A Drop of Rain Page 9

  My mother left Poland altogether that night, and she never returned.

  I guess there has always been a love-hate relationship between Polish Jews and Polish Christians. Anyway, that’s how I came to be born in West Germany.

  When I was a child here in Canada, I got stories of bloated bodies piling up and of all the other horrors. I got these stories with my mother’s milk. And it was not only the Nazis my mother told me about, it was also the Polish Catholics. The Polish Catholics were anti-semitic too.

  By the time I was a teenager, I was pretty sick of these stories.

  I was different from my mother, I decided. I yearned to be like the blonde English Canadian cheerleaders in my school. They were so pretty and peppy. When a Polish Catholic girl in my class asked if I spoke any Polish, I pretended I didn’t.

  Then I started to go out with this English Canadian boy. I thought he was incredibly handsome and nice. But one day he invited me to his house. There were Christian symbols on the walls: a cross and a picture of the Last Supper.

  Suddenly, I felt very uncomfortable, and I broke up with the boy soon afterwards. I met my present husband when I was in college. He is also the son of Polish Jews.

  Our marriage has been very happy.

  We don’t practice our religion. Yet we sent our children to a Jewish school. There happened to be a Jewish school right across the road from where we lived in Toronto, so it was convenient.

  Actually, my teenage daughter is going out with a boy who practises Wicca. It’s some kind of old Celtic religion, I think. He’s a nice boy. We’re going to celebrate Hanukkah this year, just to show him what it’s like.

  Curtis

  School is crap.

  Work is crap.

  Life is crap.

  Diaries are crap.

  My portfolio is crap.

  I am crap.

  Mary

  The Little White Rose

  One night when we come up from the shelter, our big strong house is just rubble and fire. We are poor now. We are refugees in our own country. Where before we owned a whole house, now we share one room with our neighbours.

  After four years of war, many buildings have been destroyed. In the middle of a city, maybe one apartment building is left. In a whole apartment building, maybe one room is left.

  Many people do not have a home. Neighbours sleep beside each other. They sleep in rows, like fish in a can.

  Many do not have food. Grandpa says there are Polish soldiers in German camps who have to eat their belts. Many do not have clean water. There is much sickness: cholera, typhus and tuberculosis. Most people do not have proper clothes. People cut up rubber tires to make shoes. They wear thin rags. They wear the same shirt day after day.

  By the end of the war, people are exhausted, starving and sick. There is nothing. Nothing. We are all refugees in our own country.

  After the war, a lady invites us to stay with her in her house for free. All during the war this lady vowed that, if her house were spared, she would share it with anyone who needed a roof over his head.

  Her house is not strong. It is only made of wood. Other houses are made of brick. Still, when the bombs fall and the fires rage, only this lady’s house is left standing. There is even one little white rose blooming in her garden. It is very beautiful. It smells sweet.

  When this lady sees how I cry because my Daddy is not coming home, she gives the rose to me.

  Anyway, after the war, we stay in this lady’s house for a long time.

  The lady’s husband is dead. He was in the army like Daddy. The lady herself has a broken arm. She also has a little boy who is sad all the time, even though he is only five. Also, she has no food. So we help her.

  Grandpa and Johnny fix things around this lady’s house. Grandpa also goes and works for a butcher who pays him with soup bones.

  Mommy sets the lady’s arm. Mommy and Elizabeth also clean the house every day and cook. Elizabeth sits with the little boy quietly.

  Johnny and I play with the little boy. We take him for walks. We make him laugh.

  At first there are no seeds or animals. But eventually, Grandpa buys some seed potatoes, some chickens and a cow.

  Grandpa is an old man now, but he is starting all over again. So is Mommy. So is Elizabeth. So are Johnny and I.

  We three children start to go to school. There are no notebooks for school, no books, no pens, and no ink. And at the school there are no desks or chairs. We sit cross-legged on the floor. We write with pencil in the blank spaces of used notebooks.

  We write our lessons, learn them, then rub them out.

  We write over and over again in the same space, until the paper wears out.

  And so it goes after the war.

  In Canada and the United States, people watch killing on television and in movies, and they think it is nothing. Just fun. But they wouldn’t think killing is nothing if they had lived with bullets and bombs aimed at them.

  People don’t recover so fast from war. No, they’re never the same again.

  Many years after the war, I am a grown woman, a doctor with a busy medical practice and children of my own. Suddenly one night I begin screaming in my sleep.

  My little daughter, Anne, comes running into my room.

  “Mommy, Mommy, what’s wrong?” she asks.

  “I was dreaming I was going to be killed,” I explain, holding her close. “It was a nightmare. It’s from the war long ago. Everything’s all right now. You go back to sleep.” Many years after the war, when he is a grown man, a construction engineer with a very responsible job, my brother travels back to where our old house once stood.

  There is nothing. Not a brick. Not a fence post. Not a tree.

  My big strong brother sits on a stump and cries.

  Eva

  What do I know about Hanna’s childhood and youth? Very little, because she rarely talked about herself.

  During the war, she was only a baby and toddler. She was only four years old when she was shipped with her mother and grandmother to Auschwitz after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

  Hanna was born in Warsaw in late November, 1939. She was born in a room where the windows had been blown out by a bomb.

  When Hanna was still a baby, a Nazi soldier tore Hanna from her mother’s arms, threw her on the ground and hit her on the head with his gun butt.

  Hanna’s mother hid with her from the Nazis all one night in a cemetery.

  Her mother was running along a Warsaw street one day. A Nazi bullet barely missed her, hit a wall, and bounced to the ground. Her mother scooped up the hot, squashed bullet and continued running.

  Hanna kept the squashed bullet in a box in the kitchen. One day when I was visiting in 1979, Hanna showed me the bullet.

  Hanna once described to me how everybody had to evacuate an apartment building while Nazi soldiers searched for Jews. The soldiers were convinced someone was hiding Jews.

  Hanna remembered that when she, her mother, and her grandmother were shipped to Auschwitz, they were herded into a crowded box car. The box car had no roof. Hanna remembered looking at the stars and listening to her mother singing.

  Hanna told me how the three escaped from the train before it reached Auschwitz.

  The guards let the three off the train to seek medical attention at a clinic at a station. The doctors and nurses pushed them out the back door of the clinic and told them to run. Luckily the grandmother knew the town. Relatives in the town hid them.

  The following poem was written by a Fulbright Scholar who spent a year in the 1970s teaching English at the University of Warsaw. Hanna met this scholar, David Reed, several times in Warsaw. When he returned to the United States, Reed published a slim collection of poetry about Poland I found a signed copy of Reed’s collection in one of Hanna’s boxes.

  I See a Wounded Country

  I see a wounded country

  crawling through cubed multifoliate forms in triplicate

  bleeding

  there’s a
movie crew underneath the bridge:

  the jews with their armbands and cardboard suitcases lined up to board the truck; the hurrying passers-by; the sleepy old peasant man with the big wooden wagon; the man with the attaché case and shiny boots and upturned collar; the ss-man with the dog; the man in the natty grey plus-fours riding by on a tandem bicycle: they’ve got to run through the scene again and again

  rolling over

  like the prince on the battlefield in Tolstoy’s War and Peace

  when the blue sky zoomed upwards

  there’s a pigeon on the sidewalk that doesn’t want to move: some man waiting for a bus tried to pick it up, a thin professional-looking lady said it’s probably better to leave it, a child asked his mother if the birdy was lost, no dear she said its wing is broken, it was hit by a passing bus, the man who’d tried to pick it up said that’s no. 155 I’ve got to go but I’d like to know what happens in the end: they’ll run through the scene again and again

  a beating heart

  searching for

  a body

  Joe

  I shovelled a foot of snow at my place and Eva’s. Eva repaid by providing a week’s worth of warm-in-the-microwave frozen meals on top of her usual great Saturday dinner.

  A girl in one of my classes has been an exceptionally bad discipline problem. Utterly neurotic. Talks constantly to other students in class, talks back to me, heaps verbal abuse on everybody and everything, refuses to do her assignments.

  I took her outside into the hallway alone. I told her she needed professional help. I gave her an ultimatum: “Don’t come back to class until you have signed up for counselling!” The girl started shouting about my being “abusive”. She claimed she was going to report me for “harrassment”. Then she ran off.

  Eva told me not to worry about what the student will say.

  “After all,” Eva said, “you’ve never stepped out of line with a student in twenty years, so the authorities are going to believe you, not her—even if she claims sexual harrassment. You were just doing your job. You were keeping order in the class while showing concern for an individual student.”

  In comparison to this student, Naomi is a delight. Naomi actually cracks pained smiles at my lousy jokes! In fact, Naomi is a well-balanced girl. She has begun blooming academically, and she seems to be outgrowing her self-centredness.

  Naomi is quite upset about her friend, Dr. Kowalska, being cut back to part-time.

  Week Nine

  Naomi

  Sunday, November 7, 1999

  The trouble with Mary is that she is proud and stubborn. She is working harder than ever, so she will be able to do everything that the director told her to do. The director listed her duties on paper, “so there will be no disputes.” Mary wants to prove that she is right and the director is wrong. Even if she wears herself out doing so.

  “In Poland, in communism, woman cleaner never treated like this,” said Mary.

  “Some things in communism are probably better than some things in capitalism,” I said.

  “You are right,” said Mary.

  “You should get a lawyer and take the director to court,” I said to Mary.

  “I can’t afford lawyer,” Mary said.

  After Mary and I finished work at the Rec Plex today, Mary came for dinner at our house, even though she was really tired. At our house, she didn’t talk about work.

  Joe gave me an interesting article from the Mapleville Examiner of October 9, 1999. The article, by Erica Church, reviews a film about a unique organization during World War II. Joe is going to order the film. He might use it in a class he teaches on ethics. Here is the article:

  Extraordinary Heroism

  “Kill Poles without mercy . . . all men, women and children of Polish descent and language . . . destroy all Poles.” So ordered Hitler. Yet in Nazi-occupied Poland, some Poles did not think just about saving themselves. Although it was illegal to aid Jews and such aid was punishable by death, these Poles tried to save Jewish lives.

  “Zegota is the story of extraordinary heroism . . . tantamount to Schindler’s List multiplied a hundredfold,” wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor, now a professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University.

  Zegota is also a powerful new documentary film, directed by American Sy Rotter. The film is based on a 1994 book by Christian-Canadian Irene Tomaszewski and Jewish-Canadian Tecia Webowski. The 28-minute film combines riveting archival footage with fascinating contemporary interviews.

  Zegota was a code word for Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland. Established in 1942, the year the Nazis began to transport Jews in large numbers to death camps, Zegota saved about five thousand Jews before the war ended in 1945.

  One of Zegota’s most important contributions was providing “Aryan” documents for the Jews under its care. Zegota forged false baptismal, marriage, and death certificates, as well as identity and employment cards. This was done to help Jews pass as Christians.

  Zegota manufactured about 50,000 documents. But three million Jews still lost their lives in wartime Poland.

  “The help we provided was a small drop in an ocean of need,” says Zegota activist Wladislaw Bartoszewski, an historian and a former Foreign Minister of Poland. “Only one or two per cent received help. . . . I would warn Christians against smugness and self satisfaction.”

  “Too little was done,” says another Zegota activist, Irena Sendlerowa, crippled and nearly killed by the Nazis for helping Jewish children. “Many Poles wanted to help. They wanted to, but they were afraid to.”

  Zegota was a “rare phenomenon” in Europe during World War II, according to Professor Yisrael Gutman, director of Yad Vashem’s research center and former member of a Jewish fighting organization in the Warsaw ghetto. Yad Vashem, the “Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority”, is located in Israel. It was established in 1953 to document the history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

  “In Poland the effort to save Jews was much more dangerous than in other occupied countries,” says Professor Gutman. “It is a kind of glory for the Polish people, even it is only the achievement of a very small minority. It was an expression of a great human spirit.”

  Zegota was “very important, morally important,” according to Professor Alexander Gieysztor, President of Poland’s Academy of Sciences and a former Home Army liaison with Zegota. “It was a kind of civic duty to help.”

  Members of Zegota came from differing backgrounds. They were mainly Catholic but also atheist, agnostic and Jewish.

  This moving, thought-provoking film was produced by the Documentaries International Film & Video Foundation of Washington, D.C. for classroom and community screening.

  I am angry with Sarah. She forgot about my audition for her band when I was too shy to mention it again.

  I saw Curtis again in the hall at school. I marched up to him and asked him why he hadn’t phoned the aquatic director at the Rec Plex about the job I got him.

  “You could have told me that you were not interested,” I said. “Why didn’t you? I told the aquatic director that you were interested, and that you’d phone her.”

  “Look, Naomi, I’m really sorry about how rude I’ve been,” Curtis said, getting red in the face. “I can’t explain now because I have another class, but I can meet you at the front doors of the school in an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But don’t be late. I won’t wait.”

  What Curtis said when I met him later was both embarrassing and astounding. He said that he preferred to get his own jobs. He also said that he had been so impressed by me on the plane, he was too shy to phone me afterward.

  “You were so well dressed, sophisticated and sure of yourself!” he said. “I didn’t think you’d be interested in what I’m really like. You seemed like a privileged person who can’t imagine why everyone else isn’t as sociable as she is.”

  I told him that I had given him the wrong imp
ression. I said that if he wants to see how weird my life is, he should come over to my house on Saturday evening and meet my family. He said he’d really like to come. I hope he’ll keep his word this time.

  Curtis

  Lone Wolf saw She Wolf.

  She Wolf saw Lone Wolf.

  She Wolf attacked Lone Wolf. She bit and clawed.

  Lone Wolf defended himself.

  She Wolf wants Lone Wolf to visit her den and pack.

  Q: Will lonely Lone Wolf win the paw of lovely She Wolf?

  A: Wait for the first edition of our new cartoon strip entitled, “Something.”

  I got zero on the physics assignment. Mr. Bell noticed that Tom’s and my answers were identical. I told him I’d work hard from now on.

  “See that you do,” he said ominously.

  I felt humilitated.

  I wish I could talk to Dad more often. He’s in California now on business.

  “Big bucks in the land of Bill Gates,” he said. “I should have no problem buying you a car for Christmas. Maybe even a new one.”

  That was Dad’s message in our epic, one-minute discussion today.

  Mary

  Who Is Mary?

  Many students in my class have a special talent. Alice is a poet. The teacher always reads aloud what Alice writes. The class must discuss Alice’s poem.

  Frederick is a mathematician. No matter what question the teacher gives him, he can do the calculations—one, two, three and presto!

  Peter is an artist. He draws pictures of everybody in the class—even the teacher. And his portraits really look like the person.