the mother who sold her daughter Flashcards
difference for Sarna / ROmek on aryan side
Sarna lived in own house and Romek lived in hole behind the stove in that house. Easier for women than men on Aryan side – circumcision (birthplace film)
pre war antisemitism
- As far as the Allies were concerned, the matter ended here. With Poland’s signature under the treaty, the rights of the ethnic minorities inhabiting its territories were guaranteed. The new Polish Republic, however, having barely emerged from years of bitter fighting for its political independence and struggling to formulate and protect its newly achieved nationhood, found it hard to come to terms with its multi-ethnic character
Under its increasingly nationalistic governments, the rights of the two largest minorities – Ukrainians and Jews, – became progressively curtailed and challenged during the interwar period until finally, in 1934, Poland ‘refused to cooperate with the League of Nations in matters pertaining to the question of minorities protection.’
treatment of Ukrainians pre war
- Towards its Ukrainian minority, Poland carried out determined Polonisation and discriminatory policies almost from the start. The republic reduced the number of Ukrainian-language schools, barred Ukrainians from higher education and government jobs, demolished Orthodox churches, and censored the Ukrainian press.
Jewish treatment in Poland
- Yet almost from the birth of the Polish Republic, the ‘Jewish issue’ was on the public agenda. Discussions in Parliament and in the media suggested ‘solutions’ to ‘the problem’, which, depending on political orientation, ranged from voluntary or forced emigration to Palestine and ‘de-Judaization’ of Poland to demands for complete assimilation.
shtetl life
- The shtetl Jew fulfilled the unenviable role of an intermediary between the village, the landed estate, and the town - of necessity tolerated, but often mistrusted. If for the Jew, the illiterate dirty peasant was a figure of derision, in peasant folklore, the figure of a sly and crafty ‘infidel’ Jew was an object of hate and fear.
- Easter holidays kept many Jewish families, especially in the countryside, indoors, out of fear of assault by their deeply religious peasant neighbours
pogroms and national conflict
- Pogroms and massacres were a familiar part of Jewish experience in times of national strife or conflict, when the level of threat to the shtetl communities inevitably intensified. During the Ukrainian national uprising (1648–49), for instance, Jews, regarded by the Ukrainians as the tool of Polish oppression, were massacred
relationship of Jews to soviets
- The Poles – who look at the Soviet invasion in terms of a collusion between Poland’s two greatest enemies, Germany and Russia, to obliterate her again from the map of Europe – refer to the brutal occupation of their land and mass deportations aimed at destroying the country’s social infrastructure. The left-wing Jews, on the other hand, though they were by no means a majority within the Jewish population, focused primarily on the new system of social justice, liberation from Polish anti-Semitism, and protection from German genocide. My mother’s case, it has to be said, would confirm the Poles’ suspicions, as she took a clearly pro-Soviet stance.
early and casual experiences of antisemitism
o ‘Boys would sometimes throw stones or shout abuse as we were passing,’- at the Jewish inn- she says. The very matter-of-fact way she glides over what must have been her earliest encounters with the animosity of the outside world takes me slightly aback, as though this was just part of Jewish life.
idea of antisemitism as learnt?
o In primary school - Paszkowski apparently used to shout at his Jewish playmates, ‘Jews to Palestine!’ Most likely he was just parroting the ubiquitous political slogan of the Right. The Polish state considered the large number of Jews within its new borders a ‘problem’, and emigration of Jews from Poland was publicly debated as a possible solution
how nazism in Germany effected Poland
- The anti-Jewish campaign intensified in the 1930s when the Nazi Party came to power in neighbouring Germany from 1935 to 1937, and was the most severe and widespread, with random attacks in the streets, on commuters, and on students and plundering of Jewish shops. Between twenty and thirty Polish Jews were killed and an estimated 2,000 injured
reference to universities
- In the 1930s - Political parties with nationalistic and anti-Semitic agendas gained influence among university students. Members of the All-Poland Youth an association of the nationalist youth groupings, had already voted in one of its earlier national rallies (1921) to exclude Jewish students from university fraternities and other student organizations. Now they demanded restrictions on the number of Jewish students at the universities
boys education
- Heder- where all boys went to school- would spend the day repeating Hebrew verses from the holy scripture. Very few boys went through the state education system.
social interaction of jews and non Jews
- In the socio-economic landscape of Galicia, individual ethnic communities, the Poles, the Ukrainians and the Jews, lived side by side, with a minimum of social interaction, separated by barriers of language, lifestyle, and religious prejudice.
Jewish and non-Jewish interaction
- In the other room, the daughter of the house, Pesia, (‘who spoke good Polish’) served meals to the ‘regulars’ – the local Polish elite. These included the school headmaster, the town mayor, the policeman, the judge, the elderly doctor… ‘Their anti-Jewish sentiments obviously never stopped them from enjoying Jewish cooking - doubtless the best and most hygienic food around.’
Neither did it stop them from marrying Jewish women. And many did. Take the judge, for instance – he was married to a local Jewish girl. And yet, he was a well-known anti-Semite”
memory as a constant intellectual exercise
- Mother pauses for a moment and reflects- Neither did it stop them from marrying Jewish women
emergence of zionism
- Emerged in wake of ww1. , particularly fertile ground in Poland.
- Nothing short of a revolutionary re-examination of the diaspora experience began to take place, calling for a redefinition of Jewish identity, not as a religious but a national minority.
Sara’s own engagement with zionism
- Zionist youth movements sprang up all over the country, encompassing a diverse political spectrum with new ideas being passionately argued in youth clubs, in family circles, and among friends
‘Evenings at home were often spent in animated and heated discussions; my brothers and sisters would gather with their friends round the kitchen table,’ my mother remembers.
split in Jews over zionism
- There were a few who tried to undermine her authority. Two Jewish brothers, she remembers, sons of a local baker, ‘simple, uneducated men’, denounced her as a Zionist, a dangerous deviation in the Soviet ideological spectrum and, to make matters worse, someone with a family in Palestine
courage of zionism
- Portrayed the courage and strength of the Jew going to Palestine, cultivating the land etc. This was in obvious contrast to the diaspora Jew, whose character was distorted by centuries of hate and prejudice and whose life was governed from cradle to grave by religious Orthodoxy and tradition.
idea of physical objects and memory
- Wanted to keep her plaits, her hair she chopped off- ‘I wanted to keep it, to remind me of who I once was. I had nothing else, you know – there were no photos, no objects from the past, no people who would remember you when you were young, nothing. So I wanted to keep something.’
absence of objects of memory for Jews
- No photos or documents escaped the conflagration. My father emerged from the war with none.
- ‘You could not find the house,’ he told her, ‘because it was not there! As soon as the Germans entered the town, the local górale’ (mountain folk) ‘burned down the Jewish homes.
- The Jewish Nurses Training School, established in July 1923 …. During the war, First it was relocated, together with the hospital, into the Jewish ghetto area of Warsaw, where its staff and students were gradually decimated through hunger, disease, killings, and deportations to camps. Finally it ceased to exist when the ghetto itself was liquidated
physical removal of Irena from her mother’s descriptions
- The images that take shape in my mind as I listen to Mother’s stories from the village of Borek – the place where, I estimate, she stayed the longest during the war – have all the elements of a small-scale pageant…. There are scenes of gripping drama. The protagonist performs acts of daring as she’s subjected to the violence of the terrifying night raid or cleverly negotiates her way through the pitfalls in an almost comical setting, cohabitation with German soldiers. These situations would be, just like in a medieval pageant, farcical, absurd, and uplifting, in their presentation of both courage and cowardice
precision of her mother’s memory
- I begin to realize that the certainties of my mother’s memories are acquiring some blurred edges. The name of the widow Wawrzyncowa, for instance, that she so often mentioned, raised no echo with Irena or her cousin. And now this name Styrna crops up, a name that I had never heard from my parents
the idea of memory coming from own perception
- My mother’s stories invariably convey the same sentiment. ‘I always felt,’ she says emphatically, ‘that their life in the ghetto was a hundred times easier than my existence on the outside, where I was exposed day in and day out to the scrutiny of strangers.
memory effected by exposure to danger
- Places always fell into two categories in Mother’s wartime terminology; they were either ‘not so dangerous’ or plain ‘dangerous’.
idea of taught prejudice
- Attended Catholic services to fit in - The sermons she heard in the church terrified her. Overtly anti-Semitic and inciting to violence, she thought. To the end of her life, my mother blamed Christianity for the popular anti-Jewish sentiment in the countryside. ‘When you are being told all your life that Jews were the Christ killers, that they drain the blood of innocent Christian children in ritual murder, that they are sinners who obstinately refuse the true (equals Christian) salvation, no wonder you believe that they are an evil force in society that should be eradicated.’
hyperboles
- Trip to Palestine- It was crazy, she reflects, to set out across Europe under a false identity and, most likely, on a counterfeit passport belonging to a man she did not trust. ‘I trembled at every border crossing. Every time the documents were taken away for inspection, I feared we might be arrested, and I would linger in some jail, with nobody knowing what had happened to me.’ I have always accepted my mother’s account of that trip to Palestine as a highly risky adventure, a unique act of daring. Yet, I later discover that it is, by now, well documented that, in the immediate post-war period, large groups of Jewish illegal immigrants, thousands of Holocaust survivors, were making their way out of Poland.
notion that two people can see things very differently
- Travelled back from Palestine under the care of a man whom took them first to Rome- I was awed by the Basilica of Saint Peter’s – its huge space, height, and colours. I had never seen anything like it. We climbed up to the galleries, where the guide did something quite unbelievable. He spotted a little blue-green mosaic stone of perhaps half a centimetre in size, loose in the wall. And right there, before my very eyes, the stone was gently wedged out of the wall and given to me!. My mother’s memories are of a different calibre. ‘Rome was where that man tried to dump us first,’
inherited political viewpoint
. ‘Stalin was not a good man…I know it…from my mum.’ This is the first time I hear anyone criticizing the ‘great leader’. My parents had never said anything negative about Stalin….. She lowers her voice. ‘He was an enemy of the Poles. He imprisoned and exiled many of them to camps in Siberia, where they suffered and perished. He killed Polish officers so that they would not fight against him…My father was one of them.’ She finally looks at me.
trauma effecting silence/ voice
- My father, as mentioned before, was rather reticent when it came to his wartime experiences, and it was only in his later years as he was preparing his testimony for the Holocaust Visual History Foundation that he began to mention some of the events. He also jotted down notes in a rather disorderly fashion on (many) separate sheets and scraps of paper, frequently referring to the same incident more than once. However, by contrast to my mother’s characteristically expressive depictions of scenes and people, his records consist almost entirely of dates, names, and facts the significance of which often escapes me
