the children of abraham

THE CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM

Anita MuirTheChildrenofAbraham

AnitaMuirBB

BB

Beginnings, before the world changed, before the Second World War,before a time when I knew anything of the beauty and vastness andvariety of the world, my beginnings in Krakōw, Poland in the 1930s. Myorigins there, in the well assimilated Jewish family of a comfortable,warm, loving home of the Abrahamers...

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THE CHILDREN

OF ABRAHAM

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THE CHILDREN

OF ABRAHAM

by

Anita Muir

Bound Biographies

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Copyright A Muir © 2010Produced in association with

Bound Biographies

Heyford Park House, Heyford Park, Bicester, OX25 5HDwww.boundbiographies.com

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The Abrahamer Family, Krakōw 1910

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I dedicate this record of my early life to David,suamiku kekasih,

ever my guide, support and inspirationthroughout the many happy years of our marriage.

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AcknowledgementsMy thanks for the initial inspiration to write this book are due toLord Paddy Ashdown who first warmly encouraged me to do so. Forthe early editing and kind suggestions by Vivien Stone, and manyhelpful remarks by Sue Armstrong as well as positive criticismoffered by Dr Brian Doberstyn, I here express my heartfelt gratitude.My sincere thanks go also to Tony Gray, my editor at BoundBiographies, for his constant support and assistance, editorialexcellence and never failing patience.

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ContentsDedication viiAcknowledgements ixContents xi

I: The Background 1II: The Beginnings 9III: Siberia 19IV: No Longer Enemies 27V: Central Asia 35VI: The Return Home 49VII: The New Life 55VIII: Looking Back 65IX: The Interview with Dzidka 69X: The Polish Scene 89XI: The Family Tree 97XII: Our Maternal Family, the Holzers 117XIII: My Mentors 127XIV: The Correspondence 137XV: Letters 141XVI: Swiss Wartime Camps 157XVII: The Aftermath 165XVIII: Carrying a Burden of the Past 183

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The sun has just risen over the fern and rain-tree like lava flowstreaming upwards through the branches and the leaves gently stirredby the breeze, golden lava, illuminating the distant hills, changing thesky from blue-grey to pink, to day’s brightness. The frangipaniflowers below the terrace now glow with the waxy white edged withpink, and their scent is going to perfume the sweet morning air overthe rice fields where the long-necked white paddy birds and greyherons circle the emerald-green young rice and settle here and thereon a branch or a stone. The white-grey Brahmin cows with their longears and hunched backs are peacefully grazing in their field, thebamboo bells sounding gently, with myna, egrets and other birdsfrequently perching on their heads or shoulders. In the distance thesaffron-robed monks can be seen moving in a slow line along thevillage, their bowls filled by the women with rice and vegetablescooked for that purpose, to feed the monks and so to acquire merit.The nightly multi-voiced chorus of frogs is now still, and thechirping of many birds is beginning to replace it. From a farmyard inthe village the cocks still crow though they can rest easy now that theworld is awake and another day has began in Sansai, by Chiang Mai.

It is a never ending delight, the awakening dawn in the magicalsurroundings of Asia where I have spent so many years of my life,having lived in or visited most of it, from Indonesia to India, SriLanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Japan,China, starting in Singapore, but already beginning in my childhoodin Central Asia, and so through long wanderings having coveredmost of the ancient Silk Road.

This time it is as tourists, visiting an old friend and colleague andmeeting up with others whom we have known in the past, or David

Chapter IThe Background

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has worked with over the many years since his joining the WorldHealth Organization over fifty years ago and our wedding inSingapore. Our quiet month with its reminiscences and long peacefulevenings during the loveliest of seasons in Thailand, when the daysare still cool, the white frangipani flowers cover the grey branches,and the mangos begin to ripen, have set the mood for opening a flowof memories which like moths in the night gently flutter around me.Perhaps if we had stayed at home this winter I would be spending mydays on the beautiful crispy white slopes of the Jura mountains,enjoying the cross-country skiing above our apartment by the Lakeof Geneva, but having chosen this year to escape the unusually coldEuropean winter, we find ourselves again under the skies of the yearsof our youth and the warm sun rekindles old memories of years goneby. These memories go further, to the distant past of childhood, tomy beginnings, oh, how different from this blessed present!

Those beginnings, before the world changed, before the SecondWorld War, before a time when I knew anything of the beauty andvastness and variety of the world, my beginnings in Krakōw, Polandin the 1930s. My origins there, in the well assimilated Jewish familyof a comfortable, warm, loving home of the Abrahamers.

But let’s go back to my Abrahamer forebears in the late 19th and thebeginning of the 20th century. Our paternal great-grandfather camefrom a little village in Galicja (the south-east part of Poland whichwas under Austrian domination during the partitions of Poland). Hehad a large family and one of his sons was to be our grandfather,Israel Abrahamer, whom I vaguely remember as a severe man towhom the whole family showed great respect. I remember moreclearly his wife, our grandmother, and I remember her only as beingin bed and me at the foot of her bed playing at saying ‘cuckoo’ toeach other – this must have been shortly before the war when I wasfour years old and she was on her deathbed.

Our grandfather’s house was an imposing building (still there) inKrakōw, set on two parallel streets, Łobzowska and Asnyka, thefamily house facing the first and the business quarters the second. Ithad a large courtyard in between, where the horse carriages, workcarts, broughams and various riding carriages, as well as the horses ofcourse, were to be found.

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Both these streets lie near the centre of Krakōw, near Planty, thepark full of chestnut trees which ring the beautiful Renaissancecentre of the old city. There in the summer months we were takenfor walks or played in its alleys and I recall the white, furry polarbear (how hot the man inside its skin must have felt!) selling deliciousice-cream, round tubes of it on wooden sticks, which we wereallowed to have on warm afternoons. The houses are big patricianmansions, with enclosed courtyards (podwórki) at the back,surrounded by the typical Krakōw feature of ganki (long balconies)with wooden balustrades connecting all first-floor apartments. It is inthe courtyards where one would see a musician playing on his violin,or someone singing, and windows would open and coins would bethrown down. Much later, next to the enlarged and modernisedbakery, our grandfather built a modern, multi-apartment house overthe door of which his oldest daughter-in-law who was a sculptor(Roma Abrahamer) set a carving of a mermaid. Why a mermaid?Because it was the emblem of Warsaw whence she came.

In 1980 or thereabouts, when private property was being, in part,returned to the survivors or heirs of the original owners, thisproperty, as well as that of our maternal grandparents, was sold. Thisenabled our mother to have more comfort in the last years of her life.She had the help and companionship of a series of young Polishwomen who were then coming to Paris to seek work; holidays in

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Grandfather and Grandmother Abrahamer


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The Mill


comfortable retirement homes in or near the city in the summer,when it was too hot to stay in town and when the Polish ladieswould all disappear for a few weeks of a well-earned holiday – a timewhen many of them could see their homes and families which theyhad left to earn some money abroad to help with the meagre earningsw kraju (at home) in Poland.

By the beginning of the 20th century Abrahamer was a good nameto have in Krakōw. Our grandfather was rich, hardworking andrespected, the owner of the biggest and most modern flourmill inthat part of Poland, a few kilometres outside Krakōw in Zielonki.After the war the Communist regime was to develop the importantnearby mines of Nowa Huta, thus attracting many workers to thearea who swamped the traditionally intellectual (and anti-Communist) elite of the traditional Church stronghold of Krakōw.And the Church, as soon as it was again free to do so, built in NowaHuta as a counter-measure to this influx of communist doctrine, themost beautiful and original of modern churches which in due courseattracted into its fold the workers who, as it turned out during themovement of Solidarność, were not as strong Communists as theregime had hoped they would be.

But to return to the Abrahamers: there were by now many of themas our grandfather had five sons and, after years of hoping for one, atlast a daughter, the beloved Helenka, later to become the talented,beautiful and intelligent Helenka Horowitz. She was the littleprincess, the long awaited golden-haired little girl whom all thefamily adored, and I remember her sitting at my bedside and readingto me when at the outbreak of the war I lay ill, and was thought tobe dying from pneumonia in our maternal aunt’s house in Lwōw(pronounced Lvouv in English).

Her brothers were expected by their father to become the support ofthe family business. And so the eldest, Szymek, very intelligent,quiet-spoken and always very serious as I remember him (and wholater, already as an elderly gentleman, achieved his boyhoodambition and obtained a doctorate in economics at the same time ashis son Zbyszek obtained his in physics) was put in charge ofaccountancy. Heniu, always delicate, short-sighted like all theAbrahamers, stubborn in character and yet gentle and kind-natured,

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was sent to study agronomy, and Jozek (our father) the latesttechniques in oven construction at Zurich Polytechnic. Another ofthe sons, Samek, stayed to look after the bakery, while the parentssettled in Zielonki where all the children (with their own families bythen) were expected every Saturday without fail to join the growingfamily gathering round the large table.

Szymek married a young and upcoming sculptor and for years it wasrepeated round the family how, on returning from theirhoneymoon, they found on their new dining-room table a roastchicken for their supper and two burial-shirts (traditional Jewishgarb at burial, as Jews are not buried in coffins but directly in theearth, so as to become part of it) as the wedding present from fatherIsrael. Although well to-do, he always remained frugal in his habitsand expected his children to be likewise.

Heniu married a charming lisping waif of a girl, Genia, and they weremy favourite uncle and aunt, kind and gentle and generous to a fault.Their only son, Witek, emigrated with them to Israel as soon as itwas possible to do so from Poland after the war, in the late ’40s early’50s. Although they found the climate very difficult, they had towork hard and only just managed to make ends meet in a verymodest existence. Witek trained as an engineer and later worked onthe construction of the Israeli airports and had three wives in rapidsuccession – and as many daughters.

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With Heniu and Witek Abrahamer in Israel in 1960


The son who took over the bakery(Samek, or Simon) was married to a ladywhom I remember as the large andsuffering Aunt Luta and they had onedaughter, Alina. Having miraculouslysurvived the Nazi occupation, Samekwas tragically murdered in Zielonki afterthe war on his way from the bank to themill with the money for the week’swages for the mill workers. Alina’smother was beaten, raped and left fordead when walking to a village on theoutskirts of Krakōw, a few months afterher husband’s murder, by a man fromwhom she had asked directions and whosaid he would show her a shortcut. She crawled through the snow tothe nearest farm and was saved. Alina and her mother also emigratedto Israel, where Alina married a man connected with the filmindustry. He left her, but she continued to work on the fringes offilm production, as far as I remember something to do with cartoon-films.

There had been another son in Israel’s family, a beautiful young boycalled Alek, who committed suicide while in his early twenties. Itwas never spoken about in the family, but I gathered that the causeof his suicide was not an unhappy love affair which would have beenin keeping with his romantic looks, but a gambling debt repaid witha falsified signature of his father. Alek was unable to admit to whathe saw as a crime, to his severe father. If only children in momentsof trouble would realise that parental love is far greater than parentaldiscipline, so much suffering would be averted!1

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Alina’s father, Samek

1. I will continue describing the rest of the family and their various histories inchapter XI.


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Uncle Alek Abrahamer in the 1920s

GrandmaAbrahamer with her daughters-in-law, andGrandfather Abrahamer (centre) with two of his brothers


Chapter IIThe Beginnings

My father with me, 1934

I was born in Krakōw, Poland’s beautiful old capital, with its ancientcastle where all the kings of Poland were buried, its lovelyRenaissance market place and the famous Church of Our Lady ofKrakōw, where stands the venerable altar of Wit Stwosz, made bythe 15th century master Veit Stoss from Nuremberg. My father’sfamily had been living in a shtetel (Jewish community of which therewere many in that part of Poland) in the region known as Galicja (inPoland) for generations, and my mother’s family had come fromVienna. German was spoken in our household as frequently as wasPolish, my first nursemaid was a German fräulein, and the culturemost admired by my father (even above the French and the English)was the German culture, so rich with its wonderful poetry andliterature. It was due to this love of the work of Schiller, Heine,Goethe, which was so important to my father, that my first languagewas in fact German and not Polish.

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We had spent the summer of 1939 in Zakopane, a hill station nearKrakōw, and as the rumours of impending hostilities circulated, ourparents thought it safer to remain up in the quiet hotel-pension tillthe hostilities were over and it was quite safe to take the childrenback home. However, other people, and among them their verygood friends and neighbours, the Wasserbergs, realised just howserious things were becoming. They sent their car and driver to bringus to Krakōw from where we were to go in a group of cars following

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Alek and me in 1937

My father, Joziu, before the war, and me again in 1937


each other (in case of eventualproblems), towards the east, to Lwōw,which was thought to be far enoughfrom the Germans to be safe. This plansuited our family as our mother’s sister,Musia, and her family lived in Lwōw,and we were to stay with them while theGermans were chased out of Poland bythe victorious Polish army, which wasexpected to happen within a few weeksat most. Nobody therefore tookanything except for immediate needs, asthe household staff were staying on tolook after the house. Our maternalgrandparents came with us.

I remember that journey east as a series of bombing raids – theaeroplanes swooping down from the sky and the long trail of peopledisappearing to the right and left of the road at each attack, lying inditches until the planes flew off, with my grandmother trying tocover us children with her body so as to protect us, then scramblingback onto the road to continue the journey as fast as possible on foot,by car or in horse-drawn carts. It must be to that experience that Iowe my lasting fear of low flying aircraft over my head, as well asany type of fireworks. After abandoning the car due to a lack of fuel,continuing on foot, where possible by train (but the trains weretaken over by the Polish army and besides were the first target of theGerman bombers), and sometimes on horse-drawn carts, where suchcould be had from wayside villages.2

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Alek and me, 1939

2. At the outset of the German invasion from the west, the Polish army as well asthe population of the western Poland, fled in a chaotic attempt to find safety in theeastern part of Poland. It was for that reason that the Germans bombed the roadsleading in that direction. Within a few days the secret agreement between theGermans and the Russians was revealed, namely the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, thenon-aggression pact between the two countries, which had been signed in Moscowon the 23rd of August 1939, in view of dividing the lands between the Baltic and theBlack Sea between themselves. On the 1st of September the Wehrmacht attacked thewest and south borders of Poland, on the 17th of that month the Red Army marchedin through its eastern borders. The two armies held a victory parade in the middleof the country.


We arrived in Lwōw and immediately had to register our presenceand address in the town as temporary residents of the city. Of ourstay there I remember very little as I became ill (learning later justhow ill), given up for dead and saved in extremis by a doctor whodeclared that the crisis caused by pneumonia was over. Thesymptoms which I was showing were due to severe dehydration,caused by the high temperature that I had suffered, and herecommended I was to be given water a drop at a time until recovery.By that time our parents were in the deepest despair and our mothervowed that if I recovered she would adopt an orphan inthanksgiving. She would have done this, I know, because she madeother vows later through the war which I know she kept, but thisone proved impossible due to developments which followed.

Before the war all the family banked with the Holzers, ‘the familybank’ (on our mother’s side) and when rumours started about theGerman invasion of Poland everyone rushed to the banks to taketheir money out, our mother among them. She said that she came tothe bank and asked the cashier (with a big queue in front of hiswindow) to let her in behind the barrier, as they usually did, so shecould get her money. Immediately one of the partners was called,took her aside and said:

What do you think you are doing here? Do you want tostart a veritable panic among our clients? Go homequietly and as we are about to close for the day,tomorrow morning at seven there will be a messenger atyour door with an envelope and all your money will bethere.

The next morning came, but no messenger, no envelope… the bankhad closed, not just for the day, but definitively, and all the directorshad left the country quietly.

When we returned to Poland after the war our mother had a dream(she had strange and often prophetic dreams regarding herself and herfamily). She dreamt that her beloved uncle, Maurycy Holzer, stoodover her and said again and again: “Alisiu, get up and go and get yourmoney out of the bank in Zurich, it is there in the name of one ofthe partners (Birnbaum), who is now in America; but the money is

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yours and my money which I left for you is also there.” Our cousinAdam (my mother’s nephew of whom I shall write more later in thisaccount) did make an attempt in the ’80s to recover the money, ofwhich a part had in fact been left in a Swiss bank, and part withUncle Maurycy’s friend and partner, Birnbaum. However, this manclaimed that he took it with him to Holland to keep it safe and thatthere the Germans despoiled him of it.

Many numbered accounts in Swiss banks were lost, as banksamalgamated, records were destroyed, sometimes deliberately, sothat those few Jews who survived or whose families survived veryseldom recovered what had been deposited there before the outbreakof the war. Although a part of the Holzer family, emigrating in goodtime either to the United States or South America, undoubtedly tookthe lion’s share of the family fortune with them, there is no doubtthat some accounts, like that of our mother’s beloved uncleMaurycy’s, deposited in Switzerland with the thought that Ignacy,his son, would be able to use it, were never found. Poor Ignacy, tenwhen war broke out, was murdered by the Nazis, but the moneywould have been there for claimants of his family, ie our mother,Dzidka and Adam. However, in spite of letters to banks, a specialtrip to the States and numerous enquiries, the money was neverrecovered.

We arrived in Lwōw where our mother’s older sister Musia Schererlived with her husband and two children, Dzidka (Janina) and Adam,both a little older than my brother and I . A few days after our arrival

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Musia Reifer Scherer


there, on the 17th of September, the Soviets took over the city.3Everyone who was not on the list of inhabitants of Lwōw was toldto register with the police.

Then one early morning came the announcement that all those onthe lists would be evacuated from Lwōw. There followed a typicallyRussian procedure of early morning rounding-up by the military ofeveryone on the lists that had been prepared according to the above-mentioned registration. We were told to come down quickly – nopacking, no preparation, no time to make any decision as what mightbe needed. It turned out later that the most important things to take,things that would make life bearable on the long journey and in theSiberian taiga (the dense forests consisting mainly of pine), wouldhave been warm clothes, cooking utensils and jewellery. Money(Polish zlotys) would be worthless in Russia. But we took none ofthese useful things and at the last minute our grandmother handed allher jewellery over to Aunt Musia to look after while we were away.This meant the ensuing starvation of the starting months of our exile(after that everyone starved in Russia anyway), but the jewellery leftwith Musia might have been what saved Adam’s life in the farmhousehideout (of which I shall speak later), so it served a good purpose. Asto warm clothing we survived without it and learnt to roll rags andnewspaper round our feet to insulate them inside the valenki (feltboots) that everyone wore in the Russian winter. Cooking utensils,containers in which one could keep water on the rare occasions whenone managed to get water during the erratic stops of the train,spoons, knives… nobody could have imagined what an enormousdifference the possession of such utilitarian objects could make toone’s existence in that slow journey into the unknown. Similarly,during the early days of arrival, what a nuisance their absence was toall those, like us, who did not have them and always had to borrowand hence to wait before we could eat the meagre, never hot soup.

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3. Lwōw in Eastern Poland was before 1920, as part of the Austrio-HungarianEmpire, known under the name of Lemberg. Between 1920 and the outbreak of thewar it was known as Lwōw (pronounced Lvouv in English). From September 1939until 1991 when it was under Soviet rule its name was Lvov, and now, as part ofUkraine it is known as Lviv.


With the Soviet troops invading Lwōw, the first thing to happen wasthat shops were emptied of all goods by the Red Army soldiers whohad never seen so much food, clothes and supplies in Soviet Russia.They would drink any alcohol they could lay their hands on, be itfrom shops, houses they requisitioned or even from the bottles ofperfume or eau de cologne they found in bathrooms. Crosses wereremoved from the outside as well as the inside of buildings, thePolish white eagle disappeared, and the local population wassqueezed into as little space as possible to make room for theinvading army.

Up to the start of hostilities the population of Lwōw consistedroughly of 12,000 each of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. With theGerman invasion of Western Poland (1st September 1939) there wasa massive movement of populations from there towards the east andLwōw’s population swelled. When, on the 17th of September, theSoviet troops marched into Poland across its eastern borders, theincoming population from the western and central areas had toreport to the police. Between that day and 1941, when the Sovietoffensive turned against the German invasion, what had been easternPoland was subjected to Sovietization. As a result of this hundreds ofthousands of people were deported from that area to Kazakhstan orSiberia, and tens of thousands more were shot.

And so it came about that we were among those being deported. Iremember vaguely the scene of our departure from Lwōw, therailway station, the long train, the cattle trucks in which we travelledand which were closed from outside by sliding a wooden plankacross the door. The platform full of a milling crowd, women intears, clutching crying children, uniformed Russians shoutingincomprehensible orders. Our father trying to contact his sisterwhose friend, Wanda Wasilewska, a fervent Communist, was said towield power in the Soviet Union (in fact she was in Kuybishev laterwhen we passed through it and effectively at the time held animportant advisory position in Stalin’s entourage). My father hopedthat she would be able to have us liberated from this transport whichwas to take us who knew where to. Our mother threatened to throwherself onto the railway lines if we were forced onto the train.Altogether a picture of despair that dark and early morning, and yet

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that enforced exile was to save us from the Nazis, from the ghetto,from concentration camp and most probably from death, whichovertook so many of our family and so many of our co-religionistswho were not taken to Russia as we were. In June 1941, as we learntonly much later, over 30,000 Jews then living in eastern Poland wereslaughtered over death pits in the massacre of Babi Yar by theUkrainians and the Nazis. The extermination of the Jews was a Naziidea, but its realisation depended on willing collaborators, be itRussians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians or Ukrainians.

The trucks were overfilled, with 30 to 40 people in each, of whom asmany as could settled themselves on the wooden bunks, with othersfinding a space on the floor. There was a small window high up, ahole in the corner for essential needs and a bar across the sliding doorto shut us in. We were hungry and the cold was intense. The trainstravelled for weeks to reach their destination in various parts ofSiberia. From time to time the trains would stop for no definedreason, for a longer or shorter period of time. During these stopspeople would try to get the most precious of commodities, kipiatok(hot water). I believe that quite a lot of people went missing in thecourse of those days by not rejoining their train in the sudden andhurried departures. They were then integrated with anothertransport and so separated from their families for the months andyears to come. Every day a bucket of water was handed into eachtruck and also a bucket of warm, watery soup, consisting usually ofcabbage, turnip or potatoes, and black bread. We were not used toeating black bread, but it is amazing how quickly one learns themeans to survival.

Of the journey I remember little except the humiliating episodes ateach unannounced stop which might last anything from a fewminutes to a few hours. My grandmother would take me with herbehind the wheels or under the train, anywhere she thought morediscreet and private, more sheltered from prying eyes, and wouldencourage me to ‘go to the toilet now’, an infuriating and impossibleorder. Sometimes people would venture further afield in search offood to buy in the village near the train’s stopping place, and onoccasion the train would suddenly move on. I remember also thelittle family groups, the privileged places of some near an opening in

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the wooden wall of the carriage, a little window, a view to theoutside, a little fresh air.

Our parents spent those stops at stations or near villages (where thetrain might be held up for an indefinite time) in trying to barter oneor other of our few possessions for some extra food from villagers,who would at times be found around the stops. Food was handed outduring certain stops by the soldiers accompanying the transport,basic food in minimal amounts – cabbage soup, black bread, foodthat seemed rough and inadequate but of which we would learn todream later during the hungry years to come, when a slice of blackbread would be the height of luxury and an impossible dream. Hencecomes my inability (and I think a similar difficulty of anyone havingonce known hunger) to throw away bread, however stale, howeverhard. I remember very clearly standing with my brother Alek at anarmy canteen window, our parents being by that time in prison, acold evening mist around us, the warm, steamy hall full of soldierswith red stars on their hats, sitting eating at long wooden tablesbehind the glass on which our noses were squashed, and a youngsoldier coming out to give us a piece of bread. An angel would nothave been more welcome.

The Soviet reality soon became apparent to us, to our parents andgrandparents, as we of course understood little of what washappening. We arrived at our destination, a small settlement,Piervomajsk, surrounded by the almost impenetrable Siberianforests. It was a place in the middle of nowhere, a big empty barrackbuilding with small windows made of fish bladder which wouldallow some light to filter in without affording more than a vagueview out and endeavour to keep out the intense cold of a Siberianwinter, with the howling of the wolves through the night and thewhistling of the gale winds around the fragile compound of huts.

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Chapter IIISiberia

We were all housed in barrack hut accommodation on arrival, andsorted out into the different categories. Those that would work inconstructing huts – which meant cutting down trees, preparingplanks, building – that was the group our father was in, and it wasduring this work that a tree fell on him. The accident reopened hisold appendicitis wound, so that for the rest of his life he had a bigpouch of his intestines hanging from his abdomen which had to besupported by a bandage and later, in easier circumstances after thewar, by a specially made belt. Our mother was put to work in thebania (community baths or a kind of sauna), which consisted of a hutconstantly heated with wood to a temperature at which the hotwater contained in the big wooden chests was steaming, almostboiling. When coming in to wash, people would use it mixed withsufficient cold water to pour over themselves while slapping theirbodies with twigs – a seemingly primitive yet very efficient processof becoming both clean and warm. Our mother was one of thewomen on duty there who brought water from the river, and woodfrom the forest, responsible for the constant functioning of the bania.As was explained to us that first morning, everyone had to work, “nowork, no bread” being the motto oft repeated until one knew it byheart.

“If you want to eat you will work”, and, “Man is not a pig, he willeat anything” – these were the two favourite sayings of the soldiersin charge of our Polish community and thus became the first wordswe learnt to understand in Russian.

Only the children and the very old were exempted from this rule. Iremember days of what must have been already warm weather whenwe children were all gathered around a tree and listened spellbound

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to the older girls reading stories and poems to us little ones. Iremember learning the poems of Tuwim, and I particularlyremember (and it must have made a great impression on me as Iremember it exactly to this day and it has been seventy years ago thatI heard it) the magic of Anne of Green Gables being read to us underthat tree in Siberia.

One and a half million Poles were forcibly deported to the SovietUnion between September 1939 and July 1940, and that is notcounting those dedicated Communists who had made their waythere already earlier for ideological reasons, and the majority ofwhom languished in Soviet jails.

By 1939 the Polish government had outlawed the Communist party(which had been up to then 20,000 strong) and in consequence somecommunists were imprisoned and some went into hiding and laterformed the basis of the clandestine Peoples’ Army (Armja Krajowa),which formed the largest independent resistance movement plannedto fight the Germans in occupied Europe during the Second WorldWar. These faithful communists were later to have their revengewhen recompensed by the Soviet authorities. After the defeat of theGermans in 1945 the Nazi occupation of Poland was replaced by aRussian ‘protectionary force’ and they were given key positions inthe Polish puppet government. The ultimate goal of the PolishPeople’s Army during those early years went beyond the end ofGerman occupation, planning to confront the Soviets with a restoredPolish state. Stalin understood that, and it accounts for one of the

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Alek and me in Russia during the war


worst atrocities committed by the Soviets while they were masters ofeastern Poland, namely Katyn. In 1943 the Germans discoveredevidence of massive executions in Katyn forests near Smolensk,where Stalin’s troops had shot some 22,000 Polish prisoners, mainlyofficers, over death pits.

Initially the Soviets denied all knowledge of this massacre, blaming iton the Germans and using the revelation of this crime as a pretext forbreaking off relations with the Polish government in exile, suggestingthat the Poles were ‘showing sympathy to the common enemy’. Infact the Soviet Union, which had not signed the 1929 conventionregarding prisoners of war, refused throughout the war years todivulge any information concerning the fate of either the Polishofficers in Soviet captivity, or the captured soldiers of theWehrmacht. The Katyn massacre took place in the spring of 1940.The discovery of eight pits containing thousands of bodies in theforest of Katyn was announced on the German radio on 12th April1943.

Until the end of the war Stalin refused responsibility for these deaths,blaming it on the Germans. Only in the spring of 1952, with theenquiry commission set up in Frankfurt by the American congressinto the massacre of the Polish officers in Katyn, the responsibilityof the NKVD, the Soviet political police, was definitely established.The truth was finally acknowledged only after the demise of theSoviet Union when Michail Gorbachev, and later also Boris Yeltsinhanded over to the Polish government documents concerning theshooting in three successive groups of 21,857 Polish officers, withorders signed by Stalin, Molotov and Mikoyan.

It is known now that tens of thousands of Poles were killed by theNKVD (later known as the KGB) during the evacuation of prisons inLvov after the start of the German-Russian war in June 1941 –political prisoners, people who refused to take Russian passports,those who refused to vote, workers accused of absenteeism, soldiersunable for any reason to travel east. So in hindsight, we were ofcourse very lucky to be on this train to Siberia, in fact even luckierto be out of Krakōw by the time the Germans arrived, by the timethe yellow stars had to be worn by Jews, by the time the ghetto wasenforced, by the time that the rest of our family perished in

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concentration camps. But of course at that time we were not to knowall this and half of our co-passengers were reproaching the other half,either husbands or wives, as the case might be, for making them leavehome – surely nothing very bad could happen to us under the care ofsuch cultured people as the Germans, while here we are in the handsof these barbarians in their chapkas (the typical Russian soldiers’hats) with their red stars.

Our arrival in Siberia, in the area known as Piervomajsk, introducedus to the realities of Soviet life at its most basic. We were at firsthoused in long barracks in the winter of 1940 when the temperaturescould fall to 70° Centigrade below, with a chill factor in those fierceblowing winds beating at us from the surrounding steppes (tundra).Food was minimal for survival, lice and fleas and bedbugs abounded,typhus, malaria, dysentery and tuberculosis were difficult to avoidand everybody had to work and work hard. The men wereimmediately set to cutting trees in the impenetrable forests of thesurrounding taiga, where skulls and mass graves were oftenuncovered by the men digging the earth. These were from the 1935killings of the Kulaks and the earlier Trotzkyists assassinated andcovered by a thin layer of earth in their shallow graves. In thesummer the malarial swamps thawed out and new diseases assailedthe work-worn, hungry population of our settlement. Our maternalgrandfather died in such circumstances, possibly of some infectiousdisease but basically of starvation. As did so many others. I believethat what kept our parents alive through these terrible years, peoplewho had never known hardship, manual work or hunger, was thefeeling of responsibility for us, their children. They knew that if theywere no longer there to protect us, we had no chance of survival, andso, however hungry, weary, ill, they had to fight on and live, live forthe sake of their children. And that is what saved them andconsequently saved us.

A cheering and oft repeated saying was: “Ne zdohnesh to privyknesh,ne privyknesh to zdohnesh” (If you do not die you will get used tothings, if you do not get used to them you will die). Another was:“Vashi kosti zdes ostanutsa” (Here your bones will remain). Which,in view of the impassable forests surrounding us, the stretches oftaiga alternating with the tundra that made up the Siberian infinity,

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combined with the impossibility and interdiction of moving even asfar as the next village without permission (the unattainableprepustka) from the commander of the settlement, seemed more thanlikely.

Huts had to be built. Water had to be carried for the bania, as well asfor everyday consumption. Toilets had to be made with pits dug andover them an unsteady wooden plank with a hole in the middle of itto crouch over. Children too small to be able for any of these jobshad to collect the branches and cuttings of the felled trees. This wascalled podgotovka (preparation), implying a preparation of a personfor more serious work and the preparation of the forest floor for thecollection of the tree trunks which were dragged to the river fortransport.

A man received 400 grams a day of heavy, wet, black bread, whichmade it only a small piece, often to be shared with members of thefamily if there were some too old or too young to work andtherefore not given any food. Those who had jewellery or clothes totrade with the local peasants, or those whose skills enabled them toearn something (for instance dressmakers), could get vegetables oreggs, cheese or even meat – otherwise a family’s diet was meagre.There was constant hunger for which the only remedy was to stealor barter.

Those months in Siberia, that stay, remain as a period of intense andever-present hunger, biting cold and summary arrests. Those arrestedwere sent to labour camps, to coal mines in the Caucasus, to stonequarries, to cotton fields on the collective farms (kolkhoz). TheRussian authorities decreed that all the adults of the Polishcommunity had to give up their nationality and take Russianpassports. Most refused, fearing they would then never be allowed toleave. The grandparents of those families that had grandparents withthem said that they would do as the Russians required and stay tolook after the children, their grandchildren and those who had nograndparents to look after them. Their reasoning was as follows:either the war would finish soon and the passport problem would beof no consequence, those imprisoned would be released and theSoviet nationality that they themselves were taking would beinvalidated; or the war would go on for a long time, by which time

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they who were old would no longer be alive and so again theiradopted nationality would be of no consequence. And so it was thatthe oldest generation stayed to group together and take care of theyoungest.

This is what happened while the parents were jailed for disobedience,the refusal of Soviet nationality. Our parents were taken with othersand I well remember waiting at the prison gates in the hope of beingable to leave some bread or other food, a piece of warm clothing, amessage that we were thinking of them. After a while these prisonerswere dispersed around the country to places of work, our mother tocotton fields and our father to the notorious mines of the labourcamps. All contact with them, however one-sided in the first weeks,now was altogether impossible until their miraculous release.

Our mother was away for a few months, our father for well over ayear. When they released him he made his way to us without ofcourse any means of letting us know he was coming. And so onewinter night there was a knocking on the hut window and there wasour father, tired, emaciated, dressed in a torn overcoat, from thelapels of which there peered the trembling head of a puppy whichour father had found on his way and which was dying of cold andhunger. Children remember odd things. I hardly remember myfather’s state of health, which must have been very shaky, but I doremember how we cared for the puppy. We of course had hardlyanything to eat and were perpetually hungry. But we kept that dog.For how long I don’t remember, or with what we fed it, or whathappened to it eventually. I suppose it landed up in a Russian familybetter able to feed it.

On one occasion – oh miracle! – we acquired a chunk of meat which,as it was during the summer, my parents decided to bury for coolnessuntil the next day in a hole dug in the earth and covered with a stone.In the morning we discovered that our dear dog, perpetually ashungry as we were, spent the night burrowing around the stonewhich we had thought so safe a cover, and the meat was gone. Iremember to this day the tragedy of that moment.

The other thing that my father brought with him from hisimprisonment was a wooden spoon, a round wooden spoon such as

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is used in Russia and which a fellow prisoner had carved out andgiven him as a remembrance. Our father was very fond of this spoonand spoke to us a lot about it and about his companions in the labourcamp, and I must have been so impressed that I decided to show it offat school, without asking permission to take it. Of course it nevercame back from school, theft was rife, and I still remember ourfather’s sadness and the pain of my guilt in this loss. I still feel it.Another sad memory of my childhood is being accused and sentpacking in the bazaar. As a treat I had been sent to buy sweets. I hadlaid the coins on the glass case of the stall while the owner of it wasgetting the sweets ready for me, only to be told that I never put anymoney down, and so, shouted at for shame, I was chased homeempty-handed.

There were no schoolbooks of course, and in the absence of anynotebooks or even writing paper, which was quite unobtainablethen, we made our own writing books by sewing together pages cutout from newspapers and learnt to write between the printed lines.Newspapers were always available, ‘Pravda’ (the Truth) and ‘Izvestia’(the News) both of course misnomers. There was a saying that in theTruth there was no news and in the News there was no truth.

We lived in that settlement of Piervomajsk in the huts which the menhad built, and I remember our hut so well that I could draw it now.I remember where the door stood and the window. Of furniturethere was very little. One moved the table away to the side for thenight and set up the beds, and in the morning one folded up the bedsand the table and chairs formed a living room of the interior of thehut. A small cooking-washing corner and no bathroom. One washedin the bania and went outside in the field for other needs. I stillremember how afraid I was to go outside in the dark if I ever had to,and how a grown-up would have to stand at the door and call out‘cuckoo’ to me until I came in again. For a long time I remainedafraid of the dark, a result of those nature-enforced nocturnal outingsI suppose, as well as the result of the horrific Russian fairy tales, filledwith brigands and murders and dark woods… and also of course thereal happenings of that period, which were not so different from thefairy tales.

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I remember very clearly my world of ‘little people’ (krasnoludki)who were living under my bed. I didn’t have to look down, I knewthey were there, a whole village of them: little houses, school, shop,station… and all these little bearded men, kerchieved women,children running about… they were my little people and as I wasgoing to sleep I could imagine them getting ready for the night aswell. When I woke up in the morning they were already busily goingabout their jobs -they were my best friends and I was their protector.

The most difficult thing to put up with all through the war years washunger. An ever constant, never to be forgotten gnawing feeling. Thefood we did get was inadequate not only in quantity, but also inquality. In the summer some managed to supplement the very basicrations with going into the forest for wild fruit or, a favouriteRussian pastime, hodit po griby (looking for mushrooms). Thesewere dangerous activities as the forests were dense, and often peopleleaving the small settlement would get lost and on occasion werenever found again. Also, of course, not many of us knew much aboutthe harmful sort of mushroom, and there were often cases of foodpoisoning which added to the generally weak health of theundernourished community and the already endemic dysenterywhich had very serious consequences. I remember our grandmothertaking us out of the compound to what must have been just the edgeof the forest, though it seemed deep into them for us children, andsitting on a tree stump while we, keeping always in sight of her,picked wild berries to take home for a treat. Our grandmother (thatis our maternal grandmother) I remember as small, intense, andusually on bad terms with our mother. She must have denied herselfeven the little food that was allotted to her so as to give it to us, theever-hungry, skinny grandchildren, because there was, it seems tome, ever less of her, until she just faded away. Though said to dieafter an illness, she really died of malnutrition. There must have beenmany a grandmother in those days that could not stand the sight oftheir starving grandchildren, and how sad now to think that theydied so much earlier than their normal span of life would haveallowed.

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Chapter IVNo Longer Enemies

On the 22nd June, 1941 Hitler attacked his erstwhile ally Stalin, thusbeginning a second eastern offensive, and Germany invaded theSoviet Union. In October of that year an amnesty was declared forthe Poles all through the Soviet Union thanks to a ‘treaty offriendship’ or the Sikorski-Maiski agreement signed in London bythe Polish government in exile.4

By the 6th of August 1941, only weeks after the German hostilitiesagainst the Soviets began, General Anders was released on Stalin’sorders from his prison cell in the notorious Lubianka jail in Moscowand was appointed as the commander of the Polish troops in theSoviet Union.

On 30th November General Sikorski arrived in Moscow (fromLondon) and was welcomed by Molotov. Stalin and Sikorski signeda joint declaration, proclaiming that the Polish army would fightagainst the Germans side by side with the allies, while:

1 Poles would be released from labour campsthroughout the Soviet Union;

2 The whereabouts of the missing Polish soldiers andofficers would be investigated (General Anders had44,000 soldiers under his command, but very fewofficers to lead them);

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4. After Germany’s takeover of Poland there was ensuing chaos due to all theleaders, political and military, fleeing to London, where the government in exilecame into being. The Polish government formed in London included the majorpolitical parties: Socialists, Peasant Party, Social Democrats, Nationalists, Catholics,and all at loggerheads with each other. Władyslaw Sikorski was appointed as PrimeMinister of the Polish government in exile. He and Ivan Maiski, the Sovietambassador in London, in the presence of the British authorities signed the treaty offriendship between Poland and the Soviet Union.


3 Bigger rations would be issued by Stalin for thePolish forces, and,

4 The future of the Polish frontiers would be revisedwhen hostilities ended.

In fact, those in the Gulags were released only two years later andfought under General Berling. Some were never released. Themissing officers were never found, or rather their bodies were foundtwo years later, more than 20,000 of them having been shot in coldblood by the Soviets in 1940. As to the fourth part of the abovedescribed agreement, after the war Poland nominally regained itsfrontiers (for instance Lvov became again part of Poland), but in factthe Soviet domination of the country and of its government (apuppet government set up by the communist regime) was already inplace and true Polish independence came only after the struggle ofthe Solidarnosc movement and the fall of communism in the ’80s.

The Polish army under the command of General Anders wasevacuated from Central Asia across the Caspian Sea to Persia, henceby way of Iraq and Syria to Cairo and Alexandria. Once in theMiddle East, the Polish troops trained in camps side by side with theBritish army, following which they participated in the western desertcampaign against the German troops under General Rommel. Manyof the young Polish trainees were sent to Britain for further training(where many of them joined and distinguished themselves in the AirForce), or to Italy where they participated in the 1944-45 Italiancampaign.

The Soviet Union suffered greatly after Hitler attacked in June ’41.In spite of warnings Stalin refused to believe that his German allieswould turn against him and so was completely unprepared for theGerman invasion. Moscow and Stalingrad were surrounded by theGermans by the winter of ’41-’42. The battle for Stalingradconstituted one of the most heroic episodes of the war in the SovietUnion. It lasted until February 1943 when Marshal von Paulus of the6th German Army capitulated. The city was surrounded by theGerman forces and the siege was so long and so tight that people aterats and many died of starvation. It was not till late in 1943 that the

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danger of being completely conquered by the Germans was finallylifted and the Russian people could breathe again.

The Soviet government and all important offices, military equipmentproduction, etc were moved to Kuybishev in 1941 which became thetemporary capital after the evacuation of Moscow.

The Polish army was recognised by the allied powers and, as far asthis affected us, parcels containing food, soap, medicines etc fromAmerica began being distributed among the Polish community. Theparcels themselves were not always of much use. The containerswould reach us in a broken state, the tea would taste of soap, theflour or sugar would be spilt, candles would arrive in small pieces…but the psychological value of these gifts were inestimable as moral-boosters and items which could not be consumed could always beexchanged for matches, or salt, or needles or thread or paper – forwhatever at that particular moment was unavailable in the openmarket.

There were three transports of Polish troops leaving from CentralAsia. Any Poles who could, left Russia with these transports, eitheras soldiers or families of soldiers, or under any pretext at all, as thatway there lay the hope of escape. It was only by luck however thatone would learn of this possibility. There was no official notificationto the Poles in the Soviet Union of the formation or evacuation of aPolish force. Many were completely ignorant of these facts. Othersheard by chance, sometimes too late to do anything about it. DespiteStalin’s orders that Jewish and Ukrainian Poles should be kept in thecamps, many managed to slip through the net and join the Polishtroops on their way to Iran, occupied at that time by Russian andBritish forces. Taking advantage of these transports of Polish troops,our family, like many others, tried to reach Tashkent in time to leaveon one of the troop trains. Poles travelled from the length andbreadth of the country to join these trains. They travelled oncrammed trains, they walked, they begged lifts from localinhabitants.

Their odyssey through the Soviet Union towards Central Russia andto Tashkent is marked by graves such as that of my grandmother’s.From Tashkent the transport took them to Krasnovodsk on the

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Caspian coast and many of them died on the way there, and manymore on the ships that took them across the sea to Iran and so wereburied at sea. Among the 100,000 that survived and reached theBritish training camps in the Middle East was the future primeminister of Israel, Menachem Begin. For those, like him, whoreached Iran, it seemed like heaven. They were deloused, they werefed, they were housed cleanly and comfortably.

For us, however, the news of these transports came late to our partof the world, and by the time we started off, the third transport wasbeing assembled near Tashkent. Due to the many setbacks which weexperienced on our long trek through the country, we missed the lastof these transports and remained in Central Asia until the end of thewar. Tadjikistan therefore became the first country that I thought ofas being mine, and the country of my first school years.

It was the winter of 1942. I well remember our journey from Siberiato Central Asia. We got to Kuybishev where my parents were againto contact Wanda Wasilewska. In her youth she had been a closefriend of our aunt Helenka’s, and as I have mentioned, was now a die-hard communist. Moreover, she was one that was close to the rulingclique around Stalin, unlike many of the idealistic Polish communistswho made their way to the Soviet Union with the idea of finding ared carpet laid out in their honour and instead found themselvesthrown into jail or worse, disappeared without trace. It was hopedshe would be able to procure the necessary papers for our onwardjourney (prepustki, the ever necessary permits in circulating aroundRussia, be it even from one village to the next). Kuybishev was at thattime the political capital of the Soviet Union as Stalin was forced toleave Moscow before the imminent threat of its take-over by theNazi army. It therefore became the important city of the SovietUnion until the Germans were conquered. There (thanks to WandaWasilewska) we were to see an unforgettable ballet of “Don Quixote”(performed by the marvellous Bolshoi ballet company), the beautyand colour of which constituted my first moving theatricalexperience. To go on from there to our destination we had to crossthe Volga River which that year froze early so that we were stuckwhile waiting for a thaw. It was while waiting that our grandmotherbecame ill and had to be taken to hospital where she died. Like ourgrandfather before her, she died basically of malnutrition.

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A long journey by train followed, unpredictable stops, forestsaround the Volga, then a mountainous region, followed by flatcountry of the Asiatic steppes stretching far into the distance, intothe desert. We eventually got to Tashkent, but too late for the Polishtroop-train which we had hoped to join, and so we were stuck inCentral Asia for the remainder of the war. Of course one did not justchoose where one would settle and we were allocated to Dzambul,not too distant from Alma-Ata, in Kazakstan, near the border ofTadjikistan where we were eventually sent to. Beyond the Aral Sea,by the Tien Shan mountains, there were Uzbeks to the south of usand Kazaks to the north.

We had, since the beginning of September 1939, travelled fromKrakōw to Lvov, from Lvov to Siberia, some 4,000 kilometres, andfrom Siberia another slow journey to Tashkent, Alma Ata andDjambul… another 2,000 kilometres. Kazakstan was to be the homefor the next few years to exiles both Russian and foreign, from allover the Soviet Union, as was also the neighbouring Tadjikistan andalso Uzbekistan. In the years following our exile I met many otherPolish expatriates who had spent those years in one or the other ofthese states. During the Stalin era there was little to distinguish thembeyond their origins and the language used in one or the other –Kazakstan and Uzbekistan shared a language Turkish in origin, whileTadjikistan’s origins were basically Persian. The life, the hardship,the absence of men in those days (all were in the army), the very hardworking women, the poverty, the hunger – it was shared by all theregion and the exiles sent to one state were no better off than thosesent to another. The difficult life was the lot of one and all. It was notuntil much later, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, thateach became an independent state and some fared better than others.Kazakstan for instance, due to its natural resources, became muchbetter off and Djambul, which I remember as being an insignificantsettlement (posolek), is now an important town on the map.

And so it was that I began my schooling in 1942, at the age of eight,in the small settlement near Djambul, in Russian, as that was theofficial language throughout the Soviet Union (although Uzbek andTadjik were spoken by the indigenous population).

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The map on the left hand page shows our routefrom Krakow through Europe to Russia, withthe map on the right showing a close up of the

area where we spent several years


THE CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM

Anita Muir

TheChildrenofAbrahamAnitaMuir

BBBB

Beginnings, before the world changed, before the Second World War,before a time when I knew anything of the beauty and vastness andvariety of the world, my beginnings in Krakōw, Poland in the 1930s. Myorigins there, in the well assimilated Jewish family of a comfortable,warm, loving home of the Abrahamers...

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the children of abraham

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early life

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