The Old Brown Suitcase (16 page)

THE OLD BROWN SUITCASE
tells the story of a young refugee named Slava whose experiences occur before, during and after the Second World War. The story crosses the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to North America.

Although her story begins some seventy years ago, it remains relevant today. Wars still continue to occur in many countries, and many governments still do appalling things to individuals and minority groups. Such horrors continue to cause people to leave their native lands and become refugees.

There may be a number of Slavas in your school or neighbourhood. They may have a different name, a different hair colour, a different language or country of origin than the girl in this book. Like Slava, however, they want to fit in, find friends, do well in school, and somehow overcome the weight of their painful past.

In order to understand these new arrivals, it helps to understand where they came from and the events that made them flee. If Slava’s story has moved or interested you, remember that each refugee has his or her own story that could fill its own book.

THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS BOOK

The Old Brown Suitcase
is a documentary fiction. Although several characters were invented and minor facts and names of places were altered slightly, the story is based on historical events that form the core of the author’s own experience. The following notes may clarify some parts of the story.

POLAND lies between Russia on its east side and Germany on its west. It was an independent republic when Germany invaded on September 1, 1939. The Polish army, ill-equipped to fight the efficient war machine of the Third Reich, fell apart after a few weeks of brave resistance. In 1945, at the end of the war, Poland was liberated by the Soviet Army.

WARSAW is the capital of Poland. Before the Second World War it was a beautiful city bustling with commerce, culture and night life. At the war’s end in Europe, in May 1945, Warsaw lay in total ruin. Its destruction was staged in three acts. During the German invasion, continuous bombing and shelling destroyed many buildings. In 1943, a large section of the city known as the Warsaw Ghetto was annihilated. Finally, after the Poles staged an uprising in August 1944, Hitler ordered Warsaw to be “levelled to the ground.” After looting everything of value, the Nazis divided the city into sections and systematically proceeded to destroy it. While this was happening, the Soviet Army remained on the other side of the Vistula River, cynically waiting until the uprising was crushed. The destruction included the burning of museums, theatres and archives that held irreplaceable documents and treasures of Polish culture. After the war ended, the people of Poland set about rebuilding their beloved city.

THE JEWS OF POLAND were a thriving community before the war. In the 1930s there were over two and a half million Jews in Poland, comprising approximately ten percent of the Polish population. Jewish society included both secular and religious Jews who were active participants in the business, the industrial and the professional affairs of Polish life. There were many Jewish citizens such as doctors, lawyers and engineers, who assimilated into Polish society through professional interaction with the Gentiles. Nevertheless, the majority were poor tradespeople and industrial workers who struggled to keep their families fed.

Once the Nazis established themselves in Poland, they began to persecute all Jews. They deprived them of their homes, businesses and professions. They forced them to do hard labour and menial tasks. They ordered them to wear arm bands with the Star of David. Most often these stars were yellow in colour. In Warsaw, however, they were blue. Jews suffered public humiliation and lynching. Then they were thrown into ghettos and deported to death camps where they were tortured, starved, gassed and burned. At the end of the war in 1945, only 30,000 Jews were left in Poland. These survived only by chance, by running, hiding in barns, villages, basements and attics. Some were fortunate to find kind Christian individuals who offered help with housing and food. The ones in the concentration camps of Poland, miraculously still alive at the end of the war, were rescued by the Russians.

THE WARSAW GHETTO (1939–1943) was sealed off in mid-November 1940. Some four hundred thousand Jews, thirty-seven percent of the Warsaw population, were forced to live in a space of about 3.5 square kilometres, or 4.5 percent of the city’s area. This area, decreed by the Nazis to become the Warsaw Ghetto, had been the Jewish quarter of the city before the war, where many Jews enjoyed a vibrant communal Jewish life. As more and more Jewish people were forced in from neighbouring towns and the countryside, the population of the Ghetto increased. Starvation, typhus and Nazi raids accelerated the death rate among the people with unbelievable speed. Then the deportations began, with thousands of Jews being sent to death camps. In April 1943, when the Germans decided to liquidate the Ghetto, a group of young Jewish fighters staged a brave battle against heavily armed German troops. The battle lasted for about a month. Afterwards the Germans sent the remaining handful of Jews to concentration camps, burned the Ghetto, and ordered destroyed whatever was left. The former Jewish quarter became a large field of rubble.

It was in the Warsaw Ghetto where the famous Janusz Korczak and his assistants looked after two hundred orphaned children. He was a pediatrician and a writer of children’s stories, who dedicated his life to orphaned children. Before the war, he organized both a Christian and a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, but was forced to move the Jewish one to the Warsaw Ghetto. One day Janusz Korczak, also known as Henryk J. Goldszmidt, his assistants and the children were forced out of the orphanage and sent to the Treblinka death factory where they were all murdered.

Adler, Stanislaw.
In The Warsaw Ghetto.
Transl. Sara Chmielewska Philip. Jerusalem: Yad-Vashem, 1982.

Frank, Anne. 1947;
The Diary of Young Girl.
The Definitive Edition. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Gutman, Yisrael.
The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943.
Transl. Ina Friedman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Hersey, John.
The Wall.
New York: Random House, 1988 (original publication in 1950).

Hyams, Joseph.
A Field of Buttercups.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968.

Kalman, Judith.
The Country of Birches.
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1998.

Kahn, Leon.
No Time to Mourn.
Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2004.

Korczak, Janusz.
Ghetto Diary.
New York: Holocaust Library, 1978.

Levine, Karen.
Hand’s Suitcase.
Toronto: Second Story Press, 2002.

Lifton, Betty Jean.
The King of Children: A Biography of Janusz Korczak.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.

Matas, Carol.
Daniel’s Story.
New York: Scholastic, 1993.

Schoenberner, Gerhard.
The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933–1945.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.

Watts, Irene. N.
Goodbye Marianne.
Toronto: Tundra Books, 1998.

Wiesel, Elie.
Night.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005 (original publication in 1960).

FILMS AND/OR VIDEOS

A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto
by Jack Kuper, 1991.

Korczak
by Andrzej Wajda, English subtitles, 1989.

Memorandum
by Donald Brittain (Canadian Film Board), 1965.

My Mother, My Hero
by Daniel Leipnik, 2002 (includes Lillian Boraks-Nemetz discussing her experience in the Ghetto).

Schindler’s List
by Steven Spielberg, 1993.

Uprising
by Jon Avnet, 2001.

The Warsaw Ghetto
(three documentary films) by Log-In Productions, 2005.

(The “video” section of the Google browser offers various short films on the Warsaw Ghetto).

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz was born in Warsaw, Poland, where she survived the Holocaust as a child. She was incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto for eighteen months, then hidden in Polish villages for the remainder of the war, under a false identity. After the war, Lillian and her family fled Poland to make their home in Canada. She graduated from St. Margaret’s School in Victoria then married, raised two children and returned to the University of British Columbia to complete her Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature. Lillian has written poetry and semi-autobiographical fiction, including two sequels to her award-winning novel,
The Old Brown Suitcase.
She lives in Vancouver and teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia’s Writing Centre.