A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [110]
WHILE IT WAS TRUE that there were many Polish-born Israelis, Jews were getting to be rare in Poland. After the upheaval of 1956, about half of the remaining Jews had left. Available figures are imprecise, but at most there were between 25,000 and 35,000 Jews left. Everyone had their own count because divining who was or was not a Jew had become an arcane Polish hobby.
No one would have counted the Gruberskis, for example, who lived in Sochaczew, a town near Warsaw. They were Polish Communist atheists, although on occasion they sent their fourteen-year-old daughter Barbara to mass. She wasn't baptized; nor was she encouraged to believe. Barbara was stubborn and different and a little difficult, and other children didn't like her. They would call her that standard Polish curse, “Zyd,” Jew. Sometimes they would call her Dreyfus or Beilis, after Mendel Beilis, who had been accused of ritual murder in Kiev early in the century. They would deliberately stretch out and distort vowels to make these names sound especially heinous.
Barbara didn't know who Beilis or Dreyfus had been, and she didn't really know what a Jew was. When she asked her parents why the other children called her Jew, they explained that it was because she was adopted. Many people her age were adopted, including a girl in the next house. But nobody called that girl “Zycf.” Her mother explained that it was her dark thick hair. Her mother also had dark thick hair, but she was not called a Jew, perhaps because she had light blue Polish eyes. Barbara had dark eyes.
Finally, in 1958, when Barbara was 16, her mother decided to tell her the truth. Barbara had been born in the Warsaw ghetto. Her real parents may have been from the nearby town of Lovice, but that was not certain. Her mother may have been the daughter of a doctor. In any case, they were Jews and had some money, and they had been trapped in the ghetto and desperate. A contract was drawn up in which they paid Polish people to take care of their baby daughter, Barbara. In addition to the monthly payments, a substantial settlement would be made after the war if the parents survived and took back the child. Three months were paid in advance, but after the three months there were no more payments, and the Polish foster parents had lost interest in caring for the child. When the Gruberskis first saw her at the foster parents’ home, she was starving. They offered the seven-month-old baby a piece of bread, and she hungrily ate it. Childless, the Gruberskis happily adopted her and had a new birth certificate drawn up.
Even more shocking for Barbara was the news that the original foster parents were people she knew—the Kwiatkowskis, who rented an apartment from the Gruberskis in the neighborhood. Kazimiera Kwiatkowska was a first cousin of Barbara's adopted mother. They often visited and had four children with whom Barbara would play.
At first, Barbara was not certain how she felt about all this. She kept thinking about the fact that the Kwiatkowskis, who she still saw regularly, probably still had the contract, something from her real mother. It would probably have her mother's signature on it. She decided to confront them, a reckoning, a showdown. Once faced with the embarrassing news that Barbara knew the truth, the Kwiatkowskis were willing to talk to her about it. But they did not want to give her the contract. “It was written by my mother, and I want to have it,” Barbara argued. She had a way of setting her jaw and turning her eyes into cold shining dark stones. Realizing that she would never relent, they gave it to her.
According to the document, Barbara had been turned over for 700 zfotys per month, with three months to be paid in advance. In 1942 this had been a substantial payment, far more than care for a baby would cost. But, of course, the foster parents were taking a risk, for which they had to be paid. If they were caught hiding a Jewish baby, the entire family would be shot. The baby was young enough