She sits us down in a cluttered room where the noises of the street float in through the open balcony. There are shelves full of books and papers, a painting of the Virgin Mary, and two carvings of Christ on top of the cupboard. Anna brings us strong coffee and homemade cake, but I can’t swallow anything. ‘Reverend Father arrived in Piszczac in 1942,’ she says. ‘He’s eighty-three now.’ Her eyes dart towards the door at every sound. ‘He usually tells me where he’s going or leaves me a note to say when he’ll be back, but today he didn’t say anything, so I don’t even know where to look for him,’ she laments.
I glance at my watch. There is still no sign of this priest, and if I wait too long, I won’t have time to get to Piszczac because we still have to drive all the way back to Warsaw this evening. Anna is wringing her hands. ‘Just a few more minutes. Do stay for lunch, he’s bound to be back by then. You’re welcome to share our potatoes and buttermilk, just wait a little longer,’ she pleads. But we have to go on to Piszczac.
All along the way to Piszczac, trucks, vans and trailers are stacked with mattresses fastened with leather straps, rattling bed frames and swaying wardrobes, and many of the farmhouses sport big signs advertising Meble. Furniture. Odd, in such an agricultural backwater. ‘It’s the Russians,’ the driver explains. ‘They’re so short of consumer goods that sharp Ruski operators buy things here to sell over there.’ I’d forgotten that we’re only about a hundred kilometres from the Russian border, which was one of the reasons why my father thought we’d be safer here, deep in Poland’s peaceful eastern countryside.
At the turn-off to Piszczac, sour orange rowanberries hang off the mountain ash trees, and brindle cows graze near a sluggish stream. My nerves rise to fever pitch as I read the road sign to Justine. Piszczac. I can’t believe I’m really here.
In the small shady park in the centre of the market square, villagers chat on benches under the tall pine trees. Perhaps someone will remember my parents and their life here during the war. There is something familiar about the little wooden houses around the square which are pressed together like old friends whispering secrets. I approach a man with fine white hair and a singlet who stands outside his cottage talking to a woman with strands of grey hair falling around her plump face.
Aleksander Krynski can’t recall a dentist called Boguslawski or a woman called Bogdanowa, but his wife nudges him. ‘Take them to see Mrs Kisiel, she may remember,’ she says. A moment later he’s knocking on the door of a tiny hut that’s tilted and sagging, with weathered planks that look as though they’re collapsing in slow motion. Peering inside a window covered by a scrap of white net, Mr Krynski presses his nose against the glass but comes away shaking his head. ‘She must be out.’
As we stroll around the square, it looks as though little has changed here in the past fifty years. The simple wooden cottages with their net curtains and pots of blood-red geraniums on the windowsills, the untended gardens with spiky sunflowers and spindly tomato plants with their sharp sourish smell, the lean dogs chained up in the yard for security rather than companionship, the horse-drawn carts piled with newly mown grass, all this must have been exactly the same fifty years ago.
In one corner of the square a man in a crumpled suit squats on the heels of his dusty shoes, ready to weigh out his homegrown tomatoes on a set of scales for the stout young woman leaning on a bicycle. ‘She’s our postmistress,’ Mr Krynski explains. As we walk around the perimeter of the square, he points out one little house after another. ‘This one belonged to Lejzar the Jewish butcher. Srulek lived over there, he had a hardware shop. Piterman the tailor lived just here. Over there was the haberdasher, another Jew.’
Although we’re walking slowly, my breathing is ragged, as if I can’t get enough air into my lungs. So Piszczac had a thriving Jewish community with shops, workshops and businesses located around this square. Later I’m surprised to learn that before the war, about one quarter of Piszczac’s 2082 inhabitants were Jews.
‘And what happened to all those Jews?’ I ask.
‘First the Germans pushed them all into one part of town, intending to make a ghetto, but then they changed their mind and deported them all to the camps.’ I’m sure that Berta, my father’s brave cousin whom he saw once after his arrival, had been among them.
When I ask whether any Jews returned, he nods his white head energetically. ‘See that house where that man is standing? One fellow returned there. And the house near the lamppost, two women came back there.’ He counts out two more. Five survivors out of five hundred people. Even though it’s a hot summer’s day, a shiver runs down my back.
Two foreign women attract a great deal of attention in a remote Polish village, and several men ride beside us on their beaten-up bicycles, curious to know why we’ve come. One of them, a man with a bulbous nose, protruding belly and a shirt as yellow as country butter, offers to take us to see someone he knows. ‘She remembers everything, she’ll tell you what you want to know,’ he keeps insisting, but we don’t trust him and keep walking.
All this time I’m aware that another man is riding behind us, keeping his distance, saying nothing, just watching. When he comes alongside us, I look into a face whose features seem to be blurred. In a voice that’s soft and hesitant, he seems to be asking a question. ‘Jude?’ he murmurs.
I stop walking and nod. ‘And you?’ I ask. ‘Are you Jewish?’
An unfathomable expression veils his face. ‘Polish,’ he says.
I ask his name. It sounds like Zydelko. Zyd means Jew in Polish. Did I just imagine this?
While I’m trying to figure this out, he whispers a word that I hear quite clearly. ‘Kim.’ The Yiddish word for come. Is this something remembered from a secret childhood? But when I turn to speak to him again, he has vanished, melted away like a shadow in the summer haze.
By now my spirits are beginning to flag. This excursion is beginning to resemble a wild goose chase. No-one remembers my parents, Mrs Bogdanowa or anything. I no longer see the point of this quest and am ready to give up and drive back to Warsaw when the guy in the yellow shirt reappears and once again urges me to see his neighbour. With nothing to lose, we follow him. Around the corner, a thin woman in a grey cardigan is nodding while he speaks. ‘Mrs Bogdanowa used to live at the turn-off to Chotylow,’ she says.
A horse and cart heaped with hay rumbles past as we walk towards the crossroads. Before we reach the corner, I catch sight of a handsome gabled farmhouse and grab Justine’s arm. ‘That’s it! That’s the house!’ Although most of it is hidden by shubbery, I recognise the gabled attic and the little path leading to it that’s almost obscured by thick lilac bushes. I have a photograph of myself at the age of four with my mother and Zosia, Mrs Bogdanowa’s daughter, taken on this very path. It was a dirt path then, and the bushes were much smaller, but this is definitely the place.
I’m trembling with excitement. This is what I came to find, and here it is, the house that seems to hold the key to a part of my existence which I recall only in tantalising fragments. Seeing that house is a validation. It proves that I really did live here at that time.
As I stand here, memories came flooding back. Chained up to a wooden kennel beside the house was a dog which bit one of my father’s patients on the thigh. Zosia and I split pumpkin seeds with our teeth up in the attic while my mother and Mrs Bogdanowa filled barrels with pickled cabbage and pickled apples down in the cellar. At the end of summer our house was filled with the bittersweet fragrance of the cherry vodka my father used to make out of small tart morello cherries. In spring, from my little iron bed by the open window, I drowned in the perfume of lilac blossoms.
My heart is thumping. After fifty years I’ll be able to enter that house and see it again and maybe capture more of the memories which have eluded me all these years but which are hovering all around me now, almost close enough to touch and smell. But as I open the wire gate, a furious bull terrier rushes towards us as if catapulted from the house, showing saw-like fangs as he
barks. We retreat rapidly, snapping the gate behind us, and wait outside. A burly man in a singlet comes out of the house towards us, but I can’t hear a word he’s saying above the dog’s shrill barking.
When I try to explain why we’ve come and ask if we could come in for just a moment to refresh my memory, he throws his arms up in the air with an aggressive gesture. ‘What do I care?’ he snaps. My pleas only make him more truculent and he turns his back on us and strides back to the house.
It doesn’t seem possible that I could have come all the way to Piszczac and found the house, yet be barred from going inside. As I stand there, seething with anger and frustration, Justine prods me to action. At least take a photo of the house, she urges. But the man has heard the click of the shutter and rushes towards us like an enraged bull, shouting, ‘Who gave you permission to take photographs here, you bloody bitch?’ He’s gesticulating, yelling obscenities, and I can see that he’s capable of breaking my camera, even attacking us. There is nobody around, we are alone. Resigned, we head back to town.
But I don’t have time to dwell on my disappointment because before we’ve reached the square, a short elderly woman with a pale face and hair dyed as black as pitch comes up to us. ‘You must be the women who were asking for me,’ she says in a friendly way and propels us inside the tiny dwelling where Mr Krynski brought us earlier. As we sit in the small room which is her kitchen, bedroom and living room all in one, she reminisces about the past. ‘Of course I remember Mr Boguslawski our village dentist!’ she exclaims. ‘He was a distinguished-looking man with glasses. He had a pretty wife.’ Pointing to a tooth she says with a laugh, ‘The filling your father gave me lasted over fifty years!’
Janina Kisiel, who was born in Piszczac, takes us around the village. Pointing to a street behind the square, she says, ‘There was a synagogue here, a big one, and every Saturday the Jews prayed there, so devoutly.’ There’s no trace of it now, no sign that it ever existed. The Germans destroyed it, and the Russians erected an ugly cement box on the site, which became the health unit.
‘On Saturdays the Jews used to come and buy pejsachowka—plum brandy—from my father. He bought a restaurant before the war from a Jew called Zuckerman. There were a lot of Jews here, but on the whole, we got on quite well,’ she recalls. ‘Once I remember a drunken brawl where somebody got thumped, but that was unusual.
‘Most of the shops belonged to Jews,’ she continues. ‘In fact there were only four Polish shops. Over there was Yankel’s fruit shop, and his mother, Mrs Mannesowa, had a bakery. A woman called Giza and her sister had a grocery shop nearby. The Koniuchy family sold horses. And over there,’ she points at a window with a net curtain, ‘was Lejzar’s place where they koshered the meat. Lejzar was a tall man with a long beard.’ It sounds as though the Jews were well known to their gentile neighbours, with whom they were interdependent. But the memorial to the victims of Nazi atrocities makes no mention of the village Jews who had comprised one quarter of the population and were deported from here en masse.
Past the memorial, Mrs Kisiel leads us to the church. It has a tall tower and a new decorative archway painted cream. Unlike synagogues, the churches of Poland have not been turned into cinemas and health units. Standing in the small garden in front of the church, my mind goes back to the serious little three-year-old with tightly plaited braids who scattered rose petals in religious processions.
Through the iron grille I peer into the church. Above the altar hangs a large painting of Christ, radiating love and compassion. I must have attended Mass here on Sundays, unaware that I was an impostor who belonged to that other religion, the one that was usually mentioned with contempt. I feel a sudden wave of nostalgia for this place, and I long to sit inside and soak up the warmth from the light slanting in through the windows while I try to make some sense of past and present. Maybe then I would recapture something of the child I used to be, instead of remaining an enigma to myself. But the church is locked up.
With a start I realise how late it is. It’s already three in the afternoon, and we still have a long drive back to Warsaw. Time is running out, but after seeing Piszczac I feel a new urgency to try the priest’s house again. Back in Biala Podlaska I run up the stairs two at a time, my heart drumming in my ears. Will he be there this time, or will I miss him now and forever? As the bell shrills, I keep thinking over and over, let him be here. Let him be here. And let it be him.
CHAPTER 45
The door opens, and an old man is looking intently into my face. Then he folds his arms around me, he’s holding me tightly against him, and he’s saying over and over again, ‘Little Danusia. My dear little Danusia.’
Tears are pouring down my face; I’m sobbing so hard that I don’t think I’ll ever stop. Some grief I didn’t know I felt is flooding over me as I stand here, a helpless little girl held by this old man who strokes my hair and cups my wet face in his gentle hands. In a soothing voice he murmurs, ‘Little Danusia. Cry, my poor child, you have plenty of reason to cry. After all you’ve gone through, after all the terrible times you’ve lived through, let it all out now, my child, just cry. My little Danusia. May God keep you, may he always have you in his care.’
When I look up, I see a puckish face, one eye reddened and half closed, but an alert gaze full of compassion. It feels as if he’s looking straight into my heart, and I stand in his doorway, sobbing, overwhelmed by feelings I cannot understand.
Seeing him again, feeling his compassion, hearing him use the Polish name which my parents used to call me, releases emotions so deeply lodged that I didn’t even know they were there. All the anxiety, tension and sorrow that my childish mind absorbed and suffered in silence fifty years ago are spilling out at this moment.
When I turn around, I see that tears are streaming down Justine’s face too. To have my own daughter witness my return to a forgotten childhood, and see her moved to tears by this extraordinary experience, is overwhelming. In that miraculous moment boundaries of time and relationship dissolve. My daughter is looking at the child I used to be, feeling the grief that I’ve suppressed for so long. She stands beside me in another time and place, supporting me with her empathy and love.
Benevolence shines from Father Soszynski’s face. In a voice that’s surprisingly strong for a man of eighty-three, he says, ‘I was thinking about you just two days ago. I thought about your parents and wondered whether little Danusia was still alive. While I was in town today someone said that people from overseas were looking for me. I thought of you straightaway. Danusia! I thought, and flew home like a bird!’
Why should this telepathy astonish me, when the fact that I am looking into the face of the priest who helped us survive the war in Piszczac is beyond anything I ever dreamed of? To find him as a result of a chance stop in Biala Podlaska, still alive and still living here after fifty years, so alert, and calling me by name as if it all happened yesterday, is a miracle. It has never occurred to me that such a marvellous thing could happen, or that meeting him would be so cathartic.
Smiling into my face with a radiance which dazzles me, he says, ‘You were a tiny girl of about three years old, but you prayed so devoutly. So innocent. I was always very moved by you. I can still see you in church before me. You usually sat with your parents, but sometimes with the village children. You were always so docile, so obedient. Mummy or Daddy only had to say “Danusia!” and you left the room at once.’
This image of me as the perfect, invisible child, the child who saw everything, understood everything, yet said nothing, makes my tears flow again. There is enormous power in the language of one’s childhood, perhaps because the words have a richer, more intense meaning which evokes the essence of the child within. Without any warning, I’m looking at the child I used to be, plunged into the terrifying times and dark emotions which I suppressed so long.
Although Father Soszynski is no stranger to miracles, he too is overcome by this unexpected encounter. ‘To think of you coming here to see me after fift
y years!’ he marvels, shaking his head. The young priest with the engaging personality who won all the women’s hearts in Piszczac fifty years ago is still bright, charismatic and animated in old age. With his twinkling blue eyes and spiky crew-cut grey hair, he reminds me of an elderly leprechaun. ‘I remember your father very clearly, better than your mother,’ he recalls. ‘She was very quiet, very anxious, she seemed frightened. Whenever she spoke, she watched him closely, like a worried pupil before an examiner. Your father was always on his guard. Like a crane watching over its nestlings, he was always vigilant. Whenever she said anything that he didn’t like, he just had to look at her and she fell silent.’
I never thought of my mother as fearful, but having experienced my father’s sharp glances which could slice through glass, I can well imagine the effect they would have on her when she was already on tenterhooks in case she gave something away. This was not a matter of making a social faux pas, it was a matter of survival, and our lives hung on each word.
‘I saw all this,’ he says. ‘It was very obvious. In fact, the only time your father relaxed was when he sat down to a game of bridge or chess. He played excellent bridge, wiped us out at chess, and enjoyed a glass of vodka. But the moment your mother opened her mouth, he tensed up again.’
In a strong, good-humoured voice that quavers slightly, Father Soszynski begins to sing a ditty that one of the villagers composed about my father rushing from his patients to his game of chess. He shakes with laughter at the recollection. ‘Oh, he demolished us all at chess, he was the village champion! Just once, our game ended in a draw, oh, I was so proud of myself! I never forgot my moment of glory!’ And to my amazement, he describes the conclusion of that game, move by move.
Father Soszynski is reminiscing about the first time he met my father, whom he liked immediately. ‘He was a distinguished-looking man with a limp and had an aura of nobility about him,’ he says. ‘Your father was an incomparable raconteur. Sharp witted, knowledgeable, intelligent, he was an extraordinary host. And the jokes he told! Oho! I wouldn’t repeat them to you!’ He gives a bawdy chuckle just thinking about them. This was a man ‘do tanca, i do rozanca’ he says, using the rhyming Polish phrase which means ‘a man for all seasons’.
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