Magda's Daughter, page 28
‘Did Magda pick me up by chance, or did she deliberately choose a child the same age as the one the Nazis had murdered so she could use the baptism record of my namesake?’
‘That’s the first question.’ Ned made a note. ‘Weronika also said that the Americans brought you and Magda into the Displaced Persons’ camp from a Lebensborn home near Munich.’
‘The first Lebensborn home was opened east of Munich.’ Josef was struggling up the stairs with four enormous box files. ‘I’ve left Stefan in charge of the bar; he’ll fetch me if someone comes in, but after the way our customers drank this morning it will take them hours to sleep off the after-effects. I predict the bar will remain deserted until this evening. So I thought I’d show you these so you could see what an impossible task you are facing.’ He dropped the files next to Helena’s chair.
‘These are the records of your search for your brother?’ she asked.
‘And all the notes I made about the Lebensborn project.’ He sat on the top stair, lifted a file on his lap and opened it.
‘If you and Magda were in a children’s home in Munich in 1945, the chances are it was this one.’ He removed a large envelope and extracted a photograph. ‘Steinhoring, the first Lebensborn home opened by Himmler in 1936. It offered Aryan women a place where they could deliver their illegitimate babies and keep the births secret from their families and the outside world to avoid social disgrace. It closed early in May 1945 when American troops moved in. According to eyewitnesses, the SS burned all the home’s records before they fled. But others who were there insist that the Americans fought the Nazis, and tried to stop them escaping into the mountains. During the fighting, the files were dumped into the Isar river and washed away. Whichever story is right, you can be sure that the identities of the children who were left in the home, and some of those who had already been placed with German families, were permanently lost.’
‘Possibly including mine.’ Helena took the photograph from him. She studied the image of the magnificent four-storey house with its typical Bavarian balconies decorated by window boxes. Leaving her chair, she went into their room and brought out the box of photographs she had brought from Pontypridd. Opening it, she removed her earliest baby picture. There was no mistake. The house in the background was the same. She passed both photographs to Josef.
‘This proves it,’ he said. ‘You were definitely in Steinhoring.’
‘With Magda. You see the wedding ring on her hand. It is quite distinctive. I have it with me.’
Ned took the photographs. ‘Do you know of any other children in the home who had come from Poland?’
‘Two boys,’ Josef said.
‘Do you know where they are now?’
‘Yes.’ Josef opened another file and flicked through the envelopes. ‘Neither has found their parents, and both live in Warsaw.’
‘You have their addresses?’
‘Yes. I interviewed both of them a few years ago.’
‘So we could visit them?’ Ned smile encouragingly at Helena. ‘There’s no point. When I spoke to them they could recall very little about their time in the home.’
‘But they might remember something about Magda or Helena. Something that didn’t seem important when you spoke to them.’
Ned knew the chance was slim, but it was the only lead they had. ‘Before going to the expense of travelling to Warsaw you could write to them and ask if they remember Helena’s mother,’ Josef replied. ‘But it’s not likely. One was three years old at liberation, the other two.’
‘But it gives us somewhere to start and something to do,’ Ned persisted.
Despite Ned’s apparent enthusiasm, Helena suspected that he saw the quest as a way of keeping her occupied until lack of progress forced her to face the fact that she probably would never discover her origins. And then what? No doubt he hoped that she would forget all about it, return to Pontypridd, calmly marry him and carry on living the life they had planned. Only she knew that she never would be able to forget the mystery that surrounded her birth.
‘Your lemonade is getting warm.’ Josef returned his photograph of Steinhoring to the envelope.
Helena looked at the mass of newspaper cuttings and envelopes in the file he had opened. ‘Can I borrow these files, please, Josef?’
‘Be my guest.’ Josef set the one he was holding on top of the others. ‘As I said, they’re mainly lists of names and addresses, and although it looks like a great deal of information, none of it is useful to anyone who isn’t looking for a specific person. And even then the accounts are fragmentary. Take me, for example. After five years of continual searching I still don’t have any idea where my brother is, or even if he’s alive.’
‘What gives you the strength to keep looking for him?’ Helena lifted one of the files on to her lap.
‘The knowledge that, if he is alive, I have one relative left in this world. A part of my parents and a part of me that makes him family. And that Leon might be as lonely without me as I am without him. If that sounds stupid –’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Helena said eagerly. ‘Because that is exactly how I feel.’
‘Then you too –’
‘Feel incomplete, yes.’
Ned watched and listened to Helena and Josef with increasing despondency. Their respective searches were drawing them together. Already they understood one another well enough to finish the other’s half-spoken sentences. And, in some ways, for all the deprivation and poverty here, Helena was more at home in this backward Polish village than he had ever seen her in Pontypridd. Or could it be that her fluency in the language and familiarity with the culture had highlighted another side of her that he had never seen before?
The thought made him even more jealous of Josef than he already was. He only wished he could talk to Helena as easily and understand exactly why she was so intent on embarking on a search that, in the unlikely event it might prove successful, could well destroy what little peace of mind she had left.
For the next hour Ned pretended to study the photographs in the files, looking for a similarity between a baby girl and Helena. In reality, the faces of the children he scanned barely registered. Engrossed in listening to Helena and Josef’s conversation, he started guiltily when Helena turned to him.
‘Sorry, were you talking to me?’ he asked.
‘Who did you think I was talking to?’ She thrust a photograph at him. ‘Do you think that looks like me?’
He took the photograph and studied it. ‘The mouth is similar to yours but the ears don’t match.’ He looked up at hers to check. ‘The shape of the ears are one feature that never changes from birth unless they are doctored by plastic surgery, and yours, my love,’ he inserted the two last words for Josef’s benefit, ‘show no sign of being surgically altered. ‘
‘What about this one?’ Josef handed him another baby photo graph.
‘The eyes slant down, not up as Helena’s do.’
‘And this?’ Helena handed him a photocopy of a passport-sized shot of a blonde baby.
‘Straight hair. Yours is naturally wavy, so it would have been curly when you were a child.’ Eaten up by jealousy, unable to sit idly by and watch Josef and Helena a moment longer, he left his chair. ‘I think I’ll cycle to the post office.’
‘When are you going to tell Norbert to pick us up?’ Helena asked.
‘As soon as he can.’
‘But –’
‘I don’t fancy trying to sleep rough in the square or the churchyard.’ Ned checked his pockets for change.
‘Anna won’t throw you out,’ Josef said authoritatively.
‘How can you be so sure?’ Ned asked.
‘I’ve been thinking about it. You’re Westerners, and the government is anxious to bring foreign currency into the country. Anna won’t risk you complaining to the authorities. If you do, they could take away her licence for this room, and she makes quite a few extra zlotys from Ministry of Agriculture officials.’
‘We can’t think of leaving here yet, Ned,’ Helena pleaded. ‘I want to talk to more people.’
‘You’ve done what you came here to do. It’s time for us to go home.’ Ned unconsciously reiterated what Anna had said to her earlier.
‘When I came here I thought Magda and Adam Janek were my parents. Now I know differently. Please, Ned. Stay and help me look through the photographs in these files. We might be lucky and find a match that’s worth further investigation·.’
Ned gazed into Helena’s eyes. He couldn’t refuse her anything, especially when she was wearing a half-pleading, half-anguished expression. He sat down again. ‘All right, sunshine, hand me one of the files.’
There was still no sign of Anna that evening. Josef served Helena and Ned Krupnik, a thick barley soup with a lot of vegetables, plus a little smoked venison and a loaf of heavy, close-baked rye bread. They ate, as usual, at the table in the yard. Afterwards Helena returned to their room, piled the box files onto the table, pulled one of the chairs from the landing inside, switched on the lamp and continued to wade through the papers.
‘Would you like me to carry on looking at the photographs?’ Ned said unenthusiastically when he walked into their room half an hour later with a couple of bottles of beer and two glasses.
‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to.’
He set the beers on the table and brought in the second chair, leaving the door open. It was a beautiful evening. The air was still, the sun had tinged the grey roof of the barn opposite with red and gold. If it hadn’t been for the smell of the chickens and pigs below, he might have felt the scene was perfect. He poured his beer. ‘As I’ve looked through all of them once without coming up with anything, is there something else that I can do?’
‘Given that you can’t read Polish, nothing I can think of,’ Helena replied absently, engrossed in the report she was reading.
‘Any other suggestions?’
‘Read your James Bond.’
‘Helena –’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’ She shuffled a sheaf of papers. ‘It’s just that these make depressing reading. Endless accounts of how children were taken, together with lists of their likes and dislikes, and anecdotes related by their relatives to illustrate behaviour in the hope that will enable a lost child to be returned to his or her birth family.’
‘Doesn’t it make you feel very grateful that you had a mother who loved and cared for you?’ Ned asked.
‘I can’t think about Magda or who I might or might not be any more.’ Helena gathered all the papers together and returned them to the files.
‘Beer?’ He held up the bottle he’d bought for her and a glass.
‘No, you drink them. I’m going for a walk.’
‘To the churchyard?’ he guessed.
‘Yes, to take photographs of the grave before the sun sets. I meant to do it earlier but I was so busy talking to Weronika I forgot.’
‘You’d be better off waiting for the morning.’
But Ned found himself talking to an empty chair. Helena had gone without inviting him to accompany her.
Chapter Seventeen
Ever since Helena had arrived in the village, she had constantly thought, ‘My mother walked here’, or ‘My mother looked at this church, this house, this street …’
Now, as she walked towards the church, she no longer wondered what Magda had done or seen when she had lived in the village. The ties to the place were Magda’s. She had none. But was there another village, town or city in Poland that she could claim as her birthplace? Or had she been taken from another occupied country? That would mean that she had no right to the Polish heritage Magda had passed on to her.
She walked across the square, swinging the duffle bag that held her camera. Ned was right. It was too dark to take photographs. She would have to come back in the morning. She knew she had hurt Ned by not asking him to accompany her, but all she wanted was to be left alone with her thoughts.
It was strange, a complete reversal of their relationship in Bristol. There, she had been the insecure one, never quite believing that handsome, smart, intelligent Ned was hers. Now she resented his attempts to protect her. It was as if by trying to keep her safe, he was suffocating her, giving her no space to think or breathe, let alone be herself – whoever that might be.
She debated whether or not to ask Ned to walk with her as far as the Niklas farm in the morning so she could take a photograph of it. Then she realised there was no point. She had no more claim to a history that connected her to the Niklas farmhouse or the Niklas family. Wiktor Niklas couldn’t have made it plainer that he wanted nothing to do with her, and was intent on keeping her away from his mother and sister.
Twilight thickened around her, casting deep blue and purple shadows over the tombstones as she walked through the gate into the churchyard and around to the Janek plot. She stopped suddenly. A woman was hunched on the ground in front of Adam Janek’s stone cross. A black crocheted shawl covered her head and shoulders. She was holding out her hands and her fingers moved swiftly, clicking the beads of a rosary, as she muttered the age-old, Catholic prayer: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.’
No sooner did the woman reach the end of the prayer than she began at the beginning again, chanting as if she were hypnotized, her lips moving in synchrony with her fingers. Feeling like an interloper, yet loath to move, lest she make a noise that would disturb the woman, Helena froze.
After a few minutes the woman turned and looked at Helena.
It was only then that Helena recognised Magda’s younger sister, Julianna.
‘I am sorry,’ Helena apologised. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
Flustered, Julianna grabbed hold of the cross to steady herself, and rose stiffly from her knees. She turned back to the grave, hurriedly crossed herself and thrust the rosary into the pocket of her voluminous dark skirt.
Helena held out her hand. ‘I am Helena, your sister Magda’s adopted daughter.’
Julianna put her head down and refused to look Helena in the eye. ‘I know who you are. I saw you at the service today. Wiktor said we mustn’t talk to you.’
‘Why doesn’t Wiktor want me to talk to you, Julianna? The last thing I want to do is hurt you or your mother. Magda told me stories about you and her two brothers, what it was like for the four of you growing up on the farm. How you played together as children. She also told me about the cooking lessons your mother gave you girls, how she taught both of you to make cheese and butter and run a dairy, and look after the livestock.’
‘My sister wasn’t your mother.’
‘So I discovered today, but Magdalena always told me that I was her and Adam Janek’s daughter. And it is difficult for me now to think of her as anything other than my Mama.’
Julianna hesitated, then, still looking down at the ground, asked, ‘Was Magda happy in the West?’
‘She had a good job. She managed a cooked meat and pie shop. We lived in a busy market town, but Magda missed Poland, you and all her family. We had lots of friends, but I don’t think they compensated for the people she had left behind here.’
‘You never went hungry?’
Helena knew that she shouldn’t have been surprised by the question, but it illustrated the privations the Polish people had suffered during the war. ‘No, Mama – Magda – earned a good wage, and a nice apartment came with her job.’
‘And clothes? Before the war, when she lived here, Magda used to love pretty clothes.’
‘She liked to dress well, and she could afford to. We weren’t rich, but there was always enough to buy a few luxuries.’
‘I must go. I shouldn’t be talking to you.’
‘Why, Julianna?’
‘You know my name.’
‘I know a lot about you. As I said, Magda used to talk about you and Wiktor and her mother all the time. And she used to pray for your father and your brother, Augustyn. I have photographs that will tell you more about Magda’s life in the West than I can. Please, can I visit you at the farm and show them to you and your mother?’
‘Wiktor wouldn’t allow it.’
‘Then visit me in the village. My husband Ned and I,’ Helena swallowed hard as she repeated the lie, ‘are staying in Anna’s house.’
‘Wiktor says Anna is a bad woman. And he doesn’t like me to leave the farm. I was only able to come here now because he is sleeping. He got drunk this morning and has been asleep since.’
‘I know. I saw him.’
‘The men who brought him home said he hit you.’
Helena instinctively fingered her cut, which was still covered by the cotton wool Ned had plastered over it. ‘It was an accident.’
‘Wiktor doesn’t mean to hurt people but he gets angry when the collective wants too much from us, and there is only his wife, me and Mama to help him. And Mama can’t do much these days. She is old and tires easily.’
‘I know Magda wrote to you. Did she ever mention me?’ Helena asked.
Julianna shook her head. ‘Never.’
‘Are you sure?’
Julianna glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘I have to go. Someone could see us and tell Wiktor, and then, drunk or sober, he would be very angry with me – and you. There’s no saying what he would do to both of us for disobeying him.’
‘Who is going to see us here?’ Helena looked around the deserted churchyard. When Julianna followed suit and didn’t draw away, she was encouraged. ‘If we move back here behind the gravestones and close to the wall of the church, no one will be able to see us from the path.’ Helena shrank back behind Adam Janek’s cross and moved into the shadows. ‘Come on, we’ll whisper, so no one can hear us.’ She held out her hand. Julianna didn’t take it, but she did move alongside her.
‘Just for a few minutes,’ she conceded.
‘Magda sent you parcels every month –’
‘No, she didn’t,’ Julianna whispered.
