Journeys with My Mother
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Authors: Halina Rubin
JOURNEYS WITH MY MOTHER
Halina Rubin was born in Warsaw just as Germany invaded Poland. Her family fled to the Soviet Union where she and her mother survived together, against all odds. In 1968, in response to government-instigated anti-Semitism, she emigrated to Australia and settled in Melbourne. She qualified as a microbiologist, specialising in virology. In 2001, moved to action by the plight of asylum seekers, she started writing to young people incarcerated in Nauru. Since then Rubin has been an active advocate for refugees.
For Anetka
In memory of my parents, Ola and WÅadek
and for all those people who still have to cross borders
to escape wars or persecution
JOURNEYS WITH MY MOTHER
Halina Rubin
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
© Halina Rubin 2015
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to The Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, VIC 3204.
www.hybridpublishers.com.au
First published 2015
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Rubin, Halina, 1939- author.
Title: Journeys with my mother / Halina Rubin.
ISBN: 9781925272093 (paperback)
9781925280432 (ebook)
Subjects: Jews â Poland â Biography.
Jews, Polish â Australia â Biography.
World War, 1939-1945 â Jews â Poland â Biography.
World War, 1939-1945 â Personal narratives, Polish.
World War, 1939-1945 â Underground movements.
Anti-Nazi movement.
Life change events.
Human behaviour.
Dewey Number: 940.5336092
Cover design by Art On Order
Every attempt has been made to seek permission for copyright material used in this book. However, if we have inadvertently used copyright material without permission, we will make the necessary correction at the first opportunity. Permission has been granted for the author to translate lines of poems used.
There were historical situations in which no decisions were innocent ones, in which all significant action was a betrayal of someone or something, in which all possible choices caused suffering. Nonetheless one had to choose.
In twentieth-century eastern Europe tragedy was endemic.
âMarci Shore
Contents
14 The Short Lives of My Aunts
PART ONE
Prologue
For years following my mother's death â and my father's a good fifteen years before her â two boxes filled with papers, photographs, letters, notebooks and correspondence remained untouched.
As they sat there gathering dust, I looked at them with increasing trepidation. Something had to be done about their contents and I did not know what. So much of my parents' lives was in those boxes; the mere thought of unpacking them made me anxious.
It's not that I expected to uncover any terrible secrets. After all, I was the one who, soon after my mother's funeral, had emptied her many drawers and cupboards and stuffed everything into these boxes. Back then, I did not look, trying â not very successfully â to avoid emotion. Only when my daughter Annette dropped in with an offer to help did I give in. She planted herself on the floor, pulling out one thing after another, messing everything up. She had a myriad of questions and, before long, we were sitting next to each other, doing something I had tried hard to avoid. I felt relieved when she left and I could go back to packing; there was much to be done.
My interest in my family's past has always been somewhat selective, varying from lukewarm to intense. There were years when books about the war and the Shoah, bought or given to me by friends, sat unread, despite weighing heavily on my mind and on my bookshelves. My visit to the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem ended with the first exhibit: a photograph of a young woman standing in a barren field, using her body to protect her child from an SS soldier whose rifle is poised to shoot. The moment before execution. I burst into uncontrollable sobbing.
During my numerous trips to Poland, I did not dwell on things Jewish. But the story of my parents' lives â especially my mother's story â was never far from my thoughts.
I remember how easily she was frightened by ordinary things. When the two of us walked along the dark and empty streets of Warsaw, she was scared of drunks â even though, as everyone knew, they only beat their own wives and children and fought with each other. Later, in Australia, she was afraid of rose-eating ringtail possums.
My father was brave in a way that is beyond my comprehension. However, when I think about my mother's courage, I see a woman forced by circumstances to act bravely. But more than her tenacity, courage, reliability â more than anything â I admired her uncomplicated humanity in her ability to put herself in other people's shoes; nothing human was alien to her. I wondered, too, about the choices she had to make; how she sustained both of us during the war and, later, under a dictatorial regime.
Yet despite these many preoccupations, the idea of writing had never crossed my mind. That is, not until I recently started translating the memoir of my first cousin Haneczka, the only one of my family members who remained, and managed to survive, on Polish territory during the war.
My mother had told me the story. But reading Haneczka's recollections from the BiaÅystok ghetto, the details of everyday life as she remembered them, the fate of our family, was an altogether different experience. Suddenly I grasped that if I wanted my mother's life to be remembered, I was the one who had to write about it.
Eight years after my mother's death, I started going through the boxes. It took a long time and, even now, some papers that I considered to be of lesser importance remain unexamined. It felt strange to organise my parents' papers: ordinary, familiar objects turning into historical documentation in my hands.
When sorting out the contents, I attempted to introduce some order by placing my mother's papers on one pile, my father's on the other. But I shouldn't have bothered; their documents were bound together, just as their lives were. And here, between the photographs, the documents, postcards and letters â some of them mine â was my own life, melded tightly with theirs.
Writing increased my curiosity, urged me to find out more by going back to Poland, Belorussia, Russia and France. That's how this book started to take shape.
Halina Rubin, July 2015
1
March 1968
A native of a small country,
Born recklessly on the edge of Europe,
Called to think about freedom
[â¦]
What should he choose â he asked himself
A lesser absurdity
Or a still bigger problem?
âEwa Lipska
Many years had passed since I last grappled with the reasons for our expulsion from Poland.
New events replaced old ones, and in Australia almost no one was interested in what had brought me here, to the lucky country. This lack of curiosity spared me from talking about things that I myself only half understood, let alone could explain to someone free of similar experience. I have been reluctant to return to that year, which we call âMarch 1968'. Not that it is easy to forget being rejected by the country I considered my own. But that, too, is part of the story.
September 1968. With hundreds of others, my husband and I are standing on the platform of GdaÅski Train Station, waiting for the train that will take us to Vienna. Four days earlier my parents and my brother Andrzej had left from the same platform, on their way to Israel. Instead of a passport, I have a travel document that states what I am not. I am no longer a Polish citizen. Granted eleven days earlier, the document is valid for three more days. I have been given less than a fortnight to deal with my whole life here: to dispose of most of my earthly possessions, to take leave of everything familiar and close to my heart.
But saying goodbye to friends, most of whom I have known since childhood, seems beyond my strength; the hardest part of leaving. There is nothing much to say in the little time we have left. How we feel can only be expressed in our eyes and embraces. We try not to cry.