Journeys with My Mother (7 page)

In September 1939, when the war broke out, Zakroczym, being so close to the fortress of Modlin, was heavily bombarded. Its losses were enormous – most, seventy per cent, was in ruins, many people killed and many more wounded. During that month some people sought shelter in Warsaw and the surrounding towns. They returned home to find ruins and, soon, the occupiers.

While the town authority was still in the hands of the local Germans (
Volksdeutsche
), the attitude towards their Jewish neighbours was reasonable; there was no violence. The brutalities began with the arrival of the Gestapo, the gendarmes and German soldiers.

The first deportation of Jews from Zakroczym took place on a Sunday at the end of June or the beginning of July 1941. The town was surrounded by German gendarmes and armed
Volksdeutsche
. The Jews were herded into the town square, the same one where we senselessly laughed. Those who did not have resident permits, together with old people, were put onto lorries and taken to the camp at the nearby town of Pomiechówek. The conditions there were terrible, the food scarce. Although some inhabitants of Zakroczym risked their lives to deliver whatever they could to the camp, prisoners were dying of hunger.

A few months later, the remaining Jews were ordered to assemble in the very same place for the last time. Then they were forced to walk to the town of Nowy Dwór to swell the numbers of the district ghetto. From there, in November 1942, two deportations took place. Soon after, the ghetto was liquidated; the remaining Jews were sent to Auschwitz.

According to JewishGen records, the Szlang family shared the same fate as the other Jews of Zakroczym. After the war, none of them could be found. I would like to call them by their names, to allocate their proper places in the family tree. This is not possible. I can only assume that before the war, their daily lives were not unlike that of others in the community – their views as diverse, the young as keen to break free from convention. It must have been a vibrant, if not claustrophobic, place for those with unbridled energy.

5

Ze'ev

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

—George Bernard Shaw

If the first achievement of my father's juvenile years was to organise a strike in his father's workshop, it's not surprising that soon, and with equal determination, he wanted no less than to right the wrongs of the world.

The revolution of 1906, the year of my father's birth, began in Russia before spreading to the Congress of Poland. Workers demanded regular work and decent wages. They marched and sang, red flags flying high. Later Władek would learn all these anthems; they described barricades and bitter tears, sacrifice and breaking the shackles of despotism. The chants, and the issues, were not new; they would endure for many decades. Poetically speaking, my father was born under the star of revolution.

The end of the First World War in 1918 brought liberation from three empires and the resurrection of an independent Poland. There was a renewed desire to free the country from industrial neglect and backwardness. My father remembered the elation heralded by the new constitution, which promised equal rights and cultural autonomy to all minorities in Poland. From then onwards, the Jews, too, were Polish citizens.

He could also remember another Polish-Bolshevik war and the wave of terror that swept the country for the next few years. Jews, accused of disloyalty, were murdered and their properties destroyed. Neither emancipation nor assimilation, so eagerly embraced in previous years, brought comfort to Jewish communities. They remained as before – an unwelcome, mistrusted and despised minority.

Zionism, the first aspirations for Jewish nationhood, was emerging as the next best thing. Though it held a different meaning for various groups, just about every Jew was a Zionist back then.

My paternal great-grandfather, Izaak Leib, lived with his family in Gęsia Street, Warsaw. He had a workshop there which produced waterproof gabardine coats. The factory was profitable enough to support his large family of daughters and sons. Yet, out of thirteen children, only seven lived past their childhood.

Złata, his wife, my great-grandmother, is best remembered for her choleric character and despotic nature. Her arthritic knees made her immobile; she ruled the family from her bed. All things considered, I won't judge her too harshly. She was already an old woman when one of the early German bombardments made her blind.

In the spring of 1943, in response to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the SS, acting on Himmler's orders, combed through the ghetto, driving out the last inhabitants, the last fighters, with tanks, artillery and flamethrowers. Perhaps she could not move, or was too slow to obey orders and remained where she was; whatever the case, my great-grandmother was thrown through the window. Apparently my father was never told and I – because such things are too horrible to utter – have never talked about it. Izaak Leib had died in 1937 of diabetes. In the scheme of things, it was a merciful death.

Before the war, all my father's family lived at the same address, even as adults, with their spouses and children. Izaak's sons worked in his business before branching out on their own.

Many Jews were leaving Poland in those years. Despite their experiences of anti-Semitism, they still hoped for a peaceful and prosperous life somewhere else. Chil went to Palestine, Salomon to Argentina. Of the sons, only the oldest, Henoch (my grandfather), did not leave. Maybe filial duty kept him in Warsaw; maybe he was an optimist.

For the first several years of Henoch's marriage to Luba, my father Władek – affectionately called Wewek – was the only child. Henoch may have hesitated about emigrating, but certainly not about producing more children. Almost every year another one was born, and sometimes died. Eventually, there were eight, possibly nine, children. No wonder Babcia Luba seemed resigned.

Henoch, like his father, was a tailor, but with so many children to feed and clothe, he struggled. Before visiting someone, Luba fed her offspring, telling them not to pounce on food like wild beasts.

I have no difficulty imagining my father as a boy. He was energetic, mischievous, inventive and very good at making up stories. He remained like this for the rest of his life. Evidently, his exploits proved too much for his father. Henoch's attempts to curb Władek's behaviour with beatings failed, causing much bitterness and anger between father and son. Whether my father became defiant in response to Henoch's authoritarian ways, or it was the other way round, is impossible to know. Henoch was never given a chance to present his side of the story.

My grandparents were not orthodox, but religious traditions were the weft and warp of their lives. It was inconceivable that one day their oldest son would so willingly, even enthusiastically, leave it all behind.

He did it in a spectacular way. Months before his sixteenth birthday, he ran away from home. He was escaping the job he abhorred and his father's wrath. The idea of going to Palestine merged seamlessly with his vision of the future. Unwittingly, Henoch had forced Władek out of home.

A great number of Jewish youth were eager to go to Palestine – and just as many parents were against it. Henoch and Luba most certainly would have opposed my father's impulse, had they known about the plan. It was one thing to be in favour of the Zionists' state and quite another to let your own, still very young, son go there. So Władek left home, without parental blessings, with no money. The fact that Palestine was so far from Warsaw, the journey fraught with difficulties, only spurred him on.

With his friend Chaim, a skinny boy his age, Władek boarded the train going south. Urban Warsaw was displaced by villas and pine woods, dusty shacks with their little gardens; when the outskirts of the city gave way to open fields and, later, when the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains appeared on the horizon, the consequences of their decision came into sharper focus. Especially when, after hours of dodging roving conductors – thus avoiding having their ears boxed and being sent on the first train back to Warsaw – it all became too much for Chaim and he got off the train at the Romanian border, leaving Władek to his own devices.

My father eventually arrived at the Rumanian port city of Constanţa, tired but pleased with himself. He found the pier teeming with people, everybody pushing and shoving. Caught up in the melée, he attached himself to a couple and boarded the boat as one of their many children. Worn out and uncomfortable, he tried to cope with the nausea. They sailed past the coast of Turkey. The places known to him from maps, and which he'd dreamed about, materialised before his eyes. If only his family and Chaim could see him now: a boy from Gęsia Street looking at the wonders of the world!

If he'd had any doubts or fears, they were outshone by his sense of achievement. His tenacity had already paid off. Even years later, when telling his children about his adventures, he was pleased with his guile.

Back then Jaffa, small and busy, was the only seaport available to steamers entering Palestine. Underwater rocks prevented docking so ships had to anchor some distance away. Local boats came and went, ferrying passengers to shore. I imagine the newcomers as pilgrims, their dullcoloured clothes set against the blue of the Mediterranean sea and sky, their mood wavering between uncertainty and anticipation. To the European eye, Jaffa was just a dusty warren of decrepit houses dotted with minarets. But Władek was captivated. Arriving in Palestine in 1922, he was amongst the third wave of migration to the Holy Land – the longed-for land of milk and honey.

The quay was filled with a tightly packed crowd and the newcomers believed these people were there to make them welcome. They could not have been more wrong. Instead, the multitude was waiting for the boat to take them away – perhaps back home, perhaps somewhere else altogether. Life in the Promised Land was hard. It called for endurance and determination. There were years when almost as many people left as arrived.

The land without a people for a people without a land, claimed the Zionists. So it came as a surprise to the many early settlers that the land was not, in fact, empty. Someone complained in a letter home: But there are Arabs here, I didn't know!

The
chalutzim
(pioneers) who set the agenda for this new society were secular, urban, educated and socialist. The future Palestine was to be a place like no other, and its people everything the Jews of the old country were not. Like their European clothes, their names were at odds with the landscape. Far away from their parents, it was easy to cast off these names – the names which, after deliberations and blessings, amid tears of joy, had been given to them at birth. In Palestine, all of this receded into the distant past, replaced by Hebrew names of biblical meaning: bold and earthy, signifying strength and courage, aspiration. What emerged was a new person. There was a whiff of baptism about it.

My father found that his birth name, Ze'ev, which means wolf in Hebrew, very apt. To make his transformation complete, he replaced his Slavic-sounding surname with the Hebrew Edari. Until recently, I had never given a thought to the meaning of the word
edari
. It means flock, which makes the juxtaposition of the two words – wolf and flock – quite baffling. A wolf to his flock, with a difference? I wonder. An ideal of coexistence, a love of paradox, an expression of ambiguity?

Away from old Europe, anything was possible. The newcomers were not weighed down by the taint of Jewishness, by centuries-old traditions, parental control, even class divisions. All this could be pushed into the past. For the first – and possibly the only – time in their lives, they felt truly free. Everything seemed attainable, if only they worked hard enough.

The pioneers did not come to Palestine to conquer or to make money. They went where their labour was needed, doing what was asked of them to build the Jewish state, sharing work, food and free time. Ze'ev constructed houses, broke stones in the quarry, picked oranges and – his favourite occupation – herded flocks of sheep in the hills of the Galilee. It was a life on the move, of living in tents and makeshift shelters under the ferocious Middle Eastern sun.

The few clothes Ze'ev brought with him from Warsaw did not protect him from the summer heat or cold nights. Living conditions were primitive, food provisions scarce and the diet monotonous. Many illnesses made the rounds: colds, dysentery, skin problems. Malaria was the worst. My father contracted it and it kept him company for many years. For all that, he took pride in his ability to endure.

The early settlers viewed the sparse population of Arabs as part of the landscape, an irritating obstacle which, they were certain, could be overcome peacefully through legal means, by buying the land and wishing the Arabs would move their tents a bit further away to make room for those who didn't have anywhere else to go. The Arab presence was not perceived as a serious threat. What the settlers feared most was losing the land to a bigger power. Much effort was put into making the Jewish presence permanent.