Finding Myself in Fashion (3 page)

My father, seven years older than my mother, was a handsome, strapping man who had an incredible zest for life, a great love of people, a huge heart, a strong sense of entrepreneurship, and an uncanny ability to reinvent himself. His strong work ethic inspires me still. He used to tell us about the diverse opportunities he created for himself in his native Poland, from raising honeybees and selling horses to organizing big-band dance parties. After he and my mother immigrated to Canada in 1948—both penniless and unable to speak a word of English— he began laying the foundations for his own company, since he was adamant about being his own boss. By the early 1950s, Quality Slippers, a tiny slipper-manufacturing company, was born. For the rest of his life, my dad worked seven days a week, usually twelve hours a day, just so he could put a roof over our heads. He was selfless, brave, tenacious, and wildly generous. Undoubtedly, it was his heroic spirit that helped see both him and my mother through the war.

My mother, Bronia Rohatiner, was born in 1920. Her father, Moses Baruch, was a very religious, revered, and learned man who was a successful village merchant—a purveyor of leather goods. His first wife died giving birth to his ninth child. Nine months later, my grandfather married a woman twenty years his junior—Esther Malka Gold, a nineteen-year-old who would bear him another two children: my
mother and my beautiful aunt Sarah. My mother always delighted in telling stories about her magical Polish shtetl, Kozowa—a lively place filled with colourful characters—and her joyful girlhood. But in 1941, with the arrival of the Germans, her perfect world came crashing down.

After the Nazis gunned down two of my mother's half-brothers in a mass killing in a nearby forest, ten members of her extended family moved into her parents' large house. With the help of neighbours, they dug a small cave in the cellar. “There were two pipes for air circulation,” my mother explained to me countless times. “Often, all of us had to spend hours down there. Sometimes, we stayed there for a whole day, when the Nazis came and were looking for people to kill. We heard them walking around upstairs, and only when we were sure they had left would we come out of the cave.”

Before long, my mother's mother died of typhoid fever. Two months later, in April 1942, there was word that the Nazis were coming to liquidate the Kozowa ghetto. The family—my mother; her father; her only remaining half-brother and his two daughters; the wife of one of her late half-brothers and their three children; and my mother's sister, Sarah—went that night to their hiding place. In the morning, they heard the Nazis walking around upstairs. “They were shouting, and yelling, and searching for our family,” my mother would tell me. The Nazis couldn't find the entrance to the cave, but they must have spotted the two air pipes. They stuffed them with something, blocking the flow of air. “I was the first to faint,” my mother recalled. “That was because I'd just recently recovered from typhus myself.” When the Germans finally left, some people from the ghetto came to open the cave, and they pulled out the family, one by one. Everyone had suffocated, except for my mother. She would often tell the story of how her family's corpses were being loaded onto wagons to be taken away when someone noticed her eyelids fluttering. They poured cold water on her, and she was revived. The next thing she knew, she was in her bed, surrounded by strange people and the town's one remaining doctor. “He told me what happened. I was shocked and angry, and asked him, ‘Why did you revive me? Now I'm all alone!'” That day, the Nazis killed one thousand Kozowa Jews.

My father arrived on the scene and took my mother to his family's home. But shortly afterwards, they heard of the Nazis' plans to make the town
Judenrein
(clean of Jews). My parents fled, and for the next fourteen months, relying on their wits and the kindness of gentile strangers, they scrambled to hide from the Nazi terror. My mother would tell me how she and my father had to ration scraps of food; how she “made friends” with cute, tiny field mice; how she dreamed of being able to read a book or eat a piece of bread with butter. I remember being puzzled as a kid whenever my mother would yawn and let out a big, loud sigh. She explained to me once that she yawned so loudly because she could never make a noise when she was in hiding for all those months. From then on, her loud yawns became music to my ears.

My parents were open about their hellish memories, and adamant about raising us to appreciate that nothing should be taken for granted. Their stories built a kind of fire in my belly that fuelled that passion and desire to lead a truly exceptional life—one that would allow me to realize all the dreams they never could, and then some.

My mother often spoke about her longing to return to Poland, and maybe even visit Kozowa, now in Ukraine. But it was hard for her to get up the nerve to confront her past. After my father died, my mother said she would consider going back only if my sister and I accompanied her. The opportunity never arose. And frankly, I was afraid that a trip to Poland might be too emotionally exhausting for my mother. But fate has a funny way of delivering things that are meant to be.

In 1995, thanks to the LINK Group, a fashion promotion agency that had bought the rights to
Fashion Television
for satellite broadcast in Poland, I was given the opportunity to travel to Warsaw. Apparently, our show had been pirated across the Eastern European airwaves for years, and I was a well-known entity there—a mini-celeb, if you will. Now that
FT
was going to be delivered to Poland legitimately, the broadcast execs wanted to celebrate by bringing me over. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, especially because I knew the perfect roommate and translator—I asked my mother to accompany me. My supervising producer, Marcia Martin, and the Toronto exec who had made the deal were also on board for this first-class trip.

Days before we were to leave, my mother expressed concern as we filled out our visa applications. “It's asking what my father's name was,” she said apprehensively. “I don't want to write ‘Moses.'”

“Why not? That was his name, wasn't it?”

“Because then they'll know we're Jewish,” she explained.

“Mum, you don't have to be afraid anymore,” I told her. “You're a Canadian citizen now. And the war is over.”

The next day my mother phoned to tell me how excited she was about our impending trip. “But please try to understand,” she said. “I was so scared for so long.”

Our welcome at the Warsaw airport was ultra glam: four gorgeous models dressed in prim grey suits, each carrying a huge bouquet of roses, marched towards us upon our arrival. It was 8:30 in the morning, and there was a posse of Polish TV crews and newspaper photographers there to capture the excitement. My mother turned to me in disbelief. We felt like rock stars.

Our host in Warsaw was Jack Orlowski, an affable fellow who headed up the LINK Group. He had known my mother was coming, and he offered to drive her directly to the Natan Rappaport Memorial, which commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19, 1943. The massive monument depicts Mordecai Anielewicz and other members of the community who barricaded the gates of the walled ghetto against the Nazis. (By the time the uprising ended, on May 16, 1943, at least seven thousand people had been killed, and tens of thousands more had been captured and transported to concentration camps.) In the trunk of Jack's Mercedes was a glorious wreath he had thoughtfully brought for my mother to place at the monument.

We arrived at the Umschlagplatz, the centre of the infamous ghetto, and stepped out of the car onto the cobblestone square. Jack carried the flowers. My mother's eyes were misty. She turned to me, incredulous that she had made it this far. “If you live long enough,” she observed, “you live to see everything.” She gingerly climbed the stairs and rested the wreath at the base of the monument. I was overwhelmed by disparate emotions—joy, sorrow, peace, loss, and a sense of profound reverence. In a strange way, I felt as though I had come home. I closed
my eyes and sensed those thousands of tormented souls, screaming out to be remembered. When I opened my eyes, my mother hugged me and, wiping away her tears, thanked me for bringing her on this amazing trip. As frivolous as I've sometimes found the fashion arena to be, I silently thanked it for making all this possible.

We spent most of the rest of the day riding around the old city in a horse-drawn carriage. My mother was cooing like a kid in her native Polish. “How I dreamed of visiting Warsaw when I was a girl. This was the big city!” she said as she took in the sights. “But who could ever afford to come here in those days?”

The next morning we visited a seventeenth-century palace that had been transformed into a kind of private club used by the business community. This is where I was to introduce
FT
to about twenty journalists. At the beginning of my speech, I mentioned that this was a kind of homecoming for my mother. When it was time for questions, an elderly gentleman asked if she would say a few words. To my surprise, my mother had prepared a little speech, just in case someone asked her to speak. She pulled a paper out of her purse, and then, in her perfect Polish, provided the audience with a riveting description of how she had survived the war and how emotional it was for her to return after all these years. You could have heard a pin drop. My heart swelled with pride as I realized yet again what a remarkable, fearless woman I had for a mother.

When the press conference ended, several journalists approached her. The elderly gentleman who had asked her to speak flashed me his card. He was a former White House correspondent. “You were the sunshine of this press conference,” he told her. My mum was kvelling, especially because of her ability to speak Polish so well after so long, and she was amazed that having left this country as a second-class citizen fifty years earlier, she'd come back as the toast of the town.

Back at the Bristol, our lavish five-star hotel, my mother took a call from a reporter with a Warsaw newspaper who had been unable to grab her at the press conference. After a twenty-minute interview, she hung up. “I wonder if I told him too much,” she mused. Later that night, a full-scale fashion show was staged in our honour at a local theatre. The
director of Polsat TV approached my mother to tell her that she had been featured on the national newscast earlier that evening. They had aired part of her speech from the press conference. We all teased her about her new-found fame as Poland's media darling.

“I don't care,” she said defensively, biting into a perogy at the post-show dinner. “Make fun of me all you want.” A few beats later, evidently pretty satisfied with herself, she smugly added, “You know what? My perogies are better!” I had never seen my mother so self-assured, so fiercely proud. And this time, it wasn't because of her children or her grandchildren. She was radiantly happy with herself. I had never loved her more.

It was well past midnight when we crawled into our beds, complaining about our aching feet, exhausted but giddy, laughing and kvetching about how tough it was to be a celebrity. As I fell asleep, I thought about the last time we had shared a hotel room. In 1983, we had accompanied my dying father to a renowned hospital in Boston in a last-ditch effort to save his life. His heart condition was rapidly worsening, and we were desperate. That night, at this ritzy Warsaw hotel, I distinctly felt my dad's presence, as if he were watching us share this wondrous homecoming.

The next day, we drove to Kraków in a Polish TV minivan. As rows of farmhouses and strips of countryside darted past our windows, my mother spun some of the war stories I had heard a thousand times before. There were tales about how gallant Polish families had hidden my parents in their barns and brought them bread and milk. I wondered if the farmhouses we were passing were like the ones in which my parents sought refuge. My mother was too preoccupied reliving the past for me to ask.

In Kraków, our guide took us to the old Jewish quarter, where Steven Spielberg shot scenes for the film
Schindler's List
. My mother teared up as we walked through the stone gates of the sixteenth-century Ramu Synagogue, the oldest in Kraków. There we met an old Yiddish-speaking man in a yarmulke. He told us there used to be tens of thousands of Jews living in Kraków. Today, fewer than a thousand remain. The courtyard of the synagogue was filled with tombstones. It
was quiet, cold, and lonely. I wept silently for all Jews, and for family I'd never known. Those buried at the synagogue were fortunate to have marked graves; those who perished at the camps never did. I remembered my mother's story about a town near hers where all the tombstones in the Jewish cemetery had been torn down and made into sidewalks.

Back in Warsaw that night, I was violently ill, likely the result of food poisoning. Just as she had when I was a little girl, my mum stayed up with me, a familiar worried look on her face. In the morning, a doctor arrived to give me some anti-nausea pills for the flight home. He reminded my mother that fifty-five years ago that day, on September 1, 1939, war broke out in Poland. My mother looked at the gold signet ring she had worn all those years and remembered that on that day, fifty-five years ago, her brother had given her that ring. This was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the day her life changed forever. This was also the day she would leave Poland with a new sense of herself, and at peace with her past.