Such Good Girls (11 page)

“They killed Christ!”

“Those are lies, Zosia. People spread all kinds of lies about Jews.”

“How do you know, Mama?”

“Because I’m Jewish.”

“No, you can’t be. Because if you were Jewish, I would be too, and I’m not because I’m Catholic.”

Laura, despairing, took her daughter’s hands in hers and tried again to get through to her. She explained about the papers Zofia’s father, Daniel, bought for them, but then the Russians took Daddy, and Zofia and Laura had to sneak out of the ghetto without him.

But there was only so much truth a person could take in.

“Zofia, do you remember how I drilled you in the catechism? You had to know what any Catholic girl would know or someone might figure out you weren’t who you seemed to be, and if the Germans found out you were a Jew, they would take us both away and kill us.”

“But I’m not a Jew!” Zofia was yelling now. “I’ve been baptized, like Jesus Christ! I’m Catholic.”

“Yes.” Laura sighed. “Perhaps you are by now.”

For a few minutes, no one said anything. To Laura, speaking now seemed futile. Zofia wasn’t even trying to process what her mother was telling her.

Zofia spoke first. “And everyone knew except me?”

“You were only five, Zofia. Too young to understand that your life and mine depended on a lie. If you accidentally told the Germans or even the Poles or Ukrainians, or Russians, the truth, they’d kill us. I had to make you believe you were Catholic. I know all the drilling made you so angry, but I had no choice if I wanted to keep us alive.”

“Well, now I wish I was dead!” snapped Zofia.

Laura recoiled. She felt as if she’d been slapped. But she knew her daughter was experiencing something far worse—a frontal assault on everything she knew to be true. On the one hand, did her daughter have no idea what her mother had endured to keep them alive?

Laura leaned over and kissed the top of Zofia’s head, murmuring, “It’s all right, darling, it’s all right.”

Around them, Londoners were rushing in all directions.

“We are the lucky ones,” her mother whispered.

“I am not lucky!” Zofia cried. “I became what you wanted me to become! And now you want me to become a Jew?”

Zofia shifted on the bench to face her mother squarely. “Who,” she said, breathing hard, “who would want to be a JEW?”

For several days, Zofia was inconsolable. When she wasn’t sobbing beneath the eiderdown quilt on Rosa and Emil’s bed, she stormed around the apartment, breathing loudly through her nose, and refusing to talk or to look any of the adults in the eye. She also refused to continue her English lessons with Mrs. Camrass, who she knew was Jewish.

For Laura, accustomed as she was to a daughter who barely raised her voice and had always done everything expected of her, the transformation was frightening. But somehow Zofia managed to calm down in time for the seder, during which she sat in silence at the table, making a bed out of parsley sprigs for her stuffed bear. After calling him just “Bear” for years, she now bestowed a real name on him: “Refugee,” a word she heard increasingly, applied to her and most of those around her.

At the seder, she refused to pick up the Haggadah, which was written in a language she recognized only from the fragmented inscriptions on the Jewish gravestones that paved some of Busko’s streets. Emil, who conducted the service in Hebrew in his rich baritone, pretended not to notice Zofia’s silence, and twenty-eight-year-old Putzi asked the Four Questions as if she really were the youngest person there. But when the meal was served, Zofia’s attitude suddenly shifted. She wasn’t about to pass up Rosa’s excellent brisket and potato kugel.

A week later, when her friend Wacka’s parents wrote from Busko-Zdrój to ask for Zofia’s help in obtaining antibiotics, she was too ashamed to answer; in fact, she stopped writing Wacka entirely. Zofia hated having deceived everyone she knew in Poland—however unintentionally. She also stopped speaking Polish with strangers. On the rare occasions when her mother tried to talk to her about Judaism, Zofia wouldn’t listen. When Laura made the mistake of asking her daughter whether she now wanted to be called “Selma” again, Zofia yelled, “Go away! My name is Zofia Tymejko and I am a Catholic, not a Jew!” Her habit of curtaining off the past—both the Catholic past she embraced or the Jewish past that was being foisted on her now—prevailed. Zofia was determined to forget everything, to move ahead. She wanted to be English.

Soon after arriving in London, Zofia was placed in primary school. Although still far from fluent in English, she was thrown in the deep end with all the native-born children preparing for the exam that would determine their secondary-school track. Zofia’s English rapidly improved, thanks partly to Helen Ardmore, the girl who was assigned to look after her. Helen was an outsider too—a talented, artistic girl from a poor family. She was the only student who invited Zofia over to play, but even her very modest flat made Rosa and Emil’s apartment seem depressing by comparison.

Helen, who had done well on the exam, was accepted by the highly regarded Paddington and Maida Vale High School. Zofia was, of course, allowed to skip the exam, but she was already showing signs of promise. After a few months in England, she was no longer at the bottom of the class, which the headmistress considered an achievement, even if the ambitious Zofia did not. The headmistress arranged for Zofia to start with Helen at Paddington and Maida Vale on a trial basis. Zofia immediately liked her new headmistress there, Miss Spong, a very attractive, soft-spoken woman in her forties who came from an upper-class background and wore tweed suits. She administered a quiz to Zofia, whose performance on it convinced Miss Spong to let Zofia join Helen’s incoming class for the year, at the end of which they would see if she could continue.

That left one sensitive matter to decide, said Miss Spong: was Zofia Jewish or not? Miss Spong called Zofia and Laura in for a meeting. Paddington and Maida Vale provided its Jewish children with Jewish instruction once a week. For morning prayers Jews went separately to the school library while the Protestants and Roman Catholics went elsewhere before everyone, even the Jews, convened for an Our Father.

Miss Spong reasoned that since Zofia once had been Jewish and, despite her six years as a Catholic, apparently still was, then she was Jewish.

And so a girl who had no idea until recently that she’d ever been Jewish, began spending every weekday morning in the library, praying with her Jewish classmates, a tiny minority—fifteen or twenty in all—of the school’s population. Zofia, to put it mildly, did not feel at home in this group, and not only because its members were Jewish. They were among the brightest girls at Paddington—as well as the most spoiled. They wore pretty dresses and ballet slippers that were all the fashion. They excelled in class, as Zofia had in Busko-Zdrój, and they stuck together. Every morning in the library, she sat with these girls and listened to them pray in two languages, neither of which was her first tongue, one of which—Hebrew—she had been taught to associate with people so vile that they were not quite human. It wasn’t surprising that one of Zofia’s very best friends was a Christian girl named Elphis Christopher.

Was it because Miss Spong was aware of Zofia’s state of religious limbo that she soon appointed her to the important position of Senior Jewess during morning prayers? To ease her reentry into Judaism? Or did Miss Spong thrust the responsibility on her to bolster the young immigrant’s confidence and facilitate her integration into the social life of the school? Whatever the headmistress’s motivation, the title meant that Zofia chose those prayers. But she knew only one, and not that well either. So day after day, the girls under her leadership recited the same words, “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord let His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord look kindly upon you and give you peace.”

Meanwhile her mother enrolled Zofia in Hebrew school, which was held every Sunday at a nearby synagogue, and it was Zofia who won a scholarship prize over the other children, all of whom had been Jews their whole lives. Her academic achievement wasn’t the only way in which she stood out there, and the other children didn’t try very hard to make Zofia feel at home. Despite her sudden immersion in Judaism, Zofia avoided making Jewish friends. When a boy in Hebrew school took an interest in her, she rejected him outright.

Zofia still didn’t feel the least bit Jewish—and she didn’t want to either. The only Jews that intrigued her were Israelis. She’d seen Zionist literature for the first time in Hebrew school, and the Jews in the photographs didn’t look Jewish. They were young, tan, and muscular, breaking rocks in the fields, clearing the land. Zofia, who was beginning to realize how much living she had missed in the struggle to have a life at all, and how hard her mother had worked to ensure their survival, felt a bond with these Jews. Zofia knew that many others, including her Uncle Edek, had gone to Israel before and after the war, and now she lamented the fact that she, Laura, and Putzi had ended up in England.

Putzi remained a big part of their lives. She was now working as a domestic for a second Jewish family in Golders Green—still unhappily, as she was constantly underestimated by her more poorly educated employers. Fortunately, the job was only a bus ride away, so all three of them stayed in constant touch, although rarely by the luxury of a telephone. In 1950 Laura, Putzi, and Zofia did manage to take a week’s holiday together on the Isle of Wight, where Putzi, ever the clever seamstress and dressmaker, fashioned a ballerina outfit out of tissue paper so Zofia could enter a costume competition. In Zofia’s view, it was by far the best costume, and she thought she would have won had she not been a foreigner. She was so heartbroken that her mother and aunt, who knew a few things about standing up for themselves and Zofia, complained to the organizers, and she received a prize after all.

At Laura’s insistence, Putzi joined the Polish-Jewish Servicemen’s Club, where she fell in love with a Polish Jew named Kazimierz Rozycki who was working toward an engineering degree. He had served in Anders’ Army, led by the Polish general Wladyslaw Anders, which had fought alongside the Allies toward the end of the war. V-E Day had found him in Casablanca, from which he had been flown to Scotland before making his way to London. Laura and Zofia adored Kazimierz and welcomed him into the family when he and Putzi decided to marry. Putzi’s second employers, initially upset that she was quitting, quickly came to see her in a more appreciative light and gave the couple a generous wedding gift. For Putzi, Laura, and Zofia, the wedding ceremony seemed a miraculous outcome after Putzi’s—and their—long journey to freedom.

However, Laura and Zofia both were devastated when Putzi and Kazik decided to immigrate to Canada in 1951.

Laura hadn’t been so fortunate in meeting men. Her life with the Hoenigs was dreary. She resented Rosa’s resentment of her, felt guilt for imposing on her, and was ashamed at not being able to afford her own place. She was stuck with her obligations to Rosa in an apartment that itself was hopelessly stuck in the past. Rosa and Emil fought constantly. There was no attempt to brighten their home. They rarely had guests over.

Zofia took refuge in her schoolwork. Laura pushed her to excel in every subject, and Zofia’s academic reports reflected both of their ambitions.

“Her conduct is always good,” her teacher had written at the end of her very first term at Paddington. A year later, the same teacher reported that “Zofia works well and her progress has been good.” In the fall of 1949, her new form mistress wrote that “Zofia is a most enthusiastic and helpful member of the class.” At fourteen, in 1951, she “had the makings of a first-class scholar” and had “excellent ability in languages, and works most conscientiously in all subjects.”

By 1953, however, she was no longer listed as Zofia Tymejko, the name she had continued to use in England and that the British found virtually impossible to pronounce. After five years of statelessness, Laura and Zofia qualified for British citizenship and so were free to change their names. Laura chose the name of one of her favorite British painters as their own and became Laura Turner. And by the summer of 1953, Zofia was Sophie Turner.

With her new name, Sophie had completed a torturous journey from Selma Schwarzwald, Jew, to Zofia Tymejko, Catholic, to Sophie Turner, who didn’t quite know who she was.

By now Sophie’s relationship with Laura had largely recovered from the shock of the wartime deception. However, having spent her formative childhood years alone with a mysteriously anxious mother who, among other strict instructions, cautioned Sophie about speaking to strangers, Sophie knew little about boys, even at sixteen. The only friend who ever came to the house was Helen, who now had renounced handstands and somersaults for the opposite sex. Although Helen could easily have gone on to university, she drifted away from Sophie into a world that consisted of roughly equal parts boys, smoking, movie stars, and makeup. Watching Helen’s experiments in love and sex, Sophie felt like a clueless child. In a few years, Helen would already be married to a butcher and raising a couple of kids.

Meanwhile the once fiercely independent and audacious Laura was becoming a passive victim of circumstance. Between her household chores and unofficial job helping Emil in his store, she had no time to socialize or hunt for a new job, and few prospects for a good one. Her Polish credentials wouldn’t get her far, anyway, in Britain’s postwar economy. Some money, however, began to dribble in. First, both Laura and Sophie received monthly pensions from the German government as part of reparations for their losses. In 1951, Sophie and her mother could finally afford to rent their own apartment.

They didn’t go far, moving into the dark street-level apartment just below Emil and Rosa’s. They were hardly beyond Rosa’s reach—she complained constantly that they monopolized the single phone line they shared—but Laura and Sophie bought some modern midcentury furniture and made it as cheery as possible. They each began to invite their few friends over.