Such Good Girls (10 page)

Once again, Laura had prevailed; after all she’d endured, she was not about to let a British functionary defeat her. They had at last left Poland behind; in five years, if all went well, they would become British citizens.

Emil finally led them through customs, and soon all four of them were on a London-bound train, much nicer than any train Zofia had ever been on before. She caught the attention of an older woman in a tweed suit, who noticed on Zofia’s face the look of a bewildered immigrant—it was, in fact, sheer anxiety—and offered her some unfamiliar coins, while muttering in an equally unfamiliar language. Zofia, who had been told her entire childhood not to talk to strangers, drew back and Uncle Emil had to intervene, first comforting her in German, and then apologizing to the lady in heavily accented English. Laura studied the landscape out the train window, surprised to see spent shells littered among the rubble of burned-out Southampton buildings. It reminded her of some child’s building-block project that had been destroyed by a resentful older brother. It hadn’t sunk in that the war had reached so far beyond Busko.

The journey ended for Zofia and Laura at 109 Belsize Road in Hampstead, where Emil and Zofia’s great-aunt Rosa lived. Rosa welcomed them by serving real English tea and cakes. Their home, one in a line of tidy three-story row houses, had escaped the London blitz, but just barely. While Rosa and Emil were in a shelter during a bombing raid on the railroad tracks behind the house, a German bomb had pierced the roof of their third-floor apartment but failed to explode. The bomb had been defused and removed, but not before the couple had moved to the second floor, where they lived with their dark and heavy Viennese Biedermeier furniture, which matched the mood in the apartment.

Because Emil and Rosa couldn’t get away with claiming to need two domestics, Putzi worked as a domestic for a Jewish family in Hampstead with small children that lived within walking distance from the Hoenigs’. They had barely enough room for Zofia and Laura, anyway; Laura slept on the couch in the living room, while Zofia slept on a foldout armchair in Emil’s study.

“Isn’t it nice,” Rosa said to Zofia that first night as she tucked her in, “that your great-uncle and I can give you such a nice home? I hope you’re a neat child. Do you put your things away?”

Since Zofia, as far as she could remember, had never had enough things to put away to make putting them away any kind of issue, she could answer her aunt with a clear conscience.

“Immer,” Zofia said. Always.

It was not a happy household. Rosa and Emil had left Austria after Kristallnacht in 1938, having lost their only child to tuberculosis, and between that loss and their reduced circumstances—he came from a wealthy Austrian family that owned oil fields in Eastern Poland, and he himself had been the business adviser to the Vienna Boys Choir—the atmosphere at 109 Belsize Road in northwest London was tense and overbearing. Rosa treated Laura more as an employee than as a niece. She was a perfectionist about the housework who demanded that Laura dust, clean, and wash just so, and was never satisfied. Rosa, who had recently broken her leg, kept barking instructions to Laura from an armchair, with her leg up on an ottoman. The thought was grossly small-minded, Laura knew, but she hadn’t endured enslavement by the Nazis only to be enslaved by her dead mother’s sister. For Laura, there were miserable moments when being back in Poland, just the three of them, almost seemed preferable to her new role as Aunt Rosa’s Cinderella.

Rosa repeatedly demanded gratitude for opening her home to them, and no amount of Laura’s and Zofia’s sincere thanks seemed to placate her. It was ironic that the two of them, who had managed to squeeze whatever small happiness they could out of their anxious situation in Busko-Zdrój, had somehow landed with dyspeptic relatives who seemed more joyless than they were.

Of course, the memories of their suffering—it was too weak a word—followed her to England. The sound of SS boots stomping in her dreams ruined her sleep. Her ambiguous religious identity had followed her as well. She had asked Rosa and Emil not to let on to Zofia that they were Jewish—at least not yet. Rosa and Emil, who were not observant Jews and did not attend synagogue, complied. Laura felt no pressure to reclaim her Judaism, but Zofia’s ignorance of her origins weighed on her more and more. Several months after arriving in London, when she wrote her cousin Toncia, who had left for Israel before the war, she was still struggling with the ordeal of survival.

My Dearest Toncia,

I got your letter two weeks ago, but I was so shaken that I didn’t have the strength to answer. I saw before my eyes all I lost. If Danek and Manek had crossed the border in 1939, they would have survived. It was not in the cards. I have changed a great deal since I became dependent only on myself. I am not as healthy as I used to be and I do not trust people like I used to.

I think you got my letter written in the summer, so you know how my life in hiding in Poland was. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to go to England, I would have stayed in Poland and I would have sunk into Christian life. I have to admit that the church can make a charming impression on simpletons like me. I was completely cut off from the life of Jews. For a few years, I even forgot what a Jew looks like.

Zosia, my daughter, looks just like Danek, light blond. Her light skin and light hair rescued me many times from disaster.

I am surprised that after all I have been through that I still look like a human being. I am most depressed by the awareness that I have lost my independence, and who knows for how long. My English is quite weak, but I am making progress. I cannot look for another job because I am registered as a maid. My relatives are good to me, but we live with them and not on our own. Here, we have nothing, that’s why I am somewhat sorry that I left Poland.

Laura wasted no time getting Zofia started on English lessons with a teacher who lived on the first floor named Mrs. Dora Camrass. On Zofia’s way up and down the stairs, she often ran into the occupants of the other apartment on the second floor, an elderly woman named Levinson and her middle-aged daughter, who were Jewish. She practiced her English salutations on the two of them when they met on the landing, but Zofia was otherwise afraid to engage them in a conversation. She saw no reason to despise them just because they were Jews, despite having been taught to do so at school in Busko-Zdrój, but that didn’t mean she had to like them any more than she liked the Jewish refugees she sometimes saw in the neighborhood, with their secondhand clothes and used faces.

For Zofia, life in London was at first full of wonder. Treats that had been impossible to find were now all around her, thanks to her great-uncle’s small candy and tobacco store near Victoria Station. Her mother, having finished her housekeeping by noon, usually brought Emil his lunch and stayed to work there, illegally, during the afternoons. Zofia spent quite a bit of time there as well, where she could help herself to Cadbury chocolate bars and Wall’s ice cream, which Emil did not seem very good at selling, so that she was welcome to all the ice cream that showed early signs of freezer burn. Zofia overheard Rosa complain to her mother that, despite his business expertise back in Vienna, her husband was simply not very good at selling retail.

Just as she had gorged on oranges aboard the Batory to the point where she couldn’t eat another one, now she gorged on Neapolitan ice cream until she couldn’t even bear to look at it. How strange, Zofia thought, that one reality could so quickly be replaced by another.

Given Laura’s own weakened sense of her Jewishness, it crossed her mind to try to avoid the question of Zofia’s Catholic identity. However, now that they had escaped a country where to be a Jew was still a condition often enough punishable by death, she felt a strong ethical compulsion to reunite Zofia with her original faith. Moreover, if Zofia was her life and her salvation, which she was, how could Laura allow her to continue to be a pretend Catholic anti-Semite? It was pretend, wasn’t it? A necessary deception? No, Laura knew that it wasn’t pretend to her daughter. But even if it wasn’t pretend for Zofia, how could Laura go through life with a daughter who believed that Jews drank the blood of Christian babies and whatever other garbage they had filled her with in school? What mattered more—Laura’s own sanity or sparing her daughter the shock of learning, after everything she’d been through, that she was Jewish? To spare Zofia, to sustain the deception on her behalf, was tantamount to handing the Nazis yet another victory. Not that Zofia would understand that now, but she would thank her mother in the long run.

If Zofia didn’t know she was a Jew, how could she ever know her own mother? And if Zofia was truly an anti-Semitic Catholic, how could Laura ever truly love her own daughter?

The only question was how and when to tell her. The rapid approach of Passover just two months after they arrived in London supplied the perfect opportunity.

The neighborhood around the new Swiss Cottage tube stop was full of Jewish refugees, most of them alone, having lost their entire families to Hitler. Rosa and Emil, following the seder tradition, invited a few of these strangers who had nowhere else to go, to share the Feast of the Unleavened Bread.

A few days before the seder, Laura decided she could wait no longer and asked Zofia to accompany her on a neighborhood shopping trip.

Zofia, who was very well attuned to her mother’s moods after so many years of togetherness under stressful situations, noticed that she was unusually silent as they walked; she could feel her mother’s discomfort as they made their way toward the stores.

Was there bad news? Was it something about her father? Zofia and Laura never talked about him—or anyone else from Lvov—but sometimes Zofia was terrified by the thought that her father had been shot and buried alive in a mass grave. At other times, though, she believed that he was alive and had escaped the Russians and would soon track them down.

Had her mother learned his fate? Had she found out what happened to her other aunt, the one also called Zofia, who had visited them once in Busko and taught her the proper way to brush her teeth? Or maybe they were going to have to move again, which wouldn’t surprise her. Rosa and Emil may have opened their home to them, but not so much their hearts.

“I need to ask you something,” her mother finally said, turning.

“What is it, Mama?”

“Zofia, do you remember what your name was before you were five?”

Zofia tilted her head and looked quizzically at her. “What do you mean?” she asked. “My name has always been Zofia.”

“No, darling, it hasn’t.”

Zofia stared anxiously at her mother.

Suddenly Laura saw a whole cascade of consequences. Something inside whispered to her not to go on, since it had been only with a great effort that she had been able to repair some of the damage to their relationship brought on by her anxiety and obsessive need to create an airtight identity for Zofia in Poland. Her heart was breaking already for her clueless eleven-year-old and the new damage she was about to inflict.

She led her daughter to the small park near the shopping district and sat her down on a bench. “Darling, do you remember when the Germans made us move to a much smaller apartment in Lvov?”

“Not really.”

They were sitting close together, but, as always, in different worlds.

“Well, I had to give you a new name when you were about five and Daddy was taken away by the Russians. You remember about Daddy, don’t you?”

Zofia looked down. “Yes,” she said.

“You were five years old when the Russians took him away,” Laura continued, “and after that the Germans wouldn’t let anyone leave the ghetto. That’s when I gave us new names. You were Zofia and I was Bronislawa. We pretended to be different people so we could escape the Germans and get to Kraków. Remember that train ride?”

“But I didn’t know we were pretending. Why did we have to?”

“Because if we didn’t, the Nazis would have killed us. They were going to kill everyone in Lvov. Only a few people in our family escaped—you and me and Aunt Nusia, whose real name is Putzi, and Aunt Fryda.”

“Why did the Germans want to kill us?” Zofia said, and suddenly her eyes widened at a memory. “Herr Leming, you thought, wanted to poison us with the chocolate bar, but he didn’t.”

Laura took her daughter’s hand and held it. “Look at me, Zofia,” she said, drawing her breath. “They wanted to kill us because we were Jewish.”

Zofia pulled her hand away. “Because we were Jewish? That’s silly. We’re Catholic.”

Even though she and Putzi had blocked out so much themselves, Laura was taken aback. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that Zofia would have no memory at all of ever being Jewish.

“No, Zofia. Until you were five, you were a Jewish girl named Selma Schwarzwald, and your family was Jewish. Your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles—all Jews. When the Nazis came, there was only one way to stay alive if you were a Jew and that was to pretend you were a Catholic.”

“You’re making this up,” Zofia said.

“No, darling. Daddy and I were Laura and Daniel Schwarzwald, and when you were born, we named you Selma.”

Zofia shook her head violently to make it go away, but her mother wouldn’t stop.

“And Nusia’s real name is Adele, and we call her Putzi. We pretended in order to survive. You were too young then to understand this, to be able to pretend to lie. So I had to make you believe you were Zofia Tymejko. I was Bronislawa and we were Catholic. That was the only way I could keep you—us—alive.”

Zofia kept staring and Laura kept talking.

“In a couple of days, Aunt Rosa and Uncle Emil are having a big dinner. You’ve seen Rosa cooking, yes? They’re preparing a Passover seder. Do you know what that is?”

“That’s when the Jews use the blood of Christian children to make their special bread.”

“No, they don’t. That’s a lie. Passover is a festival, a Jewish holiday. It celebrates the Jewish people’s escape from being slaves in Egypt many thousands of years ago. In Poland, we became slaves again, the victims of Nazis instead of Egyptian kings.”