Revolution Baby (2 page)

Newspapers sold out quickly in such hard times. In just under two hours Emil could earn what used to take him all day. Delivering parcels also brought in a lot of money, because people didn't leave their homes as readily, and Emil would even agree, for a slight additional sum, to transport parcels and letters after curfew.

One day a very important Russian man offered Emil a large sum of money to deliver a letter to his son, who was at the Russo-German front, to the west of Warsaw.

Emil, duly impressed by the fortune he had just been offered, wasted no time embarking on his mission. He took a few newspapers along with him, because he figured that the soldiers might want to read about the war they were risking their lives to fight. Bullets whistling overhead, little Emil made his way to the soldiers in their trenches. And while finding the recipient for his parcel proved more arduous than he expected, selling newspapers turned out to be extraordinarily easy.

That day Emil went home, opened the little leather bag he always wore slung across his shoulder, and spilled the contents onto the kitchen table. Anna looked at him gravely.

“Where did you get all that money?”

“I earned it, selling papers.”

“Don't lie to me, please.”

“I swear! It's because of the war, and with the front so nearby, people want to know what's going on, and the papers sell like hotcakes.”

With an easy conscience—who could suspect a lie in what Emil had just told Anna?—the boy climbed into bed, his back to the wall, and set to dreaming about his day, the finest of his entire life, the fullest, the most important. “I'm a war hero,” he thought.

For those few months while the Germans and the Russians were fighting outside Warsaw, Emil went every day to the trenches to sell papers to the Russian soldiers. Every time, he came back with his bag full to bursting; the soldiers were impressed with the little boy's courage, and sometimes gave him as much as ten times what the paper was worth. And he used the opportunity to learn Russian.

He could stay for hours in the trenches with the soldiers, waiting for a lull so that he could leave again, sometimes crawling, sometimes running as fast as he could. Emil liked the camaraderie that reigned among the soldiers, the solidarity shown by those young men who did not know whether they would ever see their homes or their families again. He loved to listen to them, to play dice with them, to smoke a butt or two. And they liked the little twelve-year-old, with his admirable courage and his bundle of anecdotes and jokes. Those few months would be etched on Emil's memory in a separate little frame: a sweet memory, with touches of fraternity, the curls of cigarette smoke, and stories told in confidence that were not really for his ears.

 

Not long after the war, Poland had to put together a new army, so Emil, now eighteen, joined up. “It's a good job, with a decent salary; I already know what war is like, and I'm not afraid. And anyway, we are bound to have a few years of peace ahead of us, after the long war we've just been through.”

He was wrong. Already in 1920 he had to fight the Bolsheviks, who had managed to advance as far as Warsaw. On one side of the Vistula was the young army of the Second Republic of Poland—inexperienced, badly organized and, above all, outnumbered. On the other side, thousands of Red Army soldiers were preparing to invade Warsaw. Then, unexpectedly, the Bolshevik troops withdrew and raised the siege on the town. In the history of Poland this episode is known as the “miracle on the Vistula,” because so many Poles had prayed for Warsaw to remain Polish and free. Just the once wouldn't hurt: the Good Lord felt sorry for Poland and took her side.

During the siege Emil was fascinated by the enemy and their particular ideology. He had very animated discussions on the subject, because the other soldiers didn't like to see the pertinence of their war called into question. But Emil was not entirely convinced that everything about the enemy camped on the far side of the Vistula was evil. Since he spoke better Russian than most of the Polish soldiers, he was often called on to act as an interpreter with the prisoners of war. Sometimes he would go back to see them again after the interrogation was over and ask them about the situation in their country, and about the Bolshevik revolution. When the Soviets withdrew from Poland, Emil no longer knew what to think. He was deeply dismayed by the extreme poverty of the Polish peasants and workers. He convinced himself that there was a system where people were equal, and he was prepared to fight to see it triumph in Poland, at the cost of his life if need be. And he was increasingly convinced that only communism could lead to the liberation of the people and to class equality. So not long after he was demobilized, he set off for the office of the Polish Communist Youth, the KZMP, to request a membership card. Which he immediately took to show proudly to his friend Alek, one of the rare communist partisans he had met in the army: together they would celebrate this “historical moment” until the early hours of the morning.
Na zdrowie
, comrade!

Emil soon became a fervent member of the Communist Youth. To earn a living, he unearthed a little job with a horticulturist in the Praga quarter in Warsaw, but he then chose a more noble and revolutionary profession: metallurgist. He now officially belonged to the working class, and he devoted every spare moment to the struggle for the cause.

As the communist party was outlawed in Poland, Emil led a clandestine life: meetings, distribution of tracts, discussions with potential recruits, demonstrations, strikes, but also literary evenings and the presentation of plays with a political flavor. He noticed that often when he left his house or his work there was someone following closely on his heels. He began taking more precautions. One day when he was speaking unguardedly with a few soldiers whom he was trying to persuade to attend the next Communist Youth meeting, a man in an overcoat appeared out of nowhere and ordered him to go with him. Emil hesitated, noticed two men in the middle of the street attentively observing the scene, and complied. A few hours later, he was in prison.

Let's leave Emil Demke alone in his cell at Pawiak prison in Warsaw, because he would soon be meeting my mother, and it would be better for me to introduce her to you before I go thrusting her into my father's arms without warning.

 

My mother began her life as Guitele Rappoport. If I had set out to create a character with clearly recognizable Jewish origins, I could not have chosen a better name. Rappoport is as Jewish a name as they come. And Guitele isn't exactly Chris­tian, either.

Guitele Rappoport—Gui to her friends and family—was born in Nowy Dwór, a little village located fifty kilometers from Warsaw, but the exact day and year of birth are unknown. According to her birth certificate she was born on March 3, 1903 (third day of the third month of the third year), but her father was waiting to have at least three children to declare before embarking on the journey into town, and so he chose birth dates at random for each child. My mother always made the most of this approximation to err on the side of youth and say that she was surely two or three years younger than what it said on her papers—until she turned eighty, and then from one day to the next she began to claim she'd been born at the turn of the century and was actually eighty-three. As she was in great condition for an eighty-year-old, people were stunned to find out her age.

Guitele's family was very pious. Her father was a kosher butcher, and a strict man, who took everything that had to do with religion very seriously. Guitele, like the three other children from her father's second marriage, had misguidedly chosen to be born a girl, so she was not given the opportunity to learn to read or write. At home they spoke Yiddish. Gui wanted to go to school, to speak Polish, to live a different life. The older she got, the more she hated her rigid father, and she dreamt of getting away.

At the age of ten she was sent to work at a dressmaker's. Although it was difficult work, Guitele was delighted to leave the house and meet people from other backgrounds. All the workers were Jewish, but most of them were from less pious families than her own. Gui listened to girls of fifteen or sixteen telling of their encounters with boys, or the parties they went to. She thought of Tobcia, her elder sister, who had never been allowed out in the evening and who had left home with the first man to give her a smile. And she began waiting for her turn.

Guitele was thirteen when she joined the seamstresses' union. The union leaders were her first heroes. She viewed them as models of uprightness, determination, and courage. Whenever there was a demonstration, she was in the front row, shouting louder than all the others; whenever there was a strike somewhere, she would be outside the gates every morning to stop the bosses going in, support the morale of the troops and ladle out hot soup. But in those days, that sort of militant behavior led straight to prison.

From the age of sixteen on, my mother was sent to prison several times over. If I'd had more of a chance to know what a mother's love is, I would surely have been very proud of her. She was a brave woman. A woman who created a new family for herself among the unions and, later on, in the Communist Party. A family for whom she was ready to make every sacrifice.

Prison played an important role in my mother's life. It is where she made her first goy friends and where she broke her ties with Judaism for good. To mark the break, she took a Polish name: Helena. She became known everywhere as little Lena. It was also in prison that she learned to speak Polish and then to read and write, and she developed a habit she would maintain all through life, that of doing regular gymnastics, which is surely why she was in such good shape right up to the time of her death. My mother spent just over four years in the Pawiak prison.

 

One gray morning in the spring of 1925 Helena was set free. And that same morning, under the same gray sky, a prison guard opened the gate and said goodbye to Emil Demke, who had just finished his sentence.

Emil saw a young woman sitting on a bench on Pawiak Square. Her face was vaguely familiar. Very timidly—she had just seen him leave the prison, he mustn't frighten her—he went up to her.

“Good morning, Miss. I don't mean to bother you, but I think I've seen you somewhere before . . . ”

“Yes, yes, I remember you,” answered the young woman with a strong Yiddish accent. “It was at a party at Magda Spychalska's. I think I've also seen you at a Party meeting. Maybe five years ago, before I went to prison.”

Emil looked at her, stunned.

“Yes, I've just been released,” she said, pointing to her suitcase.

I had just entered the realm of the possible.

The man who would become my father, who was scarcely taller than five foot two, was instantly charmed by this tiny little woman with her long braids. Oh, my mother's braids . . . She didn't cut them until the summer of 1940, shortly after France surrendered to the Germans. For years afterwards she would speak of them so nostalgically, as if, by cutting them, she had put an end to her youth, to a certain carefree time.

As neither one of them had anywhere to go, Emil invited Helena for a walk in the Bielany woods to see the trees in bloom. My father often told me of his meeting with my mother. This was how his story always ended: “And we went for a walk in the Bielany woods.” Obviously, you might wonder what two people straight out of prison might do in a beautiful park on a gray day in spring . . . Since they were my future parents, I'd rather not venture an opinion on the subject.

From that moment on, Comrades Helena Rappoport and Emil Demke were comrades-in-arms. They were recognized for their commitment and their unshakeable faith in the communist model. To study the important role they would no doubt have to play in a post-revolutionary Poland, they were invited to spend a few months in Moscow, at a school run by the Comintern, to “perfect their communism.” Emil Demke, as a militant communist, was once again being sought by the police, so the first thing he had to do was change his name. In the train that took him to Moscow he locked himself in the toilet holding a passport that had been duly filled out and bore all the necessary stamps and signatures, with a blank line for the first and last name. After careful reflection, he chose a name that corresponded to his peasant origins: Michał Gruda (in Polish
gruda
means “a hard, frozen clump of earth”).

In Moscow, in the month of March, 1929, Helena Rappoport discovered that she was pregnant. Before even telling Emil—whom she would never be able to call Michał—she informed Comrade Goldman, the secretary of her Party cell. Not batting an eyelash, Comrade Goldman gave her the name and address of a doctor who would be able to provide an easy solution to the problem. Lena went home, relieved. That evening, Emil came to fetch her, and they went out for a stroll through the Moscow streets, now covered in a thick blanket of snow.

“I have to discuss something with you. In fact, everything's been arranged, so you're not to worry, but I wanted you to know . . . I'm pregnant.”

“What?”

“It's all right. I've already got an appointment with a doctor who practices abortions, there's nothing to worry about, everything will go fine.”

“What are you talking about? Why do you want to have an abortion?”

“What do you mean, why? We can't possibly keep the child!”

“We could at least talk about it, don't you think? It's not a decision to be taken lightly.”

“Look, Emil. When we go back to Poland, we'll have to go underground again. Can you picture us with a baby?”

“I understand, but I'd just like to have some time to think about it. It might be worthwhile to see if there isn't another solution, no? Besides, abortions are dangerous, I don't like the idea one bit.”

“And anyway, from what I gathered from Comrade Goldman, the Party will never agree to let me keep the baby.”