Karen Alkalay-Gut

                                                                  WAR CHILD

                                                                             I

            I am twelve or thirteen, getting ready to go to a party – in a blue dotted-swiss princess dress with a blue velvet ribbon down the front and three crinoline petticoats beneath.  I am wearing grown-up nylon stockings and am looking for the white patent leather shoes that match the outfit.  Getting nervous about being ready when my date comes I shout out, “Does anyone know what happened to my shoes?”  And my mother calls back with a laconic tone: “A platoon of soldiers came and took them away.”

            This was her way of decreasing tension, putting things into proportion.  I mean when she was growing up, in Lida on the Lithuanian corridor, the various invading armies were a common occurrence.  One day it could be the Germans, another day the Russians.  Platoons of soldiers were her bogey-men, something she’d defuse by mythologizing. 

            She was already an old woman when her occasional comments about growing up in the war, little vignettes that revealed an entire world, began to make their impression upon me.  Her eldest sister ill with consumption and coughing unbearably, she was sent out – as soon as the noise of battle diminished – to the pharmacy for cough medicine.  She was only nine or ten, and there were older brothers and sisters in the family, but she had, apparently, the greatest fortitude, and so found herself stepping over bodies of her neighbors killed in the recent attack in order to fulfill her mission.  I doubt whether she ever allowed herself to dwell on the sights of those dead and injured for seventy years:  Perhaps only when her own death drew near and she no longer needed that fortitude to fight her way through life she could stop and remember what she had battled to forget.

              Once, when she was scrubbing a pot to ready it for Passover, she recalled being responsible for scrubbing a particular pot that was used to cook the chickens that the assorted soldiers would decapitate and demand my grandmother to prepare.  She laughed at the different languages she learned from their commands even while she shuddered at their brutality.

            Growing up in the middle of an ongoing war must have helped her survive the future war.  Certainly she could not have made through the long years in that perilous city of Danzig with a communist ex-convict for a husband without resourcefulness, flexibility, a willingness to encounter danger directly, and a knowledge of how police, soldiers, and secret service officers work.    

            Those years in which my father was repeatedly beaten by the Nazis and ignored by the local police, when my mother had to search the streets for his battered body and badger the constabulary for information, when they both worked on obtaining forged passports to Palestine, forged passes to Esperanto conferences in Sweden, and finally agricultural visas to England, could not have been easy, even for the seasoned fighters they were.

            For they had been seasoned by more than World War I.  The Russian Revolution had also a share in their history.  At the age of sixteen my father was caught hanging up a sign announcing a Communist meeting and imprisoned for two years.

            When I think of how they managed to escape Lithuania my admiration for my mother’s skill increases.  As an ex-convict my father had no rights, no working papers, no passport.  It was not considered a crime to kill him.  And he was not allowed to leave the country. 

            In 1929 my mother bought a ticket for herself and her sister at the train station, with my father given a special permission to enter so as to carry their baggage.  Once the tickets were inspected on the train, her sister and my father switched places and the train took off.  This escaped saved my father from further imprisonment, and perhaps worse.  With no alternative, my parents made their way to the International City of Danzig under the government of Germany and Poland.

            On the night that Hitler invaded Danzig, on September 1, 1939, they had just managed to escape on the last bus by using the same technique.  Some German acquaintances on the bus for Berlin spotted them, signaled them to wait until the Nazis had inspected their papers, and then jumped off the bus and gave their places to my parents.  The next day they arrived in the Dutch port of Vlissingen and from there by boat to Gloucester: my mother claimed that from fear my father had turned black and was unable to speak for days.

            She always affirmed that my father had been far more paralyzed than she had been, unable to change places or plans when it was necessary.  Whenever my mother wanted to move or try something new, she would remind my father of the fact that in Danzig, when they had to relocate from rented room to rented room, one step ahead of the Nazi gangs who hunted him down, my father would always mourn the room they would have to leave.  “Where will we find a bed like this? A view like this?” she would quote him, mocking the sentimentality that was almost his demise again and again. 

            When he told stories about his adaptability in the war they were less strained.  My father’s version of their life in the British countryside is close to idyllic – as refugees they were sent to a farm where he was called upon to feed the swine.  And what smart pigs they were!  How they came to his window in the morning to wake him for breakfast!

            But my mother felt that the country was too far from the action, that much more could be done for the war effort and for the Jews trapped in Nazi countries if they moved to London.  So she brought him – kicking and screaming I imagine – to the city during the Blitz.  And there, when everyone was evacuating their children to the countryside, she decided at the age of 36 to have a baby. 

            Her usual professions – bookkeeping, sewing, pedicure – were supplemented by work in the black market (I still have lengths of English wool from that time).  She kept chickens in the garden and sold the eggs. 

            At night they slept in the Underground.  And when my brother came, he was bedded down in a suitcase by their side.  The permit I still have for the Holborn (Kingsway) Station (“Use your station quietly and regularly.  Help to keep it tidy and clean”) reminds me of my mother – the clear rules for strict and civilized behavior under chaotic and savage circumstances, rules that should always be followed – if all else fails.

                                                                             II

            My birth certificate says I was born on March 29, 1945 in Hackney Hospital. My mother claimed the hospital had been bombed so she had to leave during or after the birth to a shelter, but I always thought she exaggerated.  Only recently, when I looked more carefully at my birth certificate, did I understand that the hospital to which my mother raced on that night of bombings had a different address. The Mothers’ Hospital of the Salvation Army on 153-156 Lower Clapton Rd, and that the hospital had been evacuated except for the few births that were taking place in London.  That night, my father encouraged my mother to wait at home until a ceasefire, but she insisted on giving birth.  My mother claimed that she was immediately bundled by the surprised nurses into the shelter that had been built after the bombing of the hospital in 1940.

“You are constantly emphasizing the fact that you were born during the last bombing of London,” one of my friends recently pointed out to me.  “You bring it up whether it’s relevant or not.” 

            It is true.  I always devise a way to my birth in the war relevant. 

            Sometimes I make it positive.  I was the sign of a new beginning.   “I brought the quiet,” I hear myself saying contentedly, even though the night I was born only heralded the end of the V 1 rockets, and peace came weeks later.  Sometimes I use the circumstances of my birth to accentuate the tragic, even only to myself.  It was a miracle that I was born at all, and that perhaps I was meant to take the place of some of at least forty close relatives who had been slaughtered, that my personality was formed by people who had seen all the horrors imaginable, at the tail end of the big war.

            But one thing I have known all my life – I was born into a situation in which strangers were trying to murder me.  And as an Israeli citizen the possibility that strangers will succeed in this task remains with me daily.

            The recurring dream I had as a child, one that I have since discovered I shared with other children my age whose parents survived the Holocaust, was one in which my family is sitting around our dinner table when the Gestapo storm the door and shoot everyone but me.  Because I am the smallest child I escape by hiding under the table. 

            In the dream I am under the table for a while, watching the boots move around me.  Then suddenly Hitler’s face is down next to mine, and although I crawl to the farthest part of my hiding place, he reaches in and touches me with a jar of poison I know is lethal.

            I was always afraid of that helpless position, take inconspicuous and sometimes unconscious precautions to allow myself an escape route wherever I am, and make sure I find something active to do whenever I am threatened.

            In the Yom Kippur War in 1973, for example, I was the only person in my neighborhood with a drivers’ license.  The men had all disappeared on that fatal Day of Atonement, as soon as we were aware we’d been attacked, and the women were left to take care of the home and pray. 

            We were a pretty close group in our apartment building.  There were nine families and most of them had small children and reserve duty husbands.  The first day in the shelter we already organized games and lunches and hung up children’s drawings on the cement walls.  We felt we could handle anything together.

            But we had been unprepared for emergencies and very soon began to need basics bitterly – milk for the children and batteries for flashlights were at the top of the list.  Being a brand new immigrant to Israel I had had very little knowledge about the needs of Israelis and the means by which they could be fulfilled. 

            In my blue Peugeot I navigated the unfamiliar streets of Tel Aviv with a savvy I am still surprised at.  Twice a week I visited the battery factory and convinced the warehouse manager to sell me supplies for my neighbors, my friends, and my father-in-law’s shop.  Every other day I was at the dairy with a cooler for milk.  I took sick children to their doctors and sick mothers to their own mothers. 

            Food packages began arriving from the U.S.  My mother had heard that eggs were not available, so powdered eggs, unknown then in Israel, made their way to me through mysterious channels.  There was talk of hoarding food the first few days when everything was unclear, so I began to receive packages of tuna and coffee.  We had no telephone, so strangers began to drop by with inquiries from my parents.

            We found my mother’s behavior anachronistic, after the first few weeks – once it began to appear that this war would not be fought in our own yards.  “What, no tuna today?” the neighbors’ children would ask with a laugh as I returned from the post office.

            I am not as cynical today about her behavior as I was then. 

            There were times in the Gulf War when my mother’s ghost spoke to me.  In the first place my protective maternal instincts emerged to an amazing degree – and she was the one who had originally exhibited these instincts, connected motherhood with war.  I found myself humming the tune she had used for a lullaby as a child, “The Partisan Song.” 

            The phrase “emergency routine” seemed like something she would have appreciated – maintaining some measure of normality in an absolutely abnormal situation.  Full course meals, shoes heeled and soled, clothes in perfect repair – these were not just nervous activities I indulged myself in in order to keep my mind off the SCUDs.  Taking care of basic needs comforted me – made me the mother of myself as well as others.

            The mother of all wars became for me the war of all mothers.

                                                                            III

Two years ago I found myself with two little grandchildren racing down the narrow steps of the communal shelter in our building as the alarm sounded.  We were the first ones down there – I was pushing one child and carrying the other with a drive unbefitting my age and the state of my back.  Nothing else mattered to me but getting those babies into a safe place.   

            There is a lullaby in Hebrew that always made me wonder about the texts of children’s songs.  The song by Natan Alterman begins with a typical night scene – wind blowing, star murmuring, the light being put out in the child’s room.  But then the second verse, after urging the child to ‘close your eyes,’ describes three armed horsemen on their way to ‘you.’  Then, as the child is probably collapsing in terror, the singer explains that one of these riders was consumed by wild beasts, the second died by the sword and the one remaining ‘has forgotten your name.’  You are the only one still waiting for something to happen.  And the song ends where it begins – with night and an empty road.

            What kind of song is that to sing to one’s child?   And yet . . . somehow it is right.  The mother helpless to protect or to control the outside world, reassures the child that its fears are not without base, but that – in this case – are needless.  Like “Rock-a-by Baby,” nothing bad really happens, although everything terrible is threatened.  

            Those terrors you have – “A platoon of soldiers came and took them away.”