The Testimony    (9 page)

LODZ

In mid 1945 the city of Lodz, in central Poland, was re-establishing itself. Lodz suffered less structural damage during the German retreat than other cities, yet many buildings still stood damaged by shellfire and beyond repair. Some were just a heap of bricks spilling onto the street.

Renamed Litzmannstadt during the German occupation, the city, its streets and alleys were resuming Polish names. Food supply was uneven but adequate, and most shops sold second-hand items. There were sudden shortages of some materials, which slowed the process of recovery. Paper was one such item, the daily newspaper shrinking to one small page of announcements.

There was a large influx of people returning from other parts of Poland or from abroad—survivors of labour, concentration or POW camps. Each day an updated list of these people was posted outside the Registration Office, where there was always a crowd of people looking for missing relatives. Often there were surprise reunions, which were always very emotional. Often someone would yell, ‘Is there anyone here from … [giving the name of one of the many camps]?’ ‘Have you seen my [brother/sister/father] by the name of …?’ In the streets, too, people sometimes found their missing loved ones, whom they had feared dead.

Accommodation had to be rationed, and large apartments were allotted to several families, who set up rosters for the use of the kitchen and bathroom. The Housing Office was just one of many mechanisms created to deal with the postwar chaos. Hospitals were also overcrowded with the typical aftermath of war: wounds, tuberculosis and malnutrition. They had acute staff shortages, due to the six-year backlog in training new doctors and nurses.

Community leaders and teachers were in very short supply, not only through a training backlog but also because many had been selected for incarceration during German rule, their high standing making them potential leaders of uprisings or of groups of freedom fighters. Engineers too were decimated in this way, because of their ability to sabotage installations.

Thus the city struggled to restore normal functioning, with a greatly diminished number of service providers. Education presented a particular difficulty. There were many young people whose schooling had been interrupted for six years. One school in Lodz set out to close this gap, and offered what was, in fact, a crash course. In two-and-a-half years, a concentrated syllabus covered subjects from Grade Four to Year 12, capped by a matriculation exam. Classes took up to ten hours each day, six days a week, and there was a lot of homework. The crash course catered for students from age sixteen upwards. It also provided for some mature-age students who could not aspire to matriculation level before the war. Now, in socialist Poland, there was positive discrimination towards these former underdogs, and support for their education.

The few available teachers distributed assignments on each subject, and those who came top of the class were obliged to tutor those who came last. This peer-tutoring system, born not of pedagogical wisdom but of necessity, had a lot to recommend it. The tutors had to keep ahead in their subjects to teach well, learned to meet the needs of others and often developed an ambition that their pupils should do well. This system of teaching and the mixed-age classes were regarded as a type of social experiment and the school attracted attention and favourable comments among educators in Europe.

I came to Lodz from Gdansk in September 1945 and, for the next three years, like the city, I tried to rebuild a normal life. Normal did not mean a return to the prewar order of things, for that is rarely possible after wars or revolutions. A new Poland was emerging, with its systems, institutions, social structures and mores profoundly changed.

One can only speculate on the effects of the loss of (very good) parents who were a source of affection, guidance and security; of nearly six years enduring hatred, indignities and hunger; of the absence of any form of beauty; of the loss of normal education—school and life—during years vital to intellectual development; and of gross undernourishment in years vital for physical development. Where growth is natural, there was regression.

There is no doubt my values and attitudes became very different, to the point where fitting into normal society was, at first, very difficult. (To this day, I have an impatience for small talk and inconsequential matters.)

My personal experience of normal had been a very sheltered and carefree childhood, ordered and supervised by protective parents. But I was fifteen now, retarded in normal development by the war years. The coping skills and mechanisms I had developed in prisons were useless now.

I was bewildered by the demands and complexity of freedom: the necessity to make decisions and choices, to plan my time. Managing the money given to me by the Red Cross and the UNRRA, and shopping for basics were a new experience. Every minor problem seemed gigantic. I felt like an idiot and a pest always asking for help and advice. There must have been many others who shared my bewilderment.

At first, freedom was so demanding that the end of hunger and fear, and the fact of one’s survival, were not celebrated. There was also the onset of survivor’s guilt. The explosions of joy we imagined in camp when we said ‘if we survive’ did not occur.

It was Judith Winograd, my friend from Litzmannstadt Ghetto, who found me registered in Gdansk and sent a note saying that she and her father wanted me to come and stay with them. By then I was able to walk without a stick, albeit with a limp, and was happy to find someone I knew after months of being fostered by strangers. Judith had returned to Lodz from a labour camp in Germany, and some days later ran into her father returning from another camp—one of the heart-stopping street reunions. They now lived in one room of an apartment, but insisted I stay with them.

In those days the age of maturity was twenty-one, and below that age one’s signature was not valid. Her father Ludwig Winograd became my legal guardian. In addition to signing documents, he acted
in loco parentis
at this crucial time.

There was only one towel between us, and that was how I infected Judith and her father with scabies and ringworm. I did wonder why, in spite of thorough delousing after Stutthof, my skin still itched and was blotchy; but other problems had been more pressing. The dermatologist described my infection as well established, and Ludwig’s and Judith’s as recently acquired and obviously inherited from me. I clearly recall my acute embarrassment. We had to undergo a tar cure: a smelly and messy bath of diluted tar every day for a fortnight. My hosts were very gracious about it.

Judith and I became inseparable, and to strangers we pretended to be sisters. Ours was one of many surrogate families forming after the war.

We befriended a group of people of our age, and talked about the present and a possible future but not, as if by some tacit agreement, about the past. Were we still living in the moment, out of our wartime habit, or was it a form of denial? Perhaps it was an instinct to protect one’s sanity until some healing had occurred. Neither of us went to see Baluty, the suburb of Lodz that had been the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, and where we had spent four traumatic years during the German occupation. Later, I heard and read that many survivors initially behaved in this way.

An additional problem of postwar adjustment was the difficulty in relating to people who had spent the war outside the camps and were sheltered from their horrors. They seemed to be from another planet and had, to me, incomprehensible values and reactions. I felt isolated.

I kept imagining a variety of ways in which I might find my father, each mingled with my anxiety of having to tell him that Mother had died. I searched and advertised in missing persons lists and columns in newspapers for both Father and Stasia, but to no avail. New lists of survivors registering with the Red Cross and other refugee organisations were posted daily outside a special office. People were finding relatives and friends on these lists or in the crowd outside. There were emotional scenes of reunion.

Several times I was sure I could see my father in the distance. Once, the man looked so much like him from the back that the illusion persisted until I touched him and he turned.

I gave up my daily inspection of the lists and my searching in the streets. My name and address were listed and I waited to be ‘found’. My wartime fantasies did not allow for any of this. There was meant to be only joy and a sense of victory over great evil. The reality was bitterly different.

As time went on, my hope of Father’s survival waned, then rose each time someone turned up many months after the war’s end because of illness or loss of memory. As hopes of his survival faded, I became withdrawn and aimless.

One day I was given a sharp reprimand: ‘Pull yourself together; there are now millions of orphans like you all over Europe.’ I was hurt, and said that other people’s misery couldn’t cheer me up. But I think this incident helped me to accept reality.

For many, the search for surviving family members spanned continents. Formerly distant relatives became close, and those who escaped the war in Europe now opened their homes to the survivors. When Judith and her father decided to leave Poland for Sweden, where their relatives lived, I refused to go with them, hoping that my father would turn up any day, like Judith’s had.

In the end Judith and her father left for Argentina, and their friend, Max Farber, became my new legal guardian. Max and his wife had returned from labour camps and found that their young son, presumed lost as a baby, had survived, hidden in a country village. They now wanted to foster orphans, and offered to look after me and two others. They were exceptionally helpful, enrolling me at the special school described earlier, where I intended to matriculate and then study medicine.

I was helpless in self-management, and the routine of attending classes each day, followed by homework at night, provided me with much-needed stability. In my new quarters I befriended my neighbours, Dr Stella Wislicka and her husband, and often sought their advice. There were still many living skills I had to learn.

In my first year at the school, I joined a group of volunteers to help clear fallen bricks that were blocking some roads. These citizens’ working bees took place on Sundays. Later I did a six-month crash course in nursing, which was offered to female students. We attended evening lectures and workshops in bacteriology, basic infection control, sterilisation and basic nursing procedures. Thus qualified, we worked in hospitals on Sundays, or on some evening shifts to relieve the shortage of nurses.

These extracurricular activities forged in me a sense of citizenship and of participation in building a new nation, and I became quite enthusiastic about helping to build a fairer and better society. However, this enthusiasm was eroded, and finally destroyed, by several anti-Semitic incidents that affected me deeply.

I applied for a permit to use the only swimming pool in the city—which was in the YWCA sports complex—to repair the wasted muscles in my leg. The managing clerk demanded to know my religious origins. I had not stated my religion and argued that surely this could not matter in a socialist state. He insisted, and when I put ‘Jewish’ he refused me a permit for swimming on the grounds that the YWCA was a Christian organisation, and therefore only for gentiles.

The doctor who had recommended the exercise thought I should lodge a complaint about this prewar rule, which had no place in socialist Poland; but I was too dismayed by the fact that, after the Holocaust, I still had to fight for acceptance, and gave up.

By a sheer fluke I came top in an algebra assignment and started tutoring a fellow student, Barbara, who had failed this subject. She was twenty-six years old and had been born in the country. She had fought with the underground army and had done all the things I had fantasised about during the war. She had carried out sabotage, ambushed the enemy, blown up bridges and lived in forest hide-outs—and she had medals and scars to show for her bravery.

Barbara was a very nice and decent human being, and a popular classmate. We spent a lot of time swotting algebra late at night, and sharing views and ideals, and we became good friends. One night Barbara asked me why
matzo
, the traditional Jewish bread, was so white when it contained the blood of Christian babies. As we had seen in the biology class, blood turns black when heated. I was completely stunned by the question and just sat there, unable to respond. Barbara sensed my shock, became upset and assured me that I was the last person she would want to offend. She had just asked a technical question—chemistry, really.

The experience was quite emotional for both of us. After a while I said that I could not understand how grown-up people about to matriculate could believe in such a vicious superstition, and that I wondered what hope there was for me in such a place. Barbara explained tearfully that, as a child, whenever she was naughty her mother threatened to call a Jew, who would take her away and use her blood for his bread. It was easy to believe that. The Jew was a symbol of evil, because he had crucified Our Lord Jesus Christ.

We then talked about prejudices and scapegoating generally, while Barbara kept apologising. We remained good friends, but whether this incident changed Barbara’s perception of Jews generally I don’t know. It showed me how deeply ingrained the hatred of Jews was in honest, decent people, and that it would take a long time to disappear.

During my hospital duties I also experienced anti-Semitism. I worked hard to prevent pressure sores in the often emaciated patients, and the patients were friendly and all seemed to like me. I massaged their hips, elbows, backs and heels with methylated spirits and lard—the only available means then to aid the circulation and nourish the skin. The patients often remarked how helpful it was, and some kissed my hand. Other sisters, they said, would just give a pat or two, not a real massage.

But when a priest visited, everyone except me made the sign of the cross. It may have been the priest who spoke about it to the matron, who called me to her office. She said that it was important for a patient’s wellbeing to feel secure and to trust their carers, so it was not good for them to know I was Jewish. I was deeply offended. I replied that it was an unjust remark, and also that I did not believe any patients had complained about my nursing or felt threatened by me. Of course, the matron was expressing her own prejudice, and probably believed she was acting in the patients’ best interests. I went to another hospital and worked in the operating theatre, which was off limits for priests. These incidents bitterly disappointed me.