ‘Just look at him!’ the farmer beamed.

  No matter how exhausted she was, Andzia’s mind never slept, and late one night she was awoken by murmuring from the other side of the wall where her employer slept with his wife and son in one bed beneath a big crucifix. Mr Skwara was whispering, ‘Mother, can you hear me? I want to tell you something. I’m wondering about that woman we’ve got here with her kids. I’ve heard that the Germans are offering a bottle of vodka, five hundred cigarettes and fifty zlotys for every Jew.’ Andzia pressed her ear against the wall. The man went on, ‘After all, if we don’t turn them in, someone else will.’ A shiver ran down Andzia’s spine as she realised that the man who had taken them in and treated them like family was willing to sell their lives for vodka, cigarettes and a few miserable zlotys. For the rest of the night her brain felt on fire as she tried to figure out how to get away before the Gestapo arrived.

  As soon as wisps of light appeared in the sky and the cock crowed in the yard, she nudged Krysia. ‘When we’re all out in the fields, I want you and Fredzio to pick a fight with Zenek. Really let him have it so it shows!’ Krysia stared at her mother with astonishment. At last they’d be able to pay the bully back. When Andzia came back from the fields that afternoon, her hair tied in a kerchief and her face red and sweaty, the children ran up to her, bubbling with excitement. ‘We got Zenek into the barn and pummelled him so hard that his nose bled!’ Krysia exulted.

  Quickly Andzia untied the scarf, splashed water on her face at the pump, and hurried to the magistrate’s office. ‘I hope you’ll help me because I’m very worried,’ she told him. ‘My children have had a fight with Zenek Skwara and I’m sure we’ll be thrown out, but we have nowhere to go. Could you give me a certificate of residence saying that I come from here?’

  The balding magistrate with the high forehead placed his shiny glasses on the desk and surveyed the flushed brunette. ‘But how can I say that you’re from Lomrzany? You’ve only been here six months!’

  She looked beseechingly into his face. ‘I know, but if I don’t have the certificate, I won’t be able to get the children’s medicine.’

  His face softened. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you needed medicine for the children?’ he said, and filled out the form.

  Andzia ran back to the farm, threw their belongings into a bundle, grabbed the children and headed for the station. She’d take the next train to Warsaw. It would be good to see her sister Slawa again. She kept repeating her sister’s new name over and over, to make sure she didn’t make the fatal mistake of calling her Fridzia. Mama and Rozia were living there too, so she wouldn’t have to struggle all alone anymore. The station swarmed with German soldiers, but armed with her document of residence and false papers, she felt confident. She’d just settled into her seat by the window when a German soldier entered the compartment with his huge German shepherd and with a peremptory gesture ordered her to get up to make room for the dog. In the next compartment, however, a Pole from Poznan took Fredzio on his lap, while a German traveller gave her and Krysia his seat and she spent the rest of the journey chatting with a woman who admired her beautiful children. As they neared the outskirts of Warsaw and she began gathering her belongings, the woman whispered, ‘Don’t hang around the station. They’re catching people all the time these days, not only Jews, so don’t hesitate, just go.’ The train was shuddering to a halt when Andzia broke into a cold sweat. She’d forgotten Slawa’s address and there was no way of finding out because she’d destroyed her letter.

  Remembering what the woman had said about loitering, she hailed the first dorosky she saw and climbed in with legs that shook because she didn’t know what to tell the driver. Her mind was racing around in useless circles. Dear God, what’s to become of us? Where can we go? The driver was looking at her, waiting for directions. Beads of sweat sprang out on her forehead and upper lip. She had to say something, quickly. Suddenly she heard herself say, ‘Nowogrodzka, please.’ As the driver tugged the reins and the horse clip-clopped away from the station, she sank back against the worn leather seat and let out a long sigh of relief. By some miracle the street name had come to her, but what was the number? Racking her brains, she thought of various numbers, but not one of them sounded right. Soon they’d reach Nowogrodzka Street. She couldn’t wander from house to house with two children, knocking on every single door in the hope of finding her sister.

  Aunty Andzia still remembers the panic of that dorosky ride, and the tightness in her chest as she scanned the stone-faced buildings. Leaning forward, she jabs her long red fingernail in the air between us. ‘I could talk about it for a week and you will still never understand the despair I felt at that moment, knowing that if I didn’t find my sister soon, we’d all be picked up.’

  To this day she doesn’t know what drew her towards a big wooden gate which led into a large courtyard with apartment blocks all around. At the first door in the large hallway, a woman looked her up and down, shook her head and shut the door before she had time to say a word. How many doorbells would she have to ring in this building, and how many in other houses, before she found her sister? And how long would it be before someone became suspicious and turned them in? Just as she took a deep breath and braced herself to press another bell, a door on her left opened centimetre by centimetre, a shadow fell across the hallway, and she was looking into her sister’s face.

  As soon as Slawa had found two vacant rooms in Warsaw, in a flat belonging to two elderly ladies, she’d sent for her mother and Rozia whom she introduced as her friends Mrs Marianna Popkiewicz and her daughter Karolina. The unexpected arrival of Andzia and the children meant that she’d have to hide the three of them in her small room. How could she conceal their presence from the landladies who lived in the same flat, who often dropped in for a chat? Pacing up and down her tiny room in a turmoil, Slawa stopped in front of the old-fashioned wardrobe with a mirror door.

  For the next three weeks Andzia, Krysia and Fredzio spent most of their time in the space created between the wall and the wardrobe door, which they always kept open. It’s hard to imagin
e a lively six-year-old boy spending entire days in silence behind a wardrobe door. Didn’t the children get restless standing there day after day? ‘No, they understood that our lives depended on it,’ Aunty Andzia tells me. ‘They were used to being hunted and living in terror. They were abused by life.’

  My cousin Krysia still remembers standing behind the wardrobe, changing from one foot to the other, terrified of coughing, sneezing or making the slightest sound. ‘After a while Aunty Slawa got us a little folding chair so we could take turns sitting down,’ she recalls. ‘We had to wait until the landladies weren’t around before we could use the toilet, and we couldn’t flush it too often in case it aroused suspicion. Mrs Makowska and Mrs Karasiewicz were deeply religious women who went to church every day, but if they’d known we were Jews, they would probably have turned us over to the Gestapo without a qualm. I remember being so terrified in case they came in and saw us that I hardly took my eyes off that door.’

  ‘How do children cope with such terror?’ I ask as we sip our coffee on a sunny terrace high above the Mediterranean Sea. For a few moments Krysia stares at the view below but I know she’s not seeing the waves which slap against the ramparts of old Yaffa. ‘In those times, children weren’t children,’ she says quietly. ‘We stopped being children in the face of death.’

  Within three weeks it became obvious that they couldn’t conceal their presence in Slawa’s flat indefinitely. Although Slawa tried to hide her bulging shopping bag as she climbed the stairs and although they crept around on tiptoe and hid every tell-tale sign, the old ladies had eyes like hawks and from the comments they made, it was clear that they were becoming suspicious. Andzia would have to find another room.

  Sneaking out of the flat whilst the landladies were at church, Slawa and Andzia set off in search of a room, but at the first place the woman gave them a knowing look. ‘I don’t want to have to report you, ladies,’ she said as she grabbed Andzia’s handbag, opened it, pulled out a wad of zlotys, thrust the bag back into her hands and slammed the door in their faces. She knew that they couldn’t take the risk of reporting her.