Memory is our Home: Loss and Remembering: Three Generations in Poland and Russia 1917-1960s

Chapter One

In Warsaw, the only running water in our apartment came from a small kitchen sink. In order to wash or relieve myself, I had to use a public bathhouse in the courtyard of our building. I tried not to go there any more than necessary; the bathroom was dirty, dark, and scary. Next to the bathhouse, garbage was dumped into open containers.

The lack of sanitation contributed to the spread of tuberculosis, typhus, and dysentery, but by some miracle our family was spared these illnesses. Still, there were many times in later years—as I slept in the cold of an open field, or when I saw my brother the day he came back from Stalin's labor camps—that I wondered if it might have been better to have succumbed to these diseases than endure what we suffered in our lives.

I was born on April 16, 1917. World War I was raging, and Poland would regain its independence with the conclusion of the war. The casualties were horrendous and the Polish people were impoverish, starving, and frequently dying, but even people living in poverty continued to bear children.

We lived in a tiny, fourth-floor apartment in an old tenement building at 54 Nowolipki Street. I was the sixth and the last child born to Bina Symengauz and Pinkus Talasowicz. My parents named me Rajzla, although on the streets of my neighborhood I was called by my Polish name, Roma.

Mother came from a poor, religious family. Her mother had stayed home and raised eight children. It was expected that our mother would likewise take on the difficult job of raising her six children. But her circumstances would become dire before the end of the war, when my thirty-six-year-old father died suddenly from a simple ear infection. Like most men of his class at that time, he had worked two jobs to support us. Now the burden was on my mother. I don't remember anything from this time because I was only a baby. I can't imagine how Mother managed, with no husband and six young children in a city ravaged by war, where almost everyone was struggling to survive.

My oldest brother, Adek, was twelve years old when Father died. It was considered a blessing by all that the owner of the textile factory where Father worked let Adek take Father's job. I am convinced that we were able to survive that first year due to this generosity.

My twin sisters Pola and Sala were both eleven years old. Hungry as we were, Mother did not have the heart to send them off to work, too. My sister, Anja, and my brother, Sevek, were only seven and four years old, respectively, at the time of Father's death.

My earliest memories are hauntingly painful; they take me back to a day when Mother came home with just a piece of bread. I don't know how old I was, but I can see myself sitting with my brothers and sisters—hungry, cold, and alone in our room, waiting for Mother to return. I sat on the edge of the narrow bed that I shared with Mother and watched the door for hours, just waiting for her. We didn't know where she had gone, but she had been gone all day, and my fear that she was never coming home grew stronger as darkness descended. We were forbidden to light the kerosene lamp when we were alone.

I remember how Mother looked when she opened the door, disheveled and out of breath, as though she had been chased. She paused for a few seconds, walked over to me, and gave me the small piece of bread she clutched to her chest. Turning away from my starving brothers and sisters, I devoured it. Rationally, I know in hindsight that there was no reason to feel guilty; I was too young then to be accountable. But in my heart, I ask myself over and over, How could I have not shared even a bite?

* * *

In 1919, when Pola and Sala turned twelve, Mother relented and sent them off to work. Despite working long hours, the low wages they earned did not help much at home. It seems that when Father was alive, the family had managed in the tiny, two-room apartment. However, when Mother could no longer afford to pay the rent, she felt compelled to rent out our kitchen to a couple and their son. But their family grew and eventually there were five people living in our kitchen.

As a family of seven, we had to make do with two beds, three chairs, a large table and a dresser. Finding a place to sleep for everyone was a challenge. We slept two to a bed. At night, Mother unfolded an additional cot and my older siblings took turns sleeping on a hay-stuffed mattress that we placed on top of the table. This was the least comfortable place to sleep, but every spring before Passover we stuffed this mattress with fresh hay, which infused the room with its sweet smell.

Regardless of how little money she had to feed us, Mother secretly saved to make sure we had a proper Passover. She made sure we understood the importance of this holiday: the celebration of the Exodus of our people from slavery in Egypt. We barely saw her for six weeks leading up to the holiday. Mother, along with the other Jewish women in our neighborhood, worked through the night in a bakery to earn extra money making matzah. I remember how we tiptoed in the day so that she could sleep. Today, when I contemplate Mother's preparations for Passover—realizing that most days we had practically nothing to eat—I am struck by her devotion to her faith.

Our room was always dark, even in the daytime, since the sun never reached our small window. But the night before the holiday, in the light cast by the kerosene lamp, Mother washed all the dishes, shook out the linens, and cleaned the entire apartment.

Passover began at sunset with a traditional Seder that progressed late into the night. Mother always forced me to nap in the late afternoon so that I could stay up late with the rest of the family. I looked forward to Passover, not just because of the religious ceremony and the extra food, but because it meant spring was coming and I wouldn't be cold all the time. It also meant I would be allowed to leave our dark apartment to play with the other children in our courtyard. How I'd run down those stairs! I'd step out into the courtyard and take a long, deep breath, fill my lungs with spring air and turn my white face toward the sun, welcoming its warm rays.

As a young child, I was small for my age and quiet. I was also frail and often sick. I lived in a state of almost constant hunger, but I had no idea that my back was growing round from malnutrition. There were times when, due to my poor diet, my leg bones would pop out of their joints. At first I would cry for Mother to help me, but there was nothing much she could do. Seeing the pain in her face hurt me more than the physical pain in my legs. Medical care was primitive, and most of the families in our neighborhood could not afford to pay a doctor. Instead there were home remedies, like using young onion shoots for skin infections. I don't know how effective they were, but even now, when I smell an onion I find myself feeling better.

When I was six years old, my tongue erupted with an infection that no home remedy could cure. Mother used the last of her money to take me to a doctor's assistant, which was a slightly less expensive way to get medical help. We came home with an awful-tasting liquid medicine, which my brother Adek administered once per day by wrapping a stick in cotton and applying it over my tongue. The tonic stung and I cried bitterly from the pain, but after two weeks my tongue was healed and Adek was proud to have played such an important role in my recovery.

* * *

I was too young to remember when the war ended in 1918, but Mother described to me many times how the other wives, with eyes and arms raised toward the sky, begged God for the safe return of their husbands. Their children danced happily around them, waiting to be reunited with their fathers. I remember sitting on mother's lap as she would put her hands over her face to finish our sad story: Of course, my husband was not coming home, she would say with a stifled sob. I had only the black earth that covered his body.

I often wonder what it would have been like to grow up with a father. I never saw a photograph of him, so I don't even know what he looked like. I am told that he was a tall, thin man who had dark hair and eyes. He was a good husband and devoted father. One of nine children from an observant and financially well-off family, Father worked as a supervisor in a textile factory. His other job was in the back room of a pharmacy, which in those days was considered an important job.

My father, Pinkus Talasowicz, was born in 1882, and he married my mother, Bina Symengauz, in 1901, in Warsaw. A Warsaw telephone directory from 1908 lists Pinkus Talasowicz as a weaver, living on 10 Stawki Street. This meant that, for a while, my parents were probably living with the father's in-laws.

His father, my grandfather, Gerson Talasowicz, was a well-known rabbi and teacher in the Jewish community. Grandfather ran a private Jewish school known as a cheder, where he was feared by his students and known for his strict discipline. He wore traditional black clothes and always walked with a fashionable walking stick. I often saw people bowing to him and stopping him in the street to ask for advice. Grandfather was an intense, serious man.

To attend grandfather's cheder, which accommodated about forty male students, a boy had to come from an affluent family. The cheder was located on Stawki Street, across the street from where we lived, on a sizable piece of land surrounded by a fence. The gate was almost always locked. To the side of this property stood a small house, where my grandparents lived with their spinster daughter.

Although Mother and Father both came from religious backgrounds, they were from different socioeconomic classes. I can still remember Mother telling me, her head hanging low and her voice filled with humiliation, how our affluent grandfather never approved of his son's marriage to her. When my parents met, Mother was a motherless girl from a poor family and less educated than Father. She often described to me how she and my father noticed each other on the streets of their neighborhood; how they fell in love and got married. They did it without asking for their parents' permission. Grandfather never forgave his son for marrying beneath his class. When Father was still alive, Adek was allowed to attend grandfather's cheder for free. But this single act of kindness that we received from Father's family was terminated after Father's death. One summer morning, after Father had passed, Mother sent the three youngest, Anja, Sevek, and me, to visit grandfather. Upon seeing us at his front door, grandfather grabbed his walking stick and promptly chased us away. We were so startled and shocked that we tumbled down the stairs. We ran home to tell Mother, who listened to our story with tears of shame burning her eyes. After that day, Mother never sent us to see him again.

Although Father's family became strangers to us, Mother came from a warm, kind family of eight siblings who visited often. We remained close for twenty-two years—until World War II ripped us apart. My grandmother died young, but I met my maternal grandfather who lived near us before the war. Mother visited him often, but she usually went alone. I remember hearing that he never helped his daughter or grandchildren because he was stingy.

In those days, it was customary to keep saved money under a mattress instead of putting it in the bank. I often heard Mother express her worry that upon her father's death, the neighbors would be the first to get to his money. The morning that someone knocked on our door with the news that grandfather had died, I watched Mother run to his house. She was right to worry. By the time she got there, the bag of money that he kept under the mattress was gone.

Suzanna

Fear of Holidays

Countless times I have reflected on my childhood in the city of Ziebice, where my parents were forced to settle after returning to Poland from six years of exile. They were among the 86,500 Jewish refugees throughout the Russian territories who had survived. With documents in their hands, they returned in the summer of 1946 and attempted to return to the places of their birth, Warsaw and Łódź, but were unable to receive permission to do so. According to J. Adelson's book[2] published in 1993, 124 transports with 86,563 Polish Jews left Russia for southwestern Poland, a region that belonged to Germany before World War II. They were made to settle in forty-two towns in the spring and summer of 1946 as part of repatriation.

Historically more Jews have lived next to their Catholic neighbors in Poland than anywhere in Europe. Jews had been expelled from Western Europe, England, France, and Germany. Societal and political discrimination toward the Jews has existed in most Christian countries. Persecution, pogroms, social hate, forced baptisms, and conversions stain European history. Jews were blamed for the Black Death (1347–1351). The Spanish Inquisition followed and, centuries later, the Holocaust. Jews came to Poland and found a place of what was for the most part a peaceful refuge that lasted almost a thousand years. The Polish Catholic Church, however, has a long history of being anti-Judaism. Blood libel, also known as blood accusation, the superstitious claim that Jews ritually sacrificed Christian children at Passover to obtain blood for unleavened bread, first emerged in medieval Europe in the 12th century and was revived sporadically in eastern and central Europe throughout the medieval and modern periods, lead to the persecution of Jews. During the sixteenth century, while Poland became a haven to different religious groups, the Catholic Church continued its harmful and hostile beliefs toward Judaism and Jews. This negative preaching lasted for centuries, reinforcing the social attitudes of contempt toward the Jews. The Polish hierarchy and clergy were determined to create and preserve what they conceived of as a ‘Catholic Poland'.[3] It was 1978, when Pope John Paul II went on a mission to greatly improve Catholic Church's relations with Judaism.

As a child, I never quite understood Mother's anxious behavior during the Jewish and Christian holidays. She seemed to want to make us invisible. Holidays were times to stay indoors, to be unseen and to be afraid, lest be subject to some kind of harassment. This behavior on her part only intensified the fear in my imagination.

In Ziebice, with a dwindling Jewish population, we did not go to a temple to pray or celebrate our own religious holidays. The temple was turned into a warehouse by the late 1950s. Every Friday night, my mother lit a Shabbat candle behind closed doors. She covered her face with the palms of her hands and recited a short and emotional prayer. She would never explain to her young daughters the Hebrew words of the prayer or what it meant. This unexplained act brought its own kind of discomfort. Although the war had left my mother a nonbeliever, she stood steadfast and on the Sabbath she would carry out her family tradition she had learned as a child in Warsaw. Surrounded by the hostile environment of the Catholic Church, the Communist Polish government, and her own posttraumatic stress, she found some degree of comfort in the rituals from her childhood; that was the only thing she had left of her murdered family.

Throughout my childhood, I was aware of the Church's anti-Semitic attitudes and this was especially rampant during Christian holidays: the annual celebration of the birth of Jesus at Christmas and his resurrection at Easter. Jesus and his mother Mary were Jews from the Galilee. Beneath the Church of the Nativity in today's Bethlehem is where Jesus is believed to have been born. I never knew about any of this while growing up; instead the rumors I heard in postwar Poland was that Jews were responsible for killing Christ. This folklore had its origins in the Church and was widespread, accepted by Christian Poles and passed from one generation to the next. The fact that the Middle East region at the time when Jesus lived was under Roman authority and that crucifixion was a means to terrorize and punish the subjugated people never came up. While in Poland, I was never exposed to historical information that Jesus preached and campaigned for social justice, that his popularity grew during Pontius Pilate's power in Judaea, and that he was condemned to death as a political agitator. It was when I came to the United States that I heard for the first time that Jesus was actually a Jew who lived at the time when the Middle East region was under Roman control and was crucified by the Romans.

Celebrating Passover and eating matzah in Poland also brought with it another kind of shame. Rumors still circulated that matzah was made with the blood of Christian children. Still, I remember the holiday of Hanukkah with joy. I was able to merge this holiday with snow and Christmas trees. And with candy, chocolates, and the oranges that made their way to us all the way from Israel, which we hanged on our Christmas tree as decorations.

To this day, I do not hold an emotional attachment to holidays. I welcome those days with a nagging sense of trepidation. It is only in my adulthood that I finally understood how this disconnection came about.

Chapter Two

The American allies established soup kitchens to feed the hungry and impoverished Polish people, as the country slowly recovered from World War I. Every day, before going to work, my brother Adek took me there, and I would get a cup of milk and a piece of bread. America also helped open orphanages, and many children who weren't orphans lived there because their parents couldn't care for them. Thankfully, Mother never considered sending us there.

Winters were hard on everyone, and in Warsaw the winters were especially severe. I wanted so much to go out and play despite the cold, but I didn't have shoes. I stayed inside and all I could do was work on defrosting the one small window of our room so that I could look outside. But as winter progressed Mother had to cover the window and seal the frame with rags to keep out the freezing draft.

Coal was expensive and Mother could not afford to burn it every day. Twice a week—usually on Tuesdays and always on Fridays before the Sabbath began at sundown—Mother managed to burn a little coal in our oven. By Saturday morning much of its warmth was gone, but since we were all home together we had another kind of warmth.

One Friday night, as we sat around the table in the warm glow of the Sabbath candle, Mother looked down at the potato soup and then up at us. Poor but always together, like a mother bird with her newborn chicks in a nest, she said. After dinner, Adek would bring out a book of Jewish songs and we would all gather around Mother and sing. In our limited way, we created a loving and joyous atmosphere for the mother we loved beyond words. My mother worked hard, she was always busy with chores, but on Sabbath night she appeared to be carefree and even happy. In the flickering light of the candle Mother looked content.

For us children, the Sabbath was also hard. Mother insisted that we strictly observe the Sabbath rules, so from the Friday evening meal until the concluding Havdallah[4] prayers on Saturday night, we were not allowed to do anything, even read or write, and all foods throughout Saturday were eaten cold. Our neighborhood was Jewish and Sabbath mornings were peaceful, our courtyard as well as the street outside were quiet and the neighborhood shops were closed. As soon as we saw three stars in the sky, we quickly said the blessings and lit the kerosene lamp. Afterward, Mother always managed to prepare a warm meal.

* * *

When I was six years old, I got my first pair of shoes. My older sister Sala went with me to buy them, and we walked home from the shoemaker's store holding hands. It didn't matter that they were uncomfortable and made of wood. I walked proudly in my new shoes, my head held high. But on the way home, I saw so many children without shoes turning their heads and looking at me with envy, I felt guilty in the midst of my happiness.

I don't remember ever getting new clothes, although I did have two of everything because I wore the clothes that my sisters outgrew. Mother washed one set while I wore the clean one. When my sister Anja turned twelve, Mother arranged for her to work as a seamstress. At that time, it was customary for a young person to work as an unpaid apprentice for the first few months. I overheard Mother talking to our neighbor on Anja's first day of work: What can I do? Mother said. I know Anja is being taken advantage of, but we need to eat.

The rich capitalists have no pity, the neighbor agreed. They take advantage of children most of all. She turned and walked away.

After a few months, Anja was bringing her wages home on Friday, along with my three other working siblings. Everything they earned was given to Mother, so life slowly started to get a little better. We were able to afford meat and challah for our Sabbath dinner. Daily meals now consisted of soup, bread, herring, and onions, but we still could not afford fruit. When someone was sick, Mother would buy a lemon to add to tea; otherwise, fruits were for rich people. It was common when you walked through the public gardens to see wealthy mothers loudly encouraging their children to eat their bananas and oranges. I would watch, imagining the taste of these exotic fruits.

Although Mother observed a strict Sabbath and we celebrated all of the other Jewish holidays, we dressed in Western-European fashion. Warsaw was home to many acculturated Jews who dressed and looked like Polish nationals; a large number of Jews, however, remained Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking and dressed according to traditional Jewish customs. The overwhelming majority of Jews lived separate lives from Polish Catholics and listed Yiddish or Hebrew as their native language.

In the northern part of the city, Nalewki Street, the main boulevard, was the center of Jewish life in Warsaw. Here, the stores, street peddlers, and the Jewish restaurants bustled with life. Most of the Jews who lived in the city were just like us: poor, working class. We were shopkeepers, bakers, shoemakers, painters, barbers, and tailors. We stayed together, living in certain neighborhoods and even on specific streets. Some non-Jewish Poles did live toward the end of Nowolipki Street, and we learned not to go there. To wander into this part of Nowolipki Street meant the possibility of being beaten or pelted with rocks.

Our street was long and narrow. We had a few small grocery stores, two bakeries, and a milk store, mleczarnia.[5] When we had money, one of us would run out to the bakery in the morning for fresh Kaiser, onion, or caraway seed rolls. In the evenings, men went from courtyard to courtyard with baskets full of fresh, hot bagels. These crisp bagels were my favorite. They were braided and baked in a special way, with a crust that crackled when I bit into them. On good days, we ate them with butter.

By law, stores in Poland had to close at seven in the evening, but every store had a back door. This setup allowed many stores to stay open longer for people who needed to shop after work. The police knew about this back door shopping and often enforced the law by giving summons to the shop owners, but a small bribe could usually keep the police away for a few