A Strange Dialogue

On 5 October 2012, we traveled to Łuków, near Lublin, in central-eastern Poland. The municipality was commemorating there the deportation of the Jews of that town, which had taken place on 5 October 1942. The number of Jews there had been considerable (6,000 inhabitants out of 12,000 before the war, that is, half). Several municipalities did likewise at the time. Indeed, during the second half of 1942, most of the ghettos of the towns and small towns of this region were emptied, liquidated, and their occupants sent by whole trainloads to Treblinka. It is not common for Polish municipalities to remember the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors. The Łuków commemoration was significant because of the involvement of a young journalist originally from that town, Krzysztof C., who managed to bring over survivors from Israel, the Łukover. In Paris, there is also a society of the friends of Łuków, but, notified too late, they were unable to take part.

Consulting the testimonies of the Spielberg Foundation had taught us that Marianna A., one of the last survivors of this region, had remained in Poland after the war. Might she still be alive?

We went to meet her in her village, a village where she had been born in 1930, where Polish peasants had hidden her during the war and which she never left. Her original first name was Blima; her father had been a cobbler. Before the war, Jews lived in a few villages of this area, artisans, even farmers. During the final months of 1942, the few Polish Jews who had managed to escape the German gendarmerie and its auxiliaries were desperately seeking hiding places. Blima thus found herself in a hole covered with straw beneath a pigsty. Half of her family had been shot (her mother, her sisters) some time earlier by the German gendarmerie and the Gestapo in the neighboring small town of Serokomla, where they had taken refuge. Her father, still miraculously alive, had found her this hiding place. In exchange for this refuge, Blima’s father performed cobbling work. At first she was alone in her hiding place, but very soon a little companion was brought to her, three years younger, Dora, who had escaped the Serokomla massacre. Blima was no longer alone. When her father died in the summer of 1943, killed by the Germans in the beating of a nearby forest, it was the Jewish partisans of that forest who protected the little girls, making sure that the farmer was keeping them well. Yad Vashem would award him the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

The two little girls lived pressed against each other for two years, with the possibility of going out only at night, until the arrival of the Russians in July 1944. They promised each other never to part. They were then taken out of their hiding place and led away separately to other farms, where they tended the cows for a small payment, seeing each other on Sundays. Then their paths diverged. In fact, they were immediately confronted with the dilemma that would be that of Polish Jews for the half-century that followed: leave? stay?

Blima’s whole family had perished. Of the world, she knew only her village, the neighboring small town of Serokomla, and barely the town of Łuków, some 30 km away. With little schooling — she had had only two years of education before the war — she stayed put, in what she knew, accepting what was offered to her: a welcome as a little maid in a family of poor peasants. There, she learned how to clean a house, to cook, to wash the laundry. The few Jewish survivors who returned to the region were not welcome. Fearing for her life, the host family enjoined her to be baptized, which she did.

Blima became Marianna, and she married the son of the household. She was 16; the first of her five children came into the world. “I had to be pretty for a Pole to marry me!” she told us. They worked hard as agricultural laborers in communist Poland, going off in turn to distant places to glean a few pennies, often for a month at a time. On Sundays she went to church, like the whole village. “But within myself I knew that I belonged to another people,” said Marianna, who kept within her the memory of her origins and the thought of Dora, her companion in hiding: where was Dora? Where had she gone? Why did she give no sign of life? Why had she abandoned her? More than the loss of her family, it was the thought of Dora that gnawed at Marianna.

Staying, Leaving

For Dora, it had been: Leave! Leave Poland, leave Europe. Little twelve-year-old Dora, helped at first by the Jewish Committee of Łuków — that small committee of survivors that had not managed to reach Blima-Marianna —, took a train all alone to Łódź in 1945, then left with a group for Czechoslovakia, then France, and arrived in Israel in 1948. She took part in the creation of a new world, began her schooling, trained, learned a trade, met her husband, himself a survivor of Auschwitz. She had children, a house, grandchildren.

All that time, Marianna waited for her. What they had shared in that hiding place could not be forgotten, erased. One day Dora would come back. She was convinced she had been forgotten. She had married, founded a family, but she went on thinking that one day she would see Dora again, that they would be together once more, that they would speak to each other, that the dialogue could only be suspended — it was not possible that it should be broken.

In fact, thanks to a chain of various and improbable intermediaries, ourselves among them, Blima-Marianna and Dora were brought back into each other’s presence for three days, in October 2015, after a separation of 70 years. On the one hand, they held hands the whole time; on the other, the dialogue was difficult. “I have forgotten Polish, I no longer understand it,” Dora said straightaway on arriving. She had made the journey to Lublin, accompanied by her husband and her daughter. Marianna was waiting for her, ready and resolute, full of reproaches, with the authority of the elder who had taken Dora’s fate in hand in the hiding place. “Why didn’t you come sooner? And do you remember those two times our hiding place was discovered, once by a neighboring peasant, another time by the mayor, and each time when I put myself forward to protect you?” No, Dora did not remember. “When you left, they promised me they would come for me too, but no one came, I was forgotten! I was alone as a dog!” “What would I have become without those people?” said Marianna, pointing her finger at the photo of the Polish farmers. A way of warding off regrets, with respect to the other life she might have had. By insisting on the fact that no one had come for her, by underscoring it all through her life, for herself as in all the interviews she gave, was Marianna not evacuating her own responsibility in the unfolding of her life — a difficult life, made of toil, of inner solitude, deprived of education?

Dora, for her part, had left. She ran a kindergarten, opened herself to the world, her hair is dyed, she is dressed in Western style, she has traveled, she is urban, informed, active. She is an Israeli in the image of her new country and of her compatriots. Marianna stayed, dressed like a peasant woman. She cultivated the fields, tended the cows, gathered the apples, but she is not a Polish peasant woman like the others.

In 1993, she was contacted by those in charge of the association “Children of the Holocaust,” the Polish version of the Hidden Children, and she told them her life. She realized that she was being listened to, that she was a Witness. A Canadian filmmaker even came to make a film about her story in 1994, and he took her to Israel to film her possible family reunions. A moving film came of it. In Israel, she also looked for Dora, in vain. The dialogue with Dora seemed indeed to be broken. Various obstacles had arisen.

Marianna told her story; more and more people listened to her, fascinated by her. In 1998, it was the Spielberg Foundation that recorded her. Even the local authorities of Łuków learned that there was here “the last Jew of Łuków”; journalists, university researchers, and other Polish or foreign visitors came to see her and left wishing to help renew the bond between the two little girls, now grandmothers.

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When they saw each other again, one could observe a strange dialogue: Marianna kept returning obsessively to the time of the hiding place, and Dora spoke above all of her life in Israel. She had brought color photographs of her children and grandchildren, all of them handsome and tanned. Marianna too had her grandchildren come; each of the women was flanked by an attentive, committed daughter.

For Dora, that was enough, everything had been said, and was clear. On the second day, she rejected the tribunal that had come down upon her. She had not come for that, and she said so clearly, recovering her Polish. For Dora’s husband, his wife “has nothing to hide, she — it’s not like Marianna….” He was no doubt alluding to Blima’s changes of identity. But Marianna did not care, ceaselessly returning to the incessant question: why did you disappear for so long, why did you leave, leaving me behind? She seemed to be saying: is it not important what we lived through together, what I did with you, for you, to protect the little girl, younger than I, that you were?

The persistence of a wound impossible to heal.

Marianna wanted to see Paris. We received her, but it was not the Eiffel Tower that interested her; what she wanted was to tell her story.¹

Notes