My first childhood memories are of huge church cupolas, the whistling of locomotives, white bread, cocoa, some kind of sweet paste, and American presidents. The Red Cross provided for us and the nuns had not learned how to steal. I was the youngest, the girls played with me and carried me around in their arms. The main thing was I had a brother, the first love of my life. He was so handsome. It is a pity not a single photograph of him has survived. Until I met Esther he was the only person I regarded as my senior. He died in 1953 when he was 16.
The orphanage went back to Poland in 1947 but Witek and I and a few other children were left in a children’s home in the USSR. Nobody claimed us. My mother was still in the labor camps and there were no relatives who might have come to take care of us. It was such good fortune that Witek and I stayed together, that we were not separated. We stayed in Zagorsk. Witek always spoke to me in Polish, in a whisper. It was our secret language. It was funny that, later on when I was back in Poland, for a long time I spoke in a whisper. My brother always told me that we would go back to Poland. I loved nobody in the world as much as I loved him, and he loved me more than anyone else. Those last years, when I was already at school, he would take me to the girls’ school which was in one district and then go on to the boys’ school which was in another. I remember the details of my first day. We were issued brown uniform frocks and white aprons, and he held my hand. The other girls were there with their mothers and grandmothers, but I had my brother and felt very superior. I was so proud!
Apart from our secret language, Witek shared another secret with me, by which time we were in the Soviet children’s home. He said we were Jews. He qualified this by adding that he believed in the Catholic God. I do not know whether he was baptized, but Witek told me I ought to pray and that the Mother of God was our patron. She looked after orphans. I did pray to her, but had not the slightest interest in her Son. I suppose my brother got all this from the nuns. When Witek died, I prayed for him to be resurrected but nothing happened. After that, relations between me and the Madonna went downhill and I stopped praying. Then I had a dream of her. It was nothing special. She stroked my hair and we were reconciled.
All these years my mother knew nothing about us. She did not know Witek was alive, she did not know he had died. She fought as a partisan, then she fought in the army, and then she was sent away to Stalin’s labor camps. She was released only in 1954, a year after the death of Stalin, and after the death of Witek.
My reunion with my mother took place in a hospital. I had caught scarlet fever and been sent to a hospital in Moscow. She came into the ward. She was ugly! Badly dressed, wizened. It never occurred to me that the thing she most feared at that moment was that she might burst into tears. Instead, though, I burst into tears—of disappointment. My mother sorted out our documents and we went to Poland. It was dreadful, the most terrible thing in my life. She did not take to me, and I simply hated her. I knew nothing about how or why she had left us. She was a stranger to me, and looked like just another clapped-out Russian housewife or coarse-grained kindergarten minder. I had pictured my mother as a blonde woman in a silk dress, with broad shoulders and fair curls tumbling down from a pretty haircomb.
Esther, don’t let this worry you. I am not insane. I have done the psychoanalysis. It’s just that the child I was needed a mother, a normal mother, not one who talked constantly about politics and Communism. She worshipped Stalin and still believed, after all those years in his labor camps, that his death was a terrible blow for all progressive mankind. That’s the actual expression she used, “progressive mankind”!
In Warsaw I met up with progressive mankind—a handful of comrades who had survived from the Communist underground. The most likeable was Paweł Koci
Neither the camps nor the prisons had any impact on my mother’s beliefs, even though she was imprisoned, first in Poland and later in Russia, for over 10 years. She expounded her ideas to me endlessly, but my organism is astonishingly resistant to everything she says. I simply don’t hear what she is saying.
I lived with her in Warsaw for a year but she couldn’t cope with me. I behaved abominably. I was 13, a frightful age. Then she put me in that same orphanage which had previously been in Zagorsk and had now moved to Warsaw. That year was something special. I went to church with the other girls. We were surrounded by nuns who were quiet and strict and quelled by their mere appearance what was not even disobedience but mere murmurs of self-will. I battled my mother but submitted meekly and readily to the nuns. Soon I went to the church and got myself christened. It was what I wanted. Nobody pushed me into it. I probably did it partly to spite my mother.
I went to all the services and prayed on my knees for hours at a time. There was a great deal of persecution of Catholics then and the urge to resist the sheer nastiness of the world was very strong in me. It was probably the same spirit which made a Communist of her that brought me to the Church. I did not make friends among my classmates. I was a Yid, and to crown it all a zealous Catholic, two things any normal mind considered incompatible. I spent a great deal of time at the cathedral. It was no ordinary Catholic church but a truly enormous cathedral. It had a cathedra and everybody was busy during those months preparing for the installation of a new bishop. In the cathedral crypt were rows of tombs of bishops, priests, and monks—a succession of dates and names going back to the 15th century.
I prayed at every coffin, ardently, lapsing into a deep trance. The life aboveground completely passed me by. I didn’t even want to go outside. What did I pray for? That’s a good question. I would say now, for life to change, but then, at the age of 13 or 14, I prayed for nothing of the world that surrounded me to be there, for everything to be other. Without knowing it, I was probably on the brink of insanity. Perhaps the coffins protected me.
The nuns saw my fervor and I was given an important role in the approaching celebration. I would carry the cushion with the korona cierniowa, the Crown of Thorns. It was a day I will never forget. The church was thronged with people, thousands of candles were burning, the monks carried censers from which a heavenly aroma wafted. It is a fragrance which invariably takes me back to my short-lived and desperate faith. I was on my knees holding the Crown of Christ in my outstretched hands. My arms became numb and as cold as ice. With my knees I could feel the knots in the linen carpet covering the stone floor. It hurt. Then I ceased to feel the pain, ceased to feel my legs. I rose up with the Crown and floated toward the altar. I brought the Crown to the bishop decked in gold and heard the singing of angels. I was far away from everybody but at one with all of them. A monk gently took me by the hand, the Crown lay on the altar. I do not know what happened to me, but I think I had found faith.
I lost my faith again in a single day, when I was not allowed to take my first Communion because I did not have a white dress. When my mother came to the orphanage to visit, I implored her to buy me that wretched dress but she refused point blank. The priest would not allow me to take communion in an ordinary dress. The nuns loved me and, of course, they would have found me a dress, but I was ashamed to ask. That is because, as a person, I am much too proud.