I wanted to help my mother, you see, and at the same time to establish a certain authority about myself. The most self-righteous authority is justified in the name of God, and I found out at the age of six that if I said things in the name of God, I derived a very pure feeling about myself. And so it happened that in trying to tell a more precise truth, I put both of us in great danger. Let me explain.
It was during World War II. We were Jews surviving on forged Catholic papers. My mother had decided to change her employment. She read in the classified section of the newspaper that there was a gentleman who was looking for a lady to care for his infant. My mother assumed this would be an even safer job than her present one as housekeeper. Somehow walking on the street pushing a baby carriage was less likely to make a Nazi suspicious.
She took me along on her interview and that was her undoing. I was only with her for a brief visit, fresh from one of the foster homes where I had been busy practicing my Catholic identity with great vigor—excited by the make-believe world of a new name, prayers on the rosary, and the details of the life that had been sketched out for me. It was all very challenging, and I was eager to show off to my mother my proficiency and total rapport with my new self.
We arrived at the gentleman’s apartment where he ushered us in politely. The man looked at my mother and was pleased with what he saw. She was, after all, in the prime of her youth. Though she had already experienced excruciating fears and begun to absorb the death call into her every cell, from without, nature lay on her like a dewy blanket, complementing her with a softly tender cheek and lustrous black hair. Her small, short nose contributed to her Aryan appearance, and her bearing and speech were that of a refined Polish lady. In front of her was an attractive young man about her age, whose manner was gentle and whose concern for his child’s welfare was admirable.
His wife, he explained, had left him and their child, and he was anxious to find a suitable maternal woman with whom he could entrust the child’s care. My mother was very happy with this beginning, and after some exchange of polite conversation she took out her precious document and handed it to him. He studied it for a moment and read her name out loud: Halina Bialek. As you might imagine, I had sat quietly all this time, smiling or looking serious, whichever face the moment demanded. Now suddenly, I had a chance to be noticed and also to receive a star in God’s book in heaven. But more than that, my friends—more than that—I would establish myself as a purveyor of truths by revealing an oversight. I would prove myself as such a great truth-teller that I could forever after tell the biggest lie and go undetected.
Ah! What a wonderful feeling it is to reveal the truth. How fondly people look at you and with what respect they compliment you and your honesty. But even more than that, how virtuous you feel! How strong and self-righteous!
And so, I opened my mouth and spoke with great indignation:
“That is not true at all.”
I looked at my mother and immediately knew there was something wrong with what I said, because she turned a sickly grayish white. The man sat there watching her chalky face and I quickly tried to recoup my position, “The name,” I explained as hurriedly as I could—I was really getting scared now looking at my mother, that, as stated on the document, the name was Halina Sabina Bialek. “You forgot to mention her middle name,” I finished, adding emphasis to the “middle.”
Though I made this correction quickly, it didn’t seem to improve matters at all. My mother was getting paler by the moment, all the time knowing her fear had been observed.
“Why did you get so frightened?” the Polish man asked gently. My mother’s fear had been detected. And the question now made my mother even more scared. She was no longer looking for the job, she was looking for the quickest exit. Through her panic-stricken mind flashed suspicions that this man could be a Nazi. At any minute he could ask to scrutinize her papers and perhaps have them investigated. Finally, she took her leave. I followed politely, making my blue eyes big at the man like a misunderstood angel. My mother promised to be in touch.
This, my friends, was not the only bad thing that happened to us that day or even that hour. You can imagine the state of my mother’s mind as she boarded the bus that was to take us to the place where she lived and worked. You might say that what followed could have happened regardless, but she certainly did not have the same presence of mind she might have had otherwise. Let us suppose for the sake of continuity that this is so. After all, we don’t know why things happened as they did. All we know is what happened.
My mother and I got on the bus. In her purse, underneath her coat, she had carefully placed all her documents.You wouldn’t believe what kind of purse she had placed them in: a gorgeous solid-gold mesh clutch! I remember that purse as if it were yesterday. Besides being beautiful to look at—shiny and the size of two adult fists—it was heavenly to touch. When you picked it up by its solid frame and placed it gently in your hand, the gold mesh fell cascading into your palm, folding upon itself in reclining layers like the softest, heaviest cold silk. It was hard to believe such a texture could be gotten out of a metal. Just to look at it and hold it in my hands, which I did whenever my mother let me, brought out all my young appreciation of beauty.
Well somehow, there was a big crush of people in the bus, and when we got off the bus my mother no longer had that purse underneath her coat. Maybe this was the moment when she got the scar on her heart that they saw on X-rays in America eight years later. It is hard to say. After all, she had experienced many comparable terrors already and many more were yet to come.
I assumed my mother was shaking because someone had stolen the gold bag. That’s what I was upset about. I didn’t know she had put all of her documents inside of it. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have known why it was more upsetting to lose some papers than a ravishing gold bag.
If you appreciate the subtlety of this terror, you will understand why perhaps that scar could have occurred at that moment on a busy street in Warsaw. You see, the documents in that bag included all of her identification, her address of employment, etc. What was an average Polish lady doing with a bunch of documents in a gold bag? And who carried a gold bag underneath her coat on a bus in Warsaw? A Jew, of course. Who else! A Jew who probably had more gold and diamonds stashed away, no doubt.
How lucky for my mother that the thief who stole that bag was cowardly. If he had more guts or greed, he probably could have succeeded in blackmailing her. But this thief was apparently satisfied with his plunder and wasn’t looking for further trouble.
Years later, after the war, my mother recounted the rest of the story of the gold bag. She met my father that evening and when she told him what happened, he told her there was nothing for her to do but to kill herself. That all was lost. That she was doomed. That now she was really finished. He raged till he was purple in the face and my mother was sure he would have a heart attack. Just when she had lost all strength of spirit, he finished by warning her that she must pull herself together because she had a responsibility to her child. “Remember, you have a child!” was his standard warning, and I can see his sharp, greenish eyes darting fire.
My mother made a decision right then and there. She told him that she would get another set of documents from the official bureau in Warsaw. And that was where she went the very next day.
My tall mother, with her black hair pulled back demurely from her broad, domed forehead and rolled neatly into a bun. With her naturally arched black brows and polite, grayish-violet eyes, her small straight little nose and high, round cheekbones. I picture her walking into the bureau. Her movements are slow and there is nothing about her to attract attention. I can see her before the magistrate. She is presenting her case. A genuinely upset Polish citizen whose documents were stolen. She does not raise her voice. She injects emotion at just the right moment.
My mother was an excellent storyteller. Superb, in fact. The time spent before the magistrate was one of polite and sympathetic interchanges. “No one was ever rude to me,” my mother would often say after the war. “Wherever I went, people showed me kindness.”
The replacement documents were granted.
I am glad my mother lived to become an old lady. I needed all those years with her to learn to be more like her. It took me a long time because I had such an upsetting start. And I still need a lot of time. I’m a late bloomer. I will tell you something really remarkable: Every year I become more myself, if you know what I mean. But at the same time, I become more like my mother. It is strange how these things happen.
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