A Delayed Life Page 4
Ours was a very economical family. Nothing that could still be used was thrown out. Dresses were made for me with large hems to be let out as I grew, and shoes were usually one size bigger, so they could be worn the next year.
To this day I save remnants of material, bits of wool, and scraps of food. It was, and to a degree still is, the custom of Europeans not to be wasteful. It is part of a tradition and has nothing to do with poverty or affluence. My grandmother was the champion of frugality. She unraveled old sweaters, laundered and stretched the wool to make it smooth again, and knitted new ones. She cut spiral strips from old stockings that were beyond mending. With a huge crochet needle, she made mats from these strips, quite handsome ones, brown, beige, and black, pleasant and springy under the foot. Another habit of hers was to save used matches. She kept a box for them on the rim of her cooking range, using the burnt ones to transfer the flame from one ring to another.
When I was older, Grandmother explained to me the reason for her extreme frugality. They had a son born after my father, Hans, and before my uncle Ernst-Benjamin. His name was Fritz, and he died before I was born. He had to be kept in an institution for the mentally ill. What his ailment was I don’t know. He was hospitalized as a child, and from that day, Grandmother began saving so that his two brothers would have money for his upkeep once the parents were dead. Fritz died at the age of twenty, but Grandmother could no longer change the economizing ways she had imposed on herself for so many years.
It is so strange that, years later, our daughter, Michaela, would also die at the age of twenty. She became ill when she was eight. Her disease was incurable, and we were told that she would not live long. No one could predict how long. We started to save strenuously, almost as extremely as my grandmother, to ensure that her brothers could afford her care if we died before her.
* * *
I loved my grandmother more than anybody else. Even now, almost seventy years after her death, a soothing warmth envelops me when I think of her. She was a small woman with a large nose and warm brown Semitic eyes. She wore dark, shapeless clothes that belonged to fashions of long ago. Her gray hair was collected into a bun and fastened with hairpins on the nape of her neck. I think she was never in her life in a hairdresser’s salon. Her own person was of no interest to her; her attention centered entirely on other people. She was the most unselfish person I have ever known, and I wish I had inherited this quality from her. I try to be unselfish and struggle against my egotism, but my efforts are conscious, while for Grandmother it was her nature.
She was never angry with me; even when I misbehaved and she scolded me, I felt totally accepted. She would say, “Das macht man nicht”—you do not do that—and I’d protest cheekily, “Das macht Frau ja”—that’s what women do. (It’s a wordplay, because man = anyone, Mann = a man, and Frau = a woman.)
Grandmother never hugged or kissed, neither me nor other members of the family. She respected others, even if they were her sons or granddaughter. I never heard her giving an opinion or criticizing a person. She just accepted people as they were; everyone was treated with the same respect, whether minister or servant girl. She was the kindest and most loving person of my life. She called me Edithlein; nobody else ever called me by that name.
One day when I was in kindergarten, I got a severe bellyache. The janitor’s wife was summoned to accompany me home. (No one had a car then, and few families had telephones.) On the way I insisted she take me to Grandmother, who lived much nearer. When Grandmother opened the door, the fat woman wanted to be quite sure she wasn’t making a mistake and asked, “Are you really Mrs. Grandmother?” Grandmother had to answer her twice before she was reassured, and I laughed in spite of my aching belly.
Grandma took me into the living room, made me lie on the sofa, and went to the kitchen. After a while she returned with a cup of tea and a warm pot-lid wrapped in a towel. She placed it on my belly, and when it cooled, she changed it for a second one, which had meanwhile been warming on the stove in the kitchen. After several changes, the pain miraculously vanished.
We used to visit my grandparents quite often. They had moved to Prague from Brno in the thirties, when Grandfather became a member of Parliament. I remember the day they moved into their flat, when I was three and a half years old. There was a great to-do, with the movers carrying big pieces of furniture held by straps over their shoulders. I saw two old people whom I didn’t know, and Mother told me that these were my grandfather and grandmother.
Johann and Katharina Polach, 1932
I remember the flat in great detail. There was a tall, yellow tiled stove in the corner of the living room, and it was most pleasant to warm one’s back against it in winter. During the night the fire went out, and, in the morning, Liesl the maid would scrape out the ashes and start a new one with thin sticks and newspaper. Bigger chunks of wood were added, and at last came the coal. The bedroom was cold, the stove unlit, and I rarely went there.
In the middle of the living room stood a large dining table covered with a rug, and when visitors came a white tablecloth would be spread over it. They would sit around the table, drinking tea and eating Grandmother’s ginger cookies. These cookies had a strange property: when they were fresh, they were extremely tough—one could break a tooth on them—but after some weeks in a tin box, they became brittle and very tasty.
There was a black grand piano with shiny brass wheels, and I liked to “play” on it. It made Grandfather nervous. He used to say to Grandmother, “Kathi, don’t let the child harass the instrument.” So Grandmother would put her arm around my shoulders, which was easy for her because she was barely taller than me, and take me to the kitchen, where she would make me a topinka: She opened the cupboard, releasing the fragrance of the hundreds of loaves it had held in the course of a lifetime, cut a slice of bread, and put it in a blackened pan, where goose fat was sizzling. She fried it on both sides and then smeared it with garlic. My mother sometimes also made topinkas, but they were never so crisp and tasty like Grandmother’s. Probably the pan had to have a black crust; ours was always spotless and shiny. Everybody was pleased when I finished the whole topinka, because I ate so little, and they were happy that I got something nourishing into my thin body.
Near the window there was Grandfather’s writing desk. Sometimes, when the adults were sitting around the table and talking politics, Grandmother gave me a piece of paper and some crayons and I knelt at the desk and drew pictures. Grandfather didn’t like it; he always thought I would ruin his blotting-paper mat.
On one side of the room stood the sofa, and on the opposite wall a huge bookcase almost touched the high ceiling, with decorative carvings and glass doors. It was crammed full of learned books, but some were books I could also enjoy. There were Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Wilhelm Busch picture books that had belonged to my father and his brothers when they were children. I was allowed to take them out to look at, or Grandmother would read from them to me. She also knew lots of songs and poems by heart. One poem by Friedrich Rückert I liked above all others was about a young tree that wanted to dress in something grander than the needles that grew on its branches. Its wish was granted, and next morning it was covered in beautiful green leaves. But the goats came and ate the leaves. The little tree asked for new leaves, but this time the frost burnt them, and again it stood bare. Each time, something happened to the new leaves until the little tree asked humbly to get its old needles back and never complained again.
Grandmother recited the poem with emotion, changing her voice from loud to a whisper, and I sighed with relief at the end when everything turned out for the good.
Grandmother sang, in her somewhat quivery voice, songs that I thought were folk melodies. Only as an adult did I discover that one was a Brahms lullaby and another a Mozart lied. Grandmother had had very little formal schooling but knew a surprising amount about classical music. She was the eldest of four children and often had to take care of her siblings when her mother went to work. My g
reat-grandmother’s profession was something like a midwife’s; she nursed young mothers who had given birth. At that time it was customary to engage an experienced woman to care for the baby because the mother was not supposed to get up from her bed for six weeks. My great-grandfather was abroad, trying to make his fortune in foreign lands. Grandmother, for example, was born in Hungary, where her father had worked for several years as manager of some nobleman’s estate. Then they returned to Brno, where the family stayed while Great-Grandfather was off again. He went to America to work for Baron Hirsch, the builder of railways. In the end he disappeared altogether; no one knows where he is buried.
Grandmother Kathi grew up in poverty. When she was a teenager, she was acquainted with a certain Alfred Fröhlich, who played an instrument in the symphony orchestra, and she would often attend rehearsals. She told me how she sat on the balcony and listened to the conductor’s instructions, thus becoming quite knowledgeable about classical music. I would have forgotten the man’s name, of course, had she not given me a leather-bound diary with a little lock and key for my seventh birthday. It was a present Fröhlich had given her, and she’d kept it since her youth. She never wrote anything in it, but on the first page is her friend’s dedication, dated October 27, 1892. Who knows what feelings there were between Kathi and Alfred? Perhaps she was in love with him? I will never know; more than 125 years have elapsed since then.
Miraculously, the diary is still in my possession, even though the key is long lost. A friend, Judith Lamplová, kept it for me, together with some photos and souvenirs when my family was deported to Terezín. Since one of her parents was not Jewish, Judith was not sent to the ghetto. When I came back from the camps after the war, she returned the diary to me. There are entries I wrote in 1941 and 1942, before our deportation, childish descriptions of what I did each day, but also names of those of my friends, who were in the next transport. One entry, however, contains the momentous information about my first kiss. I received it from a boy named Erik. It took place while we were sitting under a tree on the gravestone of some long-forgotten Jew in the Old Jewish Cemetery, on July 8, 1942. It was an awkward, wet, and lopsided kiss.
Dita Polach, 1942
But that was later. For now, my life was still following its regular course.
When I was small, I suffered recurrent inflammations of the ear. I remember how it hurt and how Mother held my head on her lap and administered warm ear drops.
One evening, my parents went out, and they put my bed in the living room so that Maria could sleep near me on the green sofa. My aching ear was padded with a big wad of cotton wool held in place by a knitted cap, and an electric pad was placed under my head.
In the middle of the night, Maria was awoken by an unfamiliar acrid smell. She rushed over to me and found the pillow smoldering; the cap had a burnt hole, and the cotton wool was beginning to catch fire. There must have been a short circuit, but I hadn’t felt anything—I hadn’t even woken up. It was a frightening event; I heard it told many times afterward. I must confess I have kept a certain dislike to electric pads and blankets to this day.
My ear inflammations stopped when Dr. Desensy-Bill, our pediatrician, decided to have my tonsils removed. This is one of my unforgettable childhood memories. Not because of the operation but because of the taxi. It was the first time in my life I’d ridden in a car. In Prague one took a tram, and when out of town, a train. No one owned a car; the only people I knew who had a car were our neighbors on the same floor, Mr. and Mrs. Moller. Mrs. Moller, who had a slight limp, was a young woman who’d had no children and often invited me over. Her name was also Edith, which made us namesakes. She had lots of picture magazines—something I never saw at home—with photos of beautiful film stars. She was a perfectionist housewife, always baking cookies and polishing the parquet floors. In the kitchen she wore red slippers, but when she went to the salon, she changed them at the door and put on blue ones. She went in and out, and every time, she took off and put on blue slippers and red slippers, blue slippers and red slippers. She did it to spare the carpets, Maria explained mockingly. But the Mollers never took me for a ride in their car.
I was so excited in anticipation of the taxi that I forgot it would take me to the doctor who was going to cut out my tonsils. I don’t remember the operation, only the fact that I got a double portion of ice cream to cool my hurting throat. And Mother explained that the tonsils would grow back; they had only been clipped and not extracted.
It was a comforting thought. For the next few years, I believed that if somebody lost an organ it would grow back. When I saw an invalid in a wheelchair, it was a relief to know that he would grow a new leg instead of always missing one. It helped me to bear the pity for the suffering person.
* * *
I was in love with boys as far back as I can remember. In the Czech kindergarten, there was a pretty boy whose name I have forgotten. I had a crush on him, and I would feel my cheeks flush when I met him in the afternoon in the park, he with his mother and I with Maria or my mother. One day, when he had a nosebleed in kindergarten, I lent him my handkerchief. A few days later, his mother returned it, washed and ironed, and I felt proud and important as if I had saved his life.
In the first grade there was Helmut, again the best-looking boy in class. He was popular with other girls, too, but that didn’t deter me from being in love with him. It was a German school, just around the corner from my home, which I attended from first to third grade. Helmut, like the rest of the pupils, belonged to the German minority who were citizens of Czechoslovakia.
Gerta and I were in love with the same boy when we were about nine. He lived on her street and would show us all kinds of stunts on his bicycle. He could make a U-turn on the back wheel only and jump from the road to the sidewalk and back again. We admired him immensely. We would stand in the doorway of Gerta’s house and laugh and clap hands. Gerta and I were rivals for his attention, but I felt that he secretly preferred me because he once accompanied me on his bicycle all the way from Gerta’s house to mine, three streets away.
Another crush we shared was a young circus performer of about fourteen or fifteen. The circus tent was on a vacant lot near Gerta’s house. Twice we attended the show, properly with tickets, just to see the lithe athletic boy with his bare torso perform on a freestanding ladder. His number was accompanied by a certain waltz melody, which brings him back to memory whenever I hear it played. We loitered at the fence of the circus almost daily to catch a glimpse of him and then we would endlessly describe his features to each other. Yet when the circus folded its tent a few weeks later and moved on, our young athlete was forgotten without a tear.
CHAPTER FOUR
Grandfather
Grandfather Johann Polach was born in the small town Velké Bílovice in Moravia. He had three brothers, Adolf, Arnold, and Bernard, and two sisters, Johanna and Theresah. My grandfather was the only one whose name was mistakenly registered as Polach; his brothers’ and their descendants’ family name is Pollak.
Johann was sent to study at the Schottenring gymnasium in Vienna. There he came in contact with the Social Democrats and became an activist in the party.
My grandmother once told me that Johann’s grandmother was very religious. She was known as the Ofensetzerin, the person to whom housewives brought their pots with the Shabbat cholent on Friday, because she had an enormous oven that would keep them warm till next day—Jews are not allowed to light a fire on the Shabbat. When Grandfather Johann was a young student, he once had a discussion with her about the existence of God. He was an unbeliever, an ardent socialist, and tried to convince her that there is no God. But she argued that she had absolute proof of God’s existence.
She related what happened to her one Friday afternoon: “I was walking home from a distant village with a heavy basket on my back. It was getting dark, and I was so tired I could hardly walk. I was afraid I wouldn’t be home in time before the beginning of the Shabbat. I sat down on the roadside and
prayed to God to give me strength. And lo and behold, in that instant, I wasn’t tired anymore and was back home before the first star appeared in the sky. Now, Mr. Student, isn’t that proof enough for you?”
* * *
A few years ago I came across a passage about Grandfather in the autobiography of Friedrich Stampfer (1874–1957) one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party and a well-known journalist. This is what he wrote:
In those days of my youthful enthusiasm, I met a strange schoolmate. Despite being in the same class as I, he was three years older, but judging from his appearance, he could have been ten years older. He was gaunt, poorly dressed, and had an interesting ugly face. His name was Johann Polach. I met his father, a porter at one of Vienna’s railway stations, a few years later. It happened when I was changing one students’ lodging for another and hired him through Johann—“to keep the money in the family”—to help me with the moving. But when the old man came and heaved my heavy trunk on his bent back, while I was walking beside him with a light suitcase, I had the feeling I was committing an injustice. And when he took off his red porter’s cap to thank me for the meager fee—to pay him more than the standard, I didn’t dare—I was deeply ashamed.
Johann came from Vienna, too. His abject poverty had forced him to earn a living; this was the reason he was three years behind. Like myself, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Greece; like myself, he was an ardent socialist, but he was also something more, namely a Marxist.
Until then I had never heard about Marx, and I must confess that the first encounter with him did not attract me in any way. The deprecating manner with which Johann regarded me as a mere “charity socialist” and “utopist” hurt me.