I’m grateful that we were with her when she died, that I was holding her small sparrow-like hand, so like my own, when her tired heart beat for the last time. But I feel cast adrift. She’s been here all my life, and I can’t imagine the world without her love and support. As long as she was there, I was still the younger generation, but now that the last custodian of my past has gone, I’m in the front line.
The day after her death, Michael, Jonathan, Justine and I sit together around the kitchen table trying to evoke the essence of the remarkable and unique person that Bronia had been. As Justine and Jonathan reminisce about their Nana, about her generous heart and her sharp tongue, her wisdom and her wit, I am grateful that they had the chance to know her so well.
Burying someone you love on a brilliant summer day is doubly poignant. On a day when fallen jacaranda leaves formed a thick violet carpet on the pavements, and the air smelled of honeysuckle and jasmine, we gathered at the Eastern Suburbs Crematorium. I must have been averting my mind from what was about to happen because seeing my mother’s coffin in the chapel startled me like a sudden blow to the head.
With Justine’s comforting arm around my shoulders, I listened to Michael’s heartfelt words.
‘My mother-in-law Bronia was a remarkable woman,’ he began. ‘She was different from anyone else I’ve ever met—which is why we are here at a cremation, instead of a conventional Jewish funeral.
‘She had so many different aspects to her character that it took four of us—Justine, Jonathan, Diane and myself—to sort out how to do justice to all her qualities.
‘Like her late husband Henry, she thought for herself, said exactly what she thought, and wasn’t influenced by what anyone else said or did. She was down to earth, and you always knew where you were with her.
‘She was an extraordinarily wise woman.
‘Material things meant nothing to her and in fact her greatest pleasure was in giving things away to those she loved. She gave love, money, jewellery, gifts, and never asked for anything in return—apart from one instance when she gave Justine and Jonathan her little green Datsun, on condition that Jonathan got rid of his motorbike! She always said that she preferred to give things with a warm hand, while she was alive, so that she could have the pleasure of giving.’
While listening to Michael’s tribute, I imagine my mother saying, ‘You see, I always told you that Michael was a mensch!’
Although having a Jewish funeral hadn’t been important to my mother, I arranged to have a minyan at our place that night and asked Rabbi Jeffery Kamins from the Temple Emanuel to conduct the service. Mourning didn’t feel complete without the comfort of the traditional rites and the Kaddish prayer. Friends held me, cried with me and wished me ‘Long life’, our traditional greeting to the bereaved. I’d never realised how comforting the rituals of death can be, even when you’re not religious.
As friends streamed into our home to share our sorrow, I looked up and stared in disbelief. There in the corner of the room, watching me from a distance with sympathetic eyes, was my mother’s cousin Srulek Kestecher, too shy and self-effacing to approach me. Now that his brother Aron had died, Srulek was my mother’s only living relative but I hadn’t seen him for many years, and now with a shock I realised that I’d forgotten all about him and hadn’t let him know that my mother had died. Seeing him, so frail and vulnerable, reminded me of the times he used to visit us in Walter Street so many years ago when my mother was young and energetic, my father was still alive, and all my life was still in front of me. While Srulek apologised for imposing and disturbing me, I broke down and sobbed on his shoulder. When the prayers were over, I looked for him but, like a phantom, he had slipped away.
Several days after the funeral I walk alone along a deserted, windswept beach and watch the rhythm of the sea which has no beginning and no end. Waves roll and break, sands shift, and the wind whips my face. At night I gaze at the moon, luminous and ethereal, like a spiritual lamp shining in space. In our perpetual galactic dance, the earth pivots, stars beam across the heavens, and moons wax and wane. The eternal mystery of our existence comforts me. Everything in the world is interconnected, everything moves and changes, but nothing ever vanishes.
CHAPTER 40
As Justine and I buckle our seat belts in preparation for take-off, I steel myself for three weeks of emotional upheaval. Two years after my mother’s death, we’re on our way to Poland and Ukraine to trace our roots and walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, although I realise that this might prove to be a fruitless quest. Most Jewish documents were destroyed during the war, and after so many years I’m not likely to find any traces of my family.
But there’s another aspect of the journey that makes me feel apprehensive. In recent months I’ve heard many reports about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, and even my friend Teresa, a Polish Catholic, has warned me about it. ‘It’s not pleasant for me to say this,’ she said in her musical voice, ‘but you need to know so that you’ll be prepared. Instead of going forward, the Poles have regressed. The economic situation is bad, the church is struggling to regain power, and they’re blaming Jews again, even though there are hardly any left!’
While I mull over her words, I glance at Justine who has pulled a book by an American Jewish feminist out of her backpack. I was glad when my daughter agreed to come with me on this pilgrimage. Our relationship over the past few years hasn’t been smooth, and I hope that searching for our roots together will forge a stronger bond between us.
Sydney has receded into the distance and only the pale sandy crescents on the edge of the dark sea are visible when Justine looks up from her book to tell me about a workshop she recently attended about Holocaust survivors. ‘It helped me understand some of the dynamics in our family a bit better,’ she says.
I’m intrigued that she attended such a seminar because for the past few years she hasn’t been much involved with the Jewish community. ‘So how do you think the Holocaust has affected us?’ I ask.
‘Enmeshment, for one thing,’ she replies. ‘I always felt pressured to be close. You were also intensely overprotective and often fearful of something happening to me.’
It’s an interesting point. I never thought of myself as being overprotective and wonder whether this was due to the Holocaust or normal parental concern.
On the Lot Polish Airlines flight from Bangkok to Warsaw, a male flight attendant with an unsmiling angular face hands me a Polish newspaper. Past the political and economic reports in the Warsaw News, a short item catches my eye. From his pulpit in Gdansk, Lech Walesa’s priest and confidant, Father Henryk Jankowski, equated the Star of David with the swastika and the hammer and sickle, and stated that satanic Jewish greed had caused the Holocaust. My heart hammers in my throat. Teresa was right. Nothing has changed.
We touch down in Warsaw on a drizzly grey morning. The Grand Hotel doesn’t live up to its name. Our cell-like room has two single beds whose mustard-coloured blankets peep through the diamond-shaped cut-out of the cover. The window, which doesn’t open, faces a grim inner yard. It’s seven-thirty on Sunday morning and we have two whole days in Warsaw before flying on to Lwow in the Ukraine. That sinking feeling has returned and I feel suffocated in our oppressive room.
Finally we rouse ourselves and set off towards the old market square. As we cross a side street, the name leaps to my eye. Nowogrodzka Street. ‘This is the street where my grandmother Lieba lived with her daughter Rozia when they came to Warsaw from Radlow in 1942,’ I explain, and tell Justine how Aunty Andzia spent several weeks standing behind the wardrobe with Krysia and Fredzio so that the landlady wouldn’t find out they were there. Walking along the street, I try to imagine my aunt’s desperation when she couldn’t remember the number of the house and had to knock on these very doors in the hope of finding her sister.
It’s a long damp walk to Stary Rynek, but after sitting in a plane so long, it’s a relief to stretch our legs. In the spectacular square which r
esembles an eighteenth century street scene, burly dorosky coachmen groom their horses while they wait for passengers. At their easels, artists paint vignettes of the cobbled square with its boxes of scarlet geraniums, vine-covered cafes, and the baroque facades covered all over with paintings of mythological characters and eighteenth century scenes. In between the looming clouds, the sun is struggling to emerge.
A yeasty aroma draws us to Gessler’s window where a bleached blonde in a floppy baker’s cap wraps our doughnuts and morello cherry slices in coarse paper. As we sit under a striped umbrella, drinking espresso coffee and relishing our pastries, Justine suggests writing up our diaries, and we sit together in friendly silence in the centre of Warsaw, recording our impressions in an area that was razed to the ground fifty years ago.
Sitting here in Warsaw beside my daughter, I’m overwhelmed by a rush of gratitude. ‘I feel so lucky that I had parents who were able to put the horror of the Holocaust behind them and get on with their lives, that I was able to grow up like other girls, and that you and Jonathan could live in a country where you were free to be Jewish without any fear.’
Justine nods sympathetically, then says in an impassioned voice. ‘Many Jews have never expressed their anger about this. They’ve intellectualised and rationalised their feelings. What happens to all the anger that isn’t let out? It must affect people and their children. If you’re not in touch with how you feel, you can’t be in touch with your children’s feelings either.’
Maybe she’s right. My mother always suppressed her feelings. It was only in the last years of her life that I realised she’d never expressed her anger or grief about losing her family. I don’t suppose she had the time or the opportunity, or perhaps it was too painful to deal with. There were too many people to cry for, too much savagery to forgive. Only by clamping the lid tightly over that seething cauldron of anger and grief was she able to keep going.
I look at Justine with interest. She is much more questioning and confronting than I have ever been. While I’ve always longed to be part of the mainstream, she has often turned her back on it. Perhaps she has taken on the anger that I’ve suppressed, just as I took on the grief that my mother buried deep inside.
After strolling around the square and chatting with the artists, we go to the Karczma Restaurant which resembles an old country inn with rough-hewn walls, shiny wooden benches and oak tables worn by thousands of elbows. Blackened iron cauldrons of mushroom soup are simmering on the open stove and to my surprise there’s a silver candelabra on the counter. ‘This was originally a Jewish tavern in Biala Podlaska,’ explains the gangly young waiter.
At the mention of Biala Podlaska I become excited. ‘That’s near the village where Nana, Grandpa and I spent several years during the war,’ I tell Justine. At first it seems wonderful to be sitting in what used to be a lively Jewish tavern, until it hits me that the last Jews who sipped cherry brandy, argued and drank at these tables were all dragged away to concentration camps.
By late afternoon the sun has finally peeped through the clouds in time for the Sunday concert in Lazienki Park. A large woman in loose black culottes and hair piled on top of her head sits down at the piano and, with a majestic nod to the audience, begins to play. With hundreds of other music-lovers, we soak up the fragrance of the rose gardens and the delicacy of Chopin’s nocturnes whose yearning always makes my heart ache. Now they tug at my heart more than ever. Turbulent and tender, passionate and poignant, these etudes, nocturnes, polonaises and mazurkas are the very soul of the Polish people. Chopin was my mother’s favourite composer, and each poignant note, like an invisible silver filament, binds me closer to her spirit.
Next morning we meet Jacek, our guide for the day. He’s an intelligent, educated man with a distinguished head of greying hair and a disarming smile. We start our tour at the site of the Warsaw ghetto. The air around me is so dense with tragic and heroic stories that I drag my feet and feel too choked to speak. So I’m thrown off balance when, standing on ground that is sacred to the memory of those who perished here, Jacek suddenly says, ‘It irritates me when I hear people saying that Hitler put so many concentration camps in Poland because Poles are anti-Semites. Why do we hear so much about Polish anti-Semitism? Why don’t we hear about French anti-Semitism?’
‘But we do hear about French anti-Semitism,’ I protest. ‘Only a few weeks ago, there was a documentary…’ I’ve allowed myself to become sidetracked. The issue that needs to be discussed in Poland is not French anti-Semitism.
Pointing to the perimeter of the ghetto, Jacek gathers momentum. ‘They say that people living around the ghetto walls didn’t help. How could they help when the walls were so high? Anyway, helping Jews was dangerous.’
Justine, for whom I translate our conversations as fast as a simultaneous translator at a conference, is becoming distressed. ‘We should have come here alone,’ she says. ‘Instead of acknowledging what happened here, he’s making excuses for the past. I want to be able to feel my grief without having to listen to his dismissive comments.’
Nearby, at the site of the Umschlagplatz, thousands of names are engraved on the wall. From this station Jews were jammed into cattle trucks and left for days without water in scorching summer heat, on their way to Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen. The paving stones I’m standing on are the same ones that Aunty Mania trod when they brought her here from the Hotel Polski. Instead of a visa to South America, she got one to Bergen-Belsen.
At Pawiak Prison there’s little left of the original jail except for the iron gate that’s topped with barbed wire. Past the brick wall I peer inside at the courtyard where the exercise yard used to be and wonder whether my grandmother and aunt had been lined up against that wall. Looking up at the apartment blocks nearby, I wonder from which window the doctor watched them being shot on the day of the Warsaw Uprising. ‘No-one could have seen the yard from there,’ Jacek argues. This is his only comment.
Our last stop in Warsaw is the Jewish cemetery whose sagging gravestones are still riddled with German bullet holes, and whose spongy loam contains the mass graves of thousands of nameless dead. In front of the memorial to the million dead children, I break down and cry. I could so easily have been one of them.
It’s a relief to leave this sad, grey city and drive along a straight country road that skirts neat market gardens planted with cabbages and carrots, and hothouses nurturing pencil pines, until we come to the flat farming land of Ozarow which stretches from horizon to horizon. Somewhere around here my cousin Tusiek fell in one of the first battles of the war. ‘The battle was on the western side of the town,’ Jacek explains. I think about the fair-haired young man whose teasing comments made my parents laugh, and wonder how he must have felt on the eve of the battle where his regiment rode on horseback, armed with lances, to face a juggernaut armed with cannons, tanks and howitzers.
As we walk along reading the inscriptions on the graves, Jacek resents the distinction between Jewish and Catholic war casualties. ‘They were all Poles,’ he says. I understand his desire to homogenise and sanitise the past. It’s not comfortable to face the fact that this has always been a country of Jews and Poles, a very clear distinction. He wants to ignore the fact that the Jews were always regarded as aliens, especially when they were singled out for annihilation. He is angry that, to people like us, this country has become a vast cemetery, that instead of touring the countryside and visiting castles and museums, we come to find traces of our dead.
It’s been a heavy day and we end it at a Silesian restaurant where dancers with fixed smiles and vivid costumes stamp booted feet in time to rousing folk tunes. Jacek and I toss back several glasses of Chopin Vodka the Polish way—without stopping for breath. Soon he’s regaling us with tales of Polish gallantry and patriotism and quoting stirring ballads about spilt blood and scarlet poppies. Now that I’ve downed three glasses of vodka, I feel relaxed enough to acknowledge that he’s as obsessed with Polish heroism as I am with Jewish persecution. ‘You mig
ht feel angry about the past,’ he says suddenly, ‘but you’re still closely linked to Poland. You can’t deny that there’s a bond. It’s like a family feud: you feel anger because you also feel love.’
CHAPTER 41
As the aeroplane begins its descent over Ukraine, Justine and I look down on a patchwork of sage-, ochre- and cinnamon-coloured fields dotted with hay stooks and edged with dark forests. Then I stare at the date. It’s 25 July. By a strange coincidence, we have arrived in Lwow on the anniversary of my grandfather Bernard’s murder in this bloodstained city.
My father’s account of the brutality of the Ukrainian militia is vivid in my mind as we land. Since 1991 Ukraine has been an independent nation whose government erected a monument in honour of a military unit whose members helped the Nazis murder Jews and Poles. Today they’re being hailed as patriots because they fought the Bolsheviks; their atrocities against civilians have been overlooked. My heart is beating fast as Justine and I step onto the tarmac. This is going to be a painful pilgrimage.
Inside the airport building of this city now called Lviv, I seem to have entered the pages of a John Le Carré thriller set during the iciest era of the Cold War. Sitting inside his flaking wooden booth, a flint-eyed official scrutinises newcomers with an expressionless stare. Finally he waves us towards a long table where a woman with an aggressive black fringe snaps something unintelligible. On the wall a patriotic mural depicts people in folk costume marching behind triumphant flags.
Outside, in the glaring sunshine, a smiling youth with a boyish face introduces himself as our guide Oles, and ushers us towards the dinted turquoise Lada whose driver sprawls behind the wheel. Sasha has a foxy face and eyes that give little away. He has a macho style of driving and we bump along cobbled streets and lurch in and out of ruts and potholes until Justine and I are tossed around like rag dolls.
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