Letter from my Father Read online

  The water was dark and deep. I could feel myself being dragged down, drowning. I wondered who would miss me. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again? But it was not my time. My dress caught on an underwater branch. Some boys playing nearby saw and heard me and formed themselves into a chain. The first one grabbed my hand and they pulled me up the bank, through a huge patch of nettles which stung my skin and made it burn. Soaked, frightened of what would happen and in pain, I cried all the way home. And what about my red ribbon? Now the river bank became not a playground, but a threatening place.

  I loved taking care of the stray cats which roamed around the meadows near the river. I looked after them one at a time. I stroked them and fed them and waited to see them grow. But they died, one after another. After each death I organised a burial and a funeral ceremony. I liked to put flowers on their graves. Then there were so many funerals that it all became too much. I decided that I hated cats.

  It was time for me to go to school. This part of Poland now belonged to the Soviet Union and the language spoken at the school was Russian. My classroom was a bare room with wooden desks set in straight rows with a blackboard in front for the teacher. Above the teacher’s desk was a large picture of our batko (father) Stalin. He gazed down kindly on us. He seemed to have a twinkle in his eye and I liked his bristly moustache. We knew that he loved children since we had seen many films in which he stood high up on a platform surrounded by other important Russians, watching the parade of young men, women and children marching in different formations into Red Square. I watched as one little girl came and gave him flowers and he lifted her up and kissed her. How I loved him! On 1 May, along with all my classmates, dressed in a short navy skirt and white blouse, I marched proudly carrying a little red flag and singing songs in praise of our batko Stalin. It was one of the best days of the year.

  Since I was now a big girl, I was allowed to walk by myself all the way to school, which was on the other side of the market-place. I felt very grown-up. I knew that my house was the pink building on the left side of the river just before the bridge, and every day I arrived home safely. But one day, I walked on and on until I realised that I had lost my way. I eventually found my way home. I did not tell anybody I had become lost so they would continue to believe I could be trusted like a grown-up.

  One thing that I knew, as did a classmate with whom I often walked to school: it was dangerous to walk in front of the building that housed the NKVD. The grown-ups had told me that they were the secret police. When we approached this building we would cross the street and walk on the other side for a while, before crossing back again. I smelled fear in the very air near that building. What if the NKVD found out about my aunties’ bread-rolls? Just by looking at me they might be able to tell I lived with them, and that would get the aunties into trouble. I understood that it was still important to hide certain things.

  After a few weeks Aunty Gita and Uncle Welo returned to Zbaraz. They wanted me back. Like most other Polishspeaking people in this part of Galicia, they were now going to be sent away to the main part of Poland. I was told that we were all going to a city called Bytom. The Einlegers had come back to fetch me since they would be going first with the aunties eventually following. But Aunty Erna and Aunty Susia had become fond of me and did not want to let me go.

  I felt I didn’t really belong to anyone. I was nobody’s child. Aunty Gita and Uncle Welo took my hand and pulled me in one direction, and the aunties held me by the other, pulling me the other way. I managed to stay with the aunties on the understanding that, when their turn came to go to Bytom, I would go back to living with the Einlegers. I was happy that the aunties would live close by.

  By the time we moved, it was spring 1945, around the festival of Passover, and we took some matzos with us to eat on the long, very crowded train journey to the west. We travelled in an old train that must have been used to transport goods or cattle. But it was exciting to look out the window as the train moved through towns that I could never have imagined. In Zbaraz there were no high buildings which lit up at night, no wide roads and no cars.

  I was seven-and-a-half years old when I arrived in Bytom. What would it be like going back to Gita and Welo? They welcomed me back with a big surprise: a new dress! It was red-and-white check with a white Peter Pan collar and I loved it. They had also bought a matching ribbon for my hair which was tied in a big bow and pinned to the top of my head at an angle. I loved to dress up. But I missed Zbaraz with its river and meadows.

  In Bytom we lived in a three-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a grey stone building on a busy city street. A wide wooden staircase led up from the street. We shared the apartment with another Jewish family, an older lady with her daughter Lusia and husband Janek and their niece Mucha. Her mother and father had also been killed by the Nazis. We were both orphans. They lived in two rooms and we had one bedroom for the grown-ups and an adjoining alcove where I slept. We all shared the kitchen and bathroom, the women cooking together and getting on well.

  My Uncle found a good job. Upper Silesia was a rich coal-producing region and Bytom was one of its major towns. He became head of the legal division of the mining department. At last he could save money for the future. However, since a job as good as this would still not be given to a Jew in Poland, even with the Nazis gone, he changed his name from Einleger to Gajewski. Now I was known as Ester Gajewski and again I needed to keep quiet about my real name.

  Mucha and I were the same age and became best friends. We talked about us having neither a mother nor a father, and about which aunty was kinder to us, hers or mine. We agreed that my aunty and especially my uncle were better. They had given me a doll. I often heard them criticising Mucha’s aunty for being mean to her. I was so lucky to have them!

  Aunty Gita liked to make comparisons. She was determined that we must always rate as being better, since we came from an aristocratic Jewish family. This for her meant a family with many scholars. I was obliged always to be a bright, good girl living up to her expectations so that she would be proud I was her child – or at least her niece. I became skilled at noticing how she and my uncle as well as other grown-ups felt about me, sensing very quickly whether they were cross or happy and then changing my behaviour to please them. I did not want to get into trouble and could not bear anyone being angry with me.

  Mucha’s aunty and my aunty had new dresses made for a special occasion. We were going to celebrate our eighth birthdays together. The dresses were white with wide circular skirts, flounces and puffed sleeves. We had photos taken on our little balcony. One was of Mucha and me holding hands, with the other hand lifting the hem of our skirts, just like ballet dancers. The other picture shows Aunty and Uncle with me. His arm is around her and I am holding my doll and all dressed up, with a big bow on my head. I look pretty in the photo and I am smiling. But I didn’t do that often and I certainly didn’t laugh. Everybody said I was a very serious child.

  Mucha and I had the idea of buying some gelato for our aunties on Mothers’ Day, using money from the tiny amount we were given. We managed to smuggle two little glass dishes out of the apartment, walk to the shop, have our dishes filled with lemon and strawberry gelato and then walk home, proudly holding the dishes in front of us as we chatted. But we had not reckoned on the gelato melting. By the time we reached our door the dishes held only sweet liquid which did not look or taste very nice. And we had been so sure we were bringing a good present. We went quietly into our separate parts of the apartment to have a little cry.

  One day Janek from our house was travelling on a train with a large amount of money from trading on the black market strapped around his waist. Three young Polish men followed him all the way from the train to the door of our apartment. He was foolish enough to think that they would leave him alone once he got inside, but they forced their way in, pulled guns and ordered all the adults to lie on the floor. Fortunately Uncle was at work and Aunty out shopping. Then the hooligans locked Mucha and me in
the bathroom. They stole Janek’s money as well as all the jewellery they could find in the apartment, including the women’s wedding rings.

  In the midst of all this, Aunty arrived with her shopping. It included some eggs which the intruders examined carefully to ensure they were not bombs. They did not make her lie down on the floor since she presented herself as Pani (Mrs) Gajewski.

  In the bathroom, Mucha and I were whispering together about what we could do to save our families. I wasn’t as frightened as my friend and suggested that we should climb through the narrow bathroom window on to the ledge beneath and, by moving slowly along, reach the window of the adjoining apartment and get help. We would be the rescuers! The grown-ups would be so proud of us. I could see that this might be dangerous and that we risked falling to the ground, but despite feeling a tiny bit scared, I was ready to do it. At that moment Aunty opened the bathroom door and said it was safe to come out.

  The hooligans had left with the loot and instructions that nobody should move for an hour or they would throw a bomb into the house. The adults went on lying quietly. When Uncle came home, there was much talk about this Communist Poland not being a good place for us, even if we pretended to be Christian.

  One other thing convinced my uncle that we must get out of Poland as soon as we could. In July 1946, there was a pogrom in Kielce. Over forty Jews were attacked when a Polish eight-year-old claimed he had been kidnapped by Jews and kept in a cellar. Even though he had made this up, it was a good opportunity for many Poles to express their hatred of Jews through anti-Semitism. Aunty Gita was one day standing in a bread queue when she heard a woman say: Isn’t it good that they are killing Jews at Kielce? A pity Hitler did not finish them off. She came home crying and scared. This decided my uncle and aunties that we had to flee from the graveyard of Poland to the West, to freedom. The West was a place where you didn’t need to be afraid all the time and where it was fine to be Jewish.

  But how could we cross to the West, to the American zone of post-war Germany? I knew that what we were planning was illegal, because the Communists did not want people departing without permission. Illegal meant that it was against the law. But I was used to danger and anyhow, my uncle usually found the right thing to do.

  Our first destination on our big escape adventure was a city close to the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia called Moravska Ostrava. We stayed in a bare little apartment waiting for the right time to cross the border. I went to sleep, fully dressed for the following morning’s early departure. When I woke, it was very quiet. I ran to Aunt’s and Uncle’s bedroom but they were not there. They had disappeared. I ran around looking everywhere for them, my heart pounding wildly in terror and disbelief. But there really was no one there. I was all alone. I started sobbing. I had been left behind. Abandoned – again!

  Some time passed. Then a Czech lady came and told me that Aunty and Uncle had left to slip across the border by night. I would now be able to cross officially, accompanying her over the bridge at the border, pretending I was her niece. She had permission. Then I would meet my aunty and uncle on the other side.

  We approached the sentry stationed in the middle of the bridge. As the woman showed him her papers, I let go of her hand and ran ahead as fast as I could. When she caught up with me she scolded me and told me that what I had done was dangerous. I did not care. I was still often frightened and I needed safety, which now meant Aunty and Uncle.

  She took me to a place crowded with Jewish people who told me that it would not be too long before my family would arrive. Soon they did. They had crossed the river into Czechoslovakia in a little boat, with our few belongings bundled into bags. They were helped by young Jews calling themselves the Bricha, the Escape. I was angry with Aunty and Uncle, hurt and in shock. They did not seem to understand that they should have should have trusted me! They had treated me like a baby who might blab to others.

  For the next few weeks we stayed in Hlubatin, a refugee camp a short distance from Prague. There were many other people in the camp, all escaping to the West. I really liked it there. It was spring and the weather was mild and sunny. Though the shed we had been given as a shelter was small and uncomfortable, I could be Jewish again and that made me feel good. I met another girl who came from Sweden. Her Hebrew name was Hadasa, the same as my second name, but it had been shortened to Hedda. We were both eight years old.

  At the camp I was told about the Jewish people who wanted to set up a Jewish state in the land called Palestine. My aunty and uncle were Zionists, who very much wished for such a state. I became a Zionist too and read everything I could find about Palestine. A group of young men and women visited the camp on their way to Palestine. They wanted to live and work in and support their own country. In the late afternoon with the sun low on the horizon, all we refugees gathered in the courtyard and sang the rousing Hebrew song Techazakna (Strengthen Our Hands), to the accompaniment of a clarinet played by a musician. That song was absorbed deep into my heart.

  On special occasions, Uncle took me to Prague. We walked across the bridges lined with statues of famous people and climbed the hill to the Castle, the Hradczyn. I had never seen such beautiful buildings, many decorated with gold. And all those statues! The halls of the Palace were huge, especially Vladislav Hall into which horsemen could ride. My uncle told me the history of the city as we moved around it. I heard of kings and the Hapsburg Empire and battles with the Turks. He was the best teacher in the world.

  After three months we left Hlubatin and, at a place close to the Czech-German border, were bundled into the back of a lorry, told to be quiet and driven across to the West, to the American zone of Germany, controlled by the American army. We stayed at first in a transit camp, Rehau, set up by the Americans for people like us, Holocaust survivors and refugees escaping from Communism. The Americans were very kind to us, though we found some of their habits strange. For our first Western meal we were given condensed milk congealed on white bread. It tasted awful.

  Refugees like us were people who did not belong to any country. The Germans called it staatlos, which meant stateless. The Americans referred to us as Displaced Persons or DPs. We were people in search of a country, but displaced made us sound as if we were objects being moved around. I did not like it.

  IV

  New Parents

  Stuttgart, our home for the next four-and-a-half years, had been heavily bombed during the war and had streets and streets of nothing but rubble. The ruins were like those in Tarnopol but there were more of them. The city was in the American zone of West Germany. The American army had set up a DP camp for Jewish people in Reinsburgerstrasse, a long street in what had been a pleasant quarter of town. The German people who lived there were required to move to another part of the city. The DP camp was operated by UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Ad-ministration. My uncle talked a lot about their good work.

  The DP camp was like a little village. By this time I was eight years old and enrolled as Ester Kahane at the Bet Bialik School, named after the famous poet of Zion, Chaim Nachman Bialik. The camp also had a little hospital, a synagogue and a public canteen for the distribution of the food that was provided by UNRRA. The mothers and other ladies used what they were given to cook hot meals for the school-children every day. General Eisenhower, who headed the American Army, had ruled that those of us who were victims of racial, religious or political persecution were to be given a daily food ration of 2500 calories. This meant that we were properly nourished.

  My uncle liked to explain our situation in detail and I was eager to listen. The camp was being run by a group called the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Stuttgart. They set up a number of community groups to help the refugees return to leading normal lives. Normal to me meant not being frightened. They held elections for the committee and soon became part of a bigger organisation of liberated Jews calling themselves She’erit Hapleta, the Remnants of the Holocaust. They administered the camps with UNRRA and the Ameri
cans.

  Lots of things happened in Reinsburgerstrasse. There were adult education classes and a newspaper, Oif der Frei (Free Again). Music and plays were performed and Yiddish films shown. I loved Mirele Efros starring the famous Polish Jewish actress, Ida Kaminska. It told the story of an elderly Jewish mother who gives everything to her children. But they don’t appreciate it. They are cruel to her. When things go badly for them they invite her to her grandson’s Bar Mitzvah, and she initially refuses. Then she says resignedly gute Kinder, schlechte Kinder, aber Kinder. This meant that whether the children are good or bad, they are her children. Aunt Gita could not stop quoting it. My uncle said that Mirele Efros was like a Jewish King Lear. I really did not know who King Lear was.

  My school was situated in a three-storey apartment block halfway down Reinsburgerstrasse. It backed on to a little hill so that though the entry was at ground floor level, the first floor, where my classroom was, opened on to a raised garden. The floor above us was for the upper school. The top floor was also used by the Zionist youth group, Hashomer Hatzair, which trained older students to become pioneers and fighters for the state of Israel, Erez Israel. They were taught how to defend themselves. The Kulturhaus or community centre of the camp was in the school’s large hall which we used for assemblies.

  Most of the Jewish people living in the apartments on Reinsburgerstrasse were cut off from the newly denazified Germans. Denazified meant that people had their Nazi beliefs taken out of them. When we arrived, all the housing blocks were full, so orders were given that those Stuttgart households where a member had belonged to the Nazi Party now had to offer accommodation to the DPs.

  We were lucky. My uncle inspected some places and found one for us away from crowded, noisy Reinsburgerstrasse. We rented two rooms from a German couple whose villa was in a street lined with lilac trees, high up on a hill, Gebelsbergstrasse 28. We shared the bathroom and kitchen with them. At the back there was an orchard with cherry, plum and apple trees and white, pink and red rosebushes. The basement cellar was used for storing preserves.