She wanted to get rid of me and my parents definitely did not want her to bring me to them. After all, Juzef Juzak had agreed to hide them on one condition: that they come without the girl.
Did I remember my mother and father when I was in the village, did I miss them?
MY MOTHER TOLD ME ABOUT THE LIQUIDATION. SHE HEARD everything and smelled everything. Panienska Street was right next to the ghetto. She told me, told me, and told me.
They heard the shots, the explosions, the volleys, the orders, the screams, the shouts, the pleas. They smelled the raging, roaring fire. A scorched smell filled the world and the wind bore flakes of ash.
Juzakowa saw everything. She told us about a woman mad with terror who handed a small bundle with a baby in it to the Poles, Ukrainians, and Germans who lined both sides of the street watching the herd of Jews on their way to be murdered—maybe one of them would take it and save its life. The Germans used their bayonets to hurry the Jews being led to death, and they had dogs. They were evil dogs, Juzakowa said.
That baby was murdered in its mother’s arms. No one took it.
One young boy ran away. He hid in the doorway of the house. Night came, and the hunters, the Jew hunters, found him. My mother and father heard his pleas. They murdered him under the windows of the hiding place.
A shot.
My mother heard everything.
The young boy was murdered too, and after the war, my father gave testimony about that murder and about the strangled girl tossed onto a pile of garbage.
My mother told me how they found that Jewish girl, naked and strangled, in the garbage bin. It happened after the Gestapo had searched our hiding place, when I hid in the closet with my father and my mother hid under the massive desk. Juzakowa said that she had a long neck, that Jewish girl. She was redheaded. Juzakowa said she had freckles.
That girl was dead, and I was alive.
Abandoned in the orphanage made of red bricks, I cried and cried and cried. My father, the Communist, broke his hand, and with his other hand he sold the Red Flag for a living, and my mother the salon Communist was dying in the hospital.
With the pennies my father earned, he bought my mother carrots. Carrots were cheap and considered healthy. He’d bring her small bunches of carrots or tea leaves when he went to visit her, lying helpless in her white bed, her face the color of the pillowcase and her cheeks a blazing orange-red, the image of every dying tuberculosis patient. And she always had a fever. A constant, low fever. The fever that tuberculosis patients have.
I loved carrots very much. Carrots reminded me of my horse, the horse I shepherded in the village, in Marcinkowice, and those lovely days when I lay in the tall grass nibbling carrots, occasionally giving one to my horse and touching his soft, quivering nostrils, staring at the blue sky and letting the clouds take shape—dragons, ships, butterflies, and especially horses. Their whiteness darkened the blue of the sky.
My mother’s hospital was full of men and women patients. There was a constant turnover of the dying. Many died, and new patients were admitted immediately in their place. There was no medicine, no food, and everyone was suffering—not just the patients, not just the Jews. We still hadn’t taken Berlin and the war continued. Only the rich village girls who lay near my mother always got food from their families in the village, food too plentiful to be comprehended—lard, chickens, sugar, fruits and vegetables, bread and cake, and long salamis. They ate and ate and ate, shoved butter into all their orifices, that’s what my mother told me, and it was disgusting because they kept getting thinner, shriveled up, faded away, and died.
All that rich food fed the bacilli that were gnawing them to death. The more they ate, the faster they died. On her right and on her left, in front of her and behind her. All around my mother. And my mother, who was so sick and starved, so thin that she was almost transparent, whose only food was the carrots my father brought her, began to get better, and her life was no longer in danger. My mother continued to live.
The special gas they injected into her lung kept decreasing the size of the damp hole the Koch bacillus, the tuberculosis bacillus, had gnawed, until only a scar was left.
My mother said that she defeated both Hitler and tuberculosis. It was a miracle. When the war was no longer in the world and we went back to Krakow, my mother found out that, in the meantime, a new drug had been discovered, penicillin, that ate the bacilli right away, and there was no longer any need for those painful injections of gas into the patient’s lungs with a hollow, very long needle.
My mother was saved. Professor Ordung saved her life. To us, he was a saint.
THE WAR CONTINUED WESTWARD. MY MOTHER RECOVERED, managed not to die of tuberculosis, and left the hospital. My father’s broken hand healed and he stopped selling newspapers in the street and went back to being the chief accountant in the same slaughterhouse and tanning factory he’d worked for until the ghetto was liquidated. They took me out of the orphanage built of red bricks that break and crumble into red dust and paint the puddles the color of blood like the blood in the pails my father would steal from the slaughterhouse and give to the starving Jewish workers from the ghetto.
We lived in a room in an apartment with other people, sharing the kitchen and bathroom with them. It was paradise, like the paradise Adam and Eve lived in that my father told me about when we were in the hiding place. We didn’t have to hide anymore. Enough, we’d been liberated. We’d take Berlin too, and there’d be no more war in the world. We were together again, my mother, my father, and I. My crying didn’t stop, but it no longer flowed from my eyes.
We lived in a large apartment house built around a square cobblestone courtyard. The kitchen balconies overlooked the courtyard on all sides. The building had four stories, attics and cellars, and you could walk from one kitchen balcony to another, round and round, on the same floor and from one floor to the other, because they were connected by metal stairs. The stairs and the balconies were very rickety, and they shook with every step you took on them—even my steps, and I wasn’t even big or heavy.
My mother began cooking. Not from the recipes in the black cookbook my father bought her when they went to live in the luxurious villa he built for her in Bochnia—she always mentioned, jokingly or perhaps seriously, how disappointed she’d been that my father never sensed, never realized, that even though she was a Communist, albeit a salon Communist, she would have preferred a more romantic gift. Nor did she cook from the wonderful recipes in the detailed menus she’d dictated to my father when they were hungry together in the hiding place—a notebook of menus for all the seasons, for a whole year, in which no dish appeared twice. After all, it was inconceivable that after the war, the same dish would appear on the table twice in one year. That was a notebook of recipes for starving people, improvised on individual pieces of paper that I decorated with drawings I thought were absolutely beautiful when I was with my mother and father in the hiding place after Hania Seremet threw me out of the village.
No. My mother didn’t cook from the recipes in the black book that survived the war with us, or from the menu notebook. She cooked other things. We were still thin and weak, but not hungry, and my mother cooked us all sorts of fattening dishes. Especially fattening was a yellow flour, not bright yellow like the satin of the splendid, unattainable clown at the evil Hela Fishman’s villa, but a soft yellow. That flour was called mamaliga, and it was made of corn. I’d loved corn since the time I’d hidden as a Christian girl in the village—that wonderful corn enveloped in hair as soft and shiny as the hair of the enchanted nymphs.
My mother cooked numerous dishes from that flour, all of them delicious. She even baked cakes from it.
My mother always fed me and my father. My father called her “mother bird.” A mother bird who brings food she puts in her chicks’ mouths.
She always had something for me to eat when I was hungry. Everywhere, anytime, like she used to then, when the war was in the world and there was no food because Juzakowa and Juzak and their sweet little boy,