Tailor of Inverness, The (5 page)

He was tanned and handsome, and seemed quite coherent when he was sitting at the table, but as soon as he rose, he swayed and staggered towards us, a look of calm, distant concentration on his face. He knew he’d gone too far. We scrambled clear as he made for the steps into the house, grabbing the stone balustrade and hauling himself up and past us, mumbling an apology, hurling himself into the hall and
into his bedroom to collapse onto bed. I was surprised and a little embarrassed, but the other adults sympathetically laughed it off, as did my father the next morning as we took him cups of tea to help him recover from his hangover. He was contrite too and I respected him for the frankness of his admission that he’d lost control. I’m sure there were other times when he was as drunk as that in Lesna, but I didn’t see them.

Adam, my parents and their friends boozed away, way beyond the recommended medical levels we’re so familiar with today, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Adam would take delight in opening a new bottle of ‘good medicine’, and on the celebration would go. That’s what our visit really was, one long celebration of the brothers’ reunion, of their survival, of their relative
prosperity
, of our modest piercing of the Iron Curtain and the fact that the Polish Communist state, for all its repression and subservience to Moscow, could accommodate our visit. My parents certainly had no interest in actively subverting the People’s Republic. They understood that we were there on sufferance and that any action which could be construed as subversive would result in the refusal of any future visas.

The simple fact of our presence in Poland, along with the hundreds of other British Polish families who made these summer journeys, presented the many curious Poles who met us with an impression of life in the West. The Poles in Lesna and Silesia weren’t so different from my father. They had survived the maelstrom and had settled in a new land too, albeit one where nearly everyone was Polish.

Once, after the guests had gone and my mother had retired early, Adam and my father moved to the little table in the kitchen. They had drunk a sackful, but they kept going, deep in conversation, and decided that they fancied mixing their vodka with raw eggs. They drank a shot, then tapped an egg
each with a knife and sucked it down. They kept on talking and talking, becoming more and more agitated. Then they both began to cry. Through flowing tears, they talked and drank and sucked raw eggs. Hearing them cry we gingerly approached the kitchen door and watched. They seemed oblivious. ‘What are you talking about, Dad?’

He turned to me and ushered me over, smiling. He stroked my head. ‘Ach, Matthew, we’re just remembering the friends we lost in the war. You should go to bed. On you go. To bed.’ He turned back to Adam and their memories.

I’d never seen my father in such a state. I’d never heard him talk in such a way. I’d never heard him talk about the war, except in general terms, not about specific things that had happened to
him
. I wished I could understand his Polish. I wanted to know everything he said. I did pick up quite a lot of Polish vocabulary in Lesna, but I had no grammar. I couldn’t string together anything other than the most basic sentences.

The depth of the emotions my father and Adam were expressing, the simple explanation he had given me, the length and intensity of their conversation, the fact that it could only happen here in Lesna after so much vodka, all contributed to present me with a tantalising glimpse of his terrible experience, of the pain and fear, the horror, the hunger and loss he had learned to live with and suppress. Who were these friends? Were they schoolfriends, or were they with him in the army? How had they died? How many of them were there and were any still alive? I wanted to know everything, but I knew nothing. I was shocked, moved and frustrated. This would be the first and only time I’d witness him talking in this way and I didn’t understand any of it.

The days in Lesna would pass with the happy routines of visits to Czocha, cherry picking, garden parties and big meals. A girl would turn up every morning at the house with a little enamelled bucket full of fresh, unpasteurised milk, straight from the cow. On days when we didn’t visit Czocha, we’d walk to the town square to buy
lody
– ice cream. It amused me that this was the word my Scottish granny used to address me in her musical Lanarkshire accent – ‘You’re a fine wee loddie, Matthew’.

One summer, during
longeurs
in the house, I made it my mission to rid the kitchen of flies and became adept at catching them, placing the side of my open hand gently on the wall near my prey and then whipping my hand forward as it closed into a fatal fist. Initially, I got a thrill out of perfecting my killing technique, of having the power of life and death over the flies, but after a few days I grew tired of it and a little uneasy. My persecution of the flies had become both banal and a challenge to my conscience. I gave it up.

I played numerous card games and built houses of cards. Jurek taught me a slick way to shuffle them. Ula, who was three years older than me, would often be found in the kitchen
between meals, surreptitiously spooning Cadbury’s drinking chocolate into her mouth or munching a bowl of Corn Flakes. During the ’70s, the Polish government established a network of luxury goods shops in the towns and cities which only accepted US dollars. The dollars were sent into the country by relatives in the US and other western countries. These shops stocked a lot of western goods, including the drinking chocolate which Ula loved. There was one in Luban, so we’d go there to satisfy Ula’s craving, always taking a supply of dollars. It was a condition of our visit that we exchange a stipulated amount of money at the official rate, which we did through the Polish Consulate in Edinburgh or at the border, I can’t remember which. My father gave some of his additional dollars to Adam and exchanged the rest on the black market, receiving many times the official rate and enabling him to treat our friends and relatives with even greater largesse.

We befriended Ella and Ryszard Wraga, the fair-haired friendly children of a vet who lived a couple of houses away, and we’d go with them to swim in the river which ran through the town. English had recently been introduced in Polish schools and Ella enjoyed practicing hers on us as we swung from a tree on the riverbank and released ourselves into the water. Jurek once took us to a disused quarry on the edge of the town. I wondered if it had been the quarry where Adam had been put to work during the war. It had filled with water, so we swam there. There was no shore, just sheer rock walls to dive from into the black depths of the quarry. I found the place unnerving, especially when I surfaced and found myself staring into the eyes of a large frog, just inches from my nose. When we returned, Jurek was severely reprimanded by his father. The quarry was a dangerous place. A child had dived too deep during the previous summer and drowned after becoming entangled in the submerged wreckage of machinery.

We didn’t watch much TV, though I do have two strong
TV memories from those times, both epic. We watched the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969 in Lesna. Communist TV was gracious enough to accept the American triumph in the space race. The second memory is the screening of the 1960 Polish medieval romance
Krzyzacy
(‘Knights of the Teutonic Order’), a three-hour Polish blockbuster about the titanic conflict between the Poles and the Teutonic Knights which culminated in the Battle of Grunwald (1410). The film is akin to the Hollywood historical epics of the period, such as
Spartacus
and
El Cid
. The charging massed ranks of knights and a harrowing torture scene where one of the Polish heroes is blinded with a red-hot knife remain with me. There was also a
kino
(cinema) in Lesna’s town square. The political relaxation of the ’70s allowed the screening of approved western films. I think the censors must have been quite liberal, because I remember going to the Lesna
kino
with Ula in 1974 to watch Clint Eastwood’s 1971 erotic Gothic Western
The Beguiled
. Maybe they viewed it as an educative example of capitalist degeneracy, but we were entertained.

Aniela would make more wonderful soups,
barszcz
and
zurek
, creamy cauliflower soups with eggs, and she’d cook joints of meat which were delivered every week by Jan the Butcher. We visited Jan’s slaughterhouse once to fetch some meat. It was a hot day and I remember standing by my father holding his hand as he chatted briefly with Jan. It was a high roofed building. The air was moist with steam and the odour of warm, freshly killed animals. The sun streamed through a high window creating shafts of light. A few of his colleagues worked behind him, skinning and butchering. Piles of guts and offal lay on a sloping table which had a little gutter in its centre where blood and juices ran off into a bucket. Jan stood with a huge knife in his right hand, gripping the neck of a calf in his left. His hands and apron were splashed with blood and there were flecks of it on his sweating face. The calf
whimpered, while another was led to its fate. I was transfixed, horrified and curious. Jan observed my wide eyes and joked with my dad that it was good for me to see where my dinner came from. But it was time to go. I’d seen enough. He had to get on with his work and I think they both felt that it would be too much for me to witness the killing of the calf.

I did learn a lot about killing in Poland. On more than one occasion, we’d be out on an excursion and we’d stop at a war cemetery. I remember a huge Soviet one on a hill covered with seemingly endless rows of graves. There was a track leading from the main road straight up the hill to a tapering stone column topped with a big five-pointed red star. The inscription at its base commemorated the Soviets’ Great Patriotic War and gave its dates: 1941-45. 1941 was the year the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. This prompted a bitter response from my father, Aniela and Adam, which was only tempered by the presence of so many dead Soviet soldiers. They felt insulted by the Soviets willfully ignoring the fact that the war had started here in Poland in 1939 with the almost
simultaneous
invasions by the Nazi and Soviet armies. The Poles were allowed to remember the Nazi invasion, but not the Soviet one.

On a few occasions, we passed a farmhouse in the country near Lesna. It was empty, which was unusual. It looked like a reasonably sound building. I listened as my father translated the story of the house. A peacable German family had lived there. It was said that they had harboured Jews during the war, but they were brutally murdered just after the war ended. A Polish family had taken possession of the house but, after a few years, they abandoned it, terrified by the ghosts of the murdered Germans. No one wanted to live there now. There appeared to be a collective sense of guilt about this family among the local population. It seemed strange to me that in a region where so many murders had been committed, where
the worst excesses of the Nazi regime were given free rein and where eventually almost the entire German population had been supplanted by Poles, there was this one house which had become sacrosanct. The existence of the empty farmhouse helped me to understand that in the midst of all the killing and destruction, and in its aftermath, those who survived had to grapple with their morality.

And then there was Auschwitz. We drove there and back on a long, hot summer’s day in 1969, a 650-kilometre round trip. Some of the journey was on the only stretch of motorway in Poland at the time, Hitler’s Silesian autobahn. It took us past Wroclaw, ending halfway from there to Opole, the pre-war capital of Upper Silesia. Opole was unusual because its German population was allowed to remain after the war. Most of the Opole Germans spoke a Silesian dialect,
wasserpolnisch
, and were considered to qualify as Polish. Miroslav Klose, a striker in the German national football team in recent years, was born and raised in Opole. My memory of passing through was that of a busy, grimy city where the leaves of the trees were covered in a white dust.

Opole was the gateway to the heavy industrial heartland of Silesia. We passed through Gliwice, which had a huge tank factory then, and then by-passed Katowice. The biggest of Silesia’s industrial cities, the Polish Communist government changed Katowice’s name to Stalinogrod in 1953, to mark the death of the great dictator, but the people of Katowice refused to accept this. Stalinogrod lasted three years before the Communists admitted defeat and the city reverted to Katowice. There were around five million people in this region living in a forest of industrial chimneys which belched out black smoke. The whole region was an inferno of industrial production. Steelworks, car plants, coachworks, military factories and power stations fuelled primarily by coal. There are huge coal mines in Walbrzych to the west. They yield vast quantities of
low-grade brown coal which produces much higher carbon emissions than black coal. It wasn’t surprising to find that, by the 1980s, acid rain was eroding the stonework of historic buildings and destroying the forests in the mountains to the south.

We arrived at Auschwitz in the heat of the midday sun. Graeme and I weren’t allowed in. We were too young. So my parents, Adam and Aniela left us on a bench close to the gate and its infamous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ arch, eating ice cream. We sat there in our shorts and blue polo shirts for two hours, watching the visitors come and go. My experience of Auschwitz that day was gleaned from the mood of these visitors, quiet, sombre, stony-faced, and from the conversations of the adults in the car on the way home. They were quiet and preoccupied. My father expressed surprise that so much of the place was still intact, that so much evidence was still there. They grappled with the question of how it could have happened. They
understood
the words of Nazi racial policy, but they couldn’t grasp how its followers could act upon it by building and operating such a place as Auschwitz. This came out in sighs and
exclamations
followed by silences. They were overwhelmed by the negation of humanity which Auschwitz represents and it depressed them. ‘How could they have done this….?’ ‘The children too….’ ‘You have to see it with your own eyes.’ They described the mounds of suitcases, spectacles and clothes, the piles of watches, jewellery and gold teeth which had been stripped from the victims. I pictured them, and as we passed through the nearby town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz in Polish), I wondered at the fact that the busy activity of everyday life could exist simultaneously with the place we’d just visited. I was only ten, but I felt cheated. I felt I had an understanding of what Auschwitz was but I needed to know more.

My parents had bought a book, in English, which contained photographs and a history of the camp. When we got back
to Lesna, I spent the following day reading it from cover to cover, examining every detail of every photograph. The book was horribly fascinating, although one could argue that it was wrong to expose a child of ten to the horror of Auschwitz. The revelations of the book, the scale of the slaughter, the mounds of corpses, the gas chambers, the torture, the disgusting medical ‘experiments’ didn’t give me nightmares or visibly upset me in any way. Perhaps this was due to my callowness, the immature child’s ability to simply accept the world which adults construct for him or her. But I was deeply affected in another way. I had been presented with a factual account of the
Shoah
and I had visited the gates of its epicentre. It became indisputably real to me. I realised the absolute necessity of ensuring that such a crime was never to be repeated. I
understood
that it was possible for a whole nation to be manipulated, indoctrinated and brutalised by organised political criminals and that that nation could then acquiesce or collaborate in the murder of millions of people.

The cartoon Nazis of my Hotspur and Commando comics became absurdities, the cartoon killing ridiculously clean. Witnessing the bomb-damaged buildings of Poland, its war graves and the ghastly pinnacle of industrialised murder that was Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, revealed to me the
death-filled
reality of Nazi Europe, and the monumental folly of war. At the age of ten, this new understanding was primarily an objective one. I
felt
very little about it. No anger or terror. Perhaps, a certain numbness. Perhaps it was necessary for me to protect myself unconsciously by reacting with a degree of detachment. I don’t know, but it was only with maturity that I gained the ability to empathise with the individual and
collective
suffering of the victims of the war.

In 1974, we went on a trip to Warsaw. We stayed for a night or two in the city centre flat of friends of Adam’s, Mr. & Mrs. Stefaniak. We walked by the banks of the Vistula and
in the beautiful Lazienki Gardens. We visited the amazingly convincing
Stare Miasto
(Old Town), replicated from the rubble of the razed city after the war, and saw ‘Stalin’s Gift,’ the monolithic Palace of Culture and Science, built by the Soviets after the war. It was nearly pulled down after the fall of the Berlin Wall and there’s an old joke in Warsaw that you get the best view of the city from its terraces because then you’re not looking at it.

Mr and Mrs Stefaniak were a warm, friendly couple in their late fifties. He was a caretaker in a museum in the
Stare Miasto
. He was also a concentration camp survivor. Amazingly, he’d succeeded in taking a few photographs in the camp, which he showed us: surreptitious, sometimes blurred grey pictures of prisoners sorting clothes, being marched to work, a beating. Little square black and white images of crushed lives, bent, tired bodies in striped camp uniforms. They were images filled with danger and hopelessness. Mr. Stefaniak explained how the camera had been smuggled into the camp, passed to him by a Pole who lived nearby when he was outside the camp perimeter on a work detail and then returned to him in the same way. He would have been shot for taking these pictures, if he had been caught.