Return
to Warsaw
by Helen Degen Cohen
Majka (pronounced Mayka), modern
as a young Shelley Winters, is trying to be patient with her overly religious
Catholic mother. The mother who is looking at me with those same eyes—though
not as deep, not as foggy any longer—as she did when I was eight years
old, when she had me in hiding among the wheat fields. She is eighty-five
years old now, sitting in a house dress that covers her sagging weight,
her bad legs. Her gray hair is brushed back into a bun, and deep in her
still smooth face, her eyes twinkle. She is staring at me with a slight
smile. Mocking? Scrutinizing? Without any loss to her dignity, hands quietly
in her lap, like a Mona Lisa. She is asking me questions, though not the
ones I would have expected. She is entirely flesh-and-blood now. No. Not
entirely.
 If Maria Szumska
were entirely of this world now, her daughter would not be so impatient.
It’s a habit, the way Majka reacts to her mother, to everything her mother
says. She shifts in the chair, flushes, perspires. As if to say, oh please,
they know already, why don’t you leave them alone. And yet she is
her mother’s daughter. She herself has just made a pilgrimage, to Wilno
(pronounced Vilno), as I am making mine, to Poland. Majka knows that this
is my pilgrimage, she has made every conceivable accommodation for us,
but this is her mother, this babcia (bahb-cha—granny) who will not
leave the little three-room apartment on the fourth floor, who insists
on sitting in the corner of the room—where she literally lives, eats, sleeps,
watches television, and writes letters to missionaries.
Maria Szumska sits at her
table facing the window (and me, now), writing meticulous letters in a
nearly perfect hand. The hand was perfect a year ago, but now it is less
steady, the lines don’t run as neatly across, nor do the letters stand
as regally. But God forgives what can’t be helped. Her stationery is precious.
I know it so well. It has a red rose on each sheet. (There are huge red
roses on a dark gray tapestry on the dining room wall, roses the size of
lions. She has kept that tapestry since her youth in Wilno.) She addresses
the envelopes just as carefully, an ingrained European habit, developed
when correspondence was a matter of life and death, when packages and letters
carried, or asked for, vital help or information, when telephones rang
only in the movies. Written communications in Europe are still precious.
Addresses are precious. When after the war my mother wanted to bring her
family to America, she had to recall the address of an uncle in Chicago.
There were four digits in the street number, and try as she might, she
couldn’t get them quite right, until one day she was close enough, the
letter was somehow delivered and––that is why I am here today. When I’m
in Florida I see my mother addressing packages to Israel, to Iowa, to Poland,
I see how carefully she prints each name, every digit.
The table is up against
the window. Maria Szumska sits facing the gray buildings of the suburb
Ursus in the window, pen in hand. A few feet to her left, nearly touching
the swung-open window-frame, is the television set, and on its screen the
politics of Poland. She is writing a letter to a missionary and watching
the changing fate of Poland, as we come in.
Maria Szumska is a super-patriot.
She is passionately involved in what happens on the television screen.
It is a gray meeting of the government officials, in a huge hollow assembly
hall. It lacks the spunk, the showmanship, the confrontations, the play,
of U.S. hearings on television. This meeting is dead serious, the room
seems gigantic, the men lost within it, talking in gray, somber voices.
It goes on and on for hours. She doesn’t take her eyes off it. Her daughter
Majka is extremely annoyed.
“You can finish later,”
she tells her mother and shuts off the television set. Maria Szumska acquiesces.
She begins to talk about Poland, about its patriots, its martyrs, one after
another. She pulls out pictures of saintly heroes, of Holy Mary, of the
Pope. They seem to appear out of nowhere, since there are no files to be
seen. They are postcard-sized, most of them, depicting heads with sharply
pointed haloes. She is not senile, she repeats herself out of her intense
preoccupation, repeats stories of her heroes day after day, which I still
can’t absorb fast enough—I am still getting re-acquainted with the language.
I try, I bring tapes, I hang on every word. I want to listen with everything
I’ve got. This is my pilgrimage, after all.
On the table are a bowl
of red currants, bread and sausage, a vase of flowers. Majka brings meals
to her mother two or three times a day. And now that Majka has left us
for a bit, her mother leans forward to ask me a favor, a secret. She wants
to know if I could get her some milk chocolate. She accents the milk.
Milk
chocolate. But don’t tell Majka, she would get angry. I say of course,
looking around. I am always looking around, as if she were made of the
room itself. My back is to the window, and I’m looking into the room, at
her bed along the wall on my right, at the picture of the Madonna high
on the wall, beyond the television set. Szumska is facing me, to my left,
penetrating me with her stare. It is not a spiritual stare, as I expected.
It is a worldly (bemused?) stare.
She has just talked about
the glory of Poland, and now she stares at my American athletic shoes.
Nods with approval. Her granddaughters should have such shoes. Majka comes
in at that point and her face goes red. I wish it didn’t amuse me as it
does, this trip was supposed to be all sacred.
When I was almost eight
years old, we stood at a train station in Lida, my parents and I, about
to be shipped to the camps. My mother gave me a cup and told me to pretend
I was going for water at the pump––and to keep on walking until I found
the house of a woman we knew. I asked for directions from house to house.
I walked across the town until I found the woman’s house. But because it
was too dangerous for this woman to take me into hiding, she searched for
someone else, and found Maria Szumska.
It is a much longer story,
of course. The woman my mother told me to find was a cook at the town prison,
where we had been hiding in a room over the guard house, my mother, my
father, and I. Because my father had made himself indispensable at the
prison (by barbering, distributing food supplies, and supervising all the
plumbing), he was permitted to move us from the ghetto––where living conditions
were miserable and hundreds of thousands of people were marched into the
fields to be shot during “selections”––to live, discreetly, at the prison.
In the end, though, we too were rounded up, with the rest of the remaining
Jews in town, and placed on trucks headed for the train station and the
camps. That is when my mother handed me the cup and told me to find the
prison cook, Waclawska (Vahtzlavska). When I was out of sight, she and
my father boarded the train and later joined an escape party: while the
train was speeding, they had a small boy squeeze out of a tiny window and
unlatch the door from the outside; whereupon eleven people (out of five
hundred) jumped, four were shot immediately, and seven survived and joined
the underground––my parents among them.
After several failed efforts
at finding me a safe place with someone else and having appealed to the
Mother of God, Szumska decided to do it herself. She sold her clothes,
and with the money rented a cabin in the country. She was an educated,
striking young woman, and her clothes too must have been attractive. Before
the war her husband loved taking pictures of her, one of which is now displayed
on the wall––a picture of a beautiful, dark-haired young woman seated on
a lawn, her romantically ruffled white dress spread out around her.
Maria Szumska left her husband
in Lida and came to live with me in the country. She would walk twenty-five
kilometers from our cabin in the country back into town, to do her husband’s
laundry and get food to him. It occurs to me that I still don’t know how
she got all our food, even after all the questions I’ve asked her. We picked
some of it wild, like spinach and chamomile and stray carrots, and poziomki––tiny
wild strawberries. (Truskavki is the word for normal strawberries;
these tiny ones are poziomki.) She made potato dumplings which we
ate in hot milk with boiled carrots. She baked some of our bread herself,
in a make-shift oven. She walked me to the forest and lake. She left me
with what I call “the cousins” in a novel I have written about the war,
though now it seems that they may have been “neighbors.” They were farmers,
I am almost sure of that. That was in 1943.
Szumska was in her thirties
then, with prematurely milk-white hair––it had turned suddenly white soon
after that romantic picture on the wall––and a pure, doll-like porcelain
face with haunting eyes––liquid, moonstruck eyes, as I remember. In the
pictures she shows me now they are sad, melancholy; to me, then, they were
only mysterious, only other-worldly. I have moved onto the chair on her
left, shoulder to shoulder, and she turns to look at me more closely, and
tells me that my teeth could be whiter. The surprise that goes through
me amuses me––I am disconcerted, I accept everything. I look straight through
her, into her, trying to see the young woman, the one who sleepwalked and
prayed, prayed and sleepwalked, who crossed her hands on her chest beside
me, when we lay down to sleep, in the cabin in the country. The young woman
who showed me a world my parents never knew, though they survived the war
and are alive1 and well
in Florida.
***
What else did we do in Poland in July?
We toured Warsaw; we were taken to both northern and southern Poland. Majka
and her husband Jacek (Yahtzek)2
had met us at the airport and brought us to the house they were building
out of concrete. They put us up in an upstairs room which belongs to their
then nineteen-year-old daughter, Dorota, since both daughters (the other
was twelve) were staying at their rented cabin in the northern country
(“on the Mazurkas”). Several days later we took the opportunity to get
into that northern vacation countryside by accompanying Jacek on his trip
to pick up the girls at the cabin and bring them home (at which point Dorota
would share a room with someone else and continue to let us use her room).
It was our first trip out of Warsaw.
Jacek drove us there in
his fifteen-year-old Mercedes. We reached our destination, near the Russian
border, hours later. (Lida and the cabin where Szumska had had me in hiding
were just across the border, but we had no Russian visas with us). It appeared
to us a primitive, somewhat depressed country, and their cabin was a shack;
but the girls loved it, it was summer camp, it was freedom to them. They’d
become housekeepers, were perfect hostesses when we arrived, cooked meat
and potatoes and made us tea. We picked wild strawberries and blueberries
in the forest.
***
 In my book we are
spirits, Szumska and I; in July of 1989 we are encased in concrete. Literally.
We are seated in one of the many gray concrete buildings in a suburb of
Warsaw. They don’t have the paint with which to cover the dirty-looking
ugliness of concrete. When you land, the entire city looks gray. When you
land, you smell the odor of war. I am not exaggerating. We looked out the
windows, as the plane rolled in, and saw several Russian military men in
green capes strolling around the bleak airport, the flat overcast gray
city behind them. Outside, my friend asked me, “What is that odor?” I said,
“It’s the odor of war.” Months later, in a book on Poland, I found that
another writer had characterized it exactly the same way. My friend wondered,
later in our trip: “What did they do with the rubble?” We had just finished
seeing a film on the demolition of Warsaw by Hitler. It was shown in an
upstairs room of a museum, with the windows wide open, overlooking the
rebuilt Old City square, painted in colorful pastel shades, with tourists
and artists wandering around below in the heat, or sitting under ice-cream
table umbrellas. The scene below us, through the wide-opened windows, was
in such contrast to the crumbling, black-and-white Warsaw on the screen,
that I think we both wondered: what happened to the rubble?
It must have been recycled.
It smelled to me––initially, at least––like recycled war. And yet when
we got into it, the ordinary life of the city made us forget the smell,
all our initial impressions, just a week into our stay. By the time we
left Poland, two weeks later, we’d forgotten it entirely. You can imagine
what happens to permanent residents.
***
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera says that “the struggle
of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But
it seemed that the struggle in Warsaw was in both directions––to forget
on the one hand, and not to forget on the other. To forget––in the form
of building new houses, questing for jobs, American shoes, rock music.
To not forget––in the form of Jacek, as he stood in back of his house looking
around at all the land that once belonged to his family; of Szumska, reviewing
her pictures; of Majka, making her pilgrimage to Wilno, when it was finally
allowed, in May of 1989. Many such freedoms are only a few months old,
in July of 1989. What was the black market currency exchange rate only
three or four months ago is now the legal rate at any of a number of public
currency exchanges. Once can choose whether to buy meat at a state-run
store, or at a private booth at the market. Women in babushkas sit on the
sidewalks of Warsaw selling raspberries. There are long lines at the “dollar”
stores––where one can use dollars or marks only––for Western goods. Everything
is all mixed up. In July 1989, it is practically impossible to forget,
though there is little time to remember.
The ghosts of Jews are everywhere,
though I realized it only gradually. One begins to forget the odor in the
air; one begins to remember the Jews, in time. It’s a story I don’t want
to get into here; not at this time. It is too big, too complex. But what
is curious is that the more the Jews dwindle here, the more their ghosts
are felt. Poland is a country dotted everywhere with death camps, and yet
people live all the way up to their edges––new and old developments are
immediately adjacent, children play along their fences––without acknowledging
them. Jacek had never been to Auschwitz and didn’t want to go with us at
first. “It is too macabre,” he said. Though he did decide to go in the
end, even shed some tears, and was glad for it. Majka had been, before.
I didn’t cry at all. I wanted to write the story of the tour guide, a Polish
native of Auschwitz (Oswiecim) who as a child had been exiled with his
family from his town, while they were building the camp. He returned in
middle age, to do tours of the camp––every day, day after day, year after
year. “Six million Polish citizens died here,” he says, day after day.
“Three million of them were Jews.”
The Jews and the Gentiles
had lived like two countries intertwined, co-dependent as Siamese twins.
Three-quarters of the world’s Jews once lived in Poland. There were 3.5
million at the start of the war, about one tenth after the war, and only
5,000 by the mid-1980s. Two post-war occurrences, one of them a pogrom
in 1946, and the other a government-encouraged wave of anti-Semitism in
1968, account for the two mass emigration of Jews from Poland. I had never
known this. No one I’ve asked since knew anything about it. When I returned
home, I read it in a book called Remnants3,
given to me three years earlier by a Catholic ex-nun. Strange, that I haven’t
read the text till now. It is in a way a history of my people. It interviews
a handful of the handful of remaining Jews in Poland, most of whom are
old or sick. I picked up other books, with similar accounts. There is much
more I have to read.
Majka and Jacek drove us
south to Krakow during the second week of our stay, and there, at a museum
across the road from our hotel, advertised in bold letters, was the exhibit
“ZYDZI––POLSCY” (“The Jews––of Poland”), paintings of Jews and their life
in Poland, predominantly portraits from centuries past, young and old,
some with flowing Jesus-like hair. From the book Zydzi––Polscy which
accompanies the exhibit: “. . . the few thousand Jews still living in Poland
can by no means carry on life in the social structure which belonged to
their fathers and grandfathers. A thriving graft has been cut off; its
oral transmission has been reduced to single stereotyped phrases. . . .
Those of us who are quick to blame others, including Jews, for our misfortunes,
and who worship our poets and artists, will be reminded by the exhibition
of how high a regard for the Jews those poets and artists had. The Jews
in turn, historically made sensitive to everything that concerns them,
will sense sympathy and even admiration in the works of Polish painters,
the artists of a nation at whose hands they have suffered in the past.”
The few people in the museum were staring at depictions of a vanished culture.
It was haunting, as are the suppressed attitudes towards Jews.
After dinner, back on the
third floor of the Hotel Cracovia, I heard some singing, in Hebrew––songs
I had known in West Germany after the war, at a D. P. camp, where our common
language had been Hebrew. The sound was incongruous with the setting. This
was Krakow, 1989. I had been an impressionable kid, I had loved those songs
and dances. I followed the sound down the hallway, toward our third floor
lobby, where I found a group of high school students from Israel, singing.
I asked if I could join them, and two girls made room between them on a
couch. They weren’t just singing, they were making a statement: it was
blatantly exuberant singing. They were laughing, singing, clapping. It
was their version of “We Shall Overcome.” The director said they were here
studying the camps (Krakow is near Auschwitz), that otherwise they wouldn’t
know anything about them.
Upon my return to the U.S.,
I was told by a Pole who has lived here several years now that people on
buses in Warsaw, as well as Polish cleaning women in the U.S., are still
overheard saying, “It’s a good thing Hitler took care of the Jewish problem.”
When Majka took us to Grójec, the town where I was born, just south
of Warsaw (a thriving “shtell” pre-war, like the one in Fiddler on the
Roof, but now a rough-looking place) and asked, at a tiny tourist office,
whether there are any Jews left in Grójec, she was told that yes,
there are a few, but they wouldn’t own up to it. The famous Warsaw Ghetto
(famous for its uprising against Hitler) is a large square, empty park
surrounded by apartment buildings. Where so much had happened, there was
nothing, not even visitors. We were the only ones there, standing before
the monument to the heroes of the uprising, the ghostly emptiness palpable
around us. The neighborhood where my father had been born was nearby.
The subject is overwhelming,
and I am open. All my pages are open. I don’t want to write on the white
till I know what to say. I was in Poland in July, 1989, to see, to ask
questions of, the woman who had risked her life for my sake. She is Polish,
and Catholic.
There I stand, overwhelmed
in the indoor tourist market, Sukiennica, trying to buy Babcia a present.
Strange that we call her Babcia, or Granny, the woman who once haunted
the countryside like a saint. What can I buy her? We can’t find slippers.
We can’t find chocolate. And besides, I want to get her something meaningful.
I’ve come all the way to Poland and I can’t give her anything. What would
you give her? A Polish doll? A Polish wooden plate? A necklace of amber
beads? And then I see some plaques, upon which are painted madonnas. They
are cheap. Too cheap. But what else in the world can I give her?
She is disappointed that
I haven’t converted. My son married a gentile. She asks me––did he convert?
No, I tell her. She looks at me. It is a great surprise to me, the greatest
surprise of the trip––that she’d wanted me to convert back then. She had
asked the priest, and he had told her to wait, that perhaps my parents
would return. I always thought it had been her idea. That she was all spirit,
all noble. She is smiling at me. Her eyes twinkle. There is dignity in
the way she is sitting. I feel thankful, in a way. I feel peaceful. Everything
is as it should be, in a way. I love her, in a way.
This is not the spiritual
trip I thought it would be. This is an earthy trip. It is loaded with raspberries,
sour cherries, black and red currants, strawberries, tomatoes such as we
remember in dreams; home-made sausage and fresh white cheese for breakfast,
along with a platter of sliced cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes, four kinds
of bread and sweet rolls. We have ice cream at mid-morning almost every
day on our jaunts to Warsaw, we look into every window for amber, the streets
are full of ordinary people. I see nothing especially spiritual, no one
straining to remember or forget. The crowds are in the streets as they
are in Chicago, impersonal, shopping. They look Western. What can I bring
back to Szumska?
Her daughter, Majka, is
our hostess, our joy. Working at the sink in her modern kitchen, she turns
to smile at us. Warm, demonstrative, motherly, with plenty of flesh on
her, and blood that keeps rushing to her face, she cooks for us day and
night, like crazy. Cakes and “ushki” (fried pierogi, or dumplings,
stuffed with mushrooms), and soups, and cutlets and borscht, and potatoes.
There’s fresh berry juice instead of water (which she boils). The only
thing they can’t give us––anywhere––is ice. It’s strange all right, to
have nothing cold, no Coca Cola (which is served everywhere, but warm,
in lieu of water), no beer, not even cold ice cream (nearly all melted
and topped with berries), nothing cold whatsoever, but then what is ice?
Majka drives us everywhere, she won’t let us out of her sight, afraid that
we may be treated rudely, be cheated, be––who knows what. We see palatial
Lazienki Park with its roses, sculptures, and princely buildings. Churches,
cathedrals. We take us all out to a restaurant and can’t spend more than
a dollar. And throughout it all, Babcia is sitting at her table, with her
pen, indelible.
Behind the concrete house
they’ve been building for three years, Jacek’s brother Mihal has his greenhouses
and his outdoor flower and vegetable nurseries. Behind them is Babcia’s
apartment building, rising gray, with its flower boxes. We cut through
the planted field each day to visit her, passing Mihal’s wife Yola in the
field. We enter the bleak elevator building, ride the rickety elevator
up, and find Babcia in precisely the same spot, at her table by the window,
the television set on her left. She turns toward us, slowly, happily, waiting
for me to hug her. There’s a Friday in each month when a priest comes to
see her for a private mass.
I take out my present, loosely
wrapped in paper. It is from Krakow, I tell her. She didn’t want us to
go to Krakow. It was too hot, and she was afraid for Jacek, with his bad
heart. She looks at the present suspiciously. Oh, it costs too much, she
says, without having seen it. She smiles uneasily. I unwrap it. She stares
at my plaque with the painted Madonna. What do I need it for, she says,
I have one already. We both look at the Madonna on the wall, and I feel
my embarrassment, my inadequacy. She looks at the present again, kindly.
I thank you very much, she says, but you take it. Here it will be soiled.
Not quite “soiled”––the word is untranslatable. It will be damaged, disrespected,
trashed. I know what she means. Halinko, she says to me, my life is an
infinitesimal minute. I am gone. This must not be soiled. Take it. She
hands it to me. I don’t know what to do.
She stands up laboriously,
walks toward a drawer, and extracts several more items. A gray, tinny cross
on a chain. Some dresser covers, which she herself had crocheted, years
ago. Hand-crocheted doilies in several sizes. She returns laboriously to
her chair and places the items neatly before me.
By the time I have returned
I will have a half a dozen books, a peasant skirt, earthenware bowls, holy
pictures and objects, home-made jams and dried mushrooms, vodka, and of
course all the store items: dolls, garlands, beads, wooden plates––folk
art sold at the state-run Cepelia stores. Most of the presents will have
come from Majka, one of the books from Mihal and Yola. It is Pan Tadeush,
Poland’s most beloved book of poems. A large, hard-cover book, it must
have cost them a pretty penny. Mihal has been treating us to vodka in the
back yard adjoining his flower nurseries, amidst sunshine and roses growing
among the weeds. Yola has baked a cake for us, brought me flowers.
Flowers and berries are
dirt cheap around Warsaw. When it comes to roses, I have never seen so
many in my life. They seem to grow like weeds, among the unmowed grass
along the sidewalks, behind fences, in the parks. Lazienki Park has square,
formal gardens of the same red roses as far as the eye can see. The king
had his mistresses and bath-houses there, and an outdoor theater, now in
ruins. On one side of the river lived the royalty, on the other was the
poor (then Jewish) neighborhood, with its huge outdoor market, still there.
When we come home from sightseeing, a friend of the family, a stranger,
greets us with flowers, for me––for my name day. We were met at the airport
with flowers and sent home with flowers.
In 1943, when I was in hiding,
I lived intimately with a wheatfield, and even more intimately with habri
(hah-bree,
plural for “haber”)––what we call here the cornflower. But there, beside
the floppy orange poppies, the fragrant blue cornflower is radiant. I wish
we had a different name for it, since in Poland it grows along the wheatfields,
not cornfields. I’ve never seen a cornfield in Poland.
Habri are
on Polish postal stamps. Habri are my madeleine, the intoxicating
whiff of my year with Szumska4.
Pansies are the whiff of
my earlier childhood, when I could formulate no thoughts about pansies.
Or sunshine. Or wars. Habri have become more generic, are the sun
and the moon turned into a flower, the sum of everything I’ve named beautiful.
I was dazzled, while in
hiding with Szumska. And mystified. I’d been lifted out of the heat of
the war and set down in a wheatfield––where the sun was cool as glass and
the Holy Family lived with us in the dark cabin. Seeing that I liked to
sketch, especially when she left me alone at night, she bought me a pencil
for my birthday. It’s the most important present I have ever received.
One pencil. Would the soul be happier with twenty? Never. The soul is happiest
when it isn’t abandoned. The pencil was and is my surrogate mother and
father.
She brought branches into
the cabin and stuck them in the ceiling, for decorations. We brought in
wildflowers and placed them on plates on the floor, as decorations. She
brought in a fir tree for Christmas, and I made paper chains, angels, Saint
Nicholases and stars. When on one occasion she left me with the “cousins,”
Nazis came in to interrogate the family, and me too––since they’d heard
a rumor of a Jewish child in the vicinity. When one of them came up to
me and asked me, “Are you Jewish,” I was dumb. The farmers were so genuinely
stunned that the Nazis had to believe them, give up their search, and leave.
How could anyone ask such a question of a child, of Szumska’s niece, Szumska,
who was holy? At least that’s the way I remember it.
I am trying to leave a hundred-dollar-bill
for her. She protests, mildly, glancing at Majka. Majka is beet red. No,
she says. And to me, You have brought enough, we have enough. But it’s
for her, I tell her, in case something goes wrong, and you need
it. We can take care of her, says Majka. While her mother begins to calculate,
Well, the pension comes to . . . Majka is livid. Don’t take it! she orders.
I know what a hundred dollars means. One dollar is 5,000 zlotys,
a large head of cabbage at the city market is 100 zlotys. A pound of meat
at the state-run store is 1,000 zlotys; at a private stall in the
outdoor market, 6,000 zlotys. We bought the girls Puma athletic
shoes, and Agatka slept in them all night.
It has occurred to me to
wonder who has the richer life, Majka or her mother. Majka, with her busy
suburban household, with her husband (Jacek’s workshop in is his house)
and their workers, the children and their friends, Mihal and Yola, guests
and neighbors. Maria Szumska, alone in her room, her mind flooded with
the distant work of missionaries, the entire kingdom of the Holy Family,
the nobility of Poland’s heroes. What makes Maria Szumska unique is the
largeness of the world within her mind. Were she to be moved into her daughter’s
house, the noise would disturb her world. The sorrow she feels toward her
daughter’s lack of the spiritual is matched only by Majka’s sorrow. And
yet their names are the same: Maria. Majka is a nickname. And I felt like
a bridge between them. We’ve all suffered and tried.
Even the suburb at first
seemed drenched in the worn-out odor of its history. It came in the open
window of our room––Dorota’s upstairs bedroom. The bodies, the buildings,
the manikins in the windows, the ghettoes and castles. The walls. It’s
not like your normal industrial smog, said my friend. We were silent. Majka’s
friendly voice intruded. The trees intruded, the forest was unreal. Each
time we drove into Warsaw, it seemed hotter. We noticed the strangeness
less, and the shoppers and the heat more. Trying to find parking. The lines
for vodka and meat. Communist government buildings, street names. People
(quiet people, speaking in undertones), an underground of people,
sidewalks full of people, museums, Stare Miasto (Old City), lody
(lawd-y, ice cream); hushed, harassed waitresses. People in a corner of
a square, along a wall, hushed in the strange light. In one upstairs room,
a film about the destruction of Warsaw. Clips of survivors wandering among
the ruins, looking into the holes of the city.
These people could never
be American, much as they would like to be. Nowoczestno. Modern.
Be Nowoczestno, and come work for us, says a sign on a state-owned
streetcar. It seems to be moving through a fog, to our left and behind
us, as we ride in Jacek’s car, as if it’ll never catch up. It passes us,
into a new fog.
Dziecinko (my child),
says Babcia Maria Szumska to me, we must be thankful for what God has given
us. She points to the features on her face, saying, The mouth speaks,
the eyes see, the ears hear. Often she complains about how difficult
times are, how empty the stores are, echoed by Majka. She goes through
her litany of sighs, how weak she is getting, how much she has lived through,
how difficult it is to die. Then her face changes, she wants me to buy
the books of a missionary, to contact certain people in the States, to
repeat after her: The mouth speaks, the eyes see, the ears hear.
What more can we ask for, Dziecinko?
***
 This wasn’t a spiritual
journey. Nor was it a temporal journey. It was a door I have walked through.
Everything begins here. There’s a weight to it. It’s as if I’ve built my
own concrete house and then walked through it––in the front door and out
the back, or in the back door and out the front. I am looking at the new
landscape. The door is like the Arc de Triomphe––around it, through
it, comes the air of possibility. When I crossed the threshold, I left
nothing behind. There is no wall between the past and future.
There’s nothing sentimental
about actual returns. Nostalgia is only a place in the mind. When you literally
touch the past, it disintegrates. It will not let you stay there; and because
you can’t stay there, it propels you into the future––it is a door.
Childhood has nothing to do with smallness. As a child, I was
a genie, I created the biggest world in the world. When childhood, the
biggest dream of all, reverts back to reality, it vanishes, turns into
a door. She smiles.
We are smiling at each other.
We are seeing each other through the mirrors of our past. She is
the young woman I knew. I am the child who liked to draw, whom she
left in a cabin at night, in the light of a kerosene lamp. She is
the woman with white hair, who prayed to the other Mary day and night.
***
She was supposed to receive the award with which Yad Vashem (in Israel)
honors gentiles who helped Jews during the war. The letter she had received
confirmed it. I have written to Yad Vashem again, their bureaucracy is
like any other, I have told them, she is eighty-five. It would mean
a great deal to her.
***
“Can you tell me what flowers we had
there? I need their names, for my writing, and I don’t remember.”
“Flowers?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you see it
was so long ago. We had roses––”
“No, I mean in the
fields.”
“In the fields?”
“Yes.”
“In the fields we
had habri, and maki (poppies). We had chamomile flowers,
and those small tiny ones . . . niezapominayki (forget-me-nots).”
***
Unless you return to the past and
touch it, you stand in place. The fear of returning is the fear of the
future. My God, what will happen to me, I had thought. Going back is different
from remembering. Remembering is gilded, going back is facing impoverishment.
The nourishment of the dream disintegrates; one has to re-experience hunger,
to proceed. In order to survive death, we must die.
I am no longer here, says
Szumska, the serious look of a child on her face. When I was a child, she
was not my mother. When I was a child we were spirits together. Majka is
mother to the child Szumska. Maria Szumska was never just a mother, her
soul has a revolutionary bent.
She smiles.
The secret between us is
as deep as the lake she took us to when I was eight.
1. My parents have died
since this was first written.
2. Jacek has also died.
3. Remnants of the
Last Jews of Poland by Malgorzata Niezabitowska, 1986.
4. Haby, or Habry,
or Chabry in Polish, is the title of my forthcoming book of poems
and a story.
Copyright © 1991 by Helen Degen Cohen.
This memoir first appeared in The House on Via Gombito:
Writing by North American Women Abroad, edited by Madelon Sprengnether
and C. W. Truesdale. Minneapolis, MN: New Rivers Press, 1991.
The photographs of Maria Szumska are in the private possession
of the author and used with permission.
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