My Mother's Secret (8 page)

A
fter all our servants have left
, Franciszka still comes with her fresh eggs and vegetables. My mother says, “There is some decency in the world after all.”

Franciszka comes even though she knows we're Jewish, and, unlike the others, she doesn't charge us double for doing so.

One day, my mother is talking to Franciszka, and she lowers her voice the way she does when she doesn't want me to hear what she is saying to my father.

“Can you hide us? We have money. We can pay you.”

Franciszka takes a moment to think and then says, “I only have two rooms in my house. One is the kitchen and the other is a bedroom that I share with my daughter. There is nowhere to hide, unless . . .” and then she lowers her voice so quietly that now I can't hear a thing.

My mother calls out to my father, “Helmut, come quickly.”

They huddle and speak with great animation. My father nods in agreement and Franciszka gets up to leave.

For the next several weeks, my father sleeps all morning and doesn't play with me until the afternoon.

One night, my mother wakes me up and we walk in the dark along the river.

I am really tired, but my mother says that it's important to keep walking.

My father leads the way and seems to know where to go even though it's hard to see anything.

Finally, when we arrive, it turns out to be where Franciszka lives.

I am so tired that I want to sleep in the bed as soon as we arrive.

My mother says that we have to wait while my father and Franciszka move her kitchen table, the rug underneath, and then a wooden plank to reveal a small cellar below.

It's dark and small, and I don't want to go down there. But my mother takes my hand and says, “We're playing hide-and-seek with the Germans, and they'll never find us here.”

Over the past weeks, my father, with surgeon's hands, had dug this hole under the kitchen in the middle of the night to make a shelter for us.

He brought cash and provisions to be stored in our hideaway with each trip. There were books, candles, dry food, and medicine, as well as precious pictures of our family.

The timing was close.

A few weeks later, all the Jews were rounded up and placed in a confined area.

For all the lives that my father saved, and the thought that we might have been repaid in kind, it was my mother's friendship with Franciszka that gave us a chance.

W
e have to be very quiet during the day
because you never know if a neighbor will drop by.

One day Franciszka tells us about a Polish family that was found to have hidden Jews. They were forced to walk throughout the village with signs describing their crime before they were hanged in the public square as an example.

This shakes us all up.

A Polish pharmacist had turned them in. He suspected that the family was hiding Jews when they purchased more medicine than they usually would have needed.

Not all Nazis are German.

My father says to Franciszka, “We will never forget what you and your daughter have done for us. The war will be over one day, and we will repay you.”

She says, “It's wrong, what is happening. I'm only doing what is decent.”

She says to my mother, “You would do the same for me,” and my mother nods, although who really knows? Would my mother have been willing to risk my life?

O
ne day, the deliveryman comes to drop off
a notice from German headquarters.

There is now a reward of five liters of whiskey and some cash for turning in a Jew.

He calls out to Franciszka, and she opens the door.

At this exact moment, I sneeze.

It is damp in the cellar, and I have caught a very bad cold. My father is worried but does not have cough syrup, even though he brought other medicines. We all agreed that it was not possible to obtain medicine discreetly, especially from the infamous pharmacist.

The deliveryman pushes past Franciszka and comes in.

He sees that there is no one in the house.

We hear him accusing Franciszka. “You're hiding someone, aren't you? I'm sure I heard something. I'm going to report you.”

To the astonishment of Franciszka and the deliveryman, there is a knock from the floor.

Franciszka is frozen. She doesn't know what to do now.

Then the knock becomes louder.

The deliveryman says, “Franciszka, someone hiding under your floor wants to come out.”

They move the kitchen table, and my father emerges from under the floor.

He says to the deliveryman, “Hello, Leszek.”

My father's voice is deep and resonates with authority.

He speaks as if there is no war, as if there is no hunt for Jews, and as if he is still the chief at the hospital.

For a moment, we are all suspended in this reality.

My father then says, “How is your wife, Edyta?”

He had saved her life.

The man is clearly taken aback here. ”Dr. Wolenski, I didn't know it was you. Of course I won't say anything.”

My father continues as if this man has come for a visit. “Good, now if you or your family need medical care, you can come here, and I will personally look after you.”

“Yes, yes, thank you very much, Doctor.” Leszek sounds like a different man than the one we heard earlier.

“Before you go,” my father says, “I need you to buy some medicine for my son who you heard coughing. Here is fifty zlotys for the cough medicine. You will need to say that it is for your wife. Understood?”

“Yes, Doctor, of course. I will bring it tomorrow,” Leszek replies.

We can hear my father's command of the situation from our hiding place, but my mother and I do not come out.

We huddle together like two little mice.

After Leszek leaves, my father returns to us and the table is replaced over our heads.

He is shaking, and my mother goes to him.

She holds him the way she holds me when I have had a bad dream.

The next day, good as his word, Leszek returns with the cough medicine.

We all know that cough medicine costs a few zlotys, but we weren't expecting any change.

E
very day is night, so I dream of seeing the sun
.

I remember the warmth of it shining through the window onto my face in my bedroom. How could I ever have found that annoying, and why did I close the blinds to go back to sleep?

We have a daily ritual, my mother and I. She tells me to close my eyes as she paints beautiful pictures in my mind with her words, like she used to. Mesmerizing me with her voice, it often starts like this: “You are sleeping in your bed, and the sun is shining through your window, so you are sleeping in later this day. I wake you as we are about to have a big breakfast together. Papa, you, and I are sitting at our dining-room table, and we are eating scrambled eggs with toast and jam. We drink lots and lots of milk. We are so full now that we cannot eat another bite. You pack your books for school, and you give me a big hug before going off on your day.”

We don't dream of exotic trips or adventures anymore.

We dream of our old life, and of our routines. We long to return to the world as we remembered it.

I see that my father closes his eyes when my mother works her visual magic.

He is soaking it all up, like I am.

•   •   •

I
N OUR PREVIOUS LIFE,
our world revolved around my father.

It seemed like my mother and I were just playing around until he came home.

At the dinner table, we would hear about his patients, his operations, his views on politics, and so on.

In our hiding place, my father is very quiet.

Once in a while, through the dim lighting of a small lamp, I see him smile at me, but not much more.

My mother, on the other hand, is always thinking of something for us to do. We have lessons in Yiddish. We do math problems from worksheets. It is endless activity.

My father made sure there were many books for me to learn from.

I see my mother brush my father's hair, something I have never seen before.

She tells us that we must be well prepared because one day we will leave Poland and go to Palestine.

She has no doubt that we will all go there together and rebuild our life. “Helmut, you will again be the great doctor that you are, and Mikolaj, you will go to school there.”

Her absolute certainty gives us hope and strength.

I always thought that my mother could not live without my father, but it was the other way around.

I hear my father say to my mother one day, “You are my
bashert
.”

When my father is asleep, I whisper to my mother, “What is a
bashert
?”

She says, “
Bashert
is a very special word in Yiddish. It means ‘soul mate.' It means ‘destiny.' If you find your
bashert
, it means that you have found the person that you were meant to be with—the person that completes you. It is the finest thing that your father could have said to me.”

“Do you think I will be able to find my
bashert
, Mama?” I am worried. What if we never get out of here?

She says, “Mikolaj, there is someone out there who is waiting to find you too. Maybe she is hiding, just like us. One day, we will all be free to find each other. I am sure of it.”

That makes me feel better.

F
ranciszka buys food and asks for it to be wrapped in newspapers instead of a paper bag. She doesn't read, so buying a newspaper would be suspicious. She feeds my father with day-old news, and he looks forward to those papers as much as the food that they wrap.

When Franciszka first tells my parents that she is inviting the German commander over for dinner, my mother is nervous and says, “Oh, is that safe?”

My father finds it ironic that we are hiding right beneath where they will be eating.

The day of the dinner, the smells are wonderful and make us even hungrier. My mother said to me the night before that I would need to be patient because Franciszka would make enough for us too.

In our space under the table, we can hear the sounds of the party above.

My father nods when he hears the commander speak because he knows that voice.

It is strange to hear the soldiers sing and laugh because whenever we saw them before, they were always serious and scary.

•   •   •

M
ANY DAYS LATER
and quite unexpectedly, we hear the news about Damian.

We feel the weight of the grief above us, and my father shakes his head in pity.

My mother holds me close as if she might lose her son at any time too.

V
ILHEIM

I
am lucky not to have been born earlier in Germany.

Having turned eighteen in 1942, I am not recruited until the war has been going on for almost three years.

My commanders think that I am useless, but they don't know that I shoot to miss.

I can't imagine taking a life, any life.

Before being drafted into the army, I had hoped to become a veterinarian. My
oma
has a dairy farm, which has been in our family for a hundred years. The farm is located in the far north of Germany, where there are more cows than people. Unlike other farms, we also keep horses, goats, and pigs.

The land here is as beautiful as you will see anywhere, with green pastures stretching to meet the horizon. Even with the war, it feels peaceful here.

Oma
teaches me to value every living being—an attitude that is sorely inconsistent with being a soldier and a Nazi.

•   •   •

M
Y PARENTS DIVORCED SHORTLY
after my birth, so I have never seen them both together, except in a few pictures that Oma has. They're both attractive people with perfect smiles.

My mother wanted to pursue an acting career and felt that if anyone knew that she had a child, it would have made her less attractive, less desirable. She left me with her mother, who loves me enough to make up for both my mother and my father.

I have no memories of my father because he visited only once when I was still a baby.

The earliest memory I have of my mother is that she came to visit on a rainy day.

I know because I was wet and when I went to hug her, as Oma had instructed me to do, my mother pushed me away and said, “Oh no, not my silk dress. You'll ruin it!”

Her usual way with me is to say, “Kiss, kiss,” like it is one word, while sending puckering sounds in my direction.

Sometimes she puts her cheek against mine while she kisses into the air and says, “I love you, darling.”

“It's hard for your mother, Vilheim, because you look so much like your father,” Oma tells me.

I picture myself looking like Oma and not my father, who I don't think much about. Both Oma and I are tanned and toned from spending so much time outdoors. My mother, by comparison, has skin so pale, it's almost translucent. When I was small, I used to think that she might have been a ghost, and I was afraid of her.

I learn that when my mother comes to visit, one of our animals will soon be gone. She needs money and Oma has to sell a horse, some goats, or some pigs to give her the cash she has come for.

It becomes so obvious to me that I resent her visits. I start to hate her beauty, her floral perfume, her furs, and everything about her.

I run to hide when she comes, afraid that she might take me with her.

She never does.

Eventually my mother stops coming to visit at all, and we hear that she has gone to the United States.

I am relieved that our animals are now safe.