A New Beginning and Other Stories

By Anna Baum

Short stories of the Jewish experience in Poland in the years before, during, and after World War II. A slow but steady parade of real-life characters marches across the page, beginning in the paradise of privileged prewar life, moving inexorably forward despite the early warnings of the imminent destruction. Along the way, they forge chasms, shed possessions and family, face the abyss, then regroup with the tatters of their dignity to take stock and give thanks for the mixed blessing of their survival. Anna Baum presents a human catalogue of the vanished world of prewar European Jewry: it is as though she had to survive to become the curator of a treasure trove of personal experience. For while there is suffering and tragedy in this volume, there is culture, tradition, art, music, history, professional and social achievement - and, yes - laughter, dancing and love. Book 3 of 3.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329164857

Book preview

A New Beginning and Other Stories

A New Beginning

We do what we can: we give what we have.

Henry James: The Middle Years.

Also by Anna Baum:

Procession: Stories from a Polish Past; 1990

A Chance Encounter and Other Stories of Polish Jewry; 1993

Available at www.lulu.com/annabaum

A New Beginning

and Other Stories

By

A n n a  B a u m

MT Press

For Michelle, Ari, Oren, Jonathan, and Joshua

I wish to thank Dr. Jean I. Tchervenkov, Dr. J.S.T. Barkun, Dr. M. Cantarovich, Dr. M. Deschenes, Dr. P. Cleland, Dr. E. Alpert and the entire transplant team at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal for their dedication and skills in the field of organ transplantation, and for giving me an opportunity to complete this book.

Also thanks to Dr. G.L. Crelinsten for his constant interest and encouragement.

Copyright © 1999 by Anna Baum

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Foreword

1.    The Family

2.    The Girl with the Twig

3.    The Fifth Column

4.    Ghenya

5.    Ivan

6.    Katyenka

7.    The Boys

8.    The Transport

9.    A New Beginning

10.Kuba

11.A Twist of Fate

12.Halinka

13.Mrs. D.

14.An Honourable Decision

Foreword

Time does not stand still. The number of Holocaust  survivors is dwindling. Soon there will be no one left who lived through that unprecedented experience. It would be unpardonable if those who suffered so much would not give testimony. It is true that there are not too many eager listeners today. The world has had enough of these stories. But I sincerely hope that future generations will be more interested, and would like to find out how it all happened. Therefore I am of the firm belief that all survivors, according to their abilities, should through any medium make known what they have witnessed and how they have suffered.

However, this task is not a simple one. Although it seems easy enough to write down one’s recollections, eventually words get in the way, and it invariably becomes complicated. The words just pile up, and one becomes entangled in their magnitude, especially when the skills of wordsmithing are not too obliging. In order to avoid pitfalls, I’ve often had to struggle, to rein in my emotions, constrain passion, and observe self-discipline.

When I started to write down my recollections, I chose the form of the short story. To me it seemed as the most concise  and appropriate format. To write any story, and especially a story about the Holocaust, which was something so drastically new in human history, one needs a good memory of past events and a great deal of defiance, in order not to fall apart with every dying victim. One also needs the ability to choose the right words. It is my misfortune that of all of these attributes, I possess only one: I remember much too many sad occurrences, they are always on my mind. I repeat them constantly to myself until a story emerges.

The fate of most of my relatives, and of almost all my close friends, was so poignantly sad that for a long time I was incapable of speaking or writing about it. But when I overcame these obstacles and started to write, I began to feel that just by mentioning their names, the places they lived, and just by touching upon their everyday short lives, I would single them out from that unimaginable mass of six million martyrs and bring them to the foreground. I have tried to show them as they were, in a world that was still normal. Not glorious, not always beautiful, but familiar, understandable, and therefore normal. And then came that horror of horrors.

All of these stories in this and my two previous books are pictures of real people, who speak of their lives in a given place and time, and of specific real incidents. Writing down my reflections has not been a vain attempt for recognition, but a most sincere effort to bear witness and tell what I have seen and come to know. Above all, I see these stories as tombstones, put up with my clumsy unskilled hands for those who were once part of my life, who perished so tragically, leaving no graves, and for whom there is no one to mourn, no one to remember.

1.    The Family

Whenever I think of the family, seemingly unconnected images come to mind. Pictures of the past, like photographs from an old album, present themselves. The people in these portraits give the impression of being alive, busy with their everyday chores: their expressions sometimes happy, sometimes disturbed by worries and anxieties. And then single phrases, uttered by them on various occasions, drift through my head. But I know that this is all an illusion, that they have all disappeared, and that they all belong to the past.

Like many other people, I, too, have many pasts. There are the pasts of my father, of my mother, my maternal grandparents, their siblings, and my aunts and uncles. Somehow, all these pasts converge and become part of my own past.

Although I cherish quite a few intimate instances, clearly ingrained in my memory, with my father, I saw him for the last time when I was three years old. He came from Kurlandia, once a semi-independent principality on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. In 1795, when Poland lost its independence, Kurlandia was annexed by Russia, and became a separate Russian province. When Father came of age and had to enlist in the Russian Army, and that could well mean twenty-five years of service, his parents sent him to some distant relatives In Central Poland, which at the time was occupied by Germany. That was the only escape they could think of, or at least the only one they could manage. So no one in our family ever knew or even met any of Father’s close relatives. It was known that he had a brother, several years his senior, who had been sent to America some years earlier for the same reason. Father also had some cousins and other far-removed relatives. His parents had passed away before he married my mother.

Although I knew Father for such a short time, I always remember him fondly as a person with a cheerful disposition who devoted much time to his children, or so it seemed to me. All through my childhood and early teens I greatly missed his loving teasing and cuddly games. It also seemed to me that Father was a bit different from any of our relatives. He had a quaint turn of speech and intonation, dressed a bit differently, and had a penchant for native dishes Mother had never heard of. So, apparently, Father prepared them himself.

My mother came from quite a large family. She had four sisters and one brother: they were all married and the sisters had families of their own. Her brother had married only shortly before the war. When the war broke out in 1939 Mother's oldest sister was barely over forty, and the youngest still in her twenties. They all lived in P, a small town in the western part of central Poland, with a population of under five thousand.

Also in that town lived the Uszerowiczes: my grandfather's only sister and his eldest brother, with their large extended families.

My maternal grandfather's parents and all their forebears, with almost no exception, came from the neighbouring villages, where, for many generations, they were dairy farmers, some dealt in grain and cattle, but mostly they honestly and faithfully served the local gentry, with whom they had most congenial relations.

Almost all of them were educated men for their times. They were versed in both Polish and Hebrew, and they knew the Talmud. Apparently Great-grandfather, with the blessing of his father, was involved in the 1863 Polish Uprising, stories of which were still alive in the family when I was a child. There was talk of arms procured and well hidden. He educated his four sons. The eldest established himself in P, two went to Łódź to new, quite successful careers, and Grandfather went in his father's footsteps, but on his own. Grandfather had traveled, had even been abroad, a great event in those times, and in our credenza were displayed some rare pieces of china he had brought back from Dresden, Berlin, and other world renown great cities as gifts for my mother.

After Great-grandfather's death, Grandfather’s only sister, who was married to a first cousin with the same surname, took over the land. But when her children grew up and her husband passed away she sold the property, gave up her rights to the toll‑gates in Gostków, moved to the same town, bought a substantial plot of land at the back of the old medieval Square, and started to build a very impressive, for such a town, contemporary stone house on an elevated foundation, with large double windows and oak doors. Though she had many children, and her eldest grandson, Abram, was already married, the aged, proud and quiet, rather smallish woman, the Mater Familias of that large family, was still called by her diminutive name: Chayele. Auntie Chayele, that is. The whole clan would congregate in her big house, where everyone was welcome and everyone could find his place. Her youngest son, a very bright but almost blind albino, always in dark glasses, established on the premises a small but well‑drained small cow barn, equipped with up‑to‑date electric facilities and a fully automated dairy on a modest scale. The products were always sent to Łódź on time.

When Auntie Chayele passed away a few years before the war, it was not only the family, from near and far, and most of the townspeople who gathered to pay their respects: almost all the landed gentry of the region followed the simple black hearse in their old landaus and much fatigued and antiquated carriages decorated with faded coats of arms and family crests. As rumours had it, in those landaus were a number of young men and women who bore a marked resemblance to Hertzel, Grandfather's eldest brother. It has been said that Aunty Chayele’s was probably the last funeral of a Jewish landowner in the region.

Although I was not born in P., and stayed there only for brief periods of time, for me it was always home, or, more likely, a symbol of home. It was what I knew as my past. It held for me a profound feeling not only of the immediate, but of the older, remembered past in which all my ancestors on Mother's both sides had their place for so many centuries, for so many generations.

My grandmother's parents and grandparents, the Staszewskis and Podchlebniks, owned farms in the vicinity as far back as they could trace their ancestors. In the course of time some of them sold their farms and settled in P, a town established in the fourteenth century, as mentioned in the contemporary annals of the region, and where Jews had lived almost from the beginning of the town's existence. Those who moved to town were not able to all at once sever their ties with the soil, which had sustained them from time immemorial. They bought small parcels of land, built two‑ or three‑room houses of local stone, a barn, sometimes a stable and outhouses. They planted fruit trees and had their own vegetable gardens. Those who still owned their farms in the late thirties worked the land by themselves, only occasionally making use of hired help.

In Grandmother's family most of the men had only a bit of general education, though all of them could read Hebrew. Some knew just enough to follow the prayer books, but there were also some who inherited from their fathers heavy, leather‑bound Hebrew volumes with darkly yellowed pages, their margins amply filled with tiny handwritten commentaries. They were still in use by the time I was around.

Although Grandfather was the undisputable head of the family, the one who cared about the upbringing, education, and future of the children, it was Grandma's tall, broad shouldered figure and large, bright eyes that almost all the children inherited. She also endowed them with a deep and lasting love and an appreciation of nature.

One of my grandmother's brothers who was alive when the war began was a typical semi‑farmer: his house kept growing as his children got older.

Her eldest brother was of the learned type. A man of more than six feet, erect and with a luxurious white beard. He used a cane, as he was almost blind. During the warm seasons he spent his days in his old orchard where there was a small weathered wooden table and a bench put up by his granddaughters. Under an ancient huge tree he would consult his giant books and make new notes in the margins more by instinct than by sight.

When the Nazis herded up the Jews and he was pushed out from his old and small Spartan house, together with his two youngest granddaughters (his wife had passed away some years earlier), no one dared to push him around. Not the local thugs and not even the soldiers. As I was told, they were stricken with awe, and perhaps with reverence, when the almost blind, tall, proud and handsome old man walked to his death with his cane in one hand. It was a fearsome, and, at the same time, wonder‑inspiring sight. The Germans told him to step out. He did not know for what purpose. Then they told him to walk ahead. Nobody fired, a miracle in itself, and he walked down the street until he was out of sight. Only then were the others led off. After the war's end  nobody claimed to have given him shelter: he had probably walked down to the river and simply drowned himself. He was a sound, healthy, God‑fearing person about one hundred years of age, strangely resembling a Moses, as imagined by world renown sculptors and artists throughout the ages.

On both sides of our large families there were all kinds of men. There were craftsmen, teachers, artists, a poet, clerks, tradesmen, farmers, and merchants of various kinds. Theirs was not a glorious but a fundamentally stable world. A number of them were well‑to‑do, some made a decent living, some barely so. None of them were rich, but then none were very poor either. Many of them were blue‑eyed, and most were tall, sturdy, and broad shouldered. Most of them were robust, healthy, good‑hearted people: they knew their way with horses and often served in the army as cavalrymen.

When the war broke out, they, as everyone else, were alarmed. Some reservists were called up. Those who were left behind firmly believed that nothing terrible could happen to their town, far removed from any major city or even highway, hidden by impenetrable woods. A large number of them remembered the Great War; the misery and the loss of many members of their families. But now there was also the young generation: theirs was still an age of hopes and illusions, and death did not appear to them as a feasibility. They still believed in their own inventiveness and in their ability to persevere. In extreme cases, they thought, they could always take to the woods and no one would be able to reach them there.

But almost all of them perished. Nobody lifted a finger in their defence, though for generations they had lived with Christians as good neighbours. I do not want to judge too harshly. Perhaps in the end it would not have made much of a difference, but at least they would not have felt betrayed and abandoned. Everything happened at once, in one day: the Nazis worked efficiently and quickly. Nobody escaped. Nobody was saved. The town, like so many others, became Judenrein.

Not long ago I met an interesting and very amiable middle‑aged Polish Gentile couple. The vivacious, sincere, and well educated lady said: I was born in Warsaw, but you'll never guess where my husband comes from. Not only I, the lady went on, but none of my relatives have ever heard of P, Have you? I could not believe my good luck: to come across another person who not only knows P well, but also goes there every second summer to visit his relatives.

I was appalled to hear that of the destruction of the larger part of the population of his home town this gentleman had indeed heard something, but had no special recollection, though he surely must have been in his teens at the time. His reminiscences about life in his town before and after that particular event  were of the nostalgic‑pastoral kind. It did not even occur to him that to forget such an incredible incident ‑ in which thousands of the inhabitants of a quiet small town, among them possibly some neighbours, classmates, and probably friends were taken to their deaths ‑ does not befit a civilized person.

When asked in what part of town his relatives lived, and what they did for a living, he answered radiantly: Do you remember the bakery in the red brick house on the main street? Well, my brother is a baker: he owns that bakery.

Oh, yes, I do remember, that used to be Mr. Goldberg's, Lieber's friend's, bakery.

I never heard of him, was the too-quick answer. An answer that felt like salt on my open wounds.

Of the Jewish population, and apparently they were in the majority, only a minuscule number of the young survived: a few who left early and found themselves in Russia, another few in the Army, like my cousin Saul Podchlebnik, and a very small number came back from the death camps.

One of my first cousins, Sarah's youngest son, who was a child when the war began, is one of those who miraculously survived and came back from the camps. It is hard for me to say something about him. A handsome, slight of build man with a little blond moustache, he looks at the world around him with his huge, empty, washed‑out eyes as if still not able to grasp what happened. Not a talker, he seldom says anything about the horrors of the past. I have never heard him talk about the war or the camps. And if he sometimes does recall the past, it is only some vague remark about his short childhood, the only time of his life he is able to understand and to cherish.

A chance survivor, I can never move away from the past, and although, like everyone else, I live in the present, I am not able to leave far behind those who were so close to me. Of late I worry that all of them, the whole family, will soon be forgotten.

It frightens me that some of the faces of my annihilated relatives tend to blur. They are turning hazy, and before their outlines fade away completely, I have to write down at least some episodes of their lives which remain sharp and clear in my memory. I have to bring them back, if only for a short moment, if only on paper. Because the incomplete snatches of those images, the minute details of events long past, deeply impressed in my mind, are their only tombstones.

Eva

___

From the thick fog of first impressions, from the vague caprices of memory, the eternally young figure of Eva, or Evunia, as everyone called her, Mother's youngest sister, stands out clearly. From the deep layers of stored up events and images, she appears as a frail teenage girl with dark heavy braids, a sheen of gold in them, a high forehead, bright grey eyes flecked with tiny golden specks, and a short freckled nose.

As her sisters before her, she was staying at the time with her uncle's (my grandfather's youngest brother’s) family in Łódź, to learn from her cousins better manners, and to acquire a polished appearance. But unlike her older sisters, she attended school there. I do not know exactly what kind of school, but after her graduation she became a clerk and cashier, and did not return to her hometown until she got married.

My parents lived not far from Łódź. Only an hour and a half away by tram,