Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  Henek flushed from his neck to the top of his head. Humiliated, he longed to get away as fast as possible but he couldn’t afford the luxury of hurt feelings. He had to ignore the insult and brazen it out to the end. He put on a smile and, together with Bronia, moved from group to group, pretending to be unaware that no-one was speaking to them.

  At the stroke of midnight, glasses were filled again, people who had until then addressed each other in the third person linked arms and drank Bruderschaft and hoped that 1944 would bring peace. Henek and Bronia were leaving when the man who’d suggested a visit to the Turkish baths stepped over to them. Through fumes of the machorka tobacco he was smoking, he sneered, ‘I’m planning to pay you a visit tomorrow, Dr Boguslawski, at six in the morning,’ he said.

  ‘That’s too early, I’ll be in bed,’ Henek replied pleasantly.

  ‘That’s exactly where I want you to be,’ the man replied.

  Henek and Bronia trudged home in the snow in silence, their heads bent. Millions of stars trembled in a black and brittle sky, and the moon lit up boughs that drooped with snow. The air was so pure and cold that it speared Bronia’s heart. Finally she spoke in a firm, strong voice. ‘They’re playing a cat and mouse game with us, but they won’t win.’ She looked up into the starlit sky and breathed in the frosty air. ‘God won’t let us perish.’

  Henek’s mind was churning. He and Bronia had planned a New Year’s Day party and now he wondered whether anyone would turn up. If they boycott our party, that will be the end, he thought. He decided to swallow his pride and visit everyone they’d invited, to make sure. First he called on the Bultowicz brothers. After they confirmed that they’d be coming, Henek broached another subject. ‘I wonder who’s been spreading these stories about Bronia,’ he said. He deliberately focused on my mother as the butt of the rumours, because it should have been very easy to prove that he himself wasn’t a Jew.

  Bogus Bultowicz shifted in his chair and sat for a few moments without speaking. ‘Grochowski reckons that Bronia is definitely Jewish, but as for you,’ he cleared his throat, ‘he says he’ll have to check you out.’

  At the doctor’s house Mrs Forycka made excuses. She was too tired, she didn’t feel like going out, and anyway her husband was away and she had no idea when he’d be back. ‘Do come, it won’t be a party without you!’ Henek urged. To his relief, she nodded. ‘All right, I’ll come, and I’ll leave a note for Jozek to come over as soon as he gets back.’ Feeling as triumphant as Napoleon after one of his victories, Henek braced himself to call on the Grochowskis. Mrs Grochowska refused point-blank, but her husband said that since he’d promised to come, he’d keep his word.

  All day Bronia prepared for the party with Mrs Bogdanowa, who never involved herself in village gossip. They roasted ducks to crisp brown perfection, prepared marinated mushrooms and cabbage rolls, and baked cheese pancakes. But all day a black cloud hung over them. What if no-one turned up?

  They were relieved to see the cassocked figure of Father Soszynski standing at the door, followed by their neighbour, Mrs Podobasowa. But as neither of them had been at the Grochowskis’ the previous night, they mightn’t be aware that their hosts had been ostracised. Henek and Bronia tried not to glance at the door. Half an hour passed and no-one else had arrived.

  Suddenly young Krajewski, the Lewickis’ son-in-law, poked his head around the door, saw the priest deep in conversation with Henek and Mrs Podobasowa, and disappeared, soon to return with the whole Lewicki family. Another five people. Before long Dr and Mrs Forycki arrived, followed by the man who’d threatened to visit Henek before he’d had time to dress. Henek had never imagined he’d be so happy to see his sardonic face.

  Jurek and Daunta were there too, but Henek noticed that they were more reserved than usual and kept their distance. Circulating among the guests, Henek kept filling up glasses with cherry vodka and telling the jokes for which he was famous. Soon the atmosphere lightened and people started to laugh. Henek felt like a prisoner on death row, reprieved at the last moment.

  The party was in full swing when the sound of angry voices made everyone stop and turn around. Mrs Forycka was shouting at Mrs Lewicka. While the guests stared in horror, the older woman reached out and slapped the other hard across the face. The combatants then took their husbands by the arm and hurriedly left, which soon broke up the party. Henek wasn’t sorry about this turn of events. A juicy scandal in the village might divert attention away from them.

  The following day Mr Lewicki came over, ostensibly to ask Henek to try and settle the quarrel between his wife and Mrs Forycka, but he had another agenda. In his forthright manner, the resistance activist said, ‘For heaven’s sake, Boguslawski, clear yourself of this slur about being Jewish once and for all!’

  Henek’s reply was swift. ‘Don’t worry, I’m making inquiries to find out who’s casting these slanderous rumours about Bronia.’

  Before he had time to mull over Stanislaw Lewicki’s warning, there was another knock on the door. Mrs Forycka had arrived. Henek assumed that she too had come to discuss the fracas of the night before, but her words took him by surprise. ‘Everyone is saying that you’re Jews,’ the doctor’s wife was saying. ‘If you are, then you should leave as soon as possible. I don’t like Jews, but I’ll help you to get away in my brother-in-law’s car.’

  After she’d left, Henek’s face was ashen. ‘Things have come to a head. Maybe we should take her up on her offer and get away while we can.’

  Bronia was staring at him with disbelief. ‘You must be mad!’ she cried. ‘Leave and admit that we’re Jewish? How far do you think we’d get before someone runs to the Gestapo? And where would we go? Wherever we go, people will guess that we’re Jews. Running away is the worst thing we could do. Our only hope is to sit tight and keep denying the rumours. You remember what Father Soszynski said when someone told him that Danusia was Jewish. At least here we have a few friends. And as for Mrs Forycka, I’ll tell her I’m as Jewish as she is!’

  Henek couldn’t let it go any longer. At the post office he confronted the postmistress and her mother. ‘I’ve been told that the slander about my wife being Jewish started with you,’ he said in a voice that was deadly calm. While the women stared at him, he continued, ‘If that’s true, I demand an apology or you’ll find yourselves in big trouble. If the Germans find out that you take money out of people’s letters, they’ll arrest you. As you know, they throw people into jail first and ask questions afterwards.’ He was bluffing but the guilty look on their white faces told him all he needed to know.

  After a few moments the postmistress found her voice. ‘Dr Boguslawski, we’ve also heard the rumours about your wife,’ she said. ‘But we didn’t start them, they came from the presbytery, not from us. We’ve heard that Mrs Boguslawska serves chopped egg and onion, and goose rubbed with garlic, the way the Jews do. Of course we wouldn’t know about these things, since we’ve never been to your place.’ Henek apologised for the oversight. ‘You must come over for a glass of tea very soon,’ he said.

  The presbytery was next. In the village square some of the layabouts were lolling under the chestnut trees, still under the influence of bimber, the rotgut they brewed in their illicit stills. In the modest living room of the presbytery, under the priest’s alert gaze, Henek’s voice was reproachful. ‘People in Piszczac are saying that we’re Jews, and I’m shocked to hear that these dangerous rumours have been spread by your own sister.’

  Clearly upset, Father Soszynski asked his sister whether this was true. She denied it and blamed Mrs Podobasowa. Determined not to let the matter rest, my father knocked on his neighbour’s door and his implacable gaze made it clear that excuses would be useless. But Mrs Podobasowa shook her head. It wasn’t really her, it was a friend of hers who’d started those stories. ‘Unless your friend turns up at my place by four this afternoon to apologise and retract the slander, I’m going to report both of you to the police,’ he said.

  Back home, he paced around t
he room like a caged tiger, glancing out of the window every few minutes. What if they called his bluff and refused to come? What if they decided to pre-empt his threat by going to the Gestapo first? As the minutes ticked by, he became convinced that they wouldn’t come. It was childish to think that such a ruse could work. But when he looked out of the window yet again, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Mrs Podobasowa and her friend Mrs Jorucka were walking up the path.

  The two women sat on the edge of their chairs, their eyes darting around uncomfortably. ‘I never actually said that Bronia was Jewish,’ Mrs Jorucka stated. ‘All I said was that when she’s out with Danusia, she walks very fast and drags her along just like a Jewess.’

  Henek had a deadpan expression. ‘If that’s all you said, then I don’t have any problem with that, because in my opinion, you talk like a Jewess.’ Mrs Jorucka reddened. She came from Silesia and spoke Polish with a strong German accent. Henek thanked her cordially for coming to clear things up and suggested that she refrain from making dangerous accusations in future.

  CHAPTER 28

  From Bergen-Belsen station Mania and Misko staggered with their belongings for several kilometres until they reached the camp, which was enclosed by barbed wire. In the grim watchtowers, helmeted soldiers held their fingers on machine gun triggers. Someone thrust a pair of heavy wooden clogs and a red enamel bowl into Mania’s hands, yelled instructions and gestured towards one of the barrack huts. Numb with shock and exhaustion, she slumped onto a narrow two-tiered wooden bunk covered with a few handfuls of hay.

  Much later, when she was able to raise her head, she was surprised to see a few familiar faces. She was looking at the wealthy holders of South American passports whom she’d envied so much a week before. Among them were the big bosses who’d charged a fortune to be included on the lists. Instead of going to Vittel, they’d been sent to Bergen-Belsen.

  In the adjacent barrack, the huge glassy eyes staring out of cadaverous faces and the skeletal bodies of the prisoners filled her with foreboding. When guttural voices ordered them out to the Appelplatz for rollcall, and thousands of phantoms waited to be counted, she saw that Belsen was a grotesquely sprawling township of starving Jewish, Polish, Russian and Greek prisoners of war.

  She’d been there one week when they were ordered to have a shower. A deathly silence descended over the barrack. No-one could bring themselves to voice the unthinkable. They were marched into a cold cement washroom, men told to stand on one side, women on the other. Avoiding one another’s eyes as they were forced to strip naked, they shivered on the cement floor. As the first jet of water hit her body, Mania clenched her eyes and murmured a long-forgotten prayer.

  When the water was turned off, she looked around in amazement. They were still alive. Thanks to their foreign passports, Mania and Misko’s group at the Hotel Polski had been sent to this camp which had no gas chambers, instead of to Auschwitz or Treblinka where most Jews were being deported. If you didn’t starve to death or die of typhus, and managed to avoid the sadistic eye of the SS men and the phenol injections of camp doctor Karl Jager, you had a slim chance of surviving at Bergen-Belsen.

  ‘While summer lasted, things weren’t too bad, but in winter I couldn’t warm myself up from the inside or the outside. I was starving, nothing but skin and bones, and had no warm clothes to wear,’ Aunty Mania reminisces. ‘And those interminable rollcalls. In snow or rain, we had to stand in the Appelplatz until they’d counted over two thousand people. If they made a mistake, they started all over again. But you know what’s really strange? Hardly anyone got sick.’ She looks at me with her bemused gaze. ‘Can you understand that? At home I was such a weakling, but at Belsen I wasn’t sick once!’

  While Aunty Mania is describing life in Belsen, I can hear my mother’s disapproving footsteps in the flat above. Her assertive footsteps are telling me that I’m spending too much time with Mania. Why didn’t I come up and see her first? My mother’s resentment seeps through the ceiling and hovers around us. Normally she would have knocked on her sister’s door by now, but she’s not talking to Mania at the moment, so she’s trapped upstairs by her own anger.

  In October that year, when Commandant Adolf Haas ordered them out to the Appelplatz after rollcall had been completed for the day, everyone was on edge. As the guard started calling out hundreds of names, Mania realised that they all belonged to those with South American passports.

  Mania’s friend Lilka whispered, ‘Look over there, they’ve got lorries waiting, they’re going to take them to Vittel after all. I’m going to say that I’ve got papers for Paraguay too, so I can go too,’ she said and stepped forward, holding her little daughter’s hand. For once the Germans didn’t check anyone’s papers, so she joined the several hundred who climbed happily onto the lorries. The group included the Henings and most of the wheelers and dealers, all thrilled that they were going to South America at last. Mania felt depressed after so many of her friends had left. ‘People with money always manage to save themselves, while we’re left here to rot,’ she grumbled.

  As more and more prisoners arrived in Belsen, the barracks were soon bursting at the seams and typhus raged through the camp. ‘Lice were eating us alive but there was nothing we could do. We were only allowed one hot shower a week and they wouldn’t give us any soap,’ Aunty Mania recalls.

  It’s hard to imagine this fastidious woman, always perfectly groomed and dressed in the latest fashion, wearing clogs and living in filth, so I’m not surprised when her friend Irka recalls with a fond smile, ‘Even in Belsen Mania tried to look elegant. No matter what was happening, she always looked her best and she never lost hope.

  ‘All the time we were in Belsen, your aunt never stopped talking about you,’ Irka continues. ‘I’ve never met an aunt so obsessed with her niece. “My Danusia had lovely curly hair and big blue eyes, she’s so clever, she knows the names of all the animals…” On and on and she went. It was almost as if she believed you were actually her child. She talked a lot about your mother too. Bronia this and Bronia that. She couldn’t wait to see the three of you again. Especially you.’ Tears fill my eyes when she adds, ‘I think the thought of seeing you again kept her going.’

  Every day more prisoners were crammed into the camp, most of them exhausted, starving women from Flossenburg, Plaszow and Auschwitz. Among the transport from Auschwitz were two teenage sisters from Amsterdam who clung to each other—Anne and Margot Frank.

  Among the latest arrivals from Auschwitz was my father’s cousin Rozia Johannes with her fourteen-year-old daughter Wisia. When this dignified old lady tells me her story in Tel-Aviv, her calm, matter-of-fact narration seems incongruous with her experiences. Not long after Krakow had been occupied by the Germans, Rozia and Wisia, her only child, were interrogated at Gestapo headquarters in Pomorska Street in Krakow. ‘They thought that I was very wealthy and that I was working for the underground, so they imprisoned me with the political prisoners. I did have some jewellery but I managed to hide it among the coal in our fireplace before they took us away. They separated us at Pomorska Street but an SS man took a fancy to Wisia and let her visit me in my cell every evening. They interrogated me for a whole week,’ she says and adds: ‘I’ve been through a lot in my life.’

  After Pomorska Street, Rozia and Wisia moved to the Krakow ghetto and when that was liquidated, they were taken to Plaszow concentration camp. ‘That was a tough place,’ she says. ‘If you wanted to turn over in your bunk, all the others had to turn too. When I got pneumonia, the woman next to me was also drenched with sweat. Luckily one of the officers liked Wisia, so we were allowed to work at the Kavla tile factory.’ Wisia was Rozia’s good-luck charm because her earnest little face and long fair plaits melted even hard hearted guards. Wherever they were, some Ukrainian guard or German overseer took pity on Wisia and smuggled her an extra ration of bread or made sure that she and her mother weren’t separated.

  From Plaszow’s tile factory they were transported to Auschwitz. ‘They
told us that we were destined for the Himmelkommando, or death,’ Rozia recalls. ‘Only two crematoria were functioning by then, the others had been bombed. We arrived in a shocking downpour and stood there soaked and shivering while Dr Mengele carried out the selections at the railway station. He was an extremely handsome man. With a disarmingly courteous manner he decided whether people would live or die. We were among the few who were allowed to live. At Auschwitz they cut off Wisia’s plaits.’

  Rozia tells her story with as little emotion as if she were describing an interesting but not particularly involving movie she has seen. Like many survivors, she has erected a high protective wall between herself and her experiences, and I don’t dare to penetrate her defences, especially as Wisia, her only child, has recently died of cancer. So Rozia continues her story, from Auschwitz to Buchenwald and then on to Bergen-Belsen in December 1944.

  Aunty Mania recalls that, with the influx of prisoners, food rations became so small that the flesh was dissolving off people’s bones, and anatomy students wouldn’t have needed skeletons to learn about body structure. In the mornings they were given brownish water which tasted like acorns and a small piece of bread which had to last all day.

  She gives a short, bitter laugh. ‘It was terrible bread but it tasted so good! Nothing tasted so good as that bread. I longed for a whole loaf with butter to spread on it, or even a chunk of bread without butter, but to have so much that I couldn’t eat any more. You know what we talked about all day? Food. Cooking. Recipes. We exchanged recipes. We argued whose chicken soup was better, whose matzoh dumplings were the lightest! To avoid thinking about the terrible things around us, we escaped into a world of delicious cakes and elegant clothes. We talked about what we once had and hoped one day to have again.