Father told me in a whisper—after all, we couldn’t let anyone from outside know that the children of light were hiding here—that manna is a kind of cotton that you put in your mouth and eat, and it tastes exactly like the food you love the most, even cherries, for example.
My father also told me about the good soldier Schweik. My father loved that good soldier all his life. He always kept the book, with Lada’s beautiful illustrations, next to his bed before the war and after it, but he didn’t have it in the hiding place. He recited whole chapters to me that he knew by heart.
Sometimes my mother told me stories too. About elves in pointed red hats who lived in the forest, drank nectar from bellflowers, and helped Marisia, the little orphan. Sometimes the elves were mischievous and played pranks on people. They lived in lovely white-spotted red mushrooms.
And there were stories about fairies, good fairies and naughty fairies—nymphs who combed their golden hair and seduced sailors. That story was in rhyme. And I’d dictate stories to my father about fairies, flowers, princes, and elves.
My mother never told me stories about witches.
In my parents’ hiding place, where I was hiding too, I wasn’t hiding from the Germans at first, but from Rozalia Juzakowa and Juzef Juzak, who had agreed to hide my mother and father, but on one condition: that they come without the girl. Without me. No elves lived there. No fairies lived there. Just the smell of sawdust that was like the smell of the ark, but there was no manna.
My two gray mice, which my father and I trained, were there.
I believe in elves and mice.
Rozalia Juzakowa, a devout Russian Orthodox Ukrainian, believed that lice came from troubles.
Living people have troubles. The lice only lived on living people. If someone had lice, that was a sign that he was alive, a sign that he had troubles.
For the time being, we were alive. Dead people had no troubles and no lice.
We managed not to get typhus. But the Koch bacillus, the lethal tuberculosis bacillus, settled in my mother’s lungs and gnawed a damp hole in them the size of a large plum.
A hole that almost sucked her into death.
MANY ANIMALS PLAYED A PART IN MY LIFE. THE FIRST WAS A white rabbit as soft as a Parisian courtesan’s powder puff. An illiterate farmer from the area brought it to my father as a thank-you gift after my father wrote a letter to the city offices for him.
My father was flooded with requests from good people who were poor and illiterate. He never refused anyone. They would come after working hours, work-weary people, exhausted and smelly, who sat on the bench in front of my father’s office, abashed, rubbing their palms around their hats, which they held between their knees.
Sometimes they didn’t have shoes and were barefoot. The bottoms of their feet were tough—black, thick, and cracked. When they did have shoes, they would leave muddy prints that dried and crumbled on the shiny, polished parquet. Even the ones who had shoes would tie the shoelaces together and hang the shoes on their shoulder when they went out. Those were people who were born barefoot and walked barefoot.
That’s what my mother told me, told me, and told me.
My mother thought they were disgusting. She was always angry that they stole time from my father, the time he devoted to all those bewildered, downtrodden, and barefoot people, work-weary farmers and laborers.
My father was a Communist who believed the world could be changed for the better. My mother was a Communist too, but she was a salon Communist—although even she was once imprisoned for her beliefs.
When his workday was over, my father would read to the ignorant farmers and laborers the letters they had received from overseas, from relatives as poor and wretched as they were who had emigrated in search of a decent livelihood, and he would write the answers they dictated to him in simple words punctuated by tears and longing. My father also helped them when they got into trouble with the authorities and the law.
One of those people who my father helped was Juzef Juzak, the carpenter and alcoholic. The grateful Juzef Juzak thought my father was a saint. We owe our lives to him. It was Juzef Juzak who offered to hide my parents in his house when the Lvov Ghetto was due to be liquidated.
He offered to hide them because he remembered my father’s generosity and he did so over the objections of his wife, Rozalia Juzakowa, the devout Russian Orthodox Ukrainian. Like us, he had followed her to Lvov, escaping with his daughter Ania and his sweet little boy, Edjo. Juzak hid my mother and father in a room disguised as a carpentry shop, but only on one condition: that they come without the girl.
I’m the girl.
In the end, I hid there too, and my life was also saved because of him.
At the end of the war, when Batiushka Tovarish Stalin and the Red Army saved us and captured Berlin, when Communism began to build a new world, a just, good, and beautiful world, when my father, as a loyal party member, was given an extremely important job and once again was in a position to help Juzef Juzak and his family, he brought them with us to Krakow and helped him find housing and work. The Juzak family was smaller then. Teenaged Ania had already died of tuberculosis in my mother’s arms. My mother had caught the disease, and barely, miraculously, came back to life after the war.
The white rabbit that was as soft as a Parisian courtesan’s powder puff suffered a black fate. My mother said that I almost suffocated it with love. I was a year and a half old. They had to pull it out of my little arms, which clutched it as tightly as they could, and return it to the grateful man, that illiterate farmer.
The farmer and his family made a pie out of the rabbit and ate it.
My mother was honored with a gift of one of the dead, devoured little powder-puff rabbit’s soft, adorable white feet, for luck.
My mother threw the poor foot in the garbage.
The long-haired, soft white cat in the yard played with the rabbit’s foot, and dashing around with the foot in its mouth it looked like a fantastical mythological creature with five feet, four regular ones and one that grew from its mouth instead of a tongue. Later, when the Germans invaded and shells were exploding and we ran away on a freight wagon harnessed to a workhorse that had enormous brown hindquarters with white spots, the gypsy woman’s prediction came true—everything we left behind was lost.
Even the white rabbit’s foot in the white cat’s mouth.
That’s what my mother told me, told me, and told me.
We traveled at night and hid in barns and stables during the day. I wasn’t teeming with lice yet. Lice are animals too. The lice were with me all through the war and later too, when the war was no longer in the world. I used to bring them from orphanages, from schools and summer camps.
Except for the fact that we went there in the summer, those damn camps were just like the orphanages.
I also brought lice from the camp for Jewish children in Zakopane. They shot at us in Zakopane. The Poles shot at us, not the Germans, and that was after the war was no longer in the world. They attacked the villa at night and shot at us.
They weren’t Germans. They were Poles who didn’t like Jews. Not even young Jewish children. They were against the Jews.
Anti-Semitic means being against the Jews, that’s what my father said. They want to kill the Jews that the Germans hadn’t managed to kill. He wasn’t worried, not then. He said it was only a matter of education. They’ll learn, those Polish anti-Semites, and understand that there’s no difference between people and everyone should work according to his ability and receive according to his needs. That’s what my father, who was a Communist, believed. And those Poles, those anti-Semites, hated not only the Jews, but the Communists too. They hated the Russians, who liberated them from the Germans.
The