Magda's Daughter (28 page)

‘Is there a shop here that will make a copy, so you can have one?' Helena asked.

‘Here?' Weronika laughed too loudly as she wiped a tear from her eyes. ‘No. Perhaps in Warsaw or Cracow.'

‘If we can't have a copy made here, I will get someone to do it in Pontypridd and send one to you,' Helena promised.

‘Thank you. I will pay for it.'

‘No, please. It would be my pleasure. You were kind enough to come here and see me.' Helena paused. ‘You said that you met my mother again after the war in the camp?'

‘Yes.'

‘And I was with her.'

‘Obviously. You were a sweet little thing.'

‘Did she tell you that I was her child?'

‘No, because I knew that you couldn't be. Helena's birth was a difficult one, and the doctor warned Adam that Helena would be Magdalena's first and last child.'

‘Did you just tell her, Weronika?' Anna was on the stairs, a bundle of clean towels in her arms, her eyes flickering between them.

‘She has a right to know the truth, Anna,' Weronika said, switching to Polish.

‘I hoped you'd see sense.'

A peculiar buzzing filled Helena's head. She saw Anna and Weronika's lips move, sensed Ned crouching beside her, his face full of concern and love.

But who was the girl he loved?

‘Since we arrived here a couple of days ago, Helena has discovered the man she always thought was her father wasn't. This morning the man she assumed was her uncle physically attacked her, and now you tell her that the woman who brought her up wasn't her mother. I wish we had never come to Poland!' Driven by the devastating effect of Weronika's revelation on Helena, Ned lost his temper.

‘Stop it, Ned,' Helena pleaded. ‘Now I know this much, I have to find out the truth.'

Weronika poured another cup of tea for Helena, and handed it to Ned to give to her. ‘I am sorry I upset you, Helena. But I believe that everyone has the right to know who their parents were and where they came from.'

‘What right have you to tell Helena things Magda chose to keep from her,' Anna demanded bitterly, reverting to Polish. ‘Magda must have loved Helena to keep her through the war and afterwards. To take her to Britain –'

‘Magda couldn't have loved Helena more if she had been her natural daughter, Anna,' Weronika interrupted. ‘I saw just how much Magda loved Helena in the camp. Enough to die for her if need be. Although I did wonder why Magda had given you the name Helena Weronika Janek,' she said to Helena in English. ‘That poor mite had so little in life. I thought the least Magda could have done was allow her to keep her own name. But then, if Magda hadn't used Helena's name she would have had trouble getting you papers.'

Anna sat heavily on the top stair, and gazed down into the courtyard.

‘Did everyone in the camp know I wasn't Magda's daughter? The other women from the orphanage? Bob Parsons?'

‘I think everyone else assumed that you were Magda's child. The women and children who had been in the children's home with Magda might have known differently, but if they did, no one mentioned it.' Weronika frowned with the effort of remembering. ‘You were so small, so tiny and so close to Magda. In the camp it was as though the two of you were one. You slept in the same bunk, and I swear I saw Magda soothing you in the night before you even cried out. She would have done anything for you, anything at all. Everyone there had lost everything they owned, but Magda would work day and night, doing all sorts of menial work in exchange for a few balls of wool or a piece of cloth to make you a dress. And you were so bright, so cheerful, so chatty. You gave every one of us hope for the future.'

‘Did she tell you where she found me?' It had taken all the courage Helena possessed to ask that question, and she was terrified of hearing what the answer might be.

‘I never asked. I simply assumed that you had been given into her care in the home.'

‘You never once talked about it?'

‘There were many things that we avoided talking about. Things we were ashamed of, although none were our fault. The camp seems a long time and another world away. I think that if I considered you at all, I probably thought Magda had lost a child in her beloved Helena and found another. Not to replace her daughter, because, from what I have seen of mothers, I don't think it's possible to replace a lost or dead child with another. But you gave Magda a reason to go on living.'

‘You never considered the feelings of my real mother and father?'

‘Germany in the spring of 1945 was awash with orphans. You were lucky to have Magda.'

‘How many children did they take from this village?' Ned asked.

‘A dozen. All under two years old. One died in the cattle truck that took us to Germany.'

‘How many returned?' Helena didn't know why she was asking.

Weronika said, ‘That is easy to answer. None. And I was the only woman.'

‘Is there anything else that you can tell me about Mama … Magda?'

Weronika turned to Anna, who was backing down the stairs. ‘Unfortunately not. But Anna was Magda's friend, too. She may be able to tell you more.' She glanced at her watch again and picked up her handbag. ‘I will give you my address.' She took a cheap biro and small notebook from her bag, and wrote on a page before tearing it out. ‘That is the address of my flat and also the shop where I work. The telephone number is the shop's. But there are no telephones in this village. If you want to phone me you will have to go to the post office in the next village, which is seven kilometres away.'

‘So we have discovered.' Ned had already tried, and failed, to book a call to his father.

Weronika left the chair. She went to hand the photograph back to Ned, then looked at it again, holding on to it for a moment.

‘I will send you a copy,' Helena promised.

‘I know you will. And it was good to see you again, Helena, although I would never have recognised you if I hadn't been told who you were.'

Helena rose to her feet and embraced her.

‘We'll walk you to the square,' Ned offered.

‘There is no need.'

‘Please. I would like some fresh air and the walk will do me good.' Helena touched the cotton wool Ned had taped over the cut above her ear. It still stung but it wasn't as painful as it had been. ‘You said that you lived in a house here in the village, Weronika. Did my … Magda ever live there?'

They began to descend the staircase.

‘Yes, with Adam and me. Our parents and brothers and sisters died in a diphtheria epidemic before the war.'

‘Is the house still standing?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘Could you take us to it?' Ned asked when they reached the courtyard.

‘You're standing in it. When the communists closed the church and the priest's house at the end of the war, the priest moved in here.'

Helena recalled Josef telling her that his foster-father had moved into an empty house at the end of the war. ‘This was the Janek house?'

‘One of them. Anna's father, mother and sisters used to live in a room above the bar,' Weronika said loudly in Polish, so Anna who was feeding the chickens could hear her. ‘But it's more comfortable in the house, wouldn't you say, Anna?'

The landlady chose to ignore her.

‘So, you owned it?' Helena asked.

‘Communists don't recognise personal property. Besides, when you get to my age, you realise that all you'll ever own is the pit you are buried in. And most people even have to share that.'

‘You sound like an old woman, yet you can't be much older than my mother was.' Helena took Weronika's arm.

‘If you measure my years, I'm not much over forty, but in terms of what I have seen and done, I am centuries old, child.' She looked at Helena and laughed. ‘Don't look so tragic. Life is a joke. And if you're coming with me, come. I don't want to keep my friend waiting.'

Helena was aware of the villagers, particularly the older ones, watching from their windows, as she, Ned and Weronika strolled up the lane towards the square. One man opened his front door and stood on the step, glaring at Weronika, which made Helena think that he had been waiting for her to pass. Weronika calmly nodded to him. He spat after her, missing her shoes by barely an inch. Ned turned around, but Weronika touched his arm.

‘Don't, he's not worth it.' She spoke first in English, then more loudly in Polish so the man would hear.

Helena looked at her in admiration. ‘I'm not sure I could be so forgiving after what they did to you after the war.'

Weronika shrugged. ‘I knew what I was letting myself in for when I came to pay my respects to Magda.'

‘But you have done nothing wrong!' Helena exclaimed.

‘During the German Occupation there were mothers who poisoned their daughters rather than allow the Nazis to take them. Some people believe that the girls who were sent into forced labour and survived, like me, should have killed ourselves or been killed on our return. The people who suffered the least were always the first to tell us we had no right to live. But there were times when I wondered if they were right. I have been tempted to take my own life many times, especially when I remembered what the Nazis did to Adam and little Helena. And how I stood by and watched.'

‘The only time Mama … Magda talked to me about the massacre, she said that she'd thought about killing herself, too. But if she had, it would have been allowing the Nazis to win.' What Helena hadn't said was that Magda had insisted that she had to live to look after her daughter. And it hurt now, knowing that couldn't possibly be true.

‘It must be agonizing for you to know that neither Magda nor my brother was your parent, Helena,' Weronika said. ‘I can't even begin to imagine the pain you are suffering. But console yourself with the thought that Magda loved you very much. And if she didn't tell you anything about your real parents it was either because she didn't know who they were, or she wanted to spare you. Given the way that the Lebensborn homes were run and the children's original records destroyed, I think it far more likely that she didn't know.'

‘You believe that?'

‘Yes.' Weronika looked at her challengingly. ‘Did she make a good life for herself and for you?'

‘I think she was as happy as she could be,' Helena replied. ‘Although, looking back, I can see now that she suffered from homesickness.'

‘I was afraid of that. I feel responsible for Magda going to Britain. As soon as I received my papers I returned here. After the villagers drove me out I wrote to Magda at the camp to warn her what she could expect if she came back with you.'

‘I wouldn't have been accepted?' Helena stopped walking.

‘A blonde, blue-eyed Lebensborn child? No, you wouldn't have been accepted. It was hard here after the war. People like Wiktor Niklas would have resented every mouthful of food Magda gave you, for all that she was his sister. I rather suspect the villagers would have made both your lives even more unbearable than they made mine.'

‘When Magda wrote to tell you that she was going to Britain, did she say she loved Bobby Parsons?' Helena asked.

‘No. I knew that she didn't. Although he was besotted with her.'

‘How do you know she didn't love him?' Even now, Helena couldn't blame her mother for re-writing her early years as a fairy tale, or retreating into fiction; it was kinder than the unbearable truth of the years she had spent as a prisoner of the Germans.

‘Because I had seen your mother in love. She and my brother lived for one another. Even as children it was obvious they were meant to be together. They never so much as looked at anyone else.'

‘Mama always said that their wedding day was the happiest of her life.'

‘Adam's too.' Weronika's face lit up, making Helena think of sunshine illuminating a frost-covered landscape. But her smile faded when she looked around the deserted square. Weronika glanced at her watch again. ‘I have time to take a last look at my brother's grave. And it will be a last look. I won't come here again.'

‘Do you mind if I …' Helena glanced at Ned. ‘If we come with you?'

‘Not at all. After all, it is also the last resting place of the woman who was your mother in every way that mattered.'

Ned opened the gate to the churchyard and replaced the chain after Helena and Weronika had walked through it. A shrivelled old woman, draped in voluminous black, was crouched over a grave, scrubbing a memorial stone with a brush. As she worked she talked, judging by the conversational tone, to the person in the grave. Helena made a detour to give her privacy.

‘I wonder if our dead can hear us.' Weronika said as they headed for the back of the church and the Janek plot.

‘Everyone would like to know the answer to that question, but I've always thought that even if they can't, the living wouldn't want to believe it.' Ned stopped when they reached Adam Janek's memorial stone.

Weronika looked at her brother's grave. It had been tidied up after Wiktor had filled it in. The loose dirt had been swept up and the ostentatious wreath of artificial roses moved to the side of the stone cross.

‘My mother … Magda hated artificial flowers. She thought they were in bad taste,' Helena commented. ‘She liked single rosebuds. She used to say, “One is –ˮ'

‘“Perfection. Take time to study it, because to cut any more than one from the bush would be greedy and deprive other people of the pleasure of seeing its beauty.Ë®' Weronika finished for her.

‘It's strange to think that you knew her as well as me.'

‘The Magda I like to remember was not the woman I met in the camp at the end of the war, but a happy young girl, who loved music, dancing, cooking and single rosebuds.'

‘We had a vase at home that she kept on the sideboard below her wedding photograph. She used to buy a rose from the flower-seller at the local market every week when they were in season.'