CROSSING BORDERS
On a warm July night in 1946, a train rolled through the countryside destined for Czestochowa, holy city of the Black Madonna, Jasna Gora. There were no available seats on the train. Since the day the war had ended, an endless stream of commuters rode trains free across Poland. People were restless. It was discernible in the way they held their bodies, like they were loose springs, coiled, propelled by a curiosity to see, to travel, because they had earned the right to indulge themselves. In one of the cars sat Pola Friedberg, a sixteen-year-old Polish Jewish survivor, who was herself returning to Czestochowa after visiting a friend in Waldenberg. Before the war, her trip would have taken her across the border to Germany, but Waldenberg had now been declared part of Poland. The borders between countries in post-war Eastern Europe were changing hands like a chessboard with competing strategists. In the aftermath, there had been talk as she passed through the stations, satisfied talk among the beleaguered Poles, that the Germans had lost territory they once possessed.
She boarded the train alone, leaving behind her sister, Rivka, and her brother and sister-in-law who were awaiting the birth of their first child. Taking a seat, she daintily flattened the folds of her skirt, laid her handbag at her side, and only then, made a quick mental note of those travelling with her. She still took this precaution in a world divided between Jews and non-Jews. Liberation from the Warta ammunition factory, the faction of the slave labor camp in Czestochowa where she had been interned, had not absolved this need. When she first left the camp with a group of fellow female prisoners in January, 1945, freedom had been bitter. German troops had withdrawn and those who lived in the area would no longer have had to face retribution for aiding Jews. The women were blindly confident as they walked out into the nearest street that cold January night, dressed in rags and open-backed wooden clogs that froze to the ground. They looked at the windows. Perhaps one of the Poles who lived there would welcome themin, offer them hot coffee, some food. Their spirits sank. Window curtains moved mysteriously, bodiless hands motioned: “Go away.” They wondered where they would go, frozen from the wind, without shelter. Returning to their hometowns proved to be as desolate an experience as the day they first rejoined the free...
Subscribe now to keep reading
Please enter your email to log in or create a new account.