Religion in my life 

Random thoughts and reminiscences

In the scientific age in which we live today more and more people choose to reject religion. THERE IS NO GOD. Or, if one insists otherwise, GOD IS DELUSION. While this may be true, there is still a human need for the experience of spirituality.  There are several definitions of spirituality in current usage. I prefer to define 'spirituality' as a way of life in which one attempts to seek meaning for our existence through various spiritual practices such as meditation, looking at beautiful artwork, listening to music, being surrounded by nature or by praying - according to personal desire and belief.

Not being a religious person in the traditional sense, and practically not visiting church (except as a tourist), I strongly oppose the fierce attacks on religion by some prominent scientists, supported by my own husband, a scientist himself,  that I’ve been witnessing for some years now. Beyond mere defiance, I have my personal reasons for a positive attitude towards religion, in this particular case - Christianity.  They are outlined below. 

1. Religious family background

My family as such did not consider itself notably religious, although we were not hardcore atheists either. For instance, my grandmother Sofia taught catechism to grade school students at a young age,  before 1926,  and my other grandmother’s cousin, auntie Vlada, entered a convent in 1928 and became a prioress. My great-grandmother Jadwiga was a devout Catholic;  her deep faith in God, whom she believed “worked in mysterious ways”, helped her hold steady through the hard times when she lost two husbands and two sons, one after the other, to tragic deaths. My parents, a doctor and a teacher, described themselves as non-practicing Catholics (a somewhat evasive attitude, one might say). 

2. A gloomy small-town childhood in postwar Poland 

I was born in Poland in the era of Stalin. Although it may seem inconceivable or illogical, the overwhelming majority of children born in the postwar Communist Poland was baptized in infancy in the Catholic Church, and received the First Communion at the age of nine, which constituted a significant emotional event in the life of a child, a spiritual rite of passage. Young Poles, myself included, were expected to diligently attend  catechism classes at a local church until graduating from secondary school. Attending mass on Sunday was a regular part of  life for an average Polish family. All Catholic holidays were celebrated by both believers and non-believers alike (read: the Party officials, although the latter did it rather unobtrusively, if not in secret). 

As for me, I quit catechism classes in the eighth grade because of an abusive priest, and stopped attending services because the sermons bored me to death. Both decisions coincided with my resolution to start to think independently.

As a little girl, in the nineteen fifties and sixties, before my rebellious adolescence, I had lived with my parents for a period of seven years in Żychlin, a small gloomy town with a big smoky factory looming over it. Every morning at 7  except Sundays, the factory would swallow up the majority of the town’s adult population only to spit it  out eight hours later. At the wail of the siren, the huge iron gates would open, and the dun crowd of tired workers would spill out, greeted by their none too well-fed children, with keys dangling on shoestrings around their rarely-washed necks. 

All children went to elementary school, then to secondary school or vocational school, depending on their abilities and interests, and the family background and ambitions. In post-War Poland, anyone with a completed secondary education was considered by small-town residents to be a respectable  member of the intelligentsia (the Polish term for well-educated members of the society) and held in esteem - even though that the Communist propaganda glorified workers and peasants. 

Those, who possessed a university degree (e. g. physicians, veterinarians, pharmacists, high-school teachers, and lawyers) represented a small percentage of the overall population. University-educated people were treated with distrust and contempt in the post-War Poland. Could this be interpreted as a manifestation of class struggle in a society which, in theory at least, eliminated class distinction? In the situation of general poverty such as then existed, people fed themselves on envy, pettiness, and resentment.

The older part of the town consisted mostly of shapeless one or two-story houses built around the intersection of the two main streets; many of them had formerly been Jewish homes.The houses had no running water, no toilets, and no baths; just as they had been in the pre-War period, they were then inhabited by “God fearing” people - in this case, peasants born in the surrounding villages, who took possession of the modest dwellings as soon as the Jewish population was evicted from them (which I learnt of many years later). I’m not sure today how these families made a living, but work in Communist countries was a citizen’s constitutional right, and everyone had easy access to some employment. 

3. My first aesthetic experiences 

It would had been unthinkable for any Polish town or village not to have a church, with its distinctive silhouette visible from afar. Similarly in my town, Żychlin: St. Peter’s and Paul’s, which dated back to the 14th century, stood predictably on a square adjacent to the main intersection. The parishioners were proud of their church, which had been rebuilt several times throughout its history, to finally end at the late Baroque. Looted, and turned into a warehouse during the German occupation, the church was gradually restored and renovated after Stalin’s death. In my time, it acquired new stained-glass windows, and new confessionals and pews. 

We lived on the outskirts of town, in one of the modern housing blocks designed for the factory workers. The factory was opened in 1921 by two Swiss engineers named Brown and Bovery, and had  specialized in the production of electric machines ever since; nationalized in 1945, it subsequently bore the name of a German communist, Wilhelm Pieck. The older worker blocks, constructed at the same time as the factory, had faded plaster facades, while the newer ones, constructed of red brick, represented the dreary socialist realist style, which maybe lacked individuality, but at least provided the tenants with running water for cooking and washing, not to mention the customary Saturday night bath. 

In this world devoid of color and excitement - at least in my memory - only Sundays were worth waiting for. On Sundays, as if by magic, the common untidiness yielded to festive cleanliness, grayness to color - still subdued, true, but already signifying something more sublime than everyday life. Visible effort was undertaken to beautify our gloomy reality in order to make this day special: the sidewalks of the streets leading to the church were swept clean the day before, and people dressed in their Sunday best. No wailing factory siren that day - only the joyful church bells. 

The contrast was not lost on me. I vividly remember the feeling of elation which usually accompanied me on my way to church: I almost danced. What made me so happy? Surely, not the freshly-ironed dress, the white socks (in summer), and the brightly polished shoes. The clothes, restraining to a certain degree the individual’s behavior, did play an important role in the whole experience. As a child I loved going to church. For me, entering the baroque church then was like entering another world: I marveled at the huge paintings depicting events in the life of Jesus and the saints, the altars, the plaster Stations of the Cross, the marble baptismal font, the marble sculptures, the shiny silver goblets, the heavy red fabrics embroidered with gold thread, and the white lace adorning altars. Being a compassionate child, I was deeply impressed by the heroism of  the martyrs, the courageous men and women, tortured and murdered in strange ways - stoned or riddled with arrows, for example - for believing in Jesus. The organ’s  encompassing music only added to my overall exaltation (although I could barely withstand the out-of-key singing by the congregation.) It is to this parochial church that I owe my very first exposure to art. However limited this exposure was, it awakened my aesthetic sensitivity. Had I stayed in this small town, the church  might have been the only contact with art, or rather religious-themed art, in my whole life. 

I read somewhere recently that the Council of Trent in 1563 laid down the following rule in reference to religious art: that it was to be dramatic, and appeal to the viewers’ emotions in order to raise their faith and religious fervor. It certainly worked on me, although my faith left a lot to be desired.

4. My religious beliefs

Despite my exaltation, and despite praying to St. Monica, my patron saint and perhaps my first role-model, the patient mother of the early Christian philosopher and theologian Augustine of Hippo, I had never believed in God, and still less in the Christian Trinity. At the same time, I had never doubted that Jesus of Nazareth really existed.To me he was an extremely smart and charismatic man who demonstrated gentleness and compassion in the brutal world he was born into, surrounded by guards with spears, and ruled over by powerful Roman governors. Jesus of Nazareth taught love and empathy, and he was kind to women and children. His martyr’s death gave rise to a new religion. 

This overly simplistic understanding of the New Testament was enough for a nine-year-old girl.  But was it really all about brotherly love, I kept wondering in later years, or was there something more? Surely, Pilate would not have killed Jesus for performing alleged miracles and claiming to be God's Son. He would have considered him a lunatic and sentenced him only to flogging. Instead, he gave way to Sanhedrin, which saw Jesus as a serious threat - and probably rightly so.  Jesus’ actions were political, no question about it: he challenged his society's social structure by, for instance, throwing out the merchants from the Temple. Thus, he was executed as a political trouble-maker. 

It wasn't Mahatma Gandhi who introduced non-violence as a political strategy to the Western world, it was Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus took a non-violent stand against the Jerusalem Sanhedrin’s collaborators with the Roman occupiers; Gandhi imitated him by opposing the British occupiers in India. In turn, Gandhi’s works inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his civil rights activism. “Jesus Christ gave the motivation,” King wrote, “Gandhi showed the method”. Nonviolence and spirituality also inspired Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela.

5. The religious and cultural “tribes” I identify with

I consider Christianity to be my cultural heritage. Understanding paintings and the visual arts of the Middle Ages and later centuries, as well as the literary references of any period of European History, requires at least a cursory knowledge of the Gospels. The birth, life, and death - and the Resurrection - of Christ have stirred the imagination of countless European artists, architects, musicians, and writers, and still do. The history of Christian civilization is a European history. Denying it means denying who we are. In a vain attempt, as it proved, to completely dismiss religion as “bourgeois superstition and nonsense”, Communist governments tried to reject large parts of their countries’ cultural and religious heritage -  which would have been an irreversible loss, indeed, had they succeeded. 

Christianity has its roots in Judaism, which makes us, as Europeans, part of a larger and very old “tribe” (the history of Judaism spans more than 3,000 years). Christianity borrowed heavily from Judaism:  the concept of monotheism (the Trinity was developed over the span of three and a half centuries after the time of Jesus), the belief in miracles and signs, not to mention incense, the Eucharist  (matzah), confession, the center of worship, the concept of resurrection and of a Messiah. The Old Testament is full of captivating miracles: the plagues sent upon the Egyptians, the parting of the Red Sea, the manna and quails in the desert, to name only the most spectacular ones. All this was the work of God, not of prophets like, for instance, Moses. To confirm his divine nature, Jesus of Nazareth simply had to perform miracles, demonstrate healing power, and predict things that were going to happen well in advance.  

Last but not least, Christians adopted the Decalogue from Judaism. In countries with a Christian  heritage, the Ten Commandments still serve as a solid foundation of ethical behavior in society. Those of us who don’t subscribe to the concept of a divine origin of social order, still ask ourselves whether morality is inherent in human nature. Charles Darwin proposed that morality was a byproduct of evolution, a human trait. Francisco Ayala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine sees morality as consisting of two parts: the capacity for ethics and the specific moral codes that we follow. He proposes that, while ethical capacity is a product of biological evolution, moral codes are products of cultural evolution. Unlike other animals, humans can understand the benefits of morality. This understanding has inspired humans to create laws that enforce the moral codes that benefit their society. In my opinion, at the beginning of human social history people invented laws and gods (at least before they developed this ethical capacity) to control the violence among people. It was the fear of the punitive, judgmental gods and the force behind the rule of law that created the foundation of society. 

Incidentally, morality was initially a “noble morality” which means that the noble class judged what was good and bad. According to Nietzsche, the eventual conversion of pagan Rome to Christianity is the evidence of the victory of Judeo-Christian morality over noble morality. Something to consider in the context of the contemporary world: aren’t Westerners the new “noble class” of the contemporary world? 

Early Christianity developed in Rome, which makes us close to Greco-Roman culture.  We owe our philosophy, science, drama and sculpture to the Greeks and the Romans. We also owe them law, roads, warm baths, and central heating. Greeks and Romans worshipped numerous gods. There are some pagan elements in Christianity, such as the cult of relics in Catholicism, prayer for the dead, sainthood, and even the doctrine of the Trinity. Christianity offered a sense of belonging to a group, a promise of immortality, and relief from earthly misery by believing in Heaven.

The word “catholic” means "universal”; “Catholic” was first used to describe the Christian Church in the early 2nd century to emphasize its universal scope.

6. Final remarks

For as long as people have existed they have needed religion. It is quite probable that all religions were born out of fear, out of the feeling of helplessness in the face of unbridled nature. When humans first inhabited the earth they created gods and goddesses to help them survive. Gods initially represented various aspects of nature such as the sun, wind, rain, and fire. Over the course of time,  people came up with animal-like gods, then with more powerful human-like gods. We could reject religion now, as we understand more or less how nature works and we don’t fear it, but we still need something which infuses life with meaning. Could it be art, now? Creativity? Science? The beauty of Nature?

Christianity continues to exist within the modern world, although its presence in the lives of people has been visibly declining. Some say that this Christian civilization is about to complete its allotted life of two thousand years. If so, then why waste time on waging virulent anti-religious campaigns? Why saw off the cultural branch on which one sits? Let's appreciate our heritage and enjoy what is left of it! 

Rebecca Thaddeus, the author of One Amber Bead, is a contemporary American writer with Polish roots. In her novel she describes the complicated and difficult circumstances in which Polish people lived in the chaotic and tumultuous 20th century, as seen through the eyes of two cousins, one living in U.S. and the other one in Poland. 

There are three heroines in One Amber Bead. In order of appearance they are Jadzia, Apolonya  and Evelina or Evie. Jadzia and Apolonya live in a Polish village called Niedzieliska in southern Poland; Evie lives in Chicago. Jadzia and Evie are cousins of  the same age (born around 1923), and Apolonya is a couple of years older. The three girls differ not only in their looks like day and night but also in their personalities. 

The pale and fair-haired Apolonya (whom I prefer to call Pola, though she has nothing in common with the famous Hollywood silent movie actress Pola Negri, apart from the name and a rural origin) is more serious than her age, bitter and disillusioned. She knows exactly what she wants, which is to never leave Niedzieliska. Being a principled 18 year-old woman, Pola won’t forgive her brother Antek, a Nazi sympathizer, for his treason, when he voluntarily joins the German army. Proud and fearless Pola refuses to be forcibly deported from her village. This act of disobedience costs her her life - she is shot by a ruthless Nazi commander in front of her whole village, including her best friend Jadzia. 

Equally pretty, but dark-haired and complected Jadzia is her best friend opposite: cheerful, immature, naïve, and full of illusions about human nature. She had dreamed of leaving the village, so she is not afraid of being deported and initially treats it as a kind of adventure. Later, as a slave laborer in a German countryside, she maintains positive feelings toward her masters and tries very hard to please them. As if this was not bad enough, she falls in love with their 16 year old son. Had she forgotten that there was a war going on and that she had not come to Germany of her own volition? Had she not been taught  at school and at home the legend of the Polish princess Wanda, who chose to drown in the waves of the Vistula river, rather than marry a German prince? Her naïvete causes Jadzia physical and mental humiliation, and she almost ends up in Auschwitz. After the war, disillusioned Jadzia marries a gentle, kind man, has two kids, and adapts quite well to life in communist Poland. When her kind husband dies, she marries … Antek, who meanwhile returns to Poland from Argentina, where he was hiding along with many other Nazis, and adopts his brother’s name, Alfons. Jadzia’s and Antek’s past affection towards Germans, the centuries-old enemies of Poland is the shameful secret they share now. 

Evie, Jadzia’s American doppelgänger, leads a life typical of the second generation of Polish immigrants to the States at the beginning of the 20th century: her dad and older brother work, her mom stays at home and takes care of the younger children.  While Jadzia’s dad is kind and dedicated to his family, Evie’s father is abusive and scary. He does odd jobs and drinks heavily, so the family lives very modestly. The sudden death of her mother and her younger brother put an end to Evie’s fairly happy childhood. She takes on the responsibility of her mother’s role with her little sister (who was born just before her mother died), and her father then becomes even more  abusive and violent towards the girls. Evie’s situation is not to be envied, but it does  suddenly improve: just before U.S. enters the war in December of 1941, Evie gets engaged to a Polish young man, Mikosz, whom she has known since their schooldays and whom she initially despised. When Mikosz goes to war, Evie takes a job at a defense factory. She meets the factory owner at a dance and soon afterwards they become romantically involved. She is not naïve, yet at the same time she has a glimmer of hope that the rich man will eventually want to marry her. It does not happen, so she marries Mikosz, and leads an ordinary middle-class life raising two daughters. 

Typically, the second generation of immigrant families  feels little connection to the parents’ country, considering itself  American rather than of the parents’ nationality. Not Evie though: she is proud of her Polish descent; she celebrates the holidays and weddings as it was all done in her mother’s village. When it comes to Polish food, the natives and immigrants alike seem excessively (at least to me) attached to pierogi, kiełbasa, bigos, and kołaczki, the latter considered as comfort food (presumably some local delicacy, perhaps from Małopolska or Silesia, unknown to the people from central Poland), and vodka. 

Jadzia and Evie, finally meet in 1970 in Chicago after 37 years of exchanging letters in which they confide their innermost secrets to one another. 15 years after this meeting, shortly after Jadzia’s death,  Evie travels to Poland to visit her mother’s and Jadzia’s village. It’s a difficult journey, a bit like going back in time (there are still outhouses in small villages!), for which she is not mentally prepared. However, she bravely tolerates all discomforts, and overcomes the feeling of alienation and not fitting in.  She even comes to terms with Jadzia’s deepest secret about her husband, Antek, and returns to the  U.S. with a sense of a mission fulfilled: Poland became her second home. 

Au-pair

In the late sixties of the last century, my aunt got me an au-pair position with a wealthy family living a short drive from Oxford, in rural Oxfordshire, somewhere between Abingdon-on-Thames and Dorchester-on-Thames.  

The family owned a historic house with a thatched roof and leaded windows (made of small diamond-shaped panes with lead casings to hold them together). Quite a gem! The rooms downstairs had beamed plaster ceilings, gothic dark wood paneling and wainscoting. There was a spacious kitchen with a long rustic wooden table with wooden benches on each side, copper pots and pans hanging above it, a tall cupboard to keep the tableware and a pantry. A shelf of decorative plates adorned the beamed walls, and there were lace curtains at the windows. A medium-size living room (or a “drawing room”, as they call it in England) consisted mainly of a large sofa and matching easy chairs arranged in front of an old-fashioned hearth. The dining room had an18th-century feel to it with its long dark oak table and chairs, and sideboard; on the walls hung framed lit paintings or prints of English hunting scenes—horses, hounds and colorfully dressed riders in pursuit of fox or hare. The solemn, dark interiors and the smell of furniture oil reminded me of a museum. 

In contrast to the stately downstairs, upstairs was light and bright.There were three small bedrooms (gable rooms overlooking a pretty garden), one small bathroom, the master bedroom with an ensuite bathroom, and a nursery.  

This impressive house, which I  think the family had acquired by purchase rather than inheritance, stood in the proverbial “middle of nowhere”: as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but gray fields and a dusty rural road disappearing into the horizon.There was  hardly a tree or shrub. As much as I loved the house, I couldn't make myself admire the bleak surroundings. 

My employer, Mrs. Sanderson, was an attractive woman in her late twenties or early thirties with shoulder-length sandy blond hair, who dressed stylishly in pastel clothes. Her physical appearance, however, did not match her voice. Although she looked refined and dignified, and moved with the elegance of a dancer, her voice sounded unbearably squeaky. Her handsome and taciturn husband Michael, a couple of years older than she, was a businessman of some sort. He would leave home every morning after a breakfast of a glass of orange juice (freshly squeezed by Mrs. Sanderson) a soft-boiled egg (which was wearing a tiny knitted hat to keep it warm), half of a slice of buttered toast and a cup of coffee, while she only had coffee in their big dining room. They sat at opposite ends of the long table which had been laid the evening before. (I must interject here that laying the table was my chore which I enjoyed tremendously. I loved playing with all the elegant plates and cups, expensive silver cutlery and fancy cloth napkins secured with silver napkin rings. My favorite gadget was an antique silver milk jug in the form of a cow; the bee on the cow’s back had to be lifted to fill the jug with milk which poured out of the cow’s mouth.) Mr. Sanderson would not be back until late at night, usually past my bedtime - which explains why I don’t remember whether they ate anything in the evening. He was not  around much on weekends either.

The couple had two little girls, Tanya and Alexa, who were cared for by a professional nanny. Stephanie (I think her name was) wore a uniform: a dark dress and a white apron, like a maid or Mary Poppins. The domestic staff was completed by Mrs. Sage, a heavy woman from the village. She used to come once or twice a week to polish the furniture and the floor. Stephanie cooked for the girls and herself, and for me when I was with them. The plates and dishes arrived from the kitchen in the dumbwaiter. While Stephanie was preparing the food downstairs, my job was to play with Tanya and Alexa, who constantly laughed at me, and ridiculed my English. Stephanie was not a great cook; she lacked culinary imagination, but her meals were at least nutritious. At times Mrs. Sanderson would join us for lunch, which consisted of steamed green beans or peas, mashed potatoes, stewed chicken or boiled beef, milk to drink, and tapioca pudding or custard pie for dessert. She and Stephanie would talk about the girls, what Stephanie was going to cook the next day, and what groceries she needed. (Mrs. Sanderson bought the food.) After lunch we all usually went for a long walk in the fields, with little Alexa toddling in the rear  closing the procession. I accompanied them, although walking in the windy fields wasn't my cup of tea. The paths were muddy, we had to wear galoshes or wellingtons, as the English would say.

Mrs. Sanderson did not seem to me to be a happy person. Every now and then, when she was having a particularly bad day, she would take me and her two dogs for a wild ride in her sporty Jaguar on the desolate rural roads. I’m not sure how fast she drove, but I could feel the force of the speed pushing me into my seat. She never said a word, lost in her sad thoughts. Sometimes we would stop for coffee at the neighbor’s that lived down the road from us, a rich farmer and his wife. A chat with her friend would calm Mrs. Sanderson down, and on the way back to the house, she would drive more slowly.  Once a week, when the nanny had her day off, Mrs. Sanderson would drive the girls to their ballet lessons; she liked me to go with them. Mrs. Sanderson and I would sit on a bench and watch Tanya practice,  while Alexa - also in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, but too young to stand en pointe and keep her balance - played on the floor attempting to unlace her shoes. 

When in the mood, Mrs. Sanderson, would share the slides of her fabulous honeymoon trip to Italy with us. One of the slides showed her dressed in a semi-sheer negligee on the  balcony of a luxury hotel; she looked particularly beautiful that morning. Mrs. Sanderson used to contemplate the image with sad longing. Once she took off her wedding band, played with it for a while, as if trying whether it would fit better on another fingers, then stuffed it in the cushions of the sofa. On another occasion, she looked sadly at her wedding ring, took it off, and slipped it into her pocket. Did she regret marrying Mr. Sanderson?

Occasionally Mr.and Mrs. Sanderson hosted dinner parties and other social gatherings. On these occasions, they would hire a professional cook and waiter. In the Spring, Mrs. Sanderson threw an Easter tea party for her daughters and their friends. After sweet treats had been eaten by the kids at the table while the grown-ups stood behind the kids, tending to their needs, the egg hunt and other games would be held in the garden, after which the kids would be invited to see a puppet show which usually ended the party.

Both Sanderson girls were pretty, but quite dissimilar in looks and temper: Tanya had brown eyes and dark curly hair like her dad, while Alexa was blonde with blue eyes like her mother. Tanya was skinny and tall; Alexa was a sweet, plump toddler; with dimples in her cheeks and knuckles. Tanya was a naughty, mischievous little rascal: she would pinch Alexa’s arm when nobody was watching, and she was very sneaky about it. Of course, Stephanie would spank her whenever she caught her, but it made no difference - she continued to pinch her sister’s arm. (In 1969, spanking was considered acceptable as a corrective to misbehavior.)

Thanks to English child-rearing practices, the girls were never sick - they didn’t even have runny nose; and the practices were harsh: each evening, after taking a bath in a bathroom heated only by a small electric heater turned on only for this occasion, they would run barefoot to their bedroom, which seemed to be the coldest one in the whole house. Thankfully, the nanny always put hot water bottles in their beds, so the sheets were not icy cold or damp when they got in. In fact, nobody in that house went to bed without a big mug of hot cocoa and a hot water bottle; it was a ritual. 

Although we did not talk much, Mrs. Sanderson gave me the impression that she liked me. She had a small greenhouse in the corner of the garden where she grew primroses; once or twice she potted some for me and brought them to my bedroom. She was kind and considerate: once she caught me crying. She asked me if I was homesick, but I told her no, I just could not stand the coldness of the house any longer. She drove to the village right away, and bought an electric heater for my room!  Also, when she learned that there was another au pair living nearby, she drove me to her house, so we could get acquainted. Antonietta, an Italian girl, was about my age. I enjoyed her company and we actually did get along, although my English was very limited at that time, and we had almost no conversation. Mrs. Sanderson bought me a bicycle, so I could visit my new friend on my own; she also arranged for me to  attend English classes with Antonietta at Oxford. This caused inconvenience for both families, because we were coming back late in the evening, and someone, usually Mr. Sanderson (already in his pajamas, bathrobe and slippers) as I lived deeper in the country than Antonietta did, had to pick us up from the bus stop. I could sense that Stephanie, the nanny, was jealous of all the attention I was getting. Suffice it to say that when Mrs. Sanderson raised my allowance, she begged me not to tell Stephanie.  

In spite of being pampered by the Sandersons, I decided to abandon them in favor of a more suitable educational and cultural environment, namely Westminster College in Oxford (but that's another story for another time). Have I ever regretted leaving them? Well, not really, at least - not until recently. Put it down to a change of perspective that comes with age, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them. I keep wondering what became of the family. Did the marriage last? Mrs. Sanderson would be seventy something by now. And the little girls, who are they today? They must be around fifty and probably have their own grown-up children. I’ve been trying in vain to recall the address of the place, to track the house down on Google maps, but no luck yet. Surely the lovely English cottage which dates back to the 16th century should be photographed, and shown to the world! It seems to me that the house, by hiding itself from me, is taking revenge on me for not saying a proper goodbye to its inhabitants, for leaving without looking back. In my defense I can only say that I was not ready to appreciate it all then. Today I would be wiser. 

How I remember it

We all remember the most important events in our lives, the unforeseen ones in particular. Just like people, nations too have such memorable moments in their history: each generation as a whole has witnessed a number of unanticipated, shocking incidents which have engraved themselves into its memory. We all share many common memories, despite the fact that we have never met. In a sense shared memories unite people all over the world. 

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     Take the assassination of John F. Kennedy as an example: everyone who lived in the United States or elsewhere - within reach of Western news - at that time vividly remembers November the 22nd, 1963. The Americans were aghast and devastated, and nearly the entire world was stunned. The assassination itself was not broadcast, but the funeral was transmitted by satellite to many countries, the Soviet Union included.  I was twelve at the time living in Poland, and the event barely registered in my young consciousness, which might partly have been due to our not owning a T.V.  In the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, people from all over the world, including children, wrote to Mrs. Kennedy and her children expressing sympathy and respect. The next fall, when we moved to another town, a girl at my new school - presumably wishing to win my friendship - showed me the response card which she had received from the White House: Mrs. Kennedy is deeply appreciative of your sympathy and grateful for your thoughtfulness. Even without the signature of Jacqueline Kennedy, it made a deep impression on me. It came from afar, from the forbidden land (the Communist point of view). It was hard for me to imagine that a Polish schoolgirl’s letter had been able to get through a crack in the Iron Curtain, travel far beyond the horizon of our world, and land on a desk in the White House – amazing.  Thus the tragic death of the American President had caused a small miracle. This fact imbued me with a feeling of inexplicable hope. The condolence letter which my schoolmate (today a retired teacher) wrote over fifty years ago resides now at President Kennedy's library, among hundreds of thousands of similar letters. And when I think back to the death of J.F.K, I see, invariably, two pictures: the black letters of Mrs. Kennedy’s response card, and the small, appealing boy on his third birthday, saluting his assassinated father’s casket.

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     Now, take the landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969. That day (or rather that night since the landing was in the wee hours of the morning in Europe) I remember clearly; I was taking English classes at Westminster College in Oxford with ten or so other European teenage girls, and working there as a waitress – known as a “Dining Hall Girl”. We were living on the premises: each had a small bedroom furnished with a single bed, covered with a pink chenille embroidered bedspread, an old-fashioned dresser with a mirror, a tiny oak desk, and a sturdy folding chair. There was a common washroom with bathtubs each enclosed in its own wooden surround. We also had at our disposal a large common room equipped with armchairs and a coffee-table, a black and white television set, an upright piano, and a sewing machine. (The latter inspired me to make my own clothes with the help of sewing patterns which I used to buy at Marks & Spencer and Woolworth.)  Black and white television sets were standard then, and few people owned or rented a color T.V. When off-duty, we used to watch episodes of “Dad’s Army” - a B.B.C. sitcom about the Home Guard during the Second World War. It was a brilliantly humorous comedy which even today still makes me laugh.

     The evening of the landing we all gathered in our lounge to watch the B.B.C.  We nodded and smiled as the sounds crackled from the television, but none of us applauded nor cheered when Neil Armstrong spoke. I guess we did not grasp the importance of this “giant leap for mankind”. I must confess that as a passionate reader of the Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem’s novels, I felt deeply disappointed, as I expected the astronauts to truly explore the Moon, and not just take “one small step for Man”.

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The next memorable and sensational event which caused great public interest on the world stage was the election in 1978 of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II - the first non-Italian pope (which was repeatedly emphasized by the media) since the Dutch Adrian VI, who reigned for only one year, from 1522 to 1523. Karol Wojtyła was elected on October the 16th. Being a somewhat “unconnected” person, who rarely read newspapers, listened to the radio or watched T.V., I would certainly have overlooked the event had it not been for an old boyfriend, a journalist, with whom I was having a short romantic interlude. He served me the news along with our morning coffee: “I’ve just heard on the radio that Cardinal Wojtyła has become Pope. Can you imagine?” I just shook my head in a lame attempt to hide my ignorance; I knew nothing about Cardinal Wojtyła at that time, and did not care about popes. I sank into reverie trying to figure out why it did matter or whether it did?

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I spent the summer of 1980 with my friend Ola in Edinburgh. We lived in a remote part of town, sheltered by kindly young teachers, but the majority of our time we spent at the house of a couple who owned a trendy restaurant downtown with murals of rural scenes, which my friend had painted the previous year. This summer, they were employing her to paint rural scenes to complement the murals on an old wardrobe and on a wooden pail; the pail would serve as an umbrella stand.

The summer of 1980 was not a fun summer: the United States and some other countries boycotted the Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Polish shipyard workers were on strike - which aroused interest around the world, and, of course, met with strong disapproval in Russia. My Scottish friend, Graeme, travelled to Moscow to see the games. Back in Edinburgh, he told us about the extremely hostile reception of a Polish pole vault jumper by Soviet spectators, who booed him and whistled at him. Having just secured his gold medal, Kozakiewicz made his Bras d’honneur (an elegant French name for an obscene gesture which carries the same connotation as giving someone the finger) defying the Soviet crowd which later made him famous.  During the Olympics, on July the 24th, 1980, the legendary Soviet actor and a singer-songwriter, Vladimir Vysotsky, died of a heart attack. Graeme saw the sad crowds in front of Moscow's Taganka Theater and tried, without success, to buy Vysotsky’s record in the Soviet Union.  (He did buy the record later in Paris, where he stopped on his way back.)

I followed the events in the Gdansk shipyard which my artist friend Ola found upsetting: she was sure it was going to end in bloodshed. I didn’t blame her, as developments boded nothing good for the shipyard workers. On the last day of August, our last day in U.K., just as we were on the gangplank in Harwich boarding a ferry to Hoek van Holland, some harbor workers who must had guessed where we were from (how? they heard us speaking and recognized the language?) shouted to us from below: “Hey, they signed the agreement! The Polish shipyard workers won!” We waved to them happily.

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     Then there was the assassination attempt on the Pope’s life on Wednesday the 13^th of May, 1981, the shocking and incomprehensible act of a Turkish hired killer. While John Paul II was fighting for his life in the Gemelli hospital, people from all over the world were praying for his recovery, and the Poles were dying of anxiety. “If he dies, we’re busted” I told my mother. It was obvious that without the Polish Pope, our fragile Solidarity movement was doomed. The question that troubled us all was, who hired Ali Aǧca? The Bulgarian secret service on behalf of the Soviet Union's security agency, the K.G.B?  Probably nobody will ever know.  The Pope, luckily, survived, and we could all heave a collective sigh of relief - or so it seemed.

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     On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, an awkward person with a bizarre sense of humor, and Poland’s then leader, declared “a state of war”, which is the Polish version of martial law: he ordered the army and special police units to seize control of the country, apprehended Solidarity's leaders, and prevented all further union activity. Tanks and other military vehicles poured into Poland’s streets, a curfew was imposed, telephone lines were disconnected, and the country’s borders were sealed.

     Three weeks earlier, I had been traveling in Spain with my Dad. On the weekend of November the 20th, we witnessed a creepy and ominous spectacle: hundreds of nostalgic supporters of Franco gathered in Plaza San Juan de la Cruz - the only square in Madrid where a statue of Franco remained - to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death.  In the Falangista uniform of blue shirt with the crimson yoked-arrows insignia and a black lanyard looped over the shoulder, with fierce looks on their faces, the supporters performed the Roman salute (also known as “Heil Hitler”). Swastikas and other fascist symbolism was on display. This lasted one weekend: by Monday, the posters had been removed, and the streets swept; no sign remained.

     I could had stayed longer in Spain, or gone to Morocco, where my Dad lived and worked at the time, but I decided to cut my trip short because my then boyfriend, a Scot, decided to spend the coming Christmas with me in Poland. He booked his flight for Friday, December the 11th - so I rushed back. It was the beginning of December, and there were rumors that General Jaruzelski had been planning something. According to the radio Free Europe, the “evil empire” was getting impatient and even more evil… Presumably, the Soviet troops were moving toward our borders. All our conversation began with “Will they (meaning the Russians) enter?” It had seemed imminent.

      Graeme did not get there as planned: no planes landed in Warsaw on December the 11th - due apparently to a snowstorm. He finally did arrive late the next evening. We decided to spend the night at a mutual friend’s studio on the top floor of a prewar building at the corner of Mokotowska and Koszykowa streets in Warsaw, located by ironic coincidence next to the Solidarity office.

      I slept badly that night; some people were screaming on the street below. I took them for drunks. I thought that the bar at the corner was closing, and they got kicked out - hence the loud protests.   On Sunday, December the 13th, 1981, our artist friend was taking a shower, while the Scottish guest cooked his daily porridge on a small electric stove in the kitchenette next to the shower stall. Traditional porridge requires a lot of stirring - clockwise (for luck), and simmering for twenty minutes. Still in bed and bored with watching Graeme generating luck, I turned on the radio, which in a twist of fate happened to be tuned to the B.B.C.  The announcer - whose voice we heard with difficulty through the crackling static - was saying something about a “state of war”, and “civil war”.  It took me a good few seconds to realize, with horror, that he was talking about Poland. My response was that maybe a lack of sleep was playing tricks on me. I looked questioningly at Graeme, who by this time had stopped stirring his porridge, and with his hand suspended in midair, was listening to the news. The look of concern on his face assured me that I had not misheard. We were both dumbfounded.  Meanwhile our artist friend, happily unaware of what was going on, was singing in the shower…

      I tried to call my mother in Otwock, but the phone lines were dead. (We later learned they had been cut.) We went out onto the street. Helmeted riot police carrying shields and batons were blocking both ends of Mokotowska Street, and no one was allowed to enter the block. After showing his passport to the policeman, Graeme was allowed to go to the British Embassy “for instructions”. At the embassy he was told that the embassy could no longer protect him, and that he should leave Poland as soon as possible - which he did the next day on a charter flight to London, along with other foreigners. This is my memory of the introduction of martial law in Poland which had a dramatic  effect on our lives and forced nonconformists to choose “inner emigration”. Poles recall it with sadness and as a very dark period, even darker than the communism itself. (It was lifted, at least partially, in July, 1983.) 

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     The world remembers the 4th of June, 1989 mainly because of the Tiananmen Square massacre. One particular scene has stuck in the collective memory: the image of a lone man with a shopping bag in each hand, standing before a column of tanks.  (Apparently that picture was taken the next day, near the infamous square. To this day, we don't know what had happened to the Tank Man).   A Chinese friend later told me that when she heard the shootings, she took her two-year-old son and had walked for hours to get as far as possible from the centre of Beijing.

     On the same day, on the other side of the globe in another communist country, Poles were voting in their first free elections since the end of World War II. Watching with horror the events in China, we asked ourselves if the communists in Poland would reject the election results, and start shooting us, following the example of their Chinese counterparts. Provided with an official authorization for observing the elections issued by Solidarity, I sat at the election table at the designated polling station and made sure that the voting process was conducted  in an orderly manner. Later I helped to count ballots, and in the morning, the results were posted on the wall of the polling station.  There was quite a crowd studying the results in silence. The Solidarity candidates won, by an overwhelming majority.  “Is it going to be better now?” one elderly woman asked her son. “I don’t know, mom”, he responded. “But for sure it will be different.”

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     In October 1989, my husband and I drove from Poland to West Berlin to buy a computer. While we did not have much time for sightseeing, we managed a stroll on what is known as the most elegant street in Berlin - Ku'damm (Kurfürstendamm), and we walked to the infamous Berlin Wall, where we were able to look into East Berlin from a viewing platform.  It was late afternoon, almost sunset, when Ed took my photo with the Wall in the background. Evidently, this was not a popular spot for tourists nor  for locals - nobody else was there but us.  A week or two later, we were traveling in Peru with a small group of friends. One of them, a professor, read a newspaper every day, and it was he who told us about the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was hard to believe it had happened. 

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      I was in Poland when Diana, Princess of Wales  died on August the 31st, 1997. I don’t recall what I was doing when I first heard the breaking news about the tragic accident in a Paris tunnel, but I remember watching the funeral on TV.  And I remember that I sobbed loudly - to the astonishment of my mother and myself. Her life and death were like a romantic drama, like Erich Segal’s film “Love Story” or a soap opera. It felt as if the main goal of the scriptwriter of her life was to make it “cheesy” and bring the audience to tears. I was not the only person who cried in grief at her life’s foolish waste.

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     Then, of course, there are the September the 11th attacks: on the morning of Tuesday, September the 11th, 2001, I was driving to work listening to the music of the Bolivian-born artist Oscar Reynolds. My husband Ed and I had recently been on a trip to New Mexico, where we had come upon Mr. Reynolds playing the pan flute in a small outdoor restaurant in Santa Fe. This music invariably brings good memories of the best vacation of my life, which was in Peru, where I fell in love with many things, the pan flute among the others, so we stopped in to listen. I was charmed by the Bolivian artist and his trio. In Oscar’s music there was longing, there was wistfulness, and there was joy there too.  I had met someone who, I sensed, felt the same as me - and that is a rare event. I would have stayed with him for the rest of my life if I could have. Alas, it was not to be, so I only bought his CD’s and left. Driving from Cupertino to San Jose on September the 11th and listening to Oscar Reynolds’ music, I was overcome with a longing for something I could not name, but I also felt joy in being a software engineer. It was in this mood that I arrived at work. I noticed, though not right away, that the atmosphere was different, and the people seemed quieter than normal; they were whispering to one another. I overheard my colleague saying, “One plane is still in the air”. I plucked up the courage to ask, “Was there a plane crash today?” My colleagues looked at me in boundless amazement: “You don’t know anything? Don’t you listen to the radio?” And they told me about the four hijacked planes, three of which had already slammed into the World Trade Center in New York and in the Pentagon. One was still unaccounted for …

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      I was driving to the cobbler’s to get my shoes fixed in Tualatin, Oregon, where I live, on the morning of the 2^nd of April, 2005 when I heard about Pope John Paul II’s death on the radio.  I couldn't help but shed a tear on behalf of my compatriots who loved him dearly, regardless of what the world was saying about him (that he was conservative). Polish people have always understood that it is “better to die on your feet than live on your knees”.  He had given us the strength to get up, to battle communism. He had helped us regain our pride and dignity as a nation. Without him we would never have made it as far as we had.  For this, we should always remember him and be grateful to him.

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      Out of these ten milestones, five were uplifting: the landing on the Moon, the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II, the victory of the Polish shipyard workers (Wałęsa and Solidarity), the first free elections in Poland, and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the last four are linked together. It is true that liberals and feminists in the U.S. and elsewhere had different hopes of the Polish Pope than what turned out to be the reality, but if it weren’t for the Polish Pope, there would not have been a Solidarity movement, and without Solidarity, there would not have been free elections in Poland, which in turn led to the fall of communism, and without the fall of communism in Poland, the Berlin Wall would have stood much longer.  It was a domino effect. And if one thinks of it, the landing on the Moon had a political aspect too which was to humiliate the Soviets. It appears that everything I remember had some political impact. It is puzzling - for a person who claims to have a lack of interest in politics.  

            You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories. - Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, a Polish poet and aphorist 

Pani Kominkowska

Gdy w miejscowej gazecie przeczytałam zapowiedź wizyty w lokalnej bibliotece  osoby, która przeżyła getto łódzkie i Oświęcim, pomyślałam, że nie wolno mi przepuścić tego spotkania. 

Z wielu powodów. Jednym z nich mógł być fakt, że mój dziadek,  Mieczysław Wiliński, został zamordowany w Oświęcimiu. Od lat próbuję odtworzyć w myślach jego ostatnie miesiące życia, opierając się na wspomnieniach ludzi, którzy tam byli. Myślę jednak, że to wzmianka o Łodzi podziałała na mnie najsilniej. Urodziłam się w Łodzi, w mieście, z którym moja rodzina była związana od początku lat dwudziestych ubiegłego stulecia. Urodziłam się na Bałutach, w centrum dawnej dzielnicy żydowskiej, w przedwojennym szpitalu Kasy Chorych przy ulicy Łagiewnickiej. Szpital ten w getcie istniał tylko do 1 września 1942 roku, potem pacjentów zamordowano, a budynek zajął zakład krawiecki szyjący mundury dla wermachtu. Po wojnie utworzono tam znowu szpital, szpital położniczy. Tam, gdzie kilka lat wcześniej ludzie umierali straszną śmiercią - z głodu, tyfusu czy od kuli - teraz przychodziły na świat dzieci, którym pisany był lepszy los.

Na spotkanie z Miriam Kominkowską-Greenstein przyszłam dwadzieścia minut przed czasem. Sala była już wypełniona po brzegi i personel biblioteki pośpiesznie donosił krzesła. Wyraźnie nie przewidziano takiej frekwencji. Przy stole siedziała kobieta na oko siedemdziesięciopięcioletnia (w rzeczywistości dziesięć lat starsza), a obok niej leżał pokaźny stos zielonych tomików. Z anonsu w gazecie wiedziałam, że pani Greenstein opisała swe wojenne przeżycia w książce In the Shadow of Death; A Young Girl’s Survival In the Holocaust (W Cieniu Śmierci; Historia dziewczynki, której udało się przetrwać Holokaust), którą będzie można nabyć przy okazji spotkania z autorką. Zaznaczono, że dochód ze sprzedaży zostanie przeznaczony na  konserwację Oregon Holocaust Memorial.  Kupiłam książkę i, podając ją autorce do podpisania, pochwaliłam się: “Wie pani, ja też jestem z Łodzi.” “Ja tam byłam tylko w getcie, więc Łodzi dobrze nie wspominam” - padła cierpka odpowiedź. Poczułam, że popełniłam nietakt. “Mam coś, co chciałabym Pani dać” - bąknęłam zmieszana. “Nie teraz, może później, po spotkaniu” - powiedziała to tak, jakby chciała powstrzymać mnie przed popełnieniem następnej niezręczności.

Kiedy niskim, nieco schrypniętym głosem zaczęła opowiadać swą historię, w sali zapanowała absolutna cisza. Najpierw mówiła o swym polskim wczesnym dzieciństwie, przeżytym w miasteczkach takich jak Radziejów, Aleksandrów Kujawski, Lubraniec, a jeszcze wcześniej w Sompolnie, gdzie urodziła się pod koniec 1929 roku i gdzie Kominkowscy należeli do starych zasiedziałych rodzin. Jej dziadek, Menahem, był tam właścicielem tartaku i dużego domu przy rynku. Jej ojciec, Zalmen, trudnił się handlem drewnem - zabawom dziewczynki na świeżym powietrzu towarzyszył przyjemny żywiczny zapach tarcicy. Wiedli w tych miasteczkach tryb życia typowy dla średnio-zamożnych, w miarę zasymilowanych, Żydów, przeplatany religijnymi świętami obchodzonymi w gronie rodziny -  licznych wujków, cioć, przyrodniego rodzeństwa.  

Latem 1938 roku rodzice Marychny, jak ją wówczas zdrobniale nazywano, przeprowadzili się do Aleksandrowa Kujawskiego, by być bliżej dziadków Jakubowskich, rodziców jej mamy. Niedługo potem przez Aleksandrów Kujawski przewinęły się setki niemieckich Żydów uciekających na Wschód. Ich pełne zgrozy opowiadania o prześladowaniach, jakich doznali w Niemczech, sprawiły, że rodzice Marychny zaczęli gorączkowo starać się o wyjazd do Australii. Nic z tych starań jednak nie wyszło wobec nader skromnego kontyngentu wiz australijskich dla uchodźców żydowskich. Wiosną 1939 roku przeprowadzili się do Lubrańca w nadziei, że w razie wojny będzie tam bezpieczniej niż w leżącym na skrzyżowaniu linii kolejowych Aleksandrowie. 

  Dzieciństwo Marychny urozmaicały rodzinne wyjazdy do Ciechocinka i do historycznego Torunia. W Ciechocinku piło się uzdrawiające wody mineralne i jadło pyszną zupę wiśniową, a wieczorami słuchało koncertów. Z Torunia Miriam zapamiętała szerokie bulwary ocienione drzewami, liczne kawiarnie na świeżym powietrzu, tramwaje, eleganckie wystawy sklepowe, przestronne, luksusowe mieszkanie wujostwa, bo wuj Adolf był wziętym adwokatem, którego klientelę stanowili głównie Niemcy.

Słuchając Miriam, pomyślałam, że przedwojenna małomiasteczkowa Polska z jej wspomnień znacznie się różni od apatycznej, zaniedbanej Polski, w której wychowywałam się po wojnie, choć geograficznie były to te same okolice. Czy rzeczywiście przedwojenna Polska była taka wytworna, tętniąca życiem?  Czy może po prostu kraj utracony wspomina się z większą nostalgią od tego, który opuściliśmy z własnej woli?

  Jej dzieciństwo nie skończyło się w dniu wybuchu wojny. Mimo drastycznie ograniczonej wolności (w Lubrańcu Żydzi mogli swobodnie poruszać się po mieście tylko przez jedną godzinę dziennie), rodzice dokładali wszelkich starań, by zapewnić dziewczynce w miarę normalne życie. Miała wtedy dziesięć lat i ukończone trzy klasy szkoły podstawowej. Ponieważ dzieciom z rodzin  żydowskich zabroniono chodzić do szkoły, znaleziono dla niej nauczyciela, który w domu uczył ją angielskiego, geografii, rachunków i pisania. Odwiedzała koleżanki z rodzin katolickich w ich domach, jeździła z nimi na sankach. Wielkanoc ’41 roku spędzili u zaprzyjaźnionego z ojcem zawiadowcy stacji, który na jego prośbę zgodził się wziąć Marychnę do siebie i udawać przed sąsiadami, że jest jego osieroconą siostrzenicą. Dziewczynka jednak nie chciała słyszeć o rozstaniu z rodzicami. Niebawem wszystkich zdolnych do pracy Żydów z Lubrańca, w tym jej ojca, wywieziono do obozu pracy w Poznaniu. Jeszcze wtedy nie wiedziała, że już go nigdy nie zobaczy. Jesienią tego samego roku pozostałe w miasteczku rodziny żydowskie, wśród nich ona, jej mama i dziadkowie, zostały wywiezione do getta w Łodzi, noszącej od ’41 roku obcą i złowrogo brzmiącą nazwę Litzmannstadt. 

Przypuszczalnie jesienią ’41 roku do drzwi mieszkania mojej babci w Łodzi  przy ulicy Wierzbowej zapukał mężczyzna z zawiniątkiem pod pachą. Domyślam się, że mieszkał gdzieś w sąsiedztwie i znał moją babcię, nie wiem jednak tego na pewno. Podał babci zawiniątko, w którym był zielony kwadratowy dywanik z hebrajskimi literami i obrazkiem świątyni, lusterko z rączką w grubej srebrnej oprawie i chyba jeszcze coś, ale co - tego już nikt nie pamięta. “Czy może mi pani to przechować? - poprosił. - Teraz musimy stąd iść, ale po wojnie zgłoszę się po te rzeczy.” Jakieś pół wieku później spłowiały już zielony dywanik padł ofiarą moli i został wyrzucony na śmietnik, ale lusterko, choć zmatowiało, opierało się upływowi czasu. Patrząc na nie, odnosiłam wrażenie, że ono czeka. Babcia zawsze mówiła, że powinnyśmy je oddać. Tylko komu? 

W łódzkim getcie Marychna została przydzielona do sierocińca, gdzie natychmiast ciężko zachorowała. Nie znając jidysz, nie potrafiła porozumieć się z innymi dziećmi, co tylko pogłębiło jej poczucie wyobcowania w tym nowym miejscu. Na szczęście matka znalazła dla nich kąt w jakimś bardzo zatłoczonym pokoju i zabrała ją stamtąd. Dziadek, mama i ona, jak tylko skończyła dwanaście lat, pracowali w fabryce. W szczelnie odizolowanym od aryjskiego świata getcie, rządzonym żelazną ręką Chaima Rutkowskiego, praca była warunkiem koniecznym przeżycia. Dziewczynka za dzienną miskę cienkiej zupy i kawałek chleba lakierowała i polerowała w pocie czoła stoły, szafy i krzesła w fabryce mebli. 

W pierwszej połowie września 1942 roku, niedługo potem, jak wymordowano pacjentów szpitala na Łagiewnickiej, by zamienić go w warsztat krawiecki, miała miejsce wstrząsająca akcja wywiezienia z getta małych dzieci i osób starszych, tzw. Wielka Szpera. Miriam przeczekała tę akcję schowana pod dachem domu, w którym mieszkali, ale babcia Helenka i dziadek Zygmunt Jakubowscy podzielili tragiczny los piętnastu tysięcy Żydów wywiezionych do obozu zagłady w Chełmnie nad Nerem. Wraz z utratą dziadków skończyło się definitywnie dzieciństwo Marychny. Jej mama, do tej chwili dzielna i przedsiębiorcza, tak się załamała, że dziewczynka wzięła na siebie rolę jej opiekunki.

Fabryka mebli, w której obie pracowały, funkcjonowała do końca istnienia getta. 29 sierpnia 1944 roku z getta łódzkiego wywieziono do Oświęcimia ostatnią grupę Żydów wraz z Chaimem Rumkowskim i jego rodziną. W tym transporcie znalazła się również Miriam i Ruta Kominkowskie. W Oświęcimiu Miriam, po krótkim pobycie w podobozie A, została brutalnie rozdzielona z matką. Tak jak ojca, nigdy już miała jej nie zobaczyć. Od tej chwili też musiała sobie radzić sama. 

Na przełomie jesieni i zimy znalazła się w Bergen-Belsen. Tu wraz z innymi młodymi więźniarkami spała w namiocie na słomie rozrzuconej na ziemi, zmagając się z zimnem i głodem. Zamarzłyby pewnie na śmierć, gdyby nie to, że któregoś dnia zostały wysłane do obozu w Magdeburgu, gdzie zastały znacznie lepsze warunki: drewniane budynki, prycze wymoszczone sianem, koce. Ceną za te “luksusy” była praca - w ich przypadku obieranie gór ziemniaków w piwnicy stołówki fabrycznej. Choć trafiła na litościwą strażniczkę, które wybrała do tej pracy najmniejsze i najchudsze spośród nich, by ukradkiem je dokarmiać, Miriam straciła zupełnie siły, zachorowała. Niemiecki lekarz stwierdził gruźlicę i skierował ją do szpitala. Stamtąd została odesłana z powrotem do Bergen-Belsen. Znowu chłód i głód, a w końcu tyfus z przeciągającymi się utratami przytomności. W taki stanie, na granicy życia i śmierci, dotrwała do wyzwolenia obozu przez Brytyjczyków 15 kwietnia 1945 roku. 

Zaczęto ją ratować. Przeżyła - trochę dzięki lekarzom brytyjskim, trochę dzięki troskliwej opiece Zosi (Polki, która szybciej od niej stanęła na nogi i cierpliwie ją doglądała w szpitalu), głównie jednak dzięki swej nieugiętej woli przetrwania. Choć miała już piętnaście lat, ważyła niewiele ponad dwadzieścia kilogramów i wyglądała na dziecko. Po prawie półrocznej rekonwalescencji w Szwecji, na skutek usilnych starań wujka Mońka w Portland w Oregonie, Miriam otrzymała potrzebne dokumenty na wyjazd do Stanów Zjednoczonych. Popłynęła z Norwegii pierwszym powojennym rejsem SS Stavangerfjord.

W Portland w Oregonie, gdzie mieszka do dziś, zdobyła wykształcenie, wyszła za mąż, urodziła cztery córki. Nie opowiadała bliskim o swych wojennych losach, głównie dlatego, że nikt jej do tego nie zachęcał. Wręcz przeciwnie, zaraz po przyjeździe do Ameryki usłyszała, że nie powinna rozpamiętywać przeszłości. Żyła więc pełnią życia i starała się zapomnieć. I może by się to jej udało, gdyby pewnego dnia, w 1970 roku, nie odebrała telefonu od mężczyzny zbierającego fundusze na Amerykańską Partię Nazistowską. Mężczyzna ów, dowiedziawszy się, że jego rozmówczyni jest Żydówką i nie zamierza wspomagać jego partii, obrzucił ją obelgami i groźbami. Wtedy przeszłość do niej wróciła, zaczęła prześladować ją w koszmarnych snach i nie dawała się już zapomnieć. 

13 listopada 1988 roku w Portland, skądinąd miłym i bezpiecznym mieście, skini zamordowali z pobudek rasistowskich studenta z Etiopii. Wtedy Miriam poczuła, że nie wolno jej dłużej milczeć. Zaczęła opowiadać o swoich przeżyciach wojennych w szkołach, by uświadomić młodym ludziom do jakich niewyobrażalnych nieszczęść prowadzą uprzedzenia rasowe, religijne i kulturowe. Przyczyniła się do powstania Oregońskiego Pomnika Holokaustu w Portland, odsłoniętego 29 sierpnia 2004 roku. W grupie innych Ocalałych z Zagłady odbyła podróż do Chełmna, Treblinki, Sobiboru, Bełżca, Majdanka i Oświęcimia-Brzezinki po symboliczne garstki ziemi z prochami żydowskich ofiar obozów śmierci. Na prośbę córki spisała i wydała drukiem swoje przeżycia. Książka Miriam Kominkowskiej-Greenstein nie jest znana w Polsce. Mam nadzieję, że historia dziewczynki, której udało się przetrwać Holokaust, trafi kiedyś do rąk polskich czytelników. Powinna.  

Po zakończonym spotkaniu jego uczestnicy ustawili się w długiej kolejce po książkę. Podpisując ją, Miriam sprawiała wrażenie już bardzo zmęczonej. Nie byłam pewna, czy zechce jeszcze ze mną rozmawiać. Gdy zostało już tylko kilka osób, które chciały jeszcze ją o coś spytać, podeszłam i podałam jej zapakowane w bibułkę srebrne lusterko. Pokrótce opowiedziałam jego historię. “Właściciel tego lusterka nigdy się po nie nie zgłosił, więc oddaję je Pani.” Wychodząc z biblioteki, pomyślałam, że spełniłam nie tylko życzenie mojej babci, ale może nawet wolę nieznanego właściciela lusterka. Kim był? Pewne pytania muszą pozostać bez odpowiedzi. 

  Mirror

The mirror is medium-sized and round, in a thick Art Nouveau silver frame, carved with a simple floral design. It is heavy, yet shapely, and neat. It seems to ask to be taken up and looked into...

While contemplating the blurred reflection of my face, I cannot help wondering how many women before me (and perhaps men too) have meditated upon their looks in this mirror. Who did it belong to before it was given to my grandmother for safekeeping at the end of the summer of 1940? All I know is that a  Jewish man knocked at my grandmother’s door in Lodz, handed her a bundle wrapped in brown paper, and pleaded: Can you hide it for me? We’ve got to go now, but we’ll come back after it is over. The package contained a thick green Jewish prayer rug with four Hebrew letters woven into it, along with the image of a temple, and this silver hand mirror. The man never came back. Over the passage of the years, the mysterious letters and the temple faded, and the rug became threadbare, arousing too much interest from moths, so in the end it had to be thrown away. But the old mirror, although tarnished, had kept watch. Whose was it, then? Speak, Imagination. 

I can see it lying next to two brushes in similar silver frames on the dressing table of the Jewish stationer’s wife, from whose shop my mother, Lidia (a schoolgirl at the time) used to buy her notebooks, dipping pens, nibs and ink, always bargaining hard - of which she was terribly proud.  Or perhaps it had belonged to the wife of another Jewish shop owner, the haberdasher around the corner; his was my grandmother’s favorite place to buy white satin ribbons for my mother’s long braids. The “pasmanteria” these shops are known as, in Polish, from French word passementerie, meaning lacemaking, trimmings; dressmakers could buy all kinds of lace and trimmings there, buttons of every size and color, sewing needles and thread. Or it could have belonged to the wife of the nearby Jewish baker who was praised to the skies and still remembered after the war for his wonderful buttery rolls and challahs. Or maybe it was part of the dowry of  the Jewish grocer’s wife who sold fresh cream all day. Jews had played an important role in the pre-war Poland’s everyday life, and they dominated the retail trade; in Lodz, Jews made up about a third of the population.

Lodz  was a key industrial center in Poland; its first textile mills were built by German manufacturers in the 19th century. Jews who emigrated to Lodz mainly from Russian Poland (i. e., from Lithuania, Belarus and West Ukraine), established retail and other businesses, eventually breaking into textile manufacturing as well. The city became the “Polish Manchester”, as it was known as. The rapid industrialization of Lodz was depicted in the novel The Promised Land by Wladyslaw Reymont, the first Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It tells the story of three close friends: a Pole, a German, and a Jew,  struggling to build their factory there. 

My family, Poles with Austrian and Baltic German roots, came to live in Lodz during the Ukrainian–Soviet War of 1917–21 that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Before the sovereign Polish state - previously lost to Russia, Prussia and Austria - was reestablished in 1918, my maternal great-grandparents, their siblings and their children had lived in today’s Ukrainian cities and towns: Kiev, Odessa, Vinnitsa and Zhytomyr. There was a fairly large number of Poles living in Ukraine in the 19th century, especially in the territories that formerly belonged to Poland, the so-called Eastern Borderlands (or just Borderlands). My mother’s father, Mieczyslaw Wilinski, was born in Odessa in 1898; his mother, Maria Knoch was a Baltic Germans from Latvia or Estonia, but his father, Jan Wilinski,  was Polish. At the age of 20, Mieczyslaw joined the Denikin's White Army to fight the Bolshevik Red Army. My mother’s mother, Jadwiga nee Luckiewicz, four years younger than her future husband, was hiding with a group of people in the basement of the apartment house where she lived with her mother in Kiev, while Petliura’s troops were fighting both, the Bolsheviks and the Whites. (Petliura was the Ukrainian nationalist leader.) Some of the people in the basement supported the White Russians, some supported Petliura, and still others sympathized with the Reds. They would check who the current winner was, and only then would the one with the matching political convictions be sent to get food.  

The maternal side of my family’s documented history does not, however, start with Mieczyslaw shooting the Reds from the Denikin's armored train, nor with Jadwiga praying in the basement for a truce. It begins, in fact, three generations earlier with an Austrian textile merchant, Johann Gottlieb Grosse born in 1785, who decided to settle in Kiev and open a silk and fabrics shop on the city’s main street Khreshchatyk, alongside the most prestigious and expensive restaurants and hotels in Eastern Europe. In 1824 he married a 17-year- old named Marianna Paslawska. She was a Greek Catholic, he was a Lutheran Evangelical Protestant and was 39 years old at the time. They married in a Greek Catholic church in Chyrow, the Borderlands’ small town which at that time was part of the Habsburg Empire, and which remained in Austrian Galicia until late 1918. According to the marriage certificate, there were two witnesses present at  the church: Johannes Rebutycki and Joseph Zawichowski, both Poles, judging by their last names. In the early 1830’s, probably in Kiev, the Grosse’s son Karol was born. When he grew up, Karol took over the family business where his efforts apparently met with success, since he was able to marry a Russian countess, Eloiza Bezobrazova. There are two oval portraits in shiny black frames hanging in the living room in my mother’s apartment: Karol and Eloiza, both very handsome, dressed in heavy period clothes, are sitting in big carved chairs at a small oval table which is covered with an oriental carpet (like 17th century Dutch paintings). Karol and Eloiza Grosse had a daughter Jadwiga (my great-grandmother) who was born in 1863 in Kiev. She  died in 1954 in Warsaw, having outlived two husbands as well as two sons from her first marriage, which was to Waclaw Juniewicz. Her first son was born on May the 1st, 1888, in Starokonstantynov (in today’s Ukraine), and the second son, Kazimierz, was born a year later. Waclaw Juniewicz, a good-looking lawyer with a well-groomed Victorian handlebar mustache, accidentally cut his finger and poisoned himself with rat poison while browsing through some old documents in an archive. Some years later my great-grandmother remarried; her second husband, Stanislaus Luckiewicz, was an officer in the Tsarist army, who died  in 1916 from wounds sustained on the battlefield, leaving fatherless their two children: my grandmother, Jadwiga, who was only 14 at the time, and her 16 years-old-brother Stanislaus. (My grandmother was named after her mother, and her brother was named after his father.)

The revolution and the subsequent war changed Kiev and its main street Khreshchatyk beyond recognition. The people who had once lived there are long gone too. What remains of the family Grosse are small tokens: cabinet photographs in a heavy leather album with a brass lock, some jewelry, silver cutlery, several plates from various china sets, and a black ribbon with the name “Grosse” embroidered on it in gold thread. This had once served as their business  label, and was sewn on the fabrics they sold. The Grosse men from the old photographs are not very tall; they wear good woolen suits or the decorative uniforms of the Tsarist army and the then-mandatory mustaches - rather big ones - in accordance with the contemporary era's fashion.The women are of slender build, wearing perfectly tailored clothing, bracelets and earrings, with carefully groomed hair. Their long dresses are high-collared with puffed sleeves and ruffles and trimmings, and are adorned with small golden brooches. The women and their daughters also wear huge hats with lavish brims and ostrich feathers. The hats and clothes have not survived the Bolshevik revolution and two world wars (except for a pair of calfskin gloves and an ostrich feather), but some jewelry has. I have inherited several of the mementos, photographs and documents which were brought from Kiev to Lodz, where the family finally landed in 1920. We solicitously treasure these sentimental keepsakes, passing them from generation to generation, carring them over from place to place when we move, and treating them almost as holy relics. I am their guardian now. 

           Thus, the Lodz/Łódź (incidentally, the word łódź translates as  "boat" in English) of between the world wars was a multicultural melting pot of Poles, Jews, Germans, Russians, and even Czechs. The mosaic of languages, religions and customs created a uniquely accommodating atmosphere. If there were some antagonisms between Poles and Russians, some between Poles and Jews, some rivalry between German and Jewish factory owners, this did not disrupt the functioning nor the growth of the city. The factories were in full swing, some  owners prospering, while the others went bankrupt, and the workers - as always - struggled with the hardships of everyday life. In Lodz, the Wilinski family had lived a relatively comfortable life: my mother’s father, a law graduate and Polish Army officer, was working on documenting the two-year history of his regiment, my mother’s mother was enjoying the role of an elegantly dressed officer’s wife, and my mother’s religious grandmother spent a lot of time in church. My mother  attended a prestigious private schools for girls, and being linguistically talented, she became an outstanding Latinist.  As an officer, my mother’s father was entitled to an orderly, or ordynans (Ordonnanz in German), who, apart from his normal duties (which included pressing the officer’s uniform and shining his boots), gladly helped my grandmother to run the house. The Wilinski women spent their summers in the countryside, away from the hustle and bustle of the smoky city. 

This fairly predictable life came to an end in September, 1939, when the  country plunged into panic and chaos. My grandmother and mother left Lodz with my grandfather’s regiment, which had orders to retreat to Romania - but Romania closed its border just before they reached it. A few weeks later, my grandmother and my mother managed to return to Lodz. Meanwhile my grandfather, always fearless and emphatic, had joined the underground army in Warsaw. As a Polish officer who had not surrendered to the occupant, he had to vanish from Lodz, cover his tracks, and conceal his present whereabouts. 

Lodz became a German city then, and its name was changed to Litzmannstadt. My grandmother and my mother were evicted from their comfortable apartment to make room for a German family. They moved in with my maternal great-grandmother, then 77 years old, whom they left in Lodz when fleeing the city. Fortunately, the German family allowed them to retrieve some of their books, documents and souvenirs which the new family had no use for. My grandmother -  who had never worked before - got a job at a stocking factory (called “Kebsch’s”, after its German manager). My mother, then only 17 years old, and gifted in languages, found work at a luggage store, claiming that she could speak fluent German. Needless to say, both the stocking factory and the store had been requisitioned by the Germans from their Jewish owners. A similar fate befell the other Jews: the haberdasher around the corner, the baker who baked those buns which melted in my grandmother’s mouth, the grocer …

Jewish friends and acquaintances began to disappear from their life, begining with the Kleszczelski family. It was very difficult for my grandmother to come to terms with the loss of the dentist, Doctor Jozef Kleszczelski: in addition to having been his patient for almost twenty years, my grandmother had maintained cordial relations with his whole family; she knew his wife Maria well, as well as their daughter Liza, and their son, Doctor Arno Kleszczelski, a respected urologist in Lodz with a medical degree from the University of Vienna. Liza Kleszczelska was married to an American businessman, an explorer and inventor, Richard Mark Sieradski-Sherton. Perhaps the marriage was not a happy one, or for other reasons, Liza preferred to live in Warsaw rather than accompany her husband on his numerous trips to Brazil she preferred to live in Warsaw. The whole Kleszczelski family joined her there in 1940, and soon after, they all were sent to Auschwitz. Being an American citizen, Liza could have saved herself; she chose not to. She didn’t want to leave her family behind. She and her old parents perished without trace, as did millions of others, as did the unknown  mysterious Jew who brought my grandmother the silver handheld mirror for safekeeping. 

The war did not spare my family either: in 1942, my mother’s father, Mieczyslaw Wilinski, was arrested in Warsaw and sent to Auschwitz, as a reprisal for his clandestine military activities. Three month later, on February 16, 1943, he either died of typhus (according to the death notification mailed by the Auschwitz clerk), or simply was shot as a political prisoner. Shortly before that fateful date, a postcard arrived from Auschwitz, written in German and addressed to his fake aunt in Warsaw, a woman in the Polish resistance, in which Mieczyslaw asked for a woolen sweater, socks, a tooth brush, dental powder, and lard. He spoke fluent German, which perhaps explain why his profession in the camp documents was listed as a “translator”, not as jurist, nor as a Polish army officer.  

As we know, a handful of Jews did manage to survive the horrors of the war. In February 2015, I met Miriam Greenstein, nee Kominkowska, when she spoke about her Holocaust experiences in front of a large audience at the Public Library in Tualatin, Oregon, where I live.  She was only 10 years old when she found herself in the Lodz ghetto. She had lost all her family there, and in the concentration camps, except for one uncle who had emigrated to the United States  just before 1939, to marry an American. Thanks to him, Miriam has a few of her pre-war photographs, which she used to illustrate her book In The Shadow Of Death, A Young Girl’s Survival In the Holocaust. In one picture taken in the summer of 1939, she is riding with her father on a motorcycle; she reminds me of myself at that age: a chubby girl in a black school robe with a white collar and pigtails. I, too, have a picture of myself with my dad on a motorcycle. Although my photograph was taken 20 years later in a different little Polish town, they look like two takes of the same scene with a different set of actors. 

There is another peculiarity connected with this story: I was born in the old hospital located in the very center of what was the poor Jewish quarter before the war, which subsequently became the Jewish ghetto during the war. Every Jew in the Lodz ghetto had to work to get meagre food rations in return - children too, so the teenaged Miriam got a job at Moebelfabrik, a furniture factory, in the staining and polishing department. Miriam and her mother had to pass by that hospital on their way to work every day, or to the nearby market where one could try to barter goods (although it was forbidden in the Lodz ghetto) in order to purchase food.

Did the Jew who had entrusted his valuables to my grandmother also work at this factory? Did his wife? Or his children? Did they ever meet Miriam, by sheer accident?  Might they ever have exchanged a word - or at least a look? There were many factories  and workshops in the Lodz ghetto, so it is very unlikely, but not entirely impossible. I think that I have, in a certain sense, honored his intention, and his trust in my grandmother by giving his silver mirror to her; she is watching it for him now. 

In January, 1945, most of the German population fled the city in fear of the Russians. My grandmother and mother moved back into their pre-war apartment. They found there a lot of things there that were not theirs: among other things, the German family left behind two framed oil paintings which have always puzzled me. One is a portrait of a young girl with long brown braids reading a magazine; the girl is dressed in a blue school uniform tunic worn over a dress with a red tied bow. She is sitting with her back to a table covered in a white cloth; the clay pot with a white cyclamen on the table covered with white cloth brings to mind a country cottage, but she is too subtle and too neat to be a country girl. The painting is signed simply signed “S. Meisner”, with the illegible date, probably 1938. “Who was this girl, who was the painter?,” I used to ponder. I recently found out that Solomon Meisner was a Jewish portrait painter. He died in the Lodz ghetto in 1942 at the age of 56. How had the German family had acquired his paintings? Some questions must remain unanswered.