A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [111]
Barbara took the contract home with her, but could not leave it in a drawer. Whenever she was home, she had to take it out and look at it. The paper was signed Karolina Leboida. That signature was the only trace of her real mother—just the signature, not the name itself. It was a Polish name, because her parents had tried to survive outside the ghetto by taking other names, just as Barbara (Irene Hochberg) Gora had done. But the name Leboida hadn't worked like Gora, and they were rounded up and put in the ghetto.
Who were they? What was her mother's real name? What was she like? Barbara Gruberska asked herself these things. Then she started asking, “And who am I? What is my real name?” She went back to the Kwiatkowskis for more information, but they had no more to tell. She took the signature to a handwriting analyst who compared the signature Karolina Leboida and with Barbara's own. The handwriting expert told her that Karolina Leboida was extremely intelligent, fearless, and well organized. Analyzing Barbara's signature, he concluded that these two people would not get along well.
Barbara decided that she would be best off, after all, as Barbara Gruberska, Polish Catholic Communist. She tried to be even more Catholic than her upbringing. But even with regular church attendance, she was not completely safe. At a youth camp in Bulgaria a Russian boy said to her, “You have Jewish hair.” she became furious and repeatedly denied that her hair was Jewish. She went to Moscow, and a man on a subway platform asked her where she was from. When she told him she was from Poland, he said, “Ah, a Jew from Poland.” And once in Wroclaw, on a tram, a man made his way toward her. She looked at him and knew he was Jewish. “So when are you moving to Israel?” the man said. Once again, Barbara became furious. “What are you talking about? Going to Israel! Me go to Israel? As a matter of fact, I am on my way to mass right now!”
EVEN BARBARA GORA, with years of practice, could not always pass. When she finished studying agriculture, she moved to a small Silesian village, Stare Olesno, where she worked on a state-run experiment developing a new breed of potato. That was the system: Take a bright young Pole and invest years in training her to be an agronomist—only to bring more potatoes to Poland.
Even though she was a party member, she did not have the usual tensions with the peasants, and she also got along well with the other scientists. She found that the Silesians, for all their German language and culture, were not anti-Semitic. But like other Poles, they had a knack for spotting a Jew when they saw one. Although nobody ever said that she was Jewish, things were often said that made her realize that everyone simply assumed that she was. One of the workers confessed that he had worked with the German Army and then asked, “How did you survive?” The name Gora didn't seem to be fooling Poles anymore. She would look in the mirror at her same light hair and reasonably broad features and wonder if somehow as you get older, the face changes and becomes more Semitic.
In 1965, Barbara Gora went to Israel. She had relatives to see and the opportunity to travel. To get the travel permission she had to say that she wanted to go to Israel to visit family, which was a great deal more than she customarily said about her background. And she was saying it on official documents. Traveling by Polish freighter, she first arrived at the port of Tel Aviv. As the freighter glided into this modern harbor, a Polish crewman explained to her the harbor's layout, how well organized and modern and efficient it was.
Funny. Just