The Memories We Keep. Walter Zacharius
28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
EPILOGUE
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 1
Confined against my will. Trapped. Imprisoned. That’s my memory of the summer of 1939. It was, of course, long before I’d seen a real prison or been locked away.
We were vacationing that summer in Krzemieniec, “the Polish Athens,” an ugly, provincial little artists’ colony where we had stayed the past ten summers and which, until this year, I had adored. Now adolescent hormones had taken hold, spiraling me alternatively into giddiness and despair, and keeping me in a near rage at my parents, who had brought me to this hellhole while my classmates were spending their holidays at chic Riviera hotels and Loire Valley châteaux. Jews had always made up a sizeable minority of the resort’s seasonal population, and this year was no exception. The Polish families, like ours, mingled with the guests from Germany and France.
The Café Tarnopol, once the poet Slowacki’s salon, seemed old-fashioned now, dusty and boring, just like our hotel, and the bourgeoisie who rented the same rooms year after year filled the café with their mediocrity. They no longer spoke of Slowacki, or Pushkin, or even Baudelaire. Oh no. Conversations this season focused on “Jew this” and “Jewish that” till I thought I’d go mad.
It was impossible to concentrate on my music. In previous years, I’d played Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu or Nocturne, op. 72, but this year the non-Jews insisted on Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, and the Jews didn’t dare object. Aryan music had become high culture because of Adolf Hitler, and also because of him my parents, obsessed with our safety, returned to Krzemieniec from our home in Lodz, rather than go to Switzerland, which my father could at long last afford. It was too cruel. I gave up playing anything at all in public, refused to sing, and moped about the hotel, looking vainly for someone to share my misery. Jozef, my brother, was working on his doctoral dissertation in Kraków, all the other guests were as old as my parents, and the local girls shunned me and called me names.
My mother scolded me for being too dramatic and too impatient. “When it rains Mia gets wet,” she told my father, “even if we’re inside.”
The miserable summer of 1939 dragged on. Once, after a wasted afternoon of failing to practice my scales on the hotel’s piano, I escaped to my room and flopped across the massive four-poster. Catching my reflection in the full-length mirror as I landed, I jumped up, startled, to examine the mysterious creature who seemed to have taken over my body—a young woman with high, taut cheekbones, dark skin, jet-black hair, and green eyes rimmed with amber.
“You have Jewish eyes,” I told the stranger. “You have big sensuous Jewish lips, a succulent Jewish neck, and big Jewish breasts.” But my height and long waist were gifts from my mother. Although my hair was black and curly, my hands were tapered with the long fingers of a pianist, and my legs were thin and shapely, my feet small. Maybe I’m only half-Jewish, I told myself, and I should be grateful. I could pass.
Jozef, I realized, did not look Jewish either. With his tall, muscular build and blond hair (where had that come from?) he could have passed for a Nordic prince. Back home in Lodz when I walked beside him with my hair tied back with a silk scarf, he made me look like his gypsy bride. How I missed him!
I stared at my profile, trying to imagine one of those repulsive Jewish armbands with the Star of David set against my skin. Just before term’s end, a classmate had brought me one from Berlin. My father told me that if I had gone to the Salzberg conservatory instead of the lycée, in Paris, I’d be wearing one.
A wave of rage engulfed me, and I yanked off the carved ivory barrettes I wore in my hair and released the two long braids, which Mama had painstakingly, and painfully, wound around my head. The long curls bounced back wildly and spilled onto my shoulders. I was nearly seventeen, yet Mama insisted on treating me like a child. She kept me in plain cotton slips like some wretched Heidi and forbade me to use lipstick.
There was a sharp rap on the door. “Schatzie?”
My father. I raced to the latch and locked it.
“Are you in there?”
“Yes, Papa.” I sighed, leaning against the door.
“Have tea with us in the gazebo. I have a surprise.”
Father’s surprises were usually disappointing. “I’m not ready.”
“You’ve got five minutes,” he said. Then, perhaps regretting his harshness: “Is anything wrong?”
Wrong! I felt tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. How could I make him understand that everything was wrong? This place, my clothes, a summer among Jews without Jozef. Even Bach seemed boring. Mozart. Schönberg. The Café Tarnopol. Mama and Papa themselves. Boring, boring, boring!
“I’ll be right down,” I shouted and began pinning my hair up, rebelliously allowing a few stray wisps to float about my ears and neck.
Papa’s surprise was sitting beside Mama in the gazebo—a trim, immaculate man of about fifty, dressed in a three-piece suit utterly out of place in a resort. He was tugging on his long mustache.
“Here you are!” my mother exclaimed, looking angrily at my messy hair. “Pappie and I have been waiting for you to—”
“Never mind,” my father whispered in Yiddish. Then, in French, “Mia, this is Professor Jules Stern. He is a lecturer in philosophy at the Sorbonne, and a great lover of opera. And this, Professor Stern, this is my little songbird.”
Songbird! All my triumph at my mother’s distress dissolved, leaving me stranded between humiliation and fury.
“Enchanté,” Professor Stern said, rising to kiss my hand. His eyes roamed over me. “And may I call you—”
“Marisa, monsieur…Mia,” I managed.
He flashed a toothy grin beneath his mustache, and I felt the intensity of his eyes. Removing my hand from his sweaty grip, I scurried toward a chair next to my mother’s.
Papa intercepted me, grabbing my waist playfully and swinging me onto his lap as if I were a child.
“Dr. Levy has told me of your accomplishments, Mia.” The professor smiled. “A singer and a pianist both! Perhaps you’ll perform for me.”
“Of course she will,” Papa exclaimed, sending me on my way with a stinging love-spank. “My daughter is a prodigy. Why, in Paris she performed Schönberg’s Erwartung.”
I refused to look at either of them. Was this some sort of slave market at which I was to be auctioned off?
“As you can imagine,” Papa rattled on, “it was a hard decision—denying her the Mozartium. But the way things have gone for poor Austria….” His voice trailed off.
My mother poured tea, passed around a platter heaped with Sacher torte. “Our son, Jozef, is also accomplished,” she offered. “A celebrated German scholar at the university in Kraków.”
Stern ignored her. He was staring at me. “Do you know Stravinsky’s work?” he asked me. “Nobody is more talked about in Paris. I sincerely hope, Benjamin, that you and your family will be able to see his Oedipus Rex at L’Opéra this fall.”
Papa sighed. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to get away from Warsaw. I will be extremely busy at my medical clinic. But Mia will be back in Paris by then. She has another year at the lycée.”
The professor practically salivated. “I shall be delighted to accompany you myself, ma’amselle. That is, of course, with your parents’ consent.” He took a bite of his Sacher torte.
I snapped my head up as though I had been slapped by an invisible hand. I thought Stravinsky far inferior to Schönberg so wouldn’t