SHELANU

SHELANU ABROAD – DANKA

If I did read your stories? I think it was something about Kuba.
What do I think about it? Hard to say because I know all this. However, from my perspective, it looks a bit different. And it is valid not only for this story.
I was recently "cleaning up" my bookshelf, and found "The Notes from Exile", by Sabi Baral and went through it again. And one thing struck me. She writes there, maybe not in the same words, that leaving Poland is like the ending of life without dying.
But for me, leaving Poland was like just the beginning of life.
Because when I was in Poland, I did not feel like I was truly living. Not even a feeling that I was vegetating.
How can I explain it to you? As if I was there as a punishment that I deserved.
Because I was Jewish.
You probably think that I am exaggerating. That I am one of those bitter people who hold a grudge against Poland and Poles and cannot say anything good about it.
On the one hand, you are probably right. My life in Poland did not give me a reason for another opinion.
What was my life like in Poland? Then listen to it.
It starts with my mother. My mother was from Kowel town, but before the war began, she, together with her sister, ended up in Lviv city. She also went to a nursing school and became a nurse there. When the Germans came, she was also in the ghetto there.
Her luck was that she managed to get the Aryan papers (with her Christian name and baptizing certificate). That is how she transformed from being a Jewish maiden to a Polish widow.
Surviving the occupation in Lviv, despite having Aryan papers, seemed very dangerous to her. There was always a risk that someone would recognize her. So she decided to let herself be deported to Germany for forced work. She also tried to persuade her sister to do the same, but she did not want to leave Lviv.
And that's how my mother was left completely without a family after the war.
Her deportation to Germany ended in Kartuzy, a little Pomeranian town because my mother got sick and ended up in hospital there. When she recovered, they sent her to work in the nearby city, Gdynia. And that is where she met Mr. Zach. Mr. Zach was a sailor on the Polish cruiser "Wicher", which was bombed by the Germans when the war started. Mr. Zach survived, but to avoid an arrest, he hid himself under a false name. That is how my mother, together with Mr. Zach, survived the war.
After the war, they found a large apartment and were to start a new, normal life.
My mother was proud that she, a Jew, had survived the war. It seemed to her that the whole world should be happy because of it. However, it only seemed that way to her.
Mr. Zach went to visit his family, who was not aware that he survived the war. He returned to Gdynia, to their shared apartment, married to his pre-war sweetheart, who was from the same village. Somewhere around that time, I was born. Less than a year later, Mr. Zach became a father to another daughter.
Yes. You guessed right. Mr. Zach was my father. Although I found out about it much, much later. You know. My mother was a widow on paper, and asking her about my father seemed to be out of place.
It really hit me when I found a picture, sewn together with a thread. As if someone had torn it off, and wanted to put it back together later. That seemed like a typical behavior of my mom. On that picture was my mom and Mr. Zach.
But let's get back to the story.
Mr. Zach, his wife, and my mother lived together in that apartment. My mother and I had a separate room. Mr. Zach had a sailor job and was a guest at home.
In this way, four years have passed. I do not remember much from that period. It probably was not happy, because when my mother talked about the Zachs, someone less accustomed to her vocabulary would have scorched the cilia of one's ear.
Finally, my mother decided to move out. But it was like exchanging an axe for a stick.
My mother exchanged her large room at Mr. Zach's for a slightly smaller room in a four-room apartment, with only one bathroom for 12 people living there.
Our room was the least crowded because there were only two people, my mother and me. But behind the wall lived a five-person family. The woman living there often shouted through the wall that a new Hitler would come and finish gassing those Jews who had escaped him before.
Because my mother was as a Jew still proud of having survived the ravages of war, but the neighborhood had a completely different opinion.
So on our street, the windows were crushed quite often. Of course only ours. Finally, my mother gave up on repairing the windows. She put the red pillows where the glass was missing.
I still can see those pillows, when I have nightmares.

I lived in that apartment through the worst 10 years of my life. Because we were the only Jewesses in that street. And when someone talked about us, all you heard was "Those Jewish bitches". To make it visible, they carved on our front door "Here live two Jewesses!". The carved signs were so deep that there was no way to remove them.
When I was nine, I persuaded my mother to buy me a dog. A white puppy, all black dots, whom I named "Kropka" (a dot). You know. My mother would visit the patients, and I had a dog to keep me company. The only creature that was endlessly happy to see me and licked my face with joy when I came home from school.
I had him for less than two years. "Kropka" was poisoned. You could see right away that something was wrong with him. That dog was vomiting, messing himself and it seemed as if something was throwing him around. When my mother came home from work, she immediately took the dog out into the yard, tied him to the doghouse there, and went out to find a vet. Then the kids from the street surrounded the doghouse and started throwing stones at my dog, shouting "Mosiek! Mosiek!" I just watched it from our window and cried. Finally, my mother came with a vet, who gave "Kropka" an injection and ended his suffering.
I did not go to school nearby. Because I did not want to be called names. I was going to a school, which was about an hour away from home. That is how long it took me when I was a little girl.
Just to avoid being called names.
At school, I pretended to be a Catholic. I participated in religion classes, I knew the Bible better than the other kids did, I said my prayers, and I desired very much to blend in. So as not to stand out from the crowd.
When Poland accepted the Greek children, a Greek girl came into my class. Her name was Eleni and she did not participate in religion classes because she was the daughter of a Greek communist.
The kids called her "Jewess" and she did not react at all. I was very impressed by that, and I became friends with her. She once asked me what the word "Jewess" meant. She did not even know what it meant!
We also had a German boy in our class who once said that all communists and Jews should be hanged on the trees. Even the fact that he was a Kraut was more digestible than being a Jew.
How was it at home? My mother did not have much time, because, in addition to her regular job, where she earned small pennies, she went around the city and gave injections to the private patients. I was left with Mrs. Bachowa. Mrs. Bachowa had six children of her own, so one more brat did not make any difference to her. She was one of the few people who treated me relatively well, and she absolutely wanted to make me into a Catholic.
If we did have any Jewish friends? My mother had one Jewish friend. Mrs. Fania.
Mrs. Fania was not thrilled with me. Because for me, her daughter was terribly boring, and I always had some crazy ideas, that Mrs. Fania did not like very much.
In our Tricity (Gdynia, Gdansk, and Wrzeszcz), there were very few Jews. Of course, there was a TSKŻ (Jewish Culture Society) club in Wrzeszcz, and my mother took me there to some theater performances and other events. Apart from that, we had no contact with other Jews.
It ended with Mrs. Bachowa converting me into a Catholic. How did my mother take it? I cannot say she was thrilled. Besides, my Catholicism helped like an incense to the dead.
Why? I have a photo from my communion. I was in a white dress and with a wreath on my head. And I looked as if I had just shit my panties. Because I had just heard one of the altar boys saying to a friend: "Were you in church yesterday when they baptized that Jewess?".
It was I, who was being baptized then.
My Catholicism ended quite fast, because after ten years of hardship, we moved to a separate apartment, far away from all those insults.How did it happen? Well, my mother was "stabbing" one high-ranking guy's butt for a whole year, and his wife convinced him that my mother had to be helped in this matter.
When I was supposed to start a high school, I chose, just in case, a music high school in Gdansk. Just to be far away from that neighborhood mob.
We somehow survived until '68. And that is when the official persecution of Jews began.
My mother, after the occupation experiences, after the loss of her entire family, and after the failed relationship with Mr. Zach, was not in the best mental condition. Those ten years with broken windows also contributed to it.
The Gomułka's (the head of Polish communists) speech was the last straw. My mother decided that we had to leave Poland. She did it not because of her, but because of me.
If my mother did not want to leave Poland before? Yes. The first time was in 1947.
My mother applied for an emigration to Palestine. At that time, there was a shortage of medical personnel in Poland, and the demand for nurses was big. So her application was refused.
The second time she wanted to leave Poland was in the late fifties. It came to nothing because she became ill, and then we got that new apartment.
In 1969 we submitted the emigration documents and got a promise from the Danish embassy. Then something happened to my mother. It was a normal persecution mania. She claimed that we were not allowed to talk loudly at home because it was bugged.
That the Germans were waiting at the outside door and wanted to transport us away.
A simple madness. It ended with multiple hospital stays and at the end a shelter for the terminally ill. The planned immigration to Denmark went bananas.

I wanted to continue my music studies, but my place in the class was already taken! Because when I was applying for immigration, I signed myself off the school. Fortunately, the secretary at the school was more forward-looking and advised me to put in the application for exemption from studies a clause that if my immigration did not take place, I would like to return to my studies again. Her resourcefulness resulted in the school Rector's personal trip to Warsaw to arrange permission to accept me again. He was also one of the few decent people I have met in my life.
It may sound harsh, but that is how I feel.
Kuba? I met him at one of the summer camps organized by TSKŻ. It started with Kuba being a scarecrow for one guy at the camp who was hitting on me. Somehow it turned into something more.
My mother did not like Kuba too much. Kuba looked like a teenager and her first comment was: "Couldn't you have chosen a man?".
We also got married in a hurry because we wanted to present my mother with a fait accompli. Before she left the hospital.
How did we leave Poland? I always wanted to leave it but Kuba was in no hurry. Even when all his Jewish friends and acquaintances started to disappear. Even when he could not get a position as a scientific assistant at the university. Only as a technical assistant.
Even when they started giving him trouble. When you and the whole of your family left Poland I gave him an ultimatum. Because at that time in our backyard they called our 3-year-old son a Jew boy.
He said that we could move to Slupsk (a little Pomeranian city) or submit the papers to leave for Denmark. It was 1978 and Denmark refused us. For Kuba, it meant moving to Slupsk.
Luckily, some people who had also received a refusal from Denmark called us, and during the conversation, we learned that we could go to Vienna and decide there where we wanted to go.
Everyone was aware of this possibility. Just not us!
So finally, we left Poland, and in Vienna, we got a Canadian promissory note.
That is how we ended up in Canada. The beginnings were difficult. But I finally came alive.
I was no longer a pariah who had to be afraid of my own shadow. For me, it was like being born again and starting a new life. It was only in Canada that I felt like a human like anyone else.
Although the memories from Poland still weighed on me like a millstone.
Some might say that I was unlucky. Because of my mother's experiences and the people, I had to live among. But such is my story and there's nothing I can do about it.

Alex Wieseltier
November 2020

SHELANU ABROAD – KUBA

I read your survey, and I think you forgot something here. As if all those Shelanu were 100% Amhu. Well, my better half and I break the mold a little. Maybe not even just a little. I, admittedly, would have the right to return to Israel. Still, halachically I would be classified as a Russian on my mother's side. On the other hand, my better half, despite her baptism and a Polish father, would be considered a Jew on her mother's side!
In Poland, despite my Russian mother, I always considered myself a Pole and a Polish patriot, but I never hid my origins. Worse, our first quarrel started with my future wife saying: "Kubuś! Why do you have to inform everyone you meet about your origins?!" She was really furious with me! "
Why do I do it? It's the only thing that keeps me in good company!"
Danka indeed has very unpleasant memories from her childhood, where her origins made her to be afraid of her own shadow.
It didn't get better with her mother's experiences. The escape from the Lviv ghetto, the German occupation time, and her failed relationship with a sailor from the Polish destroyer "Wicher" left her with such psychological marks that after 1968 she ended up in a nuns' shelter.
You probably know about it because it was thanks to you that Danka skipped visiting Poland when she visited Europe last time. Visiting her mother's grave and recalling what she experienced there would certainly not have had a good effect on her psyche. That's why I'm quite happy when she calls you to cheer herself up. And I'm grateful that it might spare me from another potential scolding from her side.
Why did we leave Poland? Which version do you want? Long or short?
The short one is Danka's ultimatum after our son was called a Jew in our backyard: "Either we leave Poland together, or we get divorced".
The long one is a conglomerate of what I presented to an official at the Canadian embassy in Vienna. It was about a sidelined scientific and technical employee, about the general life difficulties in the Polish People's Republic, but also about the theoretical possibilities of changes, about looking for work in other institutions or even in other cities. But also about the possibility of changing everything. So the short answer is - because it was possible to leave the country.
The Canadian clerk clearly liked it because he wrote it down with a smile on his face.
Today, I would add that I knew that the Polish People's Republic system would be changed, and it could happen at the cost of blood, so as a half-Jew and a half-Russian, I did not want to be a direct witness to this, or perhaps, together with my wife and son, to be a victim of this.
Did I feel lonely after most of the Jews left? I don't know. There were still some colleagues at work, some neighbors, and some childhood friends. No one has distanced themselves from us. No one boycotted us. At least, I've never noticed it.
Of course, one of my school friends who was a police investigator once asked me if I wouldn't like to leave Poland. Because in his police department, they have a lot of work with people like me.
You know. The surveillance of my doing and writing reports about it.
My decision to leave was also influenced by the memory of what happened in Poznań in 1956 (I was there with my father at the Poznan International Fair), what happened in December 1970 (me in Szczecin, Danusia in Gdynia), and what happened in 1976 (me, the technical "commander" of the military field hospital, fortunately only in the forest near Szczecin). I wasn't sure if I would survive the next time, taking into consideration my responsibility for my wife and our son.
The parents? Mom wasn't against our leaving. But Dad was: "I'll never see you again..." (He lived in Calgary for the last 13 years of his life, three in our house and ten in a little flat in the Jewish Centre - with often contact with us).
Why Canada? We were actually planning to be in Denmark, which, after visiting friends there in 1973, I was skeptical about. That time, after returning home, I said: "Nice country, but it's a shame I wasn't born there". It was also Danusia's mother, whom we wanted to take to Denmark from the clinic run by the nuns. When Sister Agnieszka, the head of that clinic, heard about our problem, she said that we should leave Danusia's mother there because they would take care of her for the rest of her time.
We didn't make it on time. The validity of our Danish papers has expired. So did our Polish citizenship. The SB officer dictated: "I, first and last name, on behalf of myself and my family, first names and last names, renounce herewith our Polish citizenship, due to... Please state the reason."
Me: "Do we have time for that?" He sighed and continued, "...due to my planned departure to Israel and an acceptance of citizenship of that country." Me: "Oh, that's correct!" And I hit myself in the forehead. (The Polish People's Republic did not recognize dual citizenship!).
As for Israel, I say that I would go there when I feel like being officially recognized as a Russian because this is the only country in the world that grants nationality after one's mother's nationality.
When we went to Vienna, we did not know where we would end up. After HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) rejected us because I did not deny my mother's Russianness and they did not believe Danusia's story, we did not end up in a refugee camp only because of Mr. Simon Wiesenthal and his recommendation to the IRC (International Rescue Committee).
Besides, my origins resulted in the following conversation with Mr. Simon, for whom I had a letter of recommendation from my father: "Mr. Jakub, are you a Jew?" "I have never denied my origins".
"This is an evasive statement!" "This is the only answer I can give you!"
"You think that the world is shades of grey, but the world here is either black or white!".
Talking about IRC, they also wanted to put us in a camp, but Mr. Simon told them that he would be grateful if they didn't. In addition, IRC only billed us for the flight to Canada, which I paid off 100% within two years, to their, as I felt, big surprise.
There were no adaptation problems in Canada, apart from the foreign viruses that attacked my and our son's respiratory system during the first 6 months. But here my mixed origins don't impress anyone, because they usually have the same or even more mixed ones". My first granddaughter is a mix of six nationalities.
The employment? Danusia got a job in a symphony orchestra. In Vienna, she also played in the Wiener Kurhause orchestra. Concern myself. Four months kitchen assistant (no one was worried that I was still coughing), and half a year junior draftsman in a local shipyard. Only one colleague was offended once by the fact that I was curing myself with garlic, but the incident ended with a big laugh. Another colleague, a Scot, who drove that day the "stinking" me to the shipyard in his car, suggested that this "offended" one was from Transylvania (supposedly a vampire), and not from England.
After a year I got a job as a ship engineer in a company searching for oil in the Beaufort Sea. So I "went North" for the next 40 years until I retired.
My son felt like a fish in water from the very beginning. Even, in kindergarten, where he still neither spoke nor understood English.
He finally stopped being Polish in 1982 when the Polish Solidarity immigration boys showed up at his Canadian elementary school.

"I'm from Poland too!" "Yes? What's your name?" "Jeremiasz Domfeld." "Strange. What church does your family go to?" "We don't." "So you're not Polish!"
The Poland I remember was the one "that hasn't perished yet" (from the Polish national anthem).
And it was enough to feel Polish for someone who was born there, even to not-so-Polish parents. But not necessarily to feel like that for the whole life. Poland is a well from which I drank, so I'm not allowed to spit into it.
Polish anti-Semitism? I think it's different from all others. And the difference is that I know how to deal with it. Because it's based on grievances and prejudices supported by logical arguments that are easy to refute. Only a few Poles will admit that they think that a Jew should have fewer human rights than they, the Poles should.
Poland and the Polish affairs? I am interested in them, but only superficially. And mostly through the prism of relations with Israel.
I am more interested in Israel and what is happening near me, in Canada and the USA.
Who do I feel I am? According to the Canadian census - "which language did you use first and still understand; if there were more of them - state the most frequently used" - both I, Danusia, our son and our daughter - are Polish.
A New Zealander friend, after watching the film "Ida" (?) realized that being Polish and being from Poland is not as simple as him being from New Zealand. So he asked our Polish co-worker who Jakub was. She answered, "He is Polish". The Russian co-worker said, "Russian".
But everyone was surprised by the German geologist ("Herr Doktor", as we called him) - "Jakob is a German who, for good reasons, doesn't want to speak German!"
So who I really am? I'm probably closest to Woody Allen's "Zelig". I can simply adapt to the conditions.
Or maybe it just seems that way to me?

Alex Wieseltier
August 2020

Shelanu – One from our (closed) circle (our guy) - Hebrew.
Amhu – One of us (Jew) Hebrew