Irenas gift, p.1
Irena’s Gift, page 1
About the Book
If we seal off the past, how will we ever know the truth?
In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Poland, a Jewish child was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That child was Karen Kirsten’s mother, but she knew nothing about this extraordinary event until one day a letter arrived from a stranger.
Irena’s Gift weaves together a mystery, history and memoir to tell the story of a family torn apart by war. From the glittering concert halls of interbellum Warsaw to the vermin-infested prison where a Jewish woman negotiates with an SS officer to save her sister’s child, Irena’s Gift is about the lies we tell to survive and what happens when those lies unravel. It is about the remarkable resilience of three generations of women, and the sacrifices made for love.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Part Three
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Images
Acknowledgements
Notes
About the Author
Praise
Imprint
Read More at Penguin Books Australia
For my nieces: Brooke, Jade and Emma.
And for Joasia, your memory will always be a blessing.
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face . . . You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Author’s Note
While I am not a historian, I have attempted to corroborate my family’s recorded memories and those they recounted to me with historians, with deeply researched historical accounts, extensive research in archives, documentation, artifacts and diaries. In addition, letters, recorded testimonies, photographs and film footage helped me reconstruct historical scenes. Undoubtedly, there are mistakes. They are mine.
Because we all remember events differently, this story changes as I tell it, depending on whose point of view I am examining. When trying to inhabit a history and experiences not my own, I investigated gaps in my mother’s and grandparents’ accounts and any disparate information to determine if and how their stories connected. It was like poking an earring into my earlobe, trying to find the hole.
Besides where I have flagged details and dialogue for the reader as pictured or imagined, dialogue is as recorded by me or others, the USC Shoah Foundation or from published works. Occasionally, I have simplified dialect for clarity and combined descriptions.
PART ONE
1
Magpies warbled in the gum trees as we walked up the path to Nana Alicja’s ground-floor flat in the upper-crust Melbourne suburb of Toorak. I pushed the buzzer, then heard Nana’s poodle barking and sniffing beneath the door, the donk, schlep, schlep of Nana shuffling down the hallway with her walking stick. As the door slowly opened, I sensed my mother beside me bracing herself.
‘What you have there?’ My grandmother raised her head of perfectly coiffed, auburn-dyed hair as far as her bowed shoulders would allow. She smiled at me warmly, but barely acknowledged Mum.
I levered open a box containing cakes we had selected from Nana’s favourite patisserie: a hazelnut meringue gateau for Nana, mille-feuille filled with crème patissière for Mum and me, and strawberry tarts for us all. Nana inhaled the rich vanilla scent. ‘Mmmm!’ she said, grinning. She brushed off my mother, who was trying in vain to peck her on the cheek, and made her way back down the oil-painting-lined hallway to the galley kitchen that smelled of beef fat and carrot. Nana’s part-time Polish caregiver had made a stew.
I followed Nana and arranged the cakes on a platter while watching Mum in the lounge room trying to calm the dog. As Nana reached into a cupboard for her gold-rimmed china, light streamed in from the courtyard and caught the blue-green numbers tattooed on her forearm: 2 4 5 3 3 5, though they’d softened over time, morphing into her skin folds and sunspots.
I was four or five when I first asked about the numbers. I was sitting with my younger sister, watching Nana Alicja chop beetroot and onions for a soup. Nana’s knife hit the cutting board: rap, rap, rap. She tilted her head high to prevent the onion fumes stinging her eyes.
‘It’s our phone number,’ Nana said. ‘So I won’t forget it.’
‘Who put it there?’
Papa Mietek poked his nose over his newspaper.
‘Oh, just some man.’ Nana scraped the onions into a pot. She put down the knife and passed us a tin filled with European chocolate biscuits.
I often suspected Nana Alicja wasn’t telling the truth. On her birthday we’d stand around her Edwardian mahogany dining-room table delicately forking her freshly baked strawberry and meringue cake from her best china. I’d ask how old she was. ‘About fifty,’ she’d reply nonchalantly. Every year.
Papa Mietek would pour champagne into flutes and pass them around to the adults, then to my sister and me, with just enough for a toast. ‘Sto lat! Sto lat! Niech żyje, żyje nam!’ — One hundred years! May she live one hundred years! we’d sing in Polish.
We were never sure of Nana’s age, or what she looked like when she was young; there were few photos of her. It didn’t occur to me back then to read anything into the absence, and, besides, Nana treated me like a princess. She’d bake me cakes, shop with me at Polish and Hungarian food stores like The Chocolate Box in Camberwell, dress up to take me to the ballet and Chopin concerts, and collect seashells with me on the beach with her poodles. I didn’t want to question her stories. I was too busy basking in her love.
Now Nana’s poodle was licking my leg in her kitchen.
‘I like zis hair.’ Nana nodded at my new bob. She always took an interest in my appearance and made approving comments of the sort she rarely made of my mother. ‘Put cakes in lounge room,’ Nana commanded.
I joined Mum and placed the platter, cups and silver cake forks on the coffee table, then poured Nana a strong cup of French press as she slowly lowered herself into a recliner. Mum moved the platter to make room for Nana’s cup. My body tensed – I knew what was coming.
‘Don’t touch zat!’ Nana barked as my mother retracted her hand.
Nana often lost her temper at Mum for no reason, criticising her and snapping. My father had nicknamed Nana ‘The Dragon’. I would stay silent during these outbursts. Perhaps I held my tongue because Nana’s behaviour scared me, or because I knew by then that she had suffered unspeakable horrors in Auschwitz. Maybe, too, I felt flattered she spoiled me. Perhaps it was easier for me to justify because I was never on the receiving end of her fury.
To this day, I still don’t understand why Mum bothered to visit Nana Alicja every week only to be humiliated. Now I feel ashamed I didn’t speak up for her. Once, after witnessing Nana’s spitting insults, my sister-in-law asked Mum why she put up with the treatment.
‘Because she is my mother,’ Mum said pragmatically.
But the problem – as we knew by then – was this was only partially true.
2
The thing about secrets is they are like a loose thread in a jumper; if you pull hard enough, the whole garment falls apart. My mother tells me that growing up, she’d long suspected she didn’t belong to her parents. Alicja’s hair was auburn and Mietek’s light brown, but Mum’s was jet-black. Her chocolate-coloured eyes were not hazel, like theirs; her stubby nose contrasted with Alicja’s slim one. Alicja and Mietek were tall and lanky, whereas Mum was a curvaceous five-foot-two. ‘Short, dark and wide,’ she would say.
It went beyond appearance, though. My mother never felt loved by her parents. At times, she believed they hated her. Sometimes they’d hit her if she persisted with her circuitous questions about the war or the black-and-white photos from Poland on Alicja’s dresser. Yet they seemed to tolerate questions from her younger brother, Tony. Once, she says, the bruises from Mietek’s wallopings were so severe she stole money from Alicja’s purse to purchase bandages so as not to attract awkward questions at school. On her way home at the end of the day, she hid the bandages in her bag so Alicja and Mietek wouldn’t notice she’d covered her arms.
Then there were the strange nightmares Mum had as a child: men in uniform shooting guns, dark rooms where one needed to stay quiet. Alicja and Mi etek dismissed these and showed no interest in her dreams or memories: they wanted her to simply keep quiet and behave. Mum begged Alicja and Mietek to explain the scary men, but they tried to convince her to admit she’d imagined them, just like the world she’d often conjure at night in bed before trying to sleep, where her ‘special’ friends would hug her and listen to her secrets. ‘They said my imaginary life was lies,’ Mum tells me now.
As a teenager, Alicja and Mietek also screened her dates. They mandated Jewish boys from well-to-do immigrant families which Mum found strange, as the parents of her Aussie friends didn’t voice such concerns. It felt overbearing and protective; a form of control, not love.1 They seemed to care little about her hopes for the future, yet it was deeply important to them that, instead of the Aussie Goyish men she kissed or the biker gang she hung out with, she should date only Jewish men.
My mother believed she’d failed to live up to her refugee parents’ lofty ambitions. Mietek had wanted her to pursue law or engineering, insisting she learn Latin, French and maths. After my mother failed maths, she decided she wanted to teach children art and history. When she announced at eighteen she was enrolling at Gippsland Teachers’ College – which did not require a bachelor’s degree, but did require, as she’d intended, that she live on campus a few hours’ drive away – her parents threw their hands in the air, yelled and called her ungrateful. ‘You’d think I’d started a war,’ Mum says.
By contrast, Mum’s brother, Tony – an upbeat and relaxed child – received warmth and adulation. When Tony graduated from medical school, they presented him with a car, a flashy white MG convertible. When Mum graduated from teachers’ college, they gave her a pen.
A year after college, my mother left home for good to marry my Australian-born father, whose Swiss immigrant parents were neither well-to-do nor Jewish. Alicja’s best friend had introduced them. ‘She thought he was Jewish because of his big nose!’ Mum later told me, chuckling.
My handsome father was a sales executive who’d worked in Europe for a global chemical company. Alicja’s friend thought Alicja and Mietek might approve of my father’s rising trajectory.
After my parents married, it was my father who showed my mother how to cook basic meals. Alicja baked babkas and stewed goulashes, yet she’d taught Mum nothing about taking care of a household, about sexual matters or raising children. Maybe Alicja’s memories of her own mother were too painful to recall. Maybe the war had eradicated her ability to bond. Regardless, everything my mother knew about parenting she learned herself. When her first-born baby wailed, my mother mostly didn’t pick me up. Later, she armed herself with Dr Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care and fed her babies when they cried, instead of adhering to a strict schedule. She wanted her four children to feel secure. She wanted to create a household full of warmth and love, one that was nurturing. Her own dysfunctional home haunted her. She’d never leave me home alone with a crying sibling, as Alicja had done, while she and Mietek jitterbugged across nightclub dance floors. This was how most weekends went: Mum listening to her baby brother wailing through her bedroom wall.
When it was her turn to be a mother, Mum attended meetings at the Nursing Mothers’ Association. A gregarious, practical woman, she made quick friends with fellow young mums. They taught her how to soothe a colicky baby, treat nappy rash, bake moist cakes – and how to welcome her husband home after a hard day at the office with fresh eyeliner, lipstick and a baby-spitfree miniskirt.
I was nine and a half and at school the day my mother heard a car turn off the dirt road where we lived, in Warranwood, about thirty minutes’ drive from Nana Alicja’s. Mum always complained about the dust from that road. Whenever a car passed by, a sandy cloud rose over our clay-tile-roofed homestead. It was worse in summer, when it rarely rained and the paddocks behind the house were brown and bare and our cows wandered further to find food. On hot days like that February summer morning, my mother would close windows and draw curtains to keep the house cool, yet the dust still crept in. She would wipe away the layer that powdered the furniture and her neatly arranged knick-knacks.
That particular day, she glanced out the kitchen window and saw the postman. He handed her a thick, heavy envelope pasted with Canadian stamps. She placed the letter on the kitchen bench. She fixed herself a cup of tea. She poured coffee for my father, who was home preparing for a business trip.
Because my mother never started the day without make-up, fragrance, a necklace and matching earrings, she carried the coffee to my father in his study smelling of Chanel No. 5, an apron tied round her waist. She then returned to her cup in the kitchen, and the envelope. The address indicated a Canadian business had sent the letter: Zdzisław Przygoda and Associates.
My thirty-two-year-old mother knew no-one in Canada. She sliced a knife along the top of the envelope and removed a hefty mass of ivory paper – pages and pages. The letter was penned in curved, blue script.
My dearest Joasia,
You must excuse me to call you like this, but I have been silent for so many years, now I use the name as I hold it in my memory . . .
My mother frowned. She knelt to pick up a brown leather folder that had slipped from the envelope. Worn and dog-eared, it contained photos. They were familiar; she had seen them on Alicja’s dresser. The first was a picture of herself at around fifteen months old with jet-black hair, tucked into a pram on gigantic wheels, bundled up in a thick woollen coat, hands encased in white knitted mittens. The second photo showed Alicja’s sister, Irena, who had died in the war. This was Mum’s aunt, dressed in a long evening dress and jacket, clutching an elegant white purse. Mum stared at Irena’s black, wavy hair and her deep-set, dark eyes. She read more of the letter, her own eyes darting back and forth between the photograph and the words. Then something clicked into place.
Hearing my mother shriek, my father dashed into the kitchen. He presumed Mum had cut herself with a knife. Instead, he found her waving a letter. He led her to a chair and told her to sit. ‘Read it!’ he encouraged.
‘I survived the war only because the thought about you gave me the necessary strength . . .’ my mother began tentatively. As she read the letter aloud, faces and memories from her childhood in postwar Germany flashed inside her head. She remembered a two-storey villa in the town of Dachau, where she’d lived with Alicja and Mietek and other refugee families.
Your photograph and your mother Irena’s photograph were with me all the time. I smuggled these photos through all the camps, even standing naked in Dachau, I hid your picture under my foot . . . I did everything possible to save you and your mother. The Germans killed her – you are the only person I love now and I did love you all the war years and after the war and up till today.
Mum clutched the photograph of Irena to her chest. ‘This is my mother,’ she said. ‘This is my mother.’
My mother kept this letter hidden from me for years. One would think that having been left in the dark, she would be the last person to want to replicate what had been inflicted on her. But then, much of what transpired makes little sense to me. For example, I don’t understand why Alicja would adopt my mother only to treat her so caustically. Alicja nursed her back to health and brought her to Australia where she could have a future. Yet she withheld affection. Why would she treat a child so poorly that her future didn’t feel bright at all?
Most families harbour secrets, ordeals we’d rather forget, myths we invent to protect ourselves and those we love. The question is, how to keep secrets and preserve stories of our pasts without lying? And if we don’t unravel the lies, how will we ever know the truth?
I may as well begin with the lies. The day after the letter arrived, my father phoned Alicja and invited her to lunch at Cafe Balzac in East Melbourne. The packed restaurant was austere, well suited to Alicja’s aura of superiority, but not the kind of place one would want to make a fuss. My father topped up Alicja’s wine glass. ‘I need to tell you something,’ he said. ‘Joasia received a letter. From Canada.’
Alicja stared at my father, who calmly described the contents of the letter. Her mouth fell open. ‘Zdzisław promised he’d never tell!’ she shouted, as men in suits and ties turned to stare at her from across the dining room.
