Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  ‘I’ll try.’

  They wove their way up the hill to the hotel. In their room, as they undressed, Jerzy said: ‘I think we’ve got enough money for two nights here. We can explore Krakow quite well, before we go down to the mountains.’

  ‘Good.’ Elizabeth stood at the basin, brushing her teeth.

  ‘Also we’re not very far from Auschwitz.’

  Elizabeth stopped brushing.

  Auschwitz in German. In Polish: Oswięcim, which was what the signpost indicated. The car park in front of a long low building selling books and postcards was packed with coaches, many from Holland and Germany. There were foreign cars, as well, queuing for a place. Groups were assembling with guides; Elizabeth and Jerzy found a parking space and walked by themselves round past the bookshop to the main entrance.

  They stood before the gate famous from dozens of history-book photographs, looking up at the rusting wrought-iron words hung in an arc across it: Arbeit macht frei – Work brings freedom. Ahead, on grass, on either side of a long path, stood rows of red-brick two- or three-storey buildings, with narrow black-boarded windows. They looked very ordinary, like barracks, or perhaps some kind of farm building, to store grain. A group of men in shirtsleeves and women in light cardigans and summer dresses stood round a Dutch guide, listening. Jerzy and Elizabeth walked on.

  Some distance from the rows of brick buildings was the museum. They followed a long, slow-moving queue down an entrance corridor hung with line upon line of black and white photographs: men and women, not easily distinguished because all their heads were shaved, and almost all were dressed in identical striped shirts, like pyjama jackets. The faces were gaunt, the eyes beneath the stubble of hair stared at the camera from great hollow sockets, as the visitors moved past.

  At the end of the corridor the queue moved into a series of large rooms. The walls were hung with charcoal drawings and more photographs: skeletal figures lay in bunks, limbs flung outwards, eyes closed, mouths gaping; some were huddled up, arms round their knees, heads bent. At one end of one room, behind glass, was a pile of possessions, reaching almost to the ceiling: battered brown suitcases with labels from towns all over Europe; heaps of scuffed thirties shoes; children’s shoes, with small buttons at the side; watches, clothing, broken toys, purses; thousands of pairs of horn-rimmed spectacles; yellowing dentures. Behind another glass-covered recess was a mountain of hair.

  The queue moved on; people were talking in low voices. There were more photographs: of workshops where skeletons sat sewing; reproductions of secret sketches of the dying; of Commandant Hess, whose children had played in a well-kept garden on the borders of the camp, and been very happy here. At the end were the pictures taken on liberation: shaven-headed men, women and children crowding behind a wire fence, staring.

  ‘It wasn’t just the Jews,’ said Jerzy, as they walked out into the sun. ‘That is something you have to know. Millions of Poles died in the camps. Russians, too.’

  They walked on, to the shell of the crematorium: here, when the bodies had been dragged from the gas chambers, they had been burned, the smoke drifting over the town nearby.

  At the end of the camp stood a monument, an ugly towering heap of black blocks of stone, erected from all nations of the world. At its base were plaques in nineteen languages, each bearing the same inscription: ‘Four million suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazis, 1940–1942.’ In June, three months ago, the Pope had knelt here. Then he drove on to Brezinka-Birkenau, a part of the camp two or three miles away, where the prisoners had arrived by train. There, before a crowd of a million, he had celebrated mass, and in his homily called upon the crowd to remember Maximilian Kolbe, the saint of Auschwitz, who had gone into the starvation cell to save another man, still alive in Poland.

  It was mostly women who were kept at Birkenau. The road to reach it ran past hayfields. Elizabeth and Jerzy parked the car, and walked past a wooden watchtower through the gateway. From behind the netting and barbed-wire fence a man with a scythe stood watching them. There seemed to be no other visitors. Here, the buildings were single-storey, like long cattle-sheds, with tiled roofs, eight dark windows on each side, two at each end, usually just a single door. At the end of the long main path stood another watchtower, made of brick, high enough to observe the whole camp. Jerzy and Elizabeth moved off the path, and walked across the scythed grass. There was no museum here, no photographs or remains or belongings: just a few notices, and the rows of empty buildings.

  They stopped at one, at random, and went inside.

  On broken stone-flag floors two-tiered wooden bunks ran along each wall. Each bunk was about five foot by five; on each, at the end of the day’s work, up to eight women had groaned, and tried to settle, gnawed at by hunger, and lice and typhus. Terrible fevers had raged through the camp; the women vomited in here, or staggered outside. They tried to sleep on these wooden shelves, and tried to die.

  Elizabeth walked slowly past them. She heard Jerzy’s footsteps at the far end of the building, and then he went outside again. When she reached the end, she turned, and stood in the silence. Shafts of sunlight came through the cracks in the boarded windows, and through the open door. The tall unspeaking figure of a naked faceless woman seemed to be in here, not a ghost, not a spirit, simply a presence, which Elizabeth knew she would try to paint one day, somehow there in the pale yellow light, between the grey wooden stalls.

  The warm scent of hay drifted through the doorway. She went outside and found Jerzy, waiting for her. Poppies and tall daisies grew in the long grass which had not yet been cut; outside one of the rows of buildings, quite close to them, a little group of people was having a picnic.

  There were two plump women in sleeveless cotton dresses, and three men. From where Jerzy and Elizabeth stood watching them, it looked as if they were eating hard-boiled eggs.

  ‘Do they work here?’

  Jerzy was photographing them. ‘They must do. They can’t be first-time visitors. They can’t be.’

  They walked back towards the square gateway; the man with the scythe stood watching them again, as they went out, got into the car and drove away. Elizabeth, in the passenger seat, closed her eyes and saw faces staring at her, thousands of faces with dark defeated eyes, and a little group of people, with a picnic on the grass.

  ‘Is it true that the Poles are anti-Semitic?’

  Jerzy flushed. ‘No.’

  ‘People say they are. I read somewhere that Begin had said he’d never set foot on Polish soil again.’

  ‘In the Middle Ages,’ said Jerzy coldly, ‘under a liberal king, Poland was the refuge for every Jew in Europe. It was the one safe country.’

  ‘Why do you sound so angry?’

  He flushed again. ‘I don’t feel angry. Not exactly. I just can hardly talk about it without churning inside.’

  They were driving south, heading for the Tatra Mountains running along the border with Czechoslovakia. There were three more days left before they had to return to Warsaw.

  ‘I want to talk about it,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We never have. When I told a Jewish friend from art school that I was having an affair with you, she didn’t like it. She said a lot of Poles were anti-Semitic, that there were stories about how the peasants near the camps had turned in Jews to the Nazis, had actively cooperated.’

  Jerzy slammed on the brakes, and the car screeched into the roadside.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you tell Mama that! Or any of my family, any Pole. And they will tell you that the penalty for hiding a Jew in occupied Poland was death. The whole family was shot, or sent to the camps, no questions asked. And despite that, for every story about a peasant turning in a Jew there are stories about people who risked their lives to hide them. There was a resistance movement in Auschwitz, did you know that? No. Well, there was, of course there was, people were smuggled out, and hidden by Poles. The AK helped the Jews in the Ghetto Rising in Warsaw. There were bastards before then who exploited them, who made fortunes by s
muggling in food at sky-high prices – but to blanket Poland with “anti-Semitic” is just not right!’ His hands on the wheel were trembling.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ she said. ‘We’re not even talking about anything which touches you personally.’

  ‘None of my neuroses, you mean. It “touches me personally” just as much, to think of you thinking things like that.’

  ‘I didn’t say I thought like anything, I just asked. Surely I’m allowed to ask?’

  There was a long pause. Then Jerzy restarted the car and swung it out on to the road again.

  ‘We’re talking about something which neither of us has any experience of, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘There was a witch-hunt in the sixties, here – a persecution of the Jews in the Party after all the university troubles in 1968, but that was whipped up by the Russians, by Khrushchev, because there had to be a scapegoat. Thousands left then – I think some good friends of Wiktoria’s did. She’s not anti-Semitic, for God’s sake. Anyway – there’s that. There is the war. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were pogroms – but then Poland was under Russian rule. There may be Jewish blood on Polish hands, but there is also Polish blood lost for them. I can’t bear it if you think anything else.’

  You can’t bear it, Elizabeth thought, if Polishness is not perfection. They drove on in silence.

  Months later, on a rainy afternoon in London, in a Polish bookshop, they bought a book containing hundreds of verbatim accounts of how, all over Poland in the war, Jews had been hidden and saved from the camps and ghettos. Among them was the story of a woman in the Warsaw ghetto, who had managed to creep into one of the German workshop offices at night, and use the telephone. She had dialled the number of a Polish woman she’d known through their children before the war, and very softly spoken her own name. There was a long, stunned silence. She spoke it again, and whispered: ‘May I come to you?’ Another silence. Then a single word: ‘Yes,’ and the click of the receiver.

  Of all the stories they read, that was the one which addressed Elizabeth. She lay awake that night thinking of the voice which came from behind the ghetto wall, after a year or more in which the woman’s friend must have assumed her dead. She thought of the silence, then the single word which had saved her, and she imagined, with sudden terror, a time when a ghetto might be built in London. For Jews in Stamford Hill? For blacks in Finsbury Park or Brixton? For Asians in Southall?

  She thought of herself receiving a phone call from someone behind the wall, perhaps from Hannah, begging for shelter, and knowing that if she said yes she put at risk her own life, and Jerzy’s, and perhaps the lives of their children, who lay asleep in the next room. She tossed on the pillow, and lay looking into the darkness, unable to decide if the knowledge that she might hesitate, might even refuse, made her more or less human.

  The days in the mountains were cool and fresh. They camped for two nights, and for one night treated themselves to a room in the hotel in Zakopane which felt like the Polish equivalent of the Hilton, though even here the shower didn’t work. Zakopane was where Anna had come skiing as a tiny girl, before her mother died. Ponies and traps with jingling bells trotted down the main street, taking tourists up into the lower slopes of the forested mountains. Everywhere they drove they passed new houses being built, large, opulent, clearly costing a fortune. ‘For Party members,’ said Jerzy. ‘No doubt about that.’

  They climbed to Morskie Oko, the Eye of the Sea, a large, beautiful lake where the cloud-topped peaks of the mountains were reflected with the sky. They drank tea in a wooden café on the lakeside, and then climbed still higher, to a smaller, deeper lake, where few other people had come.

  ‘Almost our last day in Poland,’ said Elizabeth, feeling the mountain air wash her skin like the purest water.

  ‘Are you glad we came?’ asked Jerzy. ‘Even with all our – upsets?’

  ‘Oh yes. And you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Even though you didn’t find your home?’

  ‘Even though.’

  They went slowly down the mountain path again, and began the long drive back to Warsaw.

  Wiktoria was waiting for them, late at night, a meal laid ready. She had a letter written for them to give to Anna.

  ‘And I do hope that you two are going to come again.’

  ‘So do we,’ said Jerzy. ‘I wish we could take you back with us.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m much too old to travel now, though I should dearly love to see Anna again before I die.’

  In the morning they kissed her goodbye, but she did not come to the station. ‘Too many goodbyes …’ she said. ‘I don’t want any more.’ She closed the door of her apartment, and they heard her slow, stiff footsteps, walking down the corridor.

  They took back the car, and spent the time before the train left in the Cepelia tourist shops, buying wooden carvings for presents. And then they went to the station, where Pani Maria was plodding along the platform, greeting her charges. She smiled at them broadly.

  ‘You have enjoyed yourselves? Good, good. I will talk to you later.’

  They found their compartment, settled in, and sat looking out of the window as other passengers got on. There was a young couple on the platform, kissing. She was small and very blonde, with white flowers in her hair. He was lanky, with glasses. A few minutes before the train was due to leave, he climbed in with them and thrust a bulging zipped suitcase on to the luggage rack. The girl with white flowers pressed her face to the window, smiling. They kissed through the glass, very quickly, and then the train began to move, and they waved to each other until the girl was out of sight.

  The lanky young man leaned back against his seat, and shook his head. Jerzy and Elizabeth eyed him sympathetically.

  ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘We met in Croydon last year, when she came to visit her aunt. We came here last month to have a Polish wedding, and they took her passport away. I don’t know when they’re going to give it back. She’s been a student here for three years – she says she might have to work for three years to pay back her fees before they let her leave the country.’

  The train gathered speed; the suburbs of Warsaw were behind them. Pani Maria slid back the door to the corridor, beaming. ‘The gentlemen from Customs are on the train.’ She shut it again, and went to the next compartment.

  Elizabeth remembered their black-market currency exchange. There was something about declaring how much money you had brought into the country, and how much you were taking out? What were the Customs men going to ask about? When they arrived, they asked only about valuables being taken out of Poland without an export licence. They had no valuables, nothing to declare. The men went out again. Much later in the journey, Jerzy and Elizabeth discovered that Pani Maria had cheerfully paid a fine of thousands of złotys for smuggling crystal.

  They sat on deck on the ferry from the Hook of Holland, and the crossing was calm. Jerzy was reading a book of poems by the Pope, translated into English, which he’d found in the library before they left, and hardly looked at until now. A light breeze lifted the pages. He passed the book to Elizabeth, open.

  ‘Read that one.’

  Elizabeth took the book. The poem was called ‘Refrain’, and was very short.

  When I think, my Country, I look for a road running upwards, like a high voltage current cutting through slopes. This road is in each of us, steep and upward, not allowing us to stop.

  The road follows the same slopes, returns to the same places, becomes a great silence, visiting the tired lungs of my land evening after evening.

  They put down the book and stood leaning on the deck rail, their arms round each other, feeling the wind from the sea on their faces, as the ship cut through the water, leaving a foaming wake of white behind them.

  PART THREE

  Winter is Yours

  10. Warsaw and London, 1980–1981

  Warsaw, July 1980 The queue outside the butcher’s where Danuta had waited since seven o�
�clock this morning now stretched out behind her to the next block and beyond. It was half-past ten; she had already left twice, once to run to the toilet across the road and once to phone the School of Planning and Statistics, to make sure that her tutor was still there. It was vacation, but she still went in from time to time – next spring she would have completed her finals, and in the meantime she had her thesis to write, and be supervised.

  ‘When you sit your exams, you stop,’ Mama said yesterday. ‘It’s too much for you to study and waste time in a queue.’

  ‘I can read while I’m waiting, it’s all right.’

  ‘But all that standing – it’s not good for you.’

  ‘Or for you. And you go to work afterwards.’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll live.’

  The secretary of her department in the school was clipped but reassuring – her tutor would wait for her. Danuta put down the phone and ran back to the queue. On both occasions her place had been held for her by a little old lady in black; the woman behind was now complaining loudly. She was large and puffy-faced, in her fifties; her plastic holdall bulged with toilet rolls, and Danuta thought she was probably a professional, paid by two or three families.

  ‘I’ve had this place since seven o’clock this morning; why should I let you get in front and then dart in and out? If you go again, I’ll move up.’

  ‘I shan’t go again,’ Danuta said wearily. ‘I also had my place booked.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  ‘Yes I did.’

  ‘Don’t you argue with me, young woman.’

  Danuta turned away, looking over the head of the little old lady to the distant door of the shop, still firmly closed. There were jokes about butchers. That before the war you’d see a sign saying Butcher, and go inside and find meat. Now, you saw a sign saying Meat, and went inside and found a butcher. Or there was plenty of meat, so long as you didn’t mind eagle. Danuta didn’t find them funny any more. She and her mother spent half the week in queues: for meat, sugar, butter; for almost unobtainable soap, washing powder, toilet rolls, sanitary towels, shampoo. There were days when you queued for four hours without even knowing what might be in the shop when you got there. Or found that all the toilet rolls, which were what you really needed, had gone, but there was still flour, so you bought flour, pounds and pounds of it, even if you had plenty at home, just in case next time you needed it, there was none.