Episode 1 — A golden childhood
September 1, 1939, my grandfather Ignacy is on vacation 20 kilometers from Warsaw. At 12, together with his younger brother, he takes advantage of the garden and the tennis court of his mother’s cousins. Life is beautiful!
It needs to be said that he was born in a very prosperous family. His grandfather is a very rich banker, whose brother is a senator and the family life turns around the activities of these two. Thus my great grandfather Jerzy (pronounced Yehzhi) got to direct a factory that used a French patent to produce car paint. He alternates this activity with his real passion: art. He spends his time with museum curators and his apartment is a real gallery. By the way, two years before the war, the family moved to accommodate a 12 feet tall Gobelin tapestry, that didn’t fit in their previous apartment !
Pampered in his childhood, my grandfather gets the complete edition of the classic Polish literature at the age of 4, an electric bumper car at 6 (before the war and in Poland!). Except that he can never take it out because all the kids follow him! His father makes the servants call him “excellency” and one has to kiss the hands of too many aunts. Something Ignacy hates with passion.
He does not remember much about religion. Already his grandfather was finding it terribly boring and all he did was to read a couple of sentences from Exodus at Passover (jewish Easter). On the first day of school, my grandfather hears: “Catholics left, , Protestants right and Mosaic faith by the window”. He is being pushed… He doesn’t know the expression “Mosaic faith”. It’s the official expression at the time. This is how he finds out that he is a Jew. His school, the Warsaw Protestant school, one of the best, had a numerus clausus for the Jews. It was 10% or 3–4 per class. In the end, he visits the synagogue once a year … for the mandatory religious course.
The school teaches him most of all that the Poles are “ strong, united and ready” behind Marechal Pilsudski and his successors. Poland it’s a thousand years of fight against two neighbors: Germany and Russia and 120 years of occupation by Germans, Austrians and Russians. My grandfather always told us: “Poles didn’t like Germans and they didn’t like Austrians but not as much as Russians. About them, children were being told that if they misbehaved, a Bolshevik would come and eat them”. Apparently he didn’t really believe it!
Mon grand-père à gauche avec sa mère Anna, son frère Stefan et probablement leur grand-mère. Possiblement sur la presqu’île de Jurata, près de Gdansk, sur les bords de la Baltique où la famille avait une maison.
This is how my grandfather, fully confident, found himself on September 1, 1939 in an elegant villa and how, in an instant, everything was turned upside down. That September 1, the planes, repelled by by the Warsaw anti-aircraft artillery, dumped their bombs on the village where he was on vacation.
To be continued.
Note: all the anecdotes are true, from the hight of the tapestry to the hand kissing. Or at least as true as the memory of my grandparents when they were telling me them.
Original version in French
Translation by Elizabeth Sachs
