Letters from Elsewhere

Maria Jastrzębska

In the evening, as the plane lands, you can see Warsaw covered in snow. Christmas trees, lights and decorations in all of the squares mean that even this great city of concrete blocks and modern skyscrapers looks like something from a fairy tale. I chat to the taxi driver about the progress of the road works and how he has decided he will take Christmas off this year to be with his family after working nights all year long. It is freezing cold outside but every interior is incredibly well heated and, after all the rain and damp in Brighton, I find the weather here, although it’s bracing, energising. I’m here on a research trip to write a memoir about my mother as a young woman and about myself growing up.

 A day later, I make my way to the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising. I have decided to donate my mother’s notebook and a letter from my father to the Museum. It is the right thing to do but it feels heart-wrenching. After my parents died, a few of their belongings from the time of the Uprising, including a small electronic component for secret radio transmissions, were donated to the Polish Underground archive in London. Now, somehow, it’s fitting for these fragile pieces of paper to return to Poland, where they were originally written. I’ve got photocopies and I already have them scanned but I know it’s going to be hard to surrender them to anybody else. 

 The archivist has those kind eyes that people who work in jobs requiring sensitivity often have. I met an oncology nurse with eyes like that once. And I am grateful to see that, having put on white gloves, the archivist lifts out the papers I have brought her gently and thoughtfully. As quickly as I can, I explain about my father’s letter, written in pencil while he lay wounded just after the Uprising, in which he asks about his younger brother. He doesn’t know his brother has already been dead for weeks. No matter how many times I read this it floors me. The archivist and her colleague have already read the transcript of my mother’s notebook, which I emailed over before coming. On the flimsy cover of a small exercise book, my mother had written: ‘Notebook from a house where it was particularly comfortable and safe’. ‘Such a positive title, such devastating content,’ says the archivist.  

 The Museum only opened in 2004, almost 20 years ago, and 60 years after the event that began on August 1 1944. It took years for people to start speaking out. Perspectives have changed; initially only the role of the People’s Army and the Russian army, as Poland’s liberators, was acknowledged and only the Communist Party line was permitted. People were careful about what they said. The archivist tells me her grandmother was a teacher running a village school. For her own safety, she never told anyone she had been in the Home Army. It wouldn’t have gone down so well back then, the archivist says.  

 My parents both died several years ago. Could I have written this sooner? Probably not. I did have the idea of recording them talking about their experiences. I’d heard other people saying they’d done that and how moving the accounts were. When I tried it was a total disaster. My mother sabotaged the whole attempt with interruptions and a flat refusal to talk about anything I asked about. Ditching my own questions to just listen instead, letting her take the lead yielded only: ‘When you were younger you were so sweet, much better behaved than now.’ All I ended up with was a very short recording on tape where they both squabbled in the amiable, habitual way of the old married couple they were. My mother, especially, was averse to ‘ekshibicjonizm’, horrified at the idea of hanging out any washing in public at all, let alone dirty washing!  Add to that my own reservations (who am I to write her story?) and the fact that all my life I’ve been writing poetry not prose, which is a good deal less literal than a memoir, and you can see why it’s taken me a long time to get round to this. 

 I touch the papers for one last time. I tell the archivist they mean a lot to me, although I clearly don’t need to say it. They mean a lot to us too, she replies. There are fewer and fewer first-hand accounts from that time, she explains. A whole generation has gone now. Then she asks me if I know what happened to the cat. Because, she says, it was in the bag – but what if it got out?  ‘Oh no, that’s it’, I say. I can’t keep this together any longer. I look up and see she has tears in her eyes too. It’s always the animals that get you, just when you are trying to be so professional. Two women, the archivist and the writer, wondering about the fate of a cat which my mother carried in a bag while soldiers trained their guns on her. I know the passage she is talking about in the diary, though I don’t know what happened to the cat later. This cat gets mentioned earlier on and then just as my mother and her parents are being marched out of the city towards a Nazi transit camp:

August 27th …Covered in a layer of grey dust, dropping on our feet with emotion and in the heat, we drag ourselves on. We could ditch our baggage of course, it would be a relief, but these are all the belongings we have left, clothes we can wear and food to live on. 

 We reach Szczęśliwice. A military policeman by the EKD tracks doesn’t let us through and directs us towards Warsaw West station. Persuasion makes no difference and the wave of people turns back onto the road towards the station and the camp. A car is coming from the direction of the city. From a distance it seems that these are RONA so we pick up the pace. The parents are all set. Father’s face is pale, his eyes sunken, sweat has soaked through the clothes on his back and through the trousers, marking his lightly coloured clothes with dark streaks. Mother’s face is strained, she can barely walk. The cat – in a bag slung across my chest – miaows softly with every more sudden move. (In general it behaves like a dream, I had a peek inside at a stopover – the cat’s instinct tells the breathless, sweaty little animal that it is best to trust the human in this case).

 It turns out the car is German. We slow down. (And anyway hurrying is pointless since it catches up with us immediately). I hear somebody calling me. I look back. Mr O is waving at us – and shouting something. I stop my parents and we turn back. Mr O explains that it’s best to turn into a dirt road right here. We walk together – the camp does not tempt us. Some soldier stumbles by, they try to convince him to take us to Opacz. One man is running about, asking whether we have vodka for this soldier.

 We start walking, another breakaway group joins us. But the soldier walks fast, doesn’t want to slow down and my parents are not able to keep up. Several people disappear behind a fence together with this soldier. We trudge slowly behind them. Mr O stays with us, helps to carry stuff. We reach the fence. And at that very moment, a gun goes off right in front of us. We turn back. We can hear voices in the distance, “Come over here, come over here.” Who is shouting, it’s difficult to say. We have no choice, we turn back. We don’t know what is going on there. We return to the crossing and sit down on the dusty grass.

 My step-father isn’t able to continue walking. So we sit and wait for God’s mercy. Some man is walking through a potato field. A German? Probably not, you can’t see a uniform. Perhaps a Ukrainian. He comes closer. A Pole, a peasant. We ask him whether he could be our guide. He takes us to his cabin. Some five minutes away from Warsaw West station. There are several cabins there, some of them burnt out. We walk through the potato fields. On our way the peasant points to a place where a shot-down American plane and seven pilots are resting. We’re given coffee and goat’s milk. We spend the night on the ground. Complete darkness and silence, since RONA soldiers peer into the cabins at nighttime. Fleas. We scarcely slept last night. We left at 5 am. Now we all feel terrible exhaustion. I can hardly drag my feet. The bag weighs me down unbearably …’

 ‘Will they be able to add my mother’s name to the website roll call of people who took part in the Uprising or is it only for insurgents in armed combat?’ I ask the other archivist who joins us in the office. It’s not up to her but she will find out. She tells me brightly about a whole programme for families of insurgents: ‘You can meet up, give interviews, plant trees, take part in ceremonies’. I can’t think beyond the book I’m writing. I don’t know. Do I want to participate? Will it be all pomp and patriotism, the way it was in the Polish exile community when I was growing up?

 In the café of the museum, I eat a sandwich and a slice of Apple Charlotte. Along with cheesecake, this is my favourite cake. After the quiet of the archivist’s office, I go out into the museum with an appointed guide who takes me around. He has been charged, at my request, to focus on the role of women. As it happens, there is a current exhibition about women, divided into sections, each with a Greek goddess’s name. They include Hestia, goddess of heath and home, Artemis, guardian of women archers and warriors and Persephone, who delves into the darkest side of human nature, pushing limits, caring for doctors, nurses and those who crawled through Warsaw’s sewers, facing death. Aphrodite, goddess of love and art, is there too among the rubble and fighting. The museum is crowded and busy, full of images, flashing lights and buzzers, recordings of gunfire, voices and singing. It’s overwhelming. There are groups of children and teenagers following their teachers, clipboards and worksheets in hands. What do they make of this place, of an uprising in this city in which so many very young people took part? What do they think of those teenagers, girl and boy scouts, who once fought on the barricades, who delivered letters and messages? What does any of it mean to them? Is it ‘history’, something from so long ago that it exists only in books or on computer games? Do visitors think about the occupation of Ukraine by Russian troops, which is happening right now across the border from their own country? 

 My guide is a young man. Maybe half my age? He is so knowledgeable about all the fighting and keeps assuming I know the place names and different battles. He talks rapidly about atrocities, the killing of civilians, the rape of women. He mentions the SS RONA, a unit made up of soldiers from Nazi occupied parts of Russia, with Russians and Ukrainians among them. My mother mentioned them in her diary with fear as the unit that raped women held at Zieleniak, a marketplace turned into a transitional concentration camp, as the Nazis set about destroying the whole of Warsaw. A year previously, the Nazis had already destroyed the Jewish Ghetto, along with the inhabitants left there, after so many had been deported or had died fighting. The Nazis did this in retaliation against the Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Then, in 1944, they continued murdering more civilians in the rest of the city, looting and burning their homes in revenge for the Warsaw Uprising.

 My guide talks so fast that I can hardly keep up and the notes I write are too jumbled to make sense of afterwards. Contradictions and complexities abound surrounding alliances made during the Second World War. Those who feared Stalin more than they feared Hitler and naively threw in their lot with the latter, and vice versa. Those who remained neutral. 

 I ask him how on earth he has become so passionate about all this. He says his mother brought him up on the poetry of Baczyński. At last he has mentioned a name I’m familiar with. Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński was a young poet and member of the Home Army who perished in the first few days of the Uprising just like my uncle, my father’s younger brother, who was killed then too. After a while, my guide tells me that, at night, he dreams he is looking down at himself. He is a prisoner wearing a striped uniform. He has no head. The guards are playing with it, kicking it around on the ground like a football.

 When it’s time to leave, I button up my coat like everyone else, pulling on hat, scarf and gloves. In the foyer, some children are standing around waiting for their teacher to lead them out. A few begin pushing each other, laughing about something I can’t hear in all the din.  

 All my life I’ve written poems. Truthful poems. But poems tell the ‘truth slant’. They hint and imply, rather than explaining or showing too much, and metaphors provide a wonderful disguise. What has possessed me to try and write more directly about my parents now? As well as living through times in which secrecy was a matter of survival, my mother was a very private person, reserved and naturally secretive. However, she left behind piles of papers in her own handwriting. Sometimes she’d say that after her death I was to burn everything. Why didn’t she burn them herself ? Why hold onto them? 

 Was she extraordinary? No, although she was unique. Was she heroic? Yes. However, countless people in Warsaw, in Poland and all over the world at that time were heroic –  ordinary people caught out by war and occupation – some fighting back, some barely managing to survive, many losing their lives. My mother wasn’t extraordinary. She wasn’t famous. Nor was she a trailblazing revolutionary. Her life is less documented than my father’s. Her war, her struggles, happened some time ago. Depending on how you view history, that might seem very recent or a long time ago. Today, we are surrounded by new wars, seemingly by newer struggles, but ones that, to me, carry echoes of the previous ones. I am not extraordinary either, though each of us is  unique. But there can never be too many stories about ordinary people and especially about ordinary women. 

 

I am indebted to Anna Błasiak for co-translating the Polish fragment.

Photos of  Maria Jastrzębska’s parents courtesy of the author