That’s what my father, who believed that everything would be better, explained to me. And he continued to believe it until the Communists arrested his best friend and the anti-Semitic Poles threatened his life.
WHEN THE WAR BROKE OUT, I GOT TO KNOW MANY LIVING creatures that weren’t people. The squat, plump rats in the ghetto, for example, that the skinny, stiff-haired cats bolted from in fear. Do I remember that?
Or maybe I remember the rats, like the powder-puff rabbit, only from stories?
When the war broke out, I also got to know many bugs and other small creatures. Spiders and the wonderful masterpieces they spun, their webs. Shiny beetles, clumsy and slow. Roaches that ran away when the light was turned on, each at a different speed. Fleas and bedbugs. And of course, lice. The fleas were very hard to see—tiny, jumping dots that bit. I thought the fleas were terribly smelly. But maybe it was the bedbugs that stank?
Those were the animals I knew in the ghetto. But when Hania Seremet smuggled me out of the ghetto and took me to the village of Marcinkowice, to her parents—or maybe they were her grandparents—I met new animals, much larger and more exciting.
The biggest of all was the horse. I’d already seen a horse—the clumsy horse that had big brown hindquarters with white spots that was harnessed to the wagon we rode on to escape from the Germans.
But the horse in the village was my horse.
Everything about my horse was beautiful.
A thick, strong, massive creature. He was gigantic. Later, I thought he resembled the grand piano that belonged to Madame Halina Czerny-Stefanska, winner of the Chopin Competition prize.
In Krakow, when war was no longer in the world, Madame Czerny-Stefanska determined my fate in three minutes by stating that I would never know how to play the piano, and it was doubtful that I would ever know anything at all. The grand piano was black and shiny. The horse was slightly less black, slightly more brown. He was a beast of burden. He stood on four legs that grew from the bottom part of his body, one pair in front, the other pair in back. I never saw the horse lie down. His legs, relative to his body, were thin. At the ends of them were hooves nailed on by the blacksmith, a sunken-chested man who died of tuberculosis a month before Grandfather Seret died.
The horse’s enormous head was very high and grew out of a stiff, arched neck. A rather sparse mane also grew from the neck.
You had to climb a tree in order to see the horse’s back. When he bent his huge head, you could get a peek at his damp, black eye. He had another eye on the other side. You could see his flaring, quivering nostrils and imagine their softness.
How soft and pleasant to the touch that horse’s mouth was. Sometimes I saw his teeth. So huge, so yellow. Long scraggly hair grew out of his quivering nostrils. Once, when I reached out and touched his lips, the sensation at the tips of my fingers was just like I’d imagined it would be, just as I’d always hoped it would be. His pointed ears twitched abruptly every once in a while, alert to every sound.
At the back end of his body was a tail that swung and whipped and drove away the buzzing green flies. Sometimes the horse whinnied, a happy, funny sound. There were always some sores on one of his forelegs and on his gigantic round hindquarters. The humming green flies loved those moist, open sores and would gather on them.
I loved everything about that horse: his smell, the steam that came from his skin and nostrils, even the smell of the dung that dropped out of the hole under his tail.
The birds and beetles loved the dung too.
The little birds would hop around on it and peck at it, and the especially beautiful, shiny purple and yellow beetles would climb onto it. There was another small and roundish kind of beetle, bright red with black dots, that wasn’t at all frightening. It was so lovely, so innocent. I used to put my finger close to the blade of grass it was walking on and it would climb onto my finger and keep walking, tickling it gently. I was cautious and watchful, and when the beetle approached the tip of my finger, I would immediately offer it an additional path to walk on in the form of another finger. If it didn’t have a path like that, the little beetle would eject a pair of fluttery wings from under its wonderful armor, spread them, and fly off. That was a biedronka, a ladybug.
My horse didn’t gallop, didn’t trot, didn’t skip, and didn’t jump. Hitched to the plow, he plowed the field; hitched to the wagon, he transported the sky-high piles of hay. When he wasn’t working, he grazed in the small pasture, his forelegs tied so he could only take small steps.
I was that horse’s shepherd.
That was my job, to watch the horse and make sure it didn’t get into the neighbor’s vegetable garden or cabbage, carrot, or lettuce patches. It must have been summer.
During those bright days when I, Irena Seremet, a Polish Christian girl, shepherded my horse, I would lie on the grass searching the sky for clouds that looked like horses. And there were many horses in the clouds: they galloped, flew, skipped, and jumped. Those were good days.
I pulled carrots from the neighbors’ fields, sweet, stolen, orange carrots for myself and my horse. I tasted the grass that the horse ate.
The bottom part of the blades of grass was light-colored, soft and sweet. And there were bad blades of grass, sharp as knives. The sweetest of all were the carrots, with their heads of wild, mischievous, leafy hair. And there was clover, with its modest sweet flowers, three small leaves on a slender stem. Would I find a four-leaf clover, for luck?
And there were flowers. Flowers and butterflies.
There were pimpernels, with their hundred pink-edged white petals. You could pull them off, one by one by one, yes-no-yes-no, and guess your future. And there were purple lupines and bellflowers that the fairies used for hats. And at the far end of the field, in the damp muddy earth, little blue flowers that winked with a thousand yellow eyes, pleading: forget-me-not. And there were stinging nettles, the nastiest of all the plants.
My mother told me how I described to her and my father how I pulled carrots from the neighbor’s field, shook the dirt off them, and wolfed them down. The stories I told helped my parents understand why I looked so healthy, why my cheeks were as red and shiny “as two apples.”
I also told them about the fascinating guests who occasionally came to visit.
The cheerful knife grinder who was always humming lively songs that ended with a thundering cry of “Hoo-hah!” He had a huge wheel connected by a strap to a lever, and he would hold the knife and press the lever with his foot to turn the wheel, and sparks would spew from under the knife to the rhythm of the songs—like the sparks that sprayed from between the wheels of the tram and the tracks it was speeding along on.
And there was a man who fixed pots, armed with spools of iron wire, who would put together the pieces of a broken clay pot with a skillfully made net and make it usable again, even more beautiful than a new one. They would hang the pot out to dry upside down on the fence posts and it looked to me like a person’s head.
I told them about the croaking, leaping frog and the storks that would drive the frogs out of their hiding place, the storks that traipsed around on their long, thin, red legs in the muddy corner of the field where blue forget-me-nots with winking yellow eyes grew.
My dear, sweet pigs also loved that corner, the mud corner.
The storks lived in a giant nest they’d built in the top of the church tower. The nest was woven around a broken wagon wheel the farmers had put there for the storks years ago. The farmers loved the storks because they brought luck and babies.
They said that the storks came back to their nest in the top of the church tower every year. The chiming bells didn’t seem to bother them. And that’s where they grew their huge chicks. They would make tapping sounds with their long, sharp, red beaks whenever I came to church for one of the plates of thick, gray, boiling pea soup and potatoes they gave out to the poor in the soup kitchen next door to the priest’s kitchen.