Never Been This Old Before: A Love Story

By Julian Padowicz

In this most recent sequel to his award-winning memoir, "Mother and Me—Escape from Warsaw 1939," Julian Padowicz presents the adult years of his continuing struggle to become his own person, in the face of his domineering mother's responses to the personal challenges created by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Three previous memoirs covered his childhood and adolescence as Julian and his courageous and creative mother struggle to survive WWII and escape to America—in this one, adult Julian, educated now in the United States, struggles to free himself of the suffocating pall his celebrated but driven and self-centered mother has laid over his life.

Growing up in a venerable boarding school and the homes of relatives, while his mother pursues social objectives, Julian searches for companionship, love, and a career, achieving them eventually, after a series of missteps and misadventures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crossroad Press
• Release date: May 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005873189

Julian Padowicz

Born in Lodz, Poland into a middle class Jewish family, Julian Padowicz was 7 years old and living in Warsaw when WW II began. With bombs falling on their heads, Julian and his socialite mother began a trek that took them into southern Poland, where they endured Soviet occupation before escaping, in dramatic fashion, over the snow-covered Carpathian Mountains, into neutral Hungary. These experiences, as well as subsequent ones on their way to the United States, have been recounted in a three-part memoir by Padowicz under the titles, “Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939,” (Book of the Year Award, ForeWord Magazine) “A Ship in the Harbor,” (Second Prize, Connecticut Press Club) and “Loves of Yulian.”In 2010 Padowicz broke into the field of fiction with “Writer’s Block,” a humorous romance/adventure about the retired literature professor, “Kip” Kippur who sets out to avenge the wrongs of his life by writing a thinly disguised memoir and ends up in a series of life-altering and life-threatening adventures. The success of “Writer’s Block” led the author to produce a series of sequels featuring the same humorous characters and the coastal village of Venice, Massachusetts. They include “The Best Sunset in Venice”, “A Scandal in Venice”, and “Alexander’s Part Time Band.”Padowicz received a degree in English from Colgate University, and served 5 years in the Air Force as an intercept instructor and navigator, prior to a 35-year career as a documentary filmmaker. As president of BusinessFilm International, he wrote and produced films on the role of newspapers in a democratic society, alcoholism, and the legitimacy of feelings, among other subjects, as well as scripting a series on the American way of life for the U.S. Information Agency.Retired from filmmaking in 1991, Padowicz went on to write books on photography, dealing with angry customers, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, before launching his memoir series and his novels.In demand as a speaker about both his Holocaust-related experiences and the creative process, Padowicz speaks in libraries, synagogues, churches, and universities throughout the country. He was recently invited to do annual book signings at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.With his wife, Donna, Padowicz lives in Stamford, Conn. He is an avid tennis player and is frequently seen on his daily runs along Hope Street, where he says he does his most creative thinking. In a blog entitled “Confessions of the Hope Street Stalker” (hopestreetstalker.blogspot.com) Padowicz shares many of the thoughts and incidents that occur during these runs.Padowicz has three daughters, two stepsons, ten grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter. Born under the sign of Capricorn, he professes to be a “late bloomer.”

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

On the thirteenth of January, 2016, I turned eighty-four years old and proceeded to drive from what had been our home in Stamford, Connecticut, for the past twenty-nine years to Hampton, Virginia, laying claim to my birthday present from my wife.

My lovely wife, executive director for the past twenty-one years of the Greater New Haven Transit District, a bus service for the elderly and the disabled, had just turned in her company car and officially retired, becoming my fulltime companion for the first time in our twenty-nine years of marriage. We had sold our beautiful, hundred-plus-year-old five-bedroom New England farmhouse, and purchased, mortgage-free, a ninety-five-year-old bungalow on a quarter acre of land where, God willing, we could spend several years devoted to just being together.

When I said, I drove, I didn’t mean it literally. I don’t drive anymore. I insist that I’m still perfectly capable of working the pedals and the steering wheel. I could even change a tire, if I had to. It’s just that I don’t trust my judgement. Something inside me tells me that I might do something foolish, like turn into the passing lane without noticing that there is a car there already.

Not that I’ve caught myself doing something like that, but my mind has been doing crazy things lately. I forget names, or the actual sequence of some past events, or the events themselves. On the other hand, my creative faculties seem to be fine… for now.

It was some sixty years earlier, the summer of 1954, to be exact, that I stood on the set of There’s No Business Like Show Business, on a sound stage at Twentieth Century-Fox, in Los Angeles, my Speed Graphic camera heavy at my side, being as quiet and unobtrusive as I could possibly be, so as not to jeopardize my welcome, when Marilyn Monroe finished her Heatwave number, turned in my direction, and blew a kiss. I looked around to see if her husband, Joe, might be standing beside me or Kirk Douglas, Tyrone Power, or Marlon Brando, all of whom I had seen around the lot recently, but I found myself alone. Having been well brought up by my nanny, I blew a kiss In return. Then I found myself wondering how Susan (not her real name), my wife of ten months would react if I told her. Based on experience, I decided it best not to.

It was some eighteen years before that that I had woken up to find a strange woman in a navy-blue dress with white buttons up the front and topped by a Peter Pan collar sitting beside my bed. This is my next to earliest memory. I must have been five.

She had a crown of braided golden hair wound around her head, a story book in her lap, and she told me she was my new nanny. Her name was "Panna Yanka," which was "Miss Jane" in Polish. I was in bed with a cold, which was a reasonable precaution in that pre-antibiotic day, and she was speaking Polish because this was Warsaw, Poland. Then I, for some reason lost to history, decided to call her Kiki.

Kiki and I became inseparable. We slept in the same room, and on decent days we walked, hand in hand, to the park, where Kiki would sit on a park bench with her knitting or her rosary and tell me to go play, but not with any strange children. This always presented a problem to me, since the only other children that I knew were my cousins, Andy and Anita, living on the other side of town. I eventually developed a squadron of imaginary friends, but I always envied the children who had live friends to play with.

Above Kiki’s bed there hung a crucifix and a picture of Kiki’s mother. Kiki’s mother, she told me, was in Heaven. Over my bed hung a photo of my late father. Where he might be, Kiki had no idea. Because he had been a good man, he certainly wasn’t in Hell, pictures of which she had shown me. But because he had been Jewish, as were I and all my relatives, he certainly wasn’t in Heaven. Only Catholics went to Heaven.

If my father, who had died of a cold when I was a year old, wasn’t in Heaven, then I, clearly, wasn’t going there either… unless, some day, I got sprinkled with holy water and recited the Our Father and the Hail Mary a lot.

I learned both prayers and to make the sign of the cross when entering a church, though I wasn’t allowed to dip my fingers in the holy water. When, during mass, Kiki knelt at the altar rail to receive holy communion, I closed my eyes and pretended I was receiving holy communion as well. The wafer, I decided, tasted like my favorite dish, scrambled eggs with chives.

It was September 1938, I was six years old, and Kiki was holding my hand as we walked to my new school. I had my new book carrier strapped to my back, which was good. But, instead of the navy-blue uniform with a yellow or red stripe down the sides of long pants, brass buttons, and a peaked cap that other schoolchildren wore, I had on a black smock with a white Peter Pan collar and a black beret, which was bad.

Arriving at the school building, I saw other children, dressed like me, led there by their nannies or their mothers. Kiki urged me through the front door, but waited outside. The current of beret-topped children carried me inside.

There were orders being shouted at us from the first-floor landing. They were in French. I recognized the language because, when I saw my mother serving tea to her friends in our living room, they often slipped into French. But I didn’t know what the words meant.

Over the course of that year I learned one French statement there for sure: "Padowicz, dans le coin. It meant, Padowicz, go stand in the corner." The rest of my school year at that school for children of French families stationed in Warsaw, which we weren’t, was a painful blur.

I also learned to say, "Bon jour, Madame." But I was taught that at home, and I learned to say it whenever my mother proudly announced that I was attending the French school.

Then, on September 1st, 1939, I woke up to find German airplanes dropping bombs on us. A week earlier we had all been issued gas masks and Kiki and I had carried them to the park with us, just in case… And the morning after that Kiki’s crucifix and her mother’s photograph were gone from above her bed, her mattress was stripped, Kiki was gone, and my room was filled with cigarette smoke. Sitting at our little green table was the virtual stranger, who was my beautiful mother, Barbara, stubbing out a cigarette.

Kiki had only gone home to Lodz, my mother explained, to make sure her father was all right. She would meet us at our destination in a few days.

Where are we going? I asked.

Some place where they aren’t bombing, Mother said.

But where exactly? I hoped it was Jurata on the Baltic Sea, where Kiki and I had spent the summer.

I haven’t decided yet.

If my mother didn’t know where we were going, how would Kiki know where to meet us? Her father didn’t have a telephone—I knew I would never see Kiki again.

Five months later, my mother and I were trudging through deep snow, over the Carpathian Mountains between Soviet occupied Eastern Poland and what, at that time, was Hungary. For a lot of money, Mother had hired a mountaineer guide to lead us, and to carry me on his back, but he had abandoned us. Disguised as peasants, I in Mother’s mink jacket, turned inside out, her diamonds wrapped in fabric for buttons, and both of us ignorant of using stars for guidance or moss on the side of trees, we wandered in the dark.

"What are you talking bout, Basia?" people had said when Mother had announced her intentions. It was true that people had hired guides and escaped over the Carpathians, but those had been young men on their way to join the Polish Army reforming in Romania, not women with children, and it had been before the mountains were filled with snow.

That’s just it, Mother would answer. Who would be suspecting a mother and child to be escaping in February snow?

When, at a pre-dawn hour we now found ourselves in a mountain village and knocked on a door, not knowing if we were in Hungary or had wandered back into Poland, they knew what we were about and took us in. We couldn’t understand what they were saying and concluded we must be in Hungary.

Fourteen months later we sailed past the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and Mother made me give her an officer’s oath that I would never reveal that we were Jewish.

My Uncle Arthur and Aunt Julia Szyk (Shyk) met us at the dock. Uncle Arthur was, actually, my cousin, my mother’s mother and his being sisters, but, because he must have been some thirty years older than me, I had been taught to call him uncle out of respect.

Uncle Arthur was an artist. He worked in the Medieval medium of illumination, tiny, exquisite, six- by-four-inch paintings, conveying as much visual information as full sized canvasses, to illustrate books and decorate documents. For years the Szyks had lived in Paris, like all struggling artists, but, with wartime, Uncle had turned to drawing political cartoons that had caught the attention of the world and made him a sudden success. With their daughter, Alice, some ten years older than me, they had moved to New York where his cartoons, portraying Hitler and his friends as the monsters they were, regularly adorned the front or rear covers of Collier’s magazine, a direct competitor of The Saturday Evening Post, and Coronet, similar to Readers Digest.

They lived in a beautiful apartment on West 74th, just off Riverside Drive, where they brought Mother and me till we got situated, and Uncle Arthur let me stand behind him and look over his shoulder as he sat at his desk, the desk covered in jars of paint and colored inks, to execute his miniature masterpieces.

My uncle and aunt were proud of being Jewish, which I found surprising. I thought that being Jewish was something you denied and were ashamed of. In Uncle’s work I saw sympathetic renditions of Jewish people, rather than the ugly caricatures I was used to, for the first time in my life.

Aunt Julia took on the task of Americanizing me. But she spoke English with such a heavy Jewish accent that it was a year before I learned that Thanksgiving wasn’t a Jewish holiday and Douglas MacArthur wasn’t a landsman.

The following January, I was sitting cross-legged in the upper bunk of a dorm room in a Connecticut boarding school, using my limited English vocabulary to explain to a concerned master on duty why, at nine years of age, I was crying for my mother. The hole that had opened so painfully in my chest, following Kiki’s disappearance reopened the moment our dorm room lights were turned off.

At seven o’clock on Sunday mornings, while the rest of Rumsey Hall was getting an extra hour’s sleep, I and the other two or three Catholic boys would be standing on the front steps waiting to be picked up by Father Murphy on his way to say mass in the village Catholic church. When Father asked me, one day, why I never went to confession or took communion, I explained, as Mother had told me to do, that it was a family tradition to receive our First Communion from a family member, and my priestly uncle had not yet arrived from Europe. Then, to dispel any further concern, I assured Father that I came from a long line of priests and nuns. Father Murphy never asked me again.

On the other hand, I did not have an explanation for why, even though I could soon speak English as well as any of my schoolmates, I could not read my textbook any faster silently, than I could read it out loud. It made completing my homework assignments virtually impossible. What’s more, the mere process of reading became such a conscious effort that, afterwards, I could recall little of what I had read. At times I would read a passage aloud in class, but, much to the amusement of my classmates, have no idea what I had read because, as I read, my mind had been on the cigarette behind the master’s ear which, I was certain, he had forgotten was there.

This, of course, could not help but affect my general school performance and, with it, my motivation. I had little interest in what one number divided by another would produce or how much coal West Virginia yielded annually.

One day, returning to my room, after lunch, I found a note from Mrs. Smith, the housemother, on my bed. It seemed there was a package for me in her office. I hurried to her laundry-filled domain where the upstairs halls crossed, prepared for a box of fruit, but hoping for cookies.

It was a book. I unwrapped a shiny blue jacket with a falling bomb on the cover and a mother and child trudging through deep snow. The title was Flight to Freedom, and Mrs. Smith said, Oh, your mother has written a book.

Sure enough, Mother’s name was below the title, and I couldn’t figure out how that was possible, since my mother spoke English with difficulty and wrote not one word.

Let’s see if she inscribed it, Mrs. Smith said, and we opened to the title page. Make sure everyone sees this book, it said, in Polish.

Oh, what did she write to you? Mrs. Smith wanted to know.

Let us never forget what we accomplished together, I translated.

I had a classmate, Gardner McKay, who would later go on to star in his own television series, but who spent much of his study hall time drawing wonderful sketches of people. I could not draw like Gardner, but wished I could.

Then I realized that what I could do was make up stories. I could make up stories about marines fighting Japs on Pacific islands, about a good cowboy outsmarting a bad one, and the smallest boy on a baseball team hitting a home run. And, in fact, when we were assigned a story to write and then read it to the entire class, my classmates showed considerably more interest in hearing my stories than I could muster in respect to theirs. I realized that, while I could never obtain a degree in medicine, law, or engineering, I might be able to, someday, make a living writing stories.

I borrowed a friend’s typewriter and began sending my stories to the New Yorker. I picked that particular magazine because I found that their printed rejection slip came in ten days. Other magazines could take six weeks.

My teachers were concerned about my inattentiveness. Somehow I managed to advance from one grade to the next. But the fact that I wasn’t reading all of my assignments and that what I was reading I wasn’t retaining, became quite clear. Many times I got talked to by various members of the faculty, and each time I promised to mend my ways. But I could never make it work.

CHAPTER TWO

My mother got word that Lolek, my stepfather, who, as a reserve officer, had fought in the defense of Warsaw, was alive and a POW of the Germans. I had never known my real father. He, I was told, had died of a cold when I was a year old.

Mother and I went to Reno, Nevada one summer and I learned to ride like a cowboy, and Mother got a divorce from Lolek.

Then I watched the interior of our railroad car reflected in the window beside me as my schoolmates and I sped under Manhattan streets and avenues toward our waiting parents, a week before Christmas 1945. The war had just ended, and I was thirteen years old.

My expression of affection for my mother, when I saw her inside the station, would be mostly put on for the sake of giving her pleasure. But three weeks later, as she walked me down the platform to a car with