Authors: Halina Wagowska
The Testimony (10 page)
Meanwhile a larger threat now loomed in the rising temperature of the Cold War. Military training was added to our school curriculum, and there were rumours of compulsory army service for eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds.
In early 1948 Max Farber, my legal guardian, was preparing to migrate to Israel with his wife and son. He said to me very bluntly, ‘Poland doesn’t want you, and you don’t want another war. Come with us.’ I was due to matriculate in July that year, and it seemed important to me to complete my secondary education. And so, with much trepidation, I rejected that kind offer.
This nameless boy occupied my mind for many months before I saw him. He was a patient in the Children’s Hospital in Lodz, and in the care of Dr Stella Wislicka. She and I lived in adjoining rooms in an apartment, and shared the kitchen. Almost every evening Stella talked to me about this boy—a kind of progress report. She was a petite, energetic lady in her mid-thirties, and a very bright and dedicated paediatrician. I was sixteen and still studying the condensed curriculum course at the special school.
The boy, aged between four and five, had been brought to the hospital, where he behaved just like a piglet. His history was later pieced together by a journalist, and that research allows me now to start at the beginning.
In the winter of 1941 a trainload of Jews from a small town in the south of Poland was travelling to a labour (or concentration) camp. The train got bogged down in the deep snow and, during the night, a woman escaped with her small baby. She walked to the nearest cottage in a nearby village and asked for asylum. The peasants, an elderly couple, refused because of the death penalty for harbouring Jews, and her footprints were clearly visible in the snow.
In the morning her frozen body was found near their doorstep. The six- or eight-month-old baby was still alive, covered in most of the mother’s clothes. The couple hid the child and reported the woman’s death to the authorities. They were too old to claim the child as theirs, and feared that someone in the village might ‘dob them in’ to the German commandant of the district. So they hid the baby in the pigpen.
Pigs were a valuable commodity in Poland, and were fed well—even by impoverished rural families. People used to say, only half jokingly, ‘Eat up your food or I’ll put sugar and cream on it and give it to the pigs.’ Thus the boy had access to good food, and was in a fair nutritional state when he arrived at the hospital.
Just how much of his time had been spent in the pigpen was not clear, but it must have been considerable because, some four years later, he still behaved like a piglet. Apparently he liked being with the pigs best. He walked and ran on all fours, did not speak but made squealing sounds and ate by slurping the food up. Stella was in charge of his rehabilitation or, as she called it, rehumanisation.
I now wish that I had taken greater notice of all the reports about him and memorised more details. But at the time there were many children, and adults too, emerging from often bizarre hiding places, learning to stand or walk or get used to daylight, to speak rather than whisper. I too, though not so acutely, found life at that time bewildering.
The details that I do recall are as follows: at first, those in charge tried to socialise him by putting him in a ward with other children. This failed, because the children thought it fun to copy him and run on all fours, put their faces into plates and slurp the food up. He ‘demoralised’ the other children, and so had to be isolated. He was restless and would not go to sleep unless able to snuggle to a warm body, so the nurses set up what they called a piggy roster. Each night they took turns to bare their midriffs and lie with him on the floor, snuggled up, until he was asleep. It had to be the floor because he kept falling out of a bed.
Many specialists in the hospital became involved in his rehabilitation. The dermatologist treated the very thick calluses on his hands and knees, which had sand and pebbles embedded in them. It had to be a very gradual process, and I think shaving and sandpaper were involved. Blood capillaries had grown into the thick skin and caused bleeding.
The physiotherapists made a sort of armour from plaster of Paris to straighten his spine, which had been distorted by his posture on all fours, and also to support him in an upright position. This too had to be done gradually because at first he often fainted when standing up. His cardiovascular system had to get used to pumping blood upwards to his brain.
Then there was voice and speech therapy to deal with his squeals. His hair also presented a problem. It grew downwards over his face, so his eyes had become used to filtered light. When his hair was cut short he squinted or ran into dark corners, obviously unable to tolerate normal light. He had to wear some type of eye shield for a time.
Yet all these physical problems were minor compared with those of his comprehension. In his speaking lessons he learned many words quite quickly; but they were only those with a visual context, such as bread, chair, door, table. He acquired a vocabulary of words representing items that could be seen or illustrated. Concepts that had no shape or could not be pictured presented quite a problem.
Stella asked me, ‘Can you think how we can answer his question: “What is mother?” Please try.’ I recall pondering this late at night in front of my unfinished school homework. How to explain what a mother was? If you said it was the person who brought you into the world, he would ask, ‘What is a person? What is world?’ There were many concepts I struggled to define: day, night, child, adult. Time was particularly difficult to define, it seemed to me. I don’t think I was much help as the task was really beyond me.
But I realised then how much is absorbed by osmosis in normal infancy. ‘Mother’ comes with the territory and doesn’t need to be defined. Many other concepts seep into our minds unillustrated yet comprehended. I suggested that perhaps the meaning of these words could be smuggled into stories that would engage his imagination.
Fortunately he had the benefit of expertise much greater than mine. There were highly qualified psychologists and child-development specialists working with him, and at least one had based a PhD thesis on this case. There may have been more.
I do recall, quite clearly, one evening when Stella came home very elated and called out, ‘Halina, Halina, he is human!’ She hugged me and did a little jig around the kitchen. That day he had found some red poppies growing in pots on the hospital’s balcony. He had picked the head of one poppy and brought it in his cupped hands and given it to Stella. It was this that had made her so happy, and she saw it as very significant. I did not see it as very remarkable till Stella said, ‘Don’t you see? He appreciates beauty; that is, he has aesthetic responses, and also has the instinct of giving. That’s human, no longer piglet, behaviour.’
Stella was very protective of him. It was well over a year after he got to the hospital that I was allowed to see him there. I was asked not to gawp at him but to look at the other children first and for just as long. Stella did not want him to feel that he was different or a freak. By then he could talk, but was still puzzled by some words and expressions.
I saw a normal-looking six-year-old. There was just a slight waddle in his gait, perhaps due to his former posture. He had enormous, pale-grey eyes that were very still. He focused them on me like two lenses, did not seemed to blink, and I felt deeply examined by him. He had a very appealing face. I could see why everyone there had got so involved with this child.
I forgot to mention that, when found, he wore a pendant with the initials ‘B’ and (I think) ‘S’. The pendant was handed in with him. One of the nurses who was very fond of him called him Bartek, an affectionate diminutive in Polish, and it stuck. He now responded to this name.
Soon there was no good reason to keep him in hospital, so he was sent to an orphanage and started going to school. Stella kept visiting him, and received reports about his progress from school and his new home.
She now allowed a journalist to research and publish the story. I think he went to the village to find details of the boy’s early life. Probably as a result of his article, a couple in Canada who were searching for surviving relatives applied to adopt the boy, convinced he was their sister’s child. Apparently his age, the locality and the initials on the pendant all fitted. The couple came to Lodz from Canada with photographs to find any physical resemblance, and thought this child was most likely their nephew.
I left Poland at this time. From Stella’s letters to me I know that some people opposed the boy’s adoption, on the grounds that another big adjustment to another language and country would be too stressful. But others argued that he would have much better chances in life and should not be denied them. I believe that the orphanage accepted a handsome donation from the Canadian couple and let the boy go.
The family wrote to Stella for some years, informing her of the boy’s progress. In one of her letters to me Stella mentioned that the boy (no longer Bartek, but his new name escapes me) showed talent as a violinist. She marvelled at that and remembered his fingers, grossly callused and embedded with sand and pebbles. That these fingers now had the sensitive touch needed to play the violin was some sort of testament to human adaptability.
Inevitably, through the passing of time and great distance, both friendship and correspondence with Stella dwindled. Some years ago I learned that she had died.
The significance of this rehumanisation dawned on me slowly as I was growing up. Whenever I thought about the boy, it was all questions: which recollections of his early life with the pigs did he retain? Were they a problem for him? If so, how did he come to terms with them? How long did it take him to fill the gaps in his comprehension? Was his privacy invaded by someone fascinated by his early years? I hope he was able to lead a very normal life.
On 30 August 1948, at the port of Marseilles, I was one of a group of refugees and war orphans who boarded a ship bound for Australia.
I had decided that, after six years of genocidal persecution, I did not want to remain a victim, and that perhaps my patriotism to Poland was misguided. The Cold War had intensified at that time, which was another factor in my decision to leave, in spite of my support for socialism. By then it had also become painfully clear that my father must have perished.
I had met a group of people in the refugee register offices of the Red Cross and UNRRA who were also looking for surviving relatives, and they became friends. They too were considering emigrating. There were sponsors in Sweden, Canada and Australia. One particular friend, a boy whom I later married, had a distant relative in Australia, so we chose to go there.
The SS
Derna
was a 5750-tonne former German cargo boat built in 1917, captured in World War I, sold and very shoddily refitted as a passenger ship in 1948. It flew the Panamanian flag of convenience that, in the
Derna
’s case, sheltered more than the usual multitude of sins. Conditions for passengers and crew were grossly substandard and unsafe.
The boat was hired by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) to transport some 600 refugees of fifteen different nationalities. The escorting officer was a rascal. On this voyage the SS
Derna
acquired several subtitles: ‘The cursed ship’, ‘The ship from hell’ and ‘A ship of shame’.
Captain Papalas seemed a decent chap beset by problems and complaints. He used to break up fights among the crew members by threatening them with a revolver. It worked, and he probably wished that the many other problems aboard could be fixed so simply and quickly.
The crew was assembled from itinerants of several nationalities. The many Greeks and Italians among them continued World War II aboard the
Derna
—with fists, knives, chairs and ropes as weapons.
The ship’s doctor, elderly and grumpy, was frequently deeply intoxicated. It was therefore reassuring to know that the man escorting the group of orphans from Czechoslovakia was a qualified physician. Indeed, Dr Frant had to look after sick passengers on several occasions.