‘I have been silent for so many years’: The revelation Joasia never expected

This story is part of the July 15 edition of Good Weekend.See all 16 stories.

Magpies warbled in the gum trees as we walked up the path to Nana Alicja’s ground-floor flat in the upper-crust Melbourne suburb of Toorak. I pushed the buzzer, then heard Nana’s poodle barking and sniffing beneath the door, and the donk, schlep, schlep of Nana shuffling down the hallway with her walking stick. As the door slowly opened, I sensed my mother Joasia, standing beside me, bracing herself.

“What you have there?” My grandmother raised her head of perfectly coiffed, auburn-dyed hair as far as her bowed shoulders would allow. She smiled at me warmly, but barely acknowledged Mum. I levered open a box containing cakes we had selected from Nana’s favourite pâtisserie. Nana inhaled the rich
vanilla scent.

“Mmmm!” she said, grinning. She brushed off my mother, who in vain was trying to peck her on the cheek, and made her way back to the galley kitchen that smelled of beef fat and carrot. Nana’s part-time Polish caregiver had made a stew.

Joasia (left) and Alicja at Karen’s 21st birthday.Credit: Courtesy of Karen Kirsten

As Nana reached into a cupboard for her gold-rimmed china, light streamed in from the courtyard and caught the blue-green numbers tattooed on her forearm: 2 4 5 3 3 5, though they’d softened over time, morphing into her skin folds and sunspots.

I was four or five when I first asked about the numbers. I was sitting with my younger sister, Jacqui, watching Nana Alicja chop beetroot and onions for a soup. Nana’s knife hit the cutting board: rap, rap, rap. She tilted her head high to prevent the onion fumes stinging her eyes.

“It’s our phone number,” Nana said. “So I won’t forget it.”

“Who put it there?”

Papa Mietek poked his nose over his newspaper.

“Oh, just some man.” Nana scraped the onions into a pot. She put down the knife and passed us a tin filled with European chocolate biscuits.

We were never sure of Nana’s age, or what she looked like when she was young; there were few photos of her. It didn’t occur to me to read anything into their absence, and, besides, Nana treated me like a princess. She’d bake me cakes, shop with me at Polish and Hungarian food stores like The Chocolate Box in Camberwell, dress up to take me to the ballet and Chopin concerts, and collect seashells with me on the beach with her poodles. I didn’t want to question her stories. I was too busy basking in her love.

Now Nana’s poodle was licking my leg in her kitchen.

“I like zis hair.” Nana nodded at my new bob. She always took an interest in my appearance and made approving comments of the sort she rarely made of my mother. “Put cakes in lounge room,” Nana commanded. I joined Mum and placed the platter, cups and silver cake forks on the coffee table, then poured Nana a strong cup of French press as she slowly lowered herself into a recliner. Mum moved the platter to make room for Nana’s cup. My body tensed. I knew what was coming.

“Don’t touch zat!” Nana barked as my mother retracted her hand. Nana often lost her temper at Mum for no reason, criticising her and snapping. My father had nicknamed Nana “The Dragon”.

I would stay silent during these outbursts. Perhaps I held my tongue because Nana’s behaviour scared me, or because I knew by then that she had suffered
unspeakable horrors in Auschwitz. And perhaps it was easier for me to justify because I was never on the receiving end of her fury.

Joasia in Dachau, Germany, in 1946Credit: Courtesy of Karen Kirsten

To this day, I still don’t understand why Mum bothered to visit Nana Alicja every week, only to be humiliated. Now I feel ashamed I didn’t speak up for her. Once, after witnessing Nana’s spitting insults, my sister-in-law asked Mum why she put up with the treatment. “Because she is my mother,” Mum
said pragmatically.

But the problem – as we knew by then – was that this was only partially true.

The thing about secrets is they are like a loose thread in a jumper; if you pull hard enough, the whole garment falls apart. My mother tells me that, growing up, she’d long suspected she didn’t belong to her parents. Alicja’s hair was auburn and Papa Mietek’s light brown, but Mum’s was jet black. Her chocolate-coloured eyes were not hazel, like theirs; her stubby nose contrasted with Alicja’s slim one. Alicja and Mietek were tall and lanky, whereas Mum was a curvaceous five-foot-two. “Short, dark and wide,” she would say.

It went beyond appearance, though. My mother never felt loved by her parents. At times, she believed they hated her. Sometimes they’d hit her if she persisted with her circuitous questions about the war or the black-and-white photos from Poland on Alicja’s dresser. Yet they seemed to tolerate questions from her younger brother. Once, she says, the bruises from Mietek’s wallopings were so severe she stole money from Alicja’s purse to purchase bandages so as not to attract awkward questions at school.

Then there were the strange nightmares Mum had as a child: men in uniform shooting guns, dark rooms where one needed to stay quiet. Alicja and Mietek dismissed these and showed no interest in her dreams or memories: they wanted her to simply keep quiet and behave. “They said my imaginary life was lies,” Mum tells me now.

Alicja and Mietek also screened her dates as a teenager. They mandated Jewish boys from well-to-do immigrant families. It felt overbearing and protective; a form of control, not love. Increasingly, my mother felt she’d failed to live up to her refugee parents’ lofty ambitions. By contrast, Mum’s brother – an upbeat and relaxed child – received warmth and adulation. When he graduated from medical school, they presented him with a car, a flashy, white MG convertible. When Mum graduated from teachers’ college, they gave her a pen.

My mother wanted to create a household full of warmth and love. Her own dysfunctional home haunted her.

A year after college, my mother left home for good to marry my Australian-born father, whose Swiss immigrant parents were neither well-to-do nor Jewish. Alicja’s best friend had introduced them. “She thought he was Jewish because of his big nose!” Mum later told me, chuckling.

It was my father who showed my mother how to cook basic meals. Alicja baked babkas and stewed goulashes, yet she’d taught Mum nothing about taking care of a household, about sexual matters or raising children. Maybe Alicja’s memories of her own mother were too painful to recall. Maybe the war had eradicated her ability to bond. Regardless, everything my mother knew about parenting she had learnt herself. She wanted to create a household full of warmth and love. Her own dysfunctional home haunted her. She would have never left me home alone with a crying sibling, as Alicja had done, while she and Mietek jitterbugged across nightclub dance floors.

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I was nine-and-a-half and at school on the hot February morning when my mother heard a car turn off the dirt road where we lived, about 30 minutes’ drive from Nana Alicja’s. It was the postman. He handed her a thick, heavy envelope pasted with Canadian stamps. She placed it on the bench and fixed herself a cup of tea. She poured coffee for my father. Because my mother never started the day without make-up, fragrance, a necklace and matching earrings, she carried the coffee to my father in his study, smelling of Chanel No. 5, an apron tied round her waist. She then returned to her tea, and the envelope.

The address indicated a Canadian business: Zdzislaw Przygoda and Associates. My 32-year-old mother knew no one in Canada. She sliced a knife along the envelope and removed a hefty mass of ivory paper – pages and pages. The letter was penned in curved, blue script.

My dearest Joasia, You must excuse me to call you like this, but I have been silent for so many years, now I use the name as I hold it in my memory …

My mother frowned. She knelt to pick up a brown leather folder that had slipped from the envelope. Worn and dog-eared, it contained photos. They were familiar; she had seen them on Alicja’s dresser. The first was a picture of my mother at around 15 months old, tucked into a pram on gigantic wheels, bundled up in a thick, woollen coat. The second photo showed Alicja’s sister, Irena, who had died in the war. This was Mum’s aunt, dressed here in a long evening dress and jacket, clutching an elegant white purse.

Karen and Joasia in Poland, 2012.Credit: Courtesy of Karen Kirsten

Mum stared at Irena’s black, wavy hair and her deep-set, dark eyes. She read more of the letter. Something clicked into place. Hearing my mother shriek, my father dashed into the kitchen. He found her waving a letter. “Read it!” he encouraged.

“ ‘I survived the war only because the thought about you gave me the necessary strength …’ ” my mother began tentatively.

As she read the letter aloud, faces and memories from her childhood in postwar Germany flashed inside her head. She remembered a two-storey villa in the town of Dachau, where she’d lived with Alicja and Mietek and other refugee families.

Your photograph and your mother Irena’s photograph were with me all the time. I smuggled these photos through all the camps, even standing naked in Dachau, I hid your picture under my foot … I did everything possible to save you and your mother. The Germans killed her – you are the only person I love now, and I did love you all the war years and after the war and up till today.

Mum clutched the photograph of Irena to her chest. “This is my mother,” she said. “This is my mother.”

Joasia’s biological parents, Irena and Zdzislaw, in the Polish village of Raba Wyzna, 1939.Credit: Courtesy of Karen Kirsten

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My mother kept the letter from her biological father hidden from me for years. One would think that having been left in the dark, she’d be the last person to want to replicate what had been inflicted on her.

But then, much of what transpired makes little sense to me. For example, I don’t understand why Alicja would adopt my mother, only to treat her so caustically. Alicja nursed her back to health and brought her to Australia, where she could have a future. Yet she withheld affection. Why would she treat a child so poorly that her future didn’t feel bright at all?

Most families harbour secrets, ordeals we’d rather forget, myths we invent to protect ourselves and those we love. The question is, how to keep secrets and preserve stories of our pasts without lying? And if we don’t unravel the lies, how will we ever know the truth?

I may as well begin with the lies. The day after the letter arrived, my father invited Alicja to lunch at Cafe Balzac in East Melbourne. The packed restaurant was austere, well-suited to Alicja’s aura of superiority, but not the kind of place one would want to make a fuss. My father topped up Alicja’s wine glass.

“I need to tell you something,” he said. “Joasia received a letter. From Canada.” Alicja stared at my father, who calmly described the contents of the letter. Her mouth fell open.

“Zdzislaw promised he’d never tell!” she shouted, as men in suits and ties turned to stare at her from across the dining room.

The next day, while I was at school, Alicja growled through sprawling suburbs in her fancy car – burl-wood dash, bread-slicer grill – past hills dotted with dull green eucalypts, and up the dusty road to the cow-filled paddocks of my parents’ home. She slammed the car door and stepped around chicken poo splatted on the brick verandah.

“We were so good to you!” she yelled at my mother.

Mum pulled off her vinyl kitchen gloves slowly, trying to calm Alicja. “But I appreciate you more now that I know you adopted me.”

Joasia in Suchedniów, Poland, in 1943.Credit: Courtesy of Karen Kirsten

From the couch in our living room, Alicja begged my mother not to tell her grandchildren about the letter. It would only confuse them, she said. We wouldn’t love her any more. Mum thought it over. “I owe it to you, if this is what you want,” she conceded. “But I won’t lie to them about it if they ever ask me directly.”

My mother soon discovered most of Alicja and Mietek’s friends and relatives had known about the secret for years. When Alicja learnt of the letter, she made them swear not to tell her grandchildren. When my mother told her best friend, she burst into tears. She’d known for years, too. Her friend had once overheard someone explain that my mother’s contrary, stubborn nature was “because she was adopted and went through dreadful things during the war”.

My mother couldn’t believe it. Everyone around her knew. Everyone had tiptoed around the truth for years. My mother didn’t feel bitter, so much as stunned. She didn’t think it possible a secret could persist in the open for so long. Everyone knew, but her.

This is an edited extract from Irena’s Gift (Penguin Random House, $35) by Karen Kirsten, out July 18.

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