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Photo: Mikolaj Starzynski
Little Views
(Excerpt from a Story)
By Patrycja Dołowy
Translated from Polish by Daniel Sax and Caroline Stupnicki
The morning dissolves slowly. The day barges in brutally, with a crowd of people filling the streets. I am in the safety of the twilight at the bottom of a creaking wardrobe. I reach for images which exist within me, even though I am not aware of them until I dig them out, scratch them out from under the surface, unearth them. A slit, a wound. Open. Bedraggled. They emerge.
A slight young girl, in front of her a man in black uniform with a huge, snarling dog. He is holding the dog on a lead, while Donia and other girls, who all look alike, stare at him. He is swaggering a bit. Showing off here in this barn. Just a stopover along a death march route. The girls are supposed to watch because he’s got a great dog which is about to do an impressive trick. The barn is lined with shelves. The kind for storing hay. The winter is frosty. The man releases the dog and orders him to jump onto the first shelf. How proud he is of his dog, so good at fetching and following commands. He gives the command: Jump. The dog jumps. The shelf is about two meters high, maybe a touch lower. The dog almost reaches it with his front paws but doesn’t quite make it. The man orders again: Jump. The dog jumps again. This time his head reaches the shelf, but, again, he doesn’t quite make it. The man is visibly rattled, the girls look on. He orders the third time: Jump. The poor grey mutt gives himself a bloody muzzle, but fails again. And he gets a beating.
That same night, the slight girl buries herself in hay on the shelf. When everyone else is rushed to march on in the morning, she stays behind. The man in uniform enters the empty barn, sniffs around. The dog is barking loudly at the shelf. The one where Donia is hidden. The one he couldn’t reach the day before. The man looks around but the girls are already being chased barefoot in the snow. They probably won’t survive the week. There’s no one left in here to show off to. “Sure, I know you’d reach it this time, but we’re out of time, we gotta go,” he says to the dog and drags him along as he barks. The people grow distant, the voices go silent. Donia is free.
*
In the 1960s, there was a thaw in the Soviet Union, and Poles who had been exiled to Siberia were allowed to return home. One of the repatriates was Abram, a Polish patriot and officer before the war, who had been deported together with many others to Siberia. As he spent several days travelling back from Siberia on the train, his thoughts were with his homeland and his ears resounded with the national anthem, “Poland has not yet died, so long as we still live.” Many days later, as the train crossed into Poland, he opened the door wide to breathe Polish air at last; then a stone came flying through the door and he heard a shout: “Jews go home!” He arrived in Warsaw, but a few years later he moved to Israel. And there he died.
*
Abram was a cobbler before the war. After the war – because he and his family had survived – he became a travelling shoe salesman, most often plying his trade along the route between Kielce and Lublin. His wife was always terrified. She was so frightened she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, begged him not to go travelling with all those shoes. Their young son Tosiek couldn’t understand: the war was over, so why was she so afraid? But she was so terrified that they ended up deciding to leave Poland for good. When Tosiek was a grownup, many years later, he came back to live in Poland. One day he was on a train between Kielce and Lublin, the same route his father had travelled selling shoes. It was November 1st, All Souls’ Day. As you go past Pionki, the train runs through a dense forest. Tosiek spotted a row of candles lining the tracks by the trees. He asked his fellow passengers what it meant. No one knew. A few months later, when he was in Kielce, a friend happened to tell him the story. Back then, the train would stop along the route, just there, near Pionki, and bands of thugs would come out of the forest and board. As the train moved off again, the thugs went from carriage to carriage, pushing Jews off the train. The bodies of those they threw off lined the tracks. Years later, one of the murderers, as he lay on his deathbed, told the story to his grandson. Ever since, the grandson comes to this site every year and lights candles. For now that’s all he can do.
*
Places by the railway tracks. Shelters for those abandoned by history. Here, four sisters meet, who in reality will never go back to their own place. They will scatter around the world. Everywhere they ever meet again will be a new place, shaped in the image of the first. Meetings, trains, returns, the impossibility of return. Not our own place ever again. Never again ours, but always places. If only they could be non-places. If they were as fleeting as the memory of them. But no, they endure painfully. My grandmother said that she first learned that she is Jewish when she was thrown into the ghetto; before then, she’d thought of herself as someone simply “from around here.” Szlomo, who had been transported to Kazakhstan, only found out on his return that he was Jewish: “Abram, Saroczka, you’re Jews, but you are still alive? How did you manage to survive?” There was a tinge of complaint in this disbelief, a hint of disappointment.
*
Seventy years ago, the Litzmannstadt Ghetto stood empty. Well, almost empty. There were still dogs. Scrawny, famished, lonely, yet faithful. They would not be tamed. They were left behind after all the deportations from the ghetto. They came out to find scraps, and went back to the plundered homes of their people, which were deafening in their emptiness. If someone happened to leave a mattress behind, the dogs would curl up at the feet and wait patiently.
There was also a six-year-old boy with his mom and uncle. They lived in one of the abandoned apartments, behind a magical wardrobe. They collected scraps at night and came back. The magical doors opened. The massive Gdańsk-made wardrobe was so heavy that no effort could shift it from the apartment. The uncle and mom knew this very well as they crafted the hideout. They spent a long time looking for it. A meter-by-meter niche was concealed behind the wardrobe. It held a small stove, which proved essential in winter. A miniature world. Life in a small box. Who knows how long for; maybe everything will remain miniaturized forever? And, instead of having a market stall on the corner, we’ll go hunting.
“Uncle, will you tell me about when you lived behind the magical wardrobe?”
“Magical wardrobe? Oh, yes…” He seemed surprised, shocked, even, that someone might be interested. “Oh, just an ordinary tale of childhood…”
*
Today I have buried the first Little View. At 18 Franciszkańska Street, once known as 28 Nalewki Street. Here Fanni fed Jurek cyanide, and then she and Aleksander took it together. They didn’t get them. She was a dentist at the ghetto; she is recalled by Henryk Makower in his diaries, by Donia to her son many years after the war, and by him to me. Now Donia is no longer here, and I am desperately searching for her traces. All kinds, not just those. But I can only reach those by tearing soil apart with my fingers. I now have them forever, because they cannot simply be reburied.
They came to Warsaw as soon as it looked like nothing good was going to happen in Łódź. They had both studied here, before. The capital was bound to be safer.
*
M. was in the hideout with her mother. It was dark and there was no room to move. Her mother recited poems by Polish poets, bards, from memory. And M. learned them all by heart. Then, after the war, she was told they aren’t her poems, this is not her language, that she has no right to them. But she has a double right, she says. She didn’t know the history of the mezuzah her mom had hidden, risking her own life; not yet. The mezuzah which symbolically survived the Holocaust, but after the war, just as symbolically, it was shoved into a suitcase of an aunt leaving Poland forever, because “What am I going to do with it here? It’s not like I’ll hang it on my door.” The question “Why not?” hangs in the air for generations. Unanswered.
*
Alek tells me, “If you wake me up in the middle of the night, I’ll recite you a prayer in Polish and in Ukrainian, but I’ll never say a single word in Yiddish,” because where he was hiding, in the countryside, with farmers, they said: “Remember, speaking Yiddish will get you killed.” And he remembered. He was five years old then. And he says that he tried going to the animals in the barn and speaking Yiddish to them, but the words got stuck in his throat and they’ve stayed stuck ever since.
*
“Janek’s summer vacation,” Janek starts his story. “I was on vacation in the country with my parents in forty-three —” and he goes on: “No… we weren’t actually on vacation, it was the war, we were in hiding. And apart from us there were a dozen or so other families, in this hideout under the floor of a barn. But the house was a little way outside the village and they sometimes let the kids out to play in the yard. Then one day the hosts brought in a boy who had fled from a transport. As the kids were playing, the boy says: “They have these gas chambers, you know?” and the other kids ask: “Gas chambers? What’s that?” and he replies “I dunno,” so they keep on playing. They lock one kid in the privy, and the others run around outside, knock, and shout: “Gas chamber!” and take turns. “It was a barrel of laughs,” he says. “A barrel of laughs.”
*
Miss Salcia danced and danced. And she laughed as she spun. And boys talked to her and laughed. And she wore a pretty dress which her mom had made, with a star on it. That was back there.
Today Salcia says that the war was terrible, terrible, but she remembers those dances because she was young and pretty. Her mother died not long after she’d made that dress. That beautiful Salcia – found herself on one of the last transports to Auschwitz.
Today she is here. Today she is not called Salcia anymore, and she isn’t beautiful or young. Still her feet tap along to the memory of the dances.
*
Memories of photos. In the stack of faded prints, these two are clear and sharp. In the first, a Jewish boy running, a shot resounds, the boy falls and lies in a puddle of blood. In the second, the boy’s naked body stripped of everything. People from nearby houses had come over and taken his things until nothing was left.
*
Death march on the way from Auschwitz. Donia fell and said she’s not going any further, let them kill her. A German guard walked up to her, gave her a piece of bread and some water and said: “Get up. You must go on. You can do it. It’s not far now. Now you will win, we will lose.” She got up. That’s what those girls were like. The twin sisters made a decision. Each one ran away alone. They’d stand no chance together. Glances at one another, stolen quickly, tenderly, from afar. They might be the last. They might never see one another again. They’ll run off into the dusk. Into the snow. Into the emptiness of a January night.
Sima was the first to reach an abandoned house. On their birthday, she waited for Donia with a spread. The pantry was full because the occupants had run away. They left all their belongings behind as they fled the approaching Soviet Army in terror.
January 28th. They didn’t even know that the camp had been liberated.
They were alive. They’d survived.
So what that of all the surviving sisters, only Donia remained in Poland? And so what that the borders were closed later and they didn’t see one another for many years?
“Which birthday do you remember best?”
“That one, back then.”
*
In the countryside, where Hela has a plot, the old women would occasionally reminisce. And weep and long over how things used to be. And over all the terrible things which had happened:
“Many Jews died then, very many, and a few people died as well,” they would say.
*
Waldek was a good man. Looked after his family. In his field he’d discovered his school friend, Shaya, and informed on him to the blue police. Even though they used to play footbag together in the courtyard, way back when. Shaya was sure Waldek would help him. Shaya’s wife and daughter didn’t look Jewish, so they managed to hide somewhere. Waldek dragged Shaya out of his field first, then sent the boys to chase Szlomo, Shaya’s six-year-old son. They caught him and brought him back. Shaya looked Waldek in the eye: How could you, you were like a brother to me. Waldek called a soldier. He shot the kid first, then Shaya. Shaya looked at Waldek until the very end, and the question hung in the air.
*
Sisters will always be sisters. That’s what Wanda had thought when her mother, on her deathbed, reminded her of a story from many, many years before. It was October 1943. Wanda and her mother were walking down the main street of Brest, then a city in eastern Poland. Germans were chasing Jews to their death down the same street. And those people walked and walked. Old people, young people, children. And they looked as though they were travelling somewhere, because they were carrying suitcases and bundles and quilts. But no, only death awaited them. The soldiers ordered all the passers-by to turn to face the walls, to stop them from staring. And so Wanda and her mother also turned around and just stood there. Suddenly, a woman emerged from the crowd being chased down the street and pushed her little girl towards them. Wanda’s mother opened her coat without a word, wrapped the girl in it and then kept standing. The woman rejoined the crowd. Once everyone had passed and the street was quiet and empty again, the soldiers let the passers-by turn around again and go home. And the three of them went home. And that’s how it was from then on.
*
Auntie Lidka. Grandma’s friend from the camp. But what does it mean to a little girl, a “friend from the camp”? A friend from summer camp, or a friend from some camping trip? This friend was from the Auschwitz death camp. After the war, Auntie Lidka emigrated to Israel. She had children and grandchildren there. But when she retired, she said she would not die there, she was going home. Her grandchildren asked, “What do you mean, Grandma? Aren’t you home now?” “No, no, I am going home.” And she came to Poland. When she made herself at home again, when she started meeting up with friends who were still alive, she asked my grandmother: “Donia, how is it that you never said anything to your children here?” And my grandmother asked in turn: “Did you say anything?” “No, but that’s completely different…”
*
Adam fell in love. It was the 1960s. And in 1968 it turned out that his girlfriend, who was Jewish, was ordered to leave Poland alongside her parents and many other Jews. He said he couldn’t agree to the separation, that he loved her and wanted to marry her and go with her. His own mother was very angry and didn’t want to agree to the marriage. She tried to change his mind: she pleaded, begged, shouted, and in the end she stopped speaking to him. She didn’t even go to the wedding. But she came to the railway station on the day they were leaving Poland for Israel. She walked up to him, held him close. And she gave him a piece of paper with a name and an address. And said: “Once you’re in Israel, go to this address, you will find my friend from before the war.” Once Adam and his wife had made themselves at home in Tel Aviv, he took the piece of paper and went to the address. A woman opened the door and he told her what his mother had said. She looked at him long and hard and said: “And she told you I am her friend from before the war? I am her sister!” And that was how he found out that he was a Polish Jew.
*
Arie, the one who’d lived behind the magical wardrobe, had had to live in hiding even before he found himself in the hiding place behind the wardrobe, because he was in the Łódź ghetto. In the Łódź ghetto there was a tragic event which came to be known as the General Curfew, when the Germans rounded up all the children, the elderly, and the sick and took them to their death. There were no more children in the ghetto after that, apart from those who had been hidden. But Arie had his own hiding place, under the floor, under the desk. His parents put him there as they left for work in the morning, and let him out when they came back. But one day the ghetto commander Biebov gave the order for everyone to come to a roll call. Arie heard the megaphone message from his hiding place, and he thought since they said everyone, it meant him as well, so he went along to the square. The commander saw him and asked: “Whose child is this?” His parents stepped forward, and Biebov said: “Hide this child somewhere, immediately.” And they did — they hid him before the other commander of the ghetto arrived, and Arie survived. But what are you supposed to do with a story like that? That man, the commander, Biebov, murdered thousands of people. Thousands of people. Yet he saved this one child. And it just so happens that this one child is now my uncle.
*
A small factory on Rycerska Street. Today, there is nothing on Rycerska. They left in the 1930s. From Bielsko to Vienna, from Vienna to the States. Without any premonition and not because of what was to come. It wasn’t until many, many years later that they found out about their cousin – this holdout back in a country whose language they had long forgotten.
And she waited for parcels from them. Fragrant with spices. Such delicious things. So exclusive. So good, no one dared use them. Only on special occasions. So they sat there going stale. And there they sit to this very day. Occasionally someone will take a little, to add for flavor. To this very day!
The Earth keeps turning, times change. The spices sit there. Faded, dried out. They are not fragrant any more. Such old things. So unexclusive.
The once-elegant flakes coated with a thin film of glue.
*
In your village stands a black tree. Around it, nothing. Emptiness. There was a house here once. The black smoke which rose from it coated the bark, made itself at home, and stayed like that. When they asked who you were, you didn’t know. You survived the Poles, you survived the Russians and the Germans. They called you a Pole, a kulak, finally they called you a hero of the Soviet Union. When the Russians came, they took your land. Appointed you the leader of the kolkhoz. When the Germans came, the Red Army retreated. They said they would now kill communists and Russian commanders. You packed up your family and you ran away to the forest, beyond the marshes, where the Germans didn’t venture. Your house – a brick house – was taken over for their headquarters. There was nowhere to go back to. The kids were in the forest. Hungry, and there was no food. At night you’d leave the forest, go to your brother’s, eat something, go back. Someone tipped them off. They burned down your brother’s house with the whole family inside. Eight people. Little boys, a tiny girl, and even a baby. Burned them alive. You no longer had a brother. Only the tree was left. It turned black as fast as you turned grey. You left the kids with the village. People took them in, cared for them as their own. The partisans taught you to shoot Germans. You shot. And your wife did, too. After the war they rewarded you with the status of Meritorious Partisan of the Soviet Union. The borders had changed. You were still from here. In your letters you used Russian words transcribed into Polish. They’d stopped asking you who you were. Good. Because you still don’t know.
*
When she was a little girl, she couldn’t understand why her mother yelled hysterically when the neighbors would take their dogs out on the knoll in the park. She was ashamed of her then. Later she changed schools and they no longer walked that way. It was only after she left Białystok that she found out that there had been a Jewish cemetery there before the war. Not long after she left, they built a monument to the Heroes of the Białystok Lands on the knoll: God, Honor, Homeland.
*
Konin. A Little View without a story, at a cemetery which doesn’t exist. Its only remaining trace can only be found by meandering, with no memory. The information board by the park bears the inscription: The period between 1939 and 1945 was a very difficult and dark time in the park’s history, as it was in the history of the city and its residents. That’s it. Not a single word about the breathing soil stained red with blood. Not a single word about the nearby street paved with matzevahs in the 1940s. Not a single word about the abandoned buildings a little way off where wind now howls. Where will words come from?
*
Lolek, his brother Edek, his sister Estusia, and their mother and father had been in the ghetto during the war. Lolek and Estusia were old enough to find work in barns with their parents, which was a little safer. There was a lower chance of getting rounded up. Edek was little, so when the rest of the family went to work in the ghetto, Edek stayed at home. They put him on the bed and covered him with layers of quilts. Daddy was always really worried that Edek would suffocate, but it never happened, and every time they got home Edek jumped out from under the quilts and greeted them.
But one day there were roundups and Mom and Estusia were chased to Umschlagplatz where the trains to the death camps left from. Dad and Lolek tried to do something, they knew a policeman, but they couldn’t do anything. And they never saw them again. When they came home, Edek jumped out from under his quilts as usual. He looked at them and he knew. And he burst out crying. He cried for two whole days, until he’d run out of tears. He has never cried since then. He is an old man now. And his grandchildren say: “Our grandpa is so brave! He never cries!”
*
When the occupation started, Mietek was ten years old. His parents hid him away, living with another couple. It was quite a nice hiding place. He just couldn’t go outside or stand near a window. And when someone came over, he had to get into the wardrobe. His parents visited him at first, but then they stopped coming. Later the couple said that it was no longer safe and that he had to hide in the cellar. And when he sat alone in that cellar, in complete darkness, he thought of just one thing: his courtyard and his friend Helenka with pretty eyes. And he thought that as soon as he left that cellar, he’d go to the courtyard and look into Helenka’s beautiful, huge eyes. One day the couple came downstairs and said that it’s over, the war is over, that he could come out. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He was alone. He left, wandered the streets, and finally came to his old courtyard. And she was there! Beautiful Helenka was there. He walked up to her, and she looked at him with her beautiful huge eyes and said: “Mietek, but aren’t you a Yid? What are you still doing here?”
*
That day she went down to the river and listened to its whispers for a long, long time. As though she was expecting an answer from the river. There are some things you’ll sooner hear from a river than from any person. There were never words for her questions. As though everything was deaf. She had carried grief with her for so many years that it grew right into the ends of her hair, and when her aunt cut it, and when she cut it herself later, it was as though she was cutting off pieces of her grief. That day she held a letter in her hand. A certificate explaining the loss. A loss that was unexplainable. She’d rant at the river, then go home. And start thinking how to welcome them when they arrive. Will pierogi be okay, should they be kosher perhaps?
An old, wrinkled woman. A tiny, sad girl.
*
She came from the States and immediately found her, this teller of Jewish stories. She has listened to so many of them now. She will listen to this one, too, and maybe she can help. Her house. Her house was on such-and-such a street, she doesn’t remember the number. It had a white roof. It was the only house with a white roof. She remembers it clearly. They get into the car. They drive down the entire street, then get out and wander around, examining each house. She takes photos. Of every single building. When she gets back, she will look at them knowing that one of those houses used to be her home.
*
The port was incredibly crowded, full of people trying to board the ship, pushing and shoving. In the throng, the five-year-old Elina got separated from her parents. She was completely alone in the crowd, without papers. As the last boats were leaving, a boy only a little older than Elina grabbed her hand and pulled her onto a boat. Elina later found her parents in Shanghai. They spent time in the Shanghai ghetto, and after the war lived in Hangzhou until the 1950s. Many, many years later, in Israel, Elina went to a meeting of the Igud association of Jews who’d found shelter in China during the war. A man called Ron was telling his story. He had been nine years old when people were being put on the last boats to Shanghai in the port of Kobe. He clearly remembers a lost boy among the crowd, looking as though he might get trampled at any moment. He dragged him by the hand onto the boat. He doesn’t know what happened to that boy, but he still thinks of him sometimes. Elina went up to Ron and said: “That boy was me."
