Danuta Cukierman, born in 1942

I Was a Mother to My Mom

KATARZYNA MELOCH: I know you were born in 1942, at the darkest time of the Holocaust. The crematoria in concentration camps were working at full capacity. And yet, Jewish mothers kept giving birth to new babies…

DANUTA CUKIERMAN: I was born in Lvov. My mother, a Warsaw native, had escaped to Lvov with Daddy because Daddy came from Lvov. They were fleeing from the Nazi troops. They knew where to run. And they stayed there. A Red Army officer became very close to my father and begged my parents to flee deep into Russia. Mom wouldn’t agree because she wanted to return to Warsaw, to her parents. Her large family and siblings had stayed there. She wanted to go back to Warsaw and that’s why my father died. He never met his daughter, because he had died in May and I was born in June! And that’s why I don’t know my father’s surname, because my mother buried herself, buried him, buried her whole life. She stuck to her fake Polish papers for the rest of her life. She was scared… My mother was eighty when she died. Death caught up with her when she saw a blonde man jogging in a green tracksuit. She started to run away from him. While running, she fell down and the jogger approached her and want-ed to help her, but she refused his help. I know that, because after the accident, she went to Mrs. German, mother of Anna German (they lived in one building), and she told her about it… When I saw my mother, she was already in hospital. She died the next day. And I keep talking about her…

How old were you when she died?

Forty-eight. I was a mature woman. That same year, I found out that my marriage was one big lie. Everything ended with my mother’s death.

I “consciously” met my mother when I was four. When the war ended, I was two years old (because in Lvov the war ended in ’44). I had been hidden for a year. When the ghetto was being liquidated, my mother handed me over to a certain lady… She was a friend of German officers—she was a fun-loving woman, but she was a wonderful person. She cherished me, but she never let me call her “Mom”. “I am your aunt,” she’d say. But the war was over and my mother didn’t come back. Two years after the war ended, my mother suddenly remembered that she had a child. I was with this lady and I would probably have stayed there.

Why didn’t your mom come for you in 1944?

In 1943 it was known that the ghetto would be liquidated, so my mother gathered everything she had and bought an apartment for “Mrs. Zosia”—my carer. Mom left me with her and she herself returned to the ghetto.

The next day, they started deporting people, the liquidation of the ghetto began, and my mother was removed from the column by a German officer. She was a blue-eyed blonde, short, and petite. He threw her out of the column and she had nowhere to go. She had no penny to her name, she owned nothing. She didn’t want to come to me so as not to put me in danger. So she went to church, sat down; it was cool in the church—it was summer—and she was sitting in a pew. The churchman’s wife came and asked what she was doing at the church. They started talking and she found out that my mother had nowhere to go… so she was just sitting there. The woman had my mother go with her, but because her daughter worked in a German institution, she couldn’t admit that she was hiding someone. She lived on the ground floor, and on the ground floor people were making dugouts to keep potatoes and coal in them. And my mother stayed there until liberation. For almost a year. She only went out at night, the churchman’s wife let her wash up. Of course, she also made sure she had enough to eat.

When the “Ruskis” liberated Lvov, they found my mother in a state of complete stupor and took her to the hospital. She stayed there until she was well enough to remember that she had a child. And then, she came back for me. A somewhat normal life began. She moved into the house where her in-laws used to live—only the “Ruskies” came and had her move into one room, but it didn’t matter. The war was over. But my mother was scared almost until the end of her life. In her sixties, she began to worry less about it. She remembered that she was Jewish and was hospitalized every few months, and then I was sent to an orphanage. And the strangest thing: I was happy in the orphanage because I had something to eat there and my friends were there. Even if our heads were shaved bald because there were terrible lice…

It was all in Lvov. Although there was hunger in the city because the Banderites were prowling, the children in the orphanage wanted for nothing. Since no child had parents—we were different from today’s children in orphanages—we were happy to be together. It’s hard for me to comprehend why a little girl would be glad to be in an orphanage. I felt good in the orphanage. My mother hid for many, many years. She had a normal Jewish wedding, but she never told me about it. She didn’t tell me who my father was. He’s there, in my parents’ wedding photo. She never told me her real name.

One of my mother’s brothers, who had survived and settled in Australia, wrote to her (to her pre-war address). Before the war our relatives near Warsaw, in the village of Suwczyn, had a farm called “Pęchery” near Kołbiel, a mill, and fish ponds. Mom wrote a letter there and the villagers knew that my mother was alive. (They farmed her land.) When her brother wrote from Australia, the clerk from the local post office found out and replied that his sister was alive and that she lived in Lvov. The clerk obtained this information from the residents of Suwczyn or the area of Kołbiel. This is when I found out what my mother’s maiden surname was. I didn’t know anything. She stuck to her Polish papers from the occupation. She didn’t want to go back to Poland when there was repatriation and neither did she later. She stayed in Lvov.

My mother studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw. She spoke French, English, and German, but not a lick of Russian or Ukrainian.

To survive, she sold ice cream in the “Krakow” market (it’s a famous marketplace in Lvov) and made a living from it. In order to leave for Poland, you had to admit to your surname. And she didn’t want to do that. God forbid—she’s not a Jew! Maybe she didn’t say it, but she thought it: everyone around was a Jew but not her.

Despite that, she wouldn’t let me marry a Ukrainian. She blackmailed me all my life. “Danusia, you must marry a Jew, otherwise I’ll kill myself.” The Jews of Lvov didn’t want me for various reasons. These were the Jews from Alma-Ata, Siberia, who came from the depths of Russia with their Jewish customs, with their “kosher”, with religion. I didn’t know all of this, so I wasn’t an equal.

I came to Poland. I thought: I’ll give it a shot, if someone wants me, I’ll get married, if not, I’ll be a spinster. I quickly found a guy, a Jew with Jewish parents. I married him. Only because my mother wanted me to have a Jewish husband. She didn’t stick around to see how it worked out, because it didn’t. When I was eight months pregnant, I found out that my in-laws were drunkards and so was my husband. I was trapped. I didn’t want to condemn my child to a life without a father, be-cause I had missed my father all my life. My husband “blew me off”. When I started working, he picked fights every day: everyone was my lover and so on. Eventually, I got tired of this and quit my job.

So, my mother abused me, my husband abused me. No one ever hit me, it was all verbal. Sometimes, when my mom yelled at me, I would sit and think, “Go ahead, hit me and let’s get it over with!” She never did. I never lived up to her expectations. I was never a model child. I was always “bony” and it didn’t look too good. And at the age of eleven, I got encephalitis, so after that I looked like a skeleton because I had been unconscious for over twenty days. You couldn’t show off with me. She always made demands of me and was always dissatisfied. When I got Bs and Cs as a student, she’d ask, “You couldn’t try a little, could you?” I was happy with my grades: it was a Ukrainian university, I was considered a Pole and a Jew (two hostile nations that weren’t welcome at all), so these Bs and Cs were hard-earned. And I never heard, “Good job, girl”. (I praise my children for everything).

She complained that I wasn’t as capable as she wished. Having no ear for music, I had to play the piano; I had to dance, although I had no sense of rhythm; I had to do rhythmic gymnastics; and she required me to speak good French. For eleven years, I had French lessons with a “Parisian woman”. I also had French at school. The only benefit of this: I studied Romance languages. It was easy for me because I knew the language very well. But if you don’t use a language, you lose it, so unfortunately, I can now read French, but I can’t speak it.

How was your mother doing in Poland?

She bought herself a tiny apartment in Mokotów. She was happy and said to my husband: “Danek, take the children and come to see my apartment.” And Danek says: “What about Danka?” “Don’t bring her, she’s so Jewish, everyone will know right away that I’m a Jew.” And my husband got really angry with my mother. And I understood her because I knew she was dying of fear. She had been treated for it when her depression got really severe. They took her to a mental hospital. At that time, she no longer cared for me or anything. They took me to an orphanage, it was in Lvov. Later, when I was older, I stayed home alone. Our neighbors helped me a little. More often, I felt like I was more my mom’s mother than her daughter. I had to sit by her at night, hug her, stroke her, or squeeze her temples because her “head was splitting in two”—that’s how she felt. It was like that until the end. My “mothering” started when I was seven or eight years old.

When I got married and she grew old, she had to come to Poland. She had no choice, she was alone in the world. After the war, she only had me. Later, there was my stepfather, but he didn’t mean much anyway, because she re-married not out of love, but so that her child wouldn’t go hungry. We lived in extreme poverty. It didn’t bother me because back then everyone was poor, but it probably bothered my mother a lot. When I was ten, she got involved with a man much older than her. He looked after us, otherwise we wouldn’t have survived. When he was with us, we were no longer hungry.

When my mother was pregnant, she saw her beloved brother and sister-in-law get killed, and their  three-year-old  daughter,  Ruteczka, get thrown out from the first floor. It haunted her all her life, and she burdened me with it.

She came from an assimilated Jewish family with many children. She was the eleventh child and an only daughter. My dad, from what I’ve learned, came from a Hasidic family, there were thirteen children. Dad was one of the younger children. The elder ones had already established their own families. And that was all lost.

Two of my mother’s brothers survived. One—because he had escaped from the army and didn’t live in Poland, but in France. He graduated from a technical university, went to Morocco to build roads, and thus survived. The second is the one who followed the Red Army. After the war, he went to Germany, married a German woman who converted to Judaism and they left for Australia. Because he survived, and he and my mother found each other thanks to the post office clerk, I learned about my mother’s maiden name. But I didn’t get to learn about my father’s surname, because my mother passed away, and my uncle, after hearing about my mother’s death, had a stroke and became paralyzed. They were the last people who could have given me that information.

I know that your beloved son lives abroad.

This is my younger son. I’m very close to him. We talk almost every day. But the fact that he’s not getting married upsets me very much. He is thirty-one years old. He left to finish a rabbinical school and suddenly, he got over it. He graduated from high school with honors and got a college scholarship. He always liked money. He collected change like a magpie. We had a large terrace with a table. Years later, we found a small fortune under this table, which was worth nothing at that point. He especially liked collecting pennies. He liked money and he still does. He went into business, graduated from college. And because he was good and because he was a Jew from Poland, he got a job. (His boss from the Axel Bank had a mother from Otwock, a pre-war Jewish woman). He excelled at work and now is a bank manager—he earned it, but in the beginning, it was the Jews who gave him the job, his Jewishness gave him that. And the fact that he could leave Poland, that he was accepted to a school abroad…

And in an instant, he came to the conclusion that if it was so wonderful to be a banker, why be a rabbi? He goes to the synagogue, he goes to Rabbi Schudrich or Wiber on Sabbaths; he knows all of them; he stops by but he is neither very religious nor kosher. I believe very much in God, not in priests, rabbis, the middlemen. The rabbi can tell me how it should be but I won’t “confess” to him. I don’t know if Piotr will change or not, but he feels happy. I am less happy because I don’t see him a lot, and he was my “little boy”.

My elder son was always healthy, incredibly talented, I didn’t have to worry about him. And I did with younger Piotr, he was constantly ill. When I was going out with my husband (Piotr was fifteen), his eyes would tear up and instead of going out with my husband, I’d stay home with my son. He was a “little baby”. At sixteen years old, he just went ahead and left, didn’t think twice about his mother. He’s gone his own way, but it hurts me so much that he doesn’t have a family. (He has already had a dozen romances.) I must say that if my little Piotr hadn’t gotten in touch with Jews,

I would never have found out about the Association of Children of the Holocaust. Although I read about it in the newspapers. I would have stayed that gray mouse, but an old one… It was because they called Piotrek a “kike” at school that he finally got tired of this and said: “If you want me to be a Jew, I’ll be a Jew.” He met a man on a train near Warsaw, who was going to Śródborów. Piotrek showed him the way, took him to the “Śródborowianka” and this old man, a Jew, invited him for lunch at the “Śródborowianka”. He gave him his business card with an American address. My son started hanging out with young Jews. He went to Lake Balaton for a Jewish youth camp. Eventually, a sponsor, Mr. Salomon from the United States, came along. Piotrek went to the States, and he came to Poland once on vacation. He went to Twarda Street and there he was approached by Mrs. Rajber from the Social and Cultural Society of Jews, who asked him: “What year was your mother born?” “In ’42”, he said. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have learned about the Association of Children of the Holocaust in Poland.

Śródborowianka—a holiday and training center owned by the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland.

My Jewish identity began to develop only when my younger son wanted to be a Jew. This pushed me to become interested in Jewishness, to be around Jews. And I joined the Association. In life, one thing must drive another. If my Piotrek hadn’t become interested in Jews, I wouldn’t have found out about the Association, and I was already so exhausted with life… My husband left me in 1990, and in ’94, I started attending meetings of the Association. I’d sit aloof. I didn’t know anyone and no one spoke to me, and finally I realized: “Danka, this is your last chance, talk to them, approach them, and maybe they’ll notice you.” And so it turned out. If it were an environment of self-satisfied people, they wouldn’t have paid attention to me. And precisely because each of us has some barriers and flaws, we started to create friendships. I have a lot of friends that I like very much and who I know are solid. I can smile at them, talk to them, and I know they like me, too. I began to be equal to everyone in this environment. I’m not “someone” but an equal to everyone. I found my lost family among them. These are my aunts, uncles, nieces that I could have had. I deserve to have them, just like everyone else. But I had no one. Here, I found some echoes of the old days. I really feel at home here. This is my family. I’m stronger with them by my side.

One of my friends accompanied me to the offices when I was applying for a disability pension, and was rejected three times. (When I applied for the fourth time, I got it).

When our meetings started, I didn’t realize that there was some- thing wrong with me. Kasia P., a doctor, noticed this and persuaded me to go to psychotherapy. I was very reluctant. But I went, listened, and spoke. After three years of participating in group psychotherapy, at the end, when people were sharing, I just stood up and said: “Thank you, I’ve allowed myself to open up and talk about myself, and I owe all it to you.” For me it was a breakthrough… It came from the heart.

Psychotherapy has been hugely beneficial for me. It was a blessing. It made me stronger. You wouldn’t have said that I’m the same Danka from fifteen years ago. I’d tried to be a gray mouse because it was safe. And as “luck” had it, my husband was always dissatisfied with me, just like my mother. They were a good match!

I was thinking that if the Association had been established when I was a young girl, if I’d had this support, I would be a different person. I’ve changed amazingly now, but what can be done in old age? I went through most of my life as a “gray mouse”. Despite this, I’ve been very lucky. The fact that I was born in ’42 saved me a great deal of fear: I didn’t have to be afraid, I didn’t understand anything, I didn’t know anything. But on the other hand, I do have regrets because if I had been born earlier, I would have had some identity.

I remember: I was five, it was after the war, we lived in Lvov. The city is situated on seven hills, only one street and the adjoining grounds are straight and the rest is up and down. We lived on such a huge mountain. There was no tram or anything there. You had to go down, take the tram and go straight to the main post office; the tram had to turn when it was going downhill. My mother got on tram no. 12 with me, this tram went from our Wadecka Street to the High Castle. She liked going there on Sunday. The tram was so crowded that my mother got off a stop earlier, and the tram continued. After a while, the tram derailed and crashed into the pre-war bakery building, where there were many people. In Russia, bakeries were open on Sunday. It was a terrible massacre, and we had gotten off in time. It was a miracle…

On September 11, 2001, I was making dumplings. I didn’t turn on the radio. I didn’t turn on the TV either, because I was in the kitchen. I got a call. It was my elder son, “Mom, don’t get upset. Piotrek is OK.” That’s when I got upset, “What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t he be OK?” “Turn on the TV.” I did. At first, I couldn’t believe it… At that time, Piotrek worked close to the World Trade Center (one block away). For two days, the bank employees were sitting in the basement and it was impossible to leave. In New York, the entire zone was closed off. They were choking on dust, but Piotrek managed to write Henio a message on the computer: “I’m OK”. I was spared the anxiety.

I know my mom’s maiden name, perhaps I could find my father’s surname. But I’m afraid I might learn that I wasn’t my mother’s child, that everything I know is fiction. It terrifies me so much that I’d rather not know more.

Interview with Katarzyna Meloch, June 4, 2006