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By Root 22616 0

‘First from the east, now from the west. This time it will be ein Massenmord.’ I didn’t realize completely what he mean then by what he said, I suppose a little bit because in Cracow there was a ghetto but not so many Jews as other places, and anyway, I didn’t think about them being truly different or being victims or being persecuted. I suppose I was ignorant, Stingo. I was married then to Casimir—you know, I was married very, very young and I suppose I was still in this state of being a little girl and thinking that this wonderful life so comfortable and safe and secure would continue forever. Mama and Papa and Casimir and Zosia—Zosia, that is the, you know, nickname for Sophie—all living so happy in the big house, eating Wiener Gulash Suppe and studying and learning and listening to Bach—oh, forever. I don’t understood how I might be so stupid. Casimir was an instructor in mathematics that I met when my mother and father had a party for some of the young teachers at the university. When Casimir and I were married we had these plans to go to Vienna like my mother and father did. It was going to be very much like the way they done their study. Casimir would get this supérieur degree in mathematics at the Austrian Academy and I would study music. I had been playing the piano myself ever since I was eight or nine years old and I was going to study under this very famous teacher, Frau Theimann, who had teached my mother and was still teaching although she was quite old. But that year there came the Anschluss and the Germans went into Vienna. It begun to be very frightening and my father said we were certain to go to war.

“I remember so well that last year when we were all together in Cracow. Somehow I still could not believe that this life we all have together would ever be changed. I was so happy with Casimir—Kazik—and loved him so very much. He was so generous and loving, and so intelligent—you see, Stingo, how I am attracted only to intelligent men. I cannot say whether I loved Kazik more than Nathan—I love Nathan so much that it hurts my heart—and maybe we should not do such a thing as compare one love with another. Well, I loved Kazik deeply, deeply, and I could not bear to think of the war coming so near and this possibility of Kazik being a soldier. So we put it out of our heads and that year we listened to concerts and read many books and went to the theatre and took long walks in the city, and on these walks I begin to learn to speak Russian. Kazik was in the beginning from Brest-Litovsk, which was for so long Russian, and he spoke that language as good as Polish and taught me it pretty good. Not like my father, who had also lived beneath the Russians but hated them so much that he refused to speak that language unless he was compelled to. Anyway, during this time I refused to think of this life ending. Well, I knew there would be some changes, but natural changes, you know, like moving out of the house of my parents and having our own house and family. But this I thought would come after the war, if there was one, because surely the war would be very short and the Germans would be defeated and then soon Kazik and I would go to Vienna and study like we had always planned to.

“I was so stupid to think of such a thing, Stingo. It was like my Uncle Stanislaw, who was my father’s brother and was a colonel in the Polish horse troops. He was my favorite uncle, so full of life and this big laugh and this kind of wonderful, innocent feeling about the greatness of Poland—la gloire, tu comprends, la patrie, et cetera, as if Poland had never been under the Prussians and the Austrians and the Russians all these many years but had this continuité like France or England or some places like those. He would visit us in Cracow in his uniform with his saber and this mustache of a hussar and would talk very loud and laugh a lot and say that the Germans would be teach a lesson if they tried to fight Poland. I think my father would continue to be nice to my uncle—you know, try to humor him—but Kazik had this very direct, logical mentality and would argue with Uncle Stanislaw in a friendly way and ask him how these horse troops would have effect when the Germans came with their Panzer troops and tanks. And my uncle would say that all that was important was the terrain and that the Polish cavalry knew how to maneuver in the familiar terrain and the Germans would get total lost in the strange terrain, and that is how the Polish troops would turn the Germans back. And you know what happened when there was this confrontation