Journeys with My Mother (2 page)

Once in the compartment, panic sets in. I realise that what I have done is irreversible. This is a one-way journey. When the train finally takes off, the familiar faces move away, as if it is they who are leaving me. The moment I close the window, I begin to cry.

I cry for hours. There is no one in the world who could possibly comfort me now. Not even my husband, his empathy notwithstanding. For him, this is just the first step in our big adventure. We are on our way to Australia. Why Australia, of all places? In Australia – my husband's dream destination – I have cousins on my father's side.

The train passes through Czechoslovakia. New passengers enter our compartment. We are all refugees but their hostility hangs in the air, unspoken. I don't have it in me to talk, to explain how much I deplore the invasion of their country, or that I, too, had hopes for Dubček's socialism with a human face. The best I can do is to stop sobbing, suspend feeling sorry for myself, for the Czechs, and for the homeless dog I saw the other day whose misery I now seem to share.

One would imagine I have been banished from Paradise. Yet, for all that, crossing into Austria brings relief.

In Poland, the phrase ‘March '68' is understood to be a period that lasted about a year, beginning in June 1967. March, however, turned out to be the most significant and, almost instantaneously, the most symbolic time. The month itself was damp and dreary, but as the discontent of students and intellectuals rose to surface, the weather was the last thing on anybody's mind.

The communist regime that had been entrenched in power since the end of the war was cracking down on the opposition. The first news of the events in Warsaw, of police brutality and arrests, reached me during a holiday break at the skiing lodge in the Tatra Mountains. I loved these mountains: their outline against the sky, the contour of peaks, the frosty air and a promise of adventure. Warsaw seemed far away. The protestors were demanding the right to free speech, freedom of assembly, the abolition of censorship. All this mattered to me. I was no longer a student but agreed with their demands and feared for their safety.

There was something else that made me uneasy, though I tried not to make too much of it: official reports denounced the protests' leaders as a small group of privileged youth, their Jewish names writ large. My initial reaction to this racial overtone was dismissive: why would anybody buy into this nonsense? Warsaw was my home, yet coming back from the mountains this time I was overcome by a sense of foreboding.

I found the city changed. Even the familiar streets seemed hostile. We lived close to the Polytechnic. There was a great deal of activity around the campus: countless meetings and demonstrations, plus one spectacular occupational strike. The militia and paramilitary blocked some areas and combed the streets in search of students or anything suspicious, surging forward and then withdrawing, only to come back again to resume arrests and beatings. The campus in which the students barricaded themselves was surrounded by an iron-grille fence and no one, other than students, was let in. Outside, a crowd of supporters milled around, passing food, flowers and letters of support across the railings. We, too, went there to deliver our offerings, read new banners and freshly printed leaflets. These were good days of newfound solidarity and goodwill, of expectation that the workers would help, of exhilaration mixed with fear.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the confrontation with the authorities would come to no good. The odds were hopeless: the party apparatus had total control of the media and means to discredit and terrorise dissidents. Some of my friends and people I knew were imprisoned on trumped-up charges, judged by summary courts. Working-class party activists, either out of conviction or coercion, turned increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to the idea of supporting the rebels. To walk through the city was to hear their chants, see the placards and banners:
Students to Study, Writers to Writing, Zionists to Zion
, even
Zionists to Siam
. All this was intimidating and perversely amusing.

If the word ‘Jews' had not yet been spelled out, the address of the First Secretary of the Workers' Party – the most powerful man in the Communist system – to party activists clarified any lingering doubts. The speech was brutal. He personally attacked the writers who publicly demanded freedom of expression. Then he turned his attention to ‘certain people of Jewish origin', whom he accused of harbouring Zionist ideology and thus sabotaging national interests. ‘You cannot have two fatherlands,' he thundered, while the audience roared in response, urging him on. ‘They are free to leave,' the leader intoned. ‘Right away!' the crowd shouted back.

I felt the eyes of the collective on me. Their voices sounded menacing.

To stop the protests spreading beyond the universities, the campaign aimed to alienate the dissident students and intellectuals from the ‘ordinary people' by configuring them as a minority of stirrers, enemies of Polish nationhood, arrogant and self-indulgent members of the privileged establishment. The myth of Judeo-bolshevism was resurrected, the stereotypes refreshed. It was not lost on us that our parents were punished for our rebellion and we, their rebellious children, were in turn punished for opposing the system they'd built and supported. Invariably, the accused were of Jewish origin, even if wrongly attributed. In response, hundreds of jokes were making the rounds: ‘What is the difference between anti-Semitism today and that before the war? Back then, it was not compulsory.'

The weather turned gentle and warm, more arrests were made, more people perceived as ‘not with us' lost their jobs. Many university professors were dismissed from their positions when their faculties closed midway through the academic year. It spawned another quip: ‘I am only half-Jewish. Can I, at least, have a part-time position?' The difference between the Zionist and the Jew was blurred, anti-Semitism no longer hidden. One day when listening to the news, I heard the roar of the crowds chanting: ‘Jews go home, Jews go home, Jews go home!' It felt like a witch-hunt, and it was.

My sister-in-law came from Poznań to stay with us for a few days. She looked around, commenting that for the oppressed, we were doing remarkably well. What could I say? The table, the chairs, the bed, all stood unmoved as before. We had enough to eat – only the view from the windows changed with the seasons. Yet, for me, everything had changed and could never be the same again.

At the immunology department where I worked, things were less subtle. The usual banter no longer included me, my arguments turned into justifications, my words were deliberately misconstrued and used against me. Soon, the conversations froze and most of my colleagues kept their distance. I became invisible. When I was sacked two months later, I would have not been more astonished had a mighty hand appeared from the sky to strike me down. But, in truth, there was nothing spectacular in my dismissal. It was a shabby affair: a piece of paper from the personnel department informed me that I was no longer in the institute's employment. My position no longer existed. Full stop.

I remember standing in the neutral space of the staircase's landing, reading the dismissal note over and over, shaking, failing to take it in. Professor R., the head of the department – a short and sly-looking man – promptly assured me that the decision was out of his hands and, at any rate, he knew nothing about it.

Later, however, sitting with him in his office, he spoke to me in a low voice, choosing his words with care as though I were a child, but his cigarette-holding hand was trembling. ‘You must know that the research carried out in our institute is of national importance and confidential …'

I waited.

He cleared his throat and continued searching for words. ‘I hope you understand that loyalty to our country is paramount …'

As a junior research assistant, I was expected to defer to those in professorial positions, but I had nothing to lose, my anger made me reckless and, for a moment, my indignation overruled convention. ‘What other country do you think I am loyal to?' I sounded aggressive.

‘Well, considering your ties with Israel …'

The rest of the conversation no longer interested me. My satisfaction in forcing him to admit the true reason behind my dismissal did not last long. I could taste my own bile.

I was about eighteen when it finally dawned on me that, like some of my friends, I was Jewish. I was in France at the time, visiting my mother's relatives. They were so obviously Jewish that it did not leave any doubt in my mind that I was Jewish too. Somehow it did not surprise me. Nothing much changed, though I did become more guarded, wondering if my face betrayed me. It did not. Yet, meeting new people, I had the urge to confront the problem head on by talking about my origins, as if putting them through an entry test. Only later, in less threatening times, did I recognise the pathology of those years, and of my own actions.

Ours had been a secular household, free from traditions, above all Jewish traditions. Growing up among nonbelievers in Catholic Poland, I knew more about Easter than Pesach, more about Christmas than Hanukah, and of Yom Kippur I knew nothing at all. I knew about the Holocaust, which had swallowed most of my family, but I believed that the horrible past could not be repeated. I thought of myself as Polish. For who could have imagined that the new postwar world could possibly dust off the Nuremberg Laws?

At the beginning of May 1968, at one of our family dinners, I told my parents about my decision to leave. They understood; their minds, too, were already made up: they would go to Israel. There was nothing more that they could do in Poland, it was not the model of communism they were fighting for.

The summer that followed the spring was beautiful and, on the surface at least, everything went on as before. But nothing preoccupied me more than my new situation. With no work, waiting for permission to emigrate, I had plenty of time to churn through my thoughts. I went to the open-air swimming pool almost daily and met friends, but the atmosphere of my city was suffocating me.

Those of my friends who were not behind bars would come to our small flat on the eighth floor. We were all young professionals. I had known most of them since primary school, through to high school and then university. These were intimate and melancholy evenings. Over a few savouries and Egri Bikaver – one of the two red wines available on the market – we shared the latest jokes and laughed a lot, planned our future, considered possibilities. Looking at the imaginary globe, we wished for another one. There was much bravado in our conversations but little was under our control. Some of us still equivocated while others, for one reason or another, decided to sit it out. As for me, if I could no longer stay in Poland, my preference was to stay in Europe, closer to everything dear to me.

The authorities, however, did not open the borders without conditions attached, without underscoring how disloyal we – the Jews – were. The first step towards obtaining permission to leave was to renounce our citizenship; then, at least officially, we had to declare Israel as our destination. Hence, the authorities would not have to provide us with information on how to emigrate to other countries.
¹
It felt as if we were exiled already.