Regrowth: Seven Tales of Jewish Life Before, During, and After Nazi Occupation

Flora

✦ 91 ✦ Flora 1 I take up my diary: Day. . . . Month. . . . Year. . . . Dear tate, soon it will be a year that you aren’t here anymore. You, my pride and my honor, joy of my heart, and the one who brought me up—under whose protective wing I was taken and grew, without a mother, whom I didn’t even know. You, the well-known doctor among us here in the Polish-Jewish city and its surroundings—who, more than as a doctor, were known as a community leader with the cleanest hands and purest intentions . You, for whom—I noticed every time you appeared with me in town—children respectfully cleared the way, just as older people did when they crossed your path. You, whose good name and reputation among great and small, it seems, were due mainly to everyone’s familiarity with your activities for the synagogue, which you loved and gave all your free time to, with the complete devotion of which you were so very capable. You were the father and patron of the Jewish Council, which the Polish state didn’t consider a matter it had the responsibility to worry about. And you—and still other nationally minded men like you—saw yourself obliged to administrate the people’s budget. Our own teachers, the buildings of our own that they required. . . . There arose the ambition to prove, 92 ✦ der nister to whoever needed it, that the Jewish education you worked for would not stand behind, nor remain inferior to, what the state considered its obligation to provide. This was your idea, and you had the worthy satisfaction of seeing your own children raised together with those of the people , not separated by language or custom—as had occurred formerly, when intellectual do-gooders tended to create institutions of learning they did not consider for their own use—or that of their fellow Jews (because, otherwise, they could not help them at all . . . ). Despite how you provided for me and took care of me from the earliest age on—first with doting maids and then with foreign governesses (so that I would learn other languages)—when the time came for me to go to school, you found, in what you had established, nothing wanting at all—be it the methods of instruction or the provision of external necessities—nothing to make you wonder, even for a brief moment, whether you should perhaps not send me, because, evidently, it wasn’t right. . . . No, the other way around: I saw how you showed up every time you were invited to the exams; and at the promotion of students from one grade to the next, I saw how you watched the progress that all the children had made over the year—among them me, too—your one and only, dearly beloved daughter. I especially recall the last time you attended graduation exams , when I had to say good-bye to school, at the ball that was organized in honor of the occasion with dances and amusements . You let me sew a dress—a somewhat longer one than I had worn until now as a schoolgirl—one out of white silk, with a sash from the same material, tied in the back, whose ends fell down to the hem. . . . Then, when I, your already grown-up daughter—already grown a little too tall, on my long stork legs (as you used to joke when you looked at me)—then, when I—in my dress sewn especially for the festivities—joined my partner at the first note flora ✦ 93 of the music, in the great big hall, as the first in a row of dancers , and I made the first few steps—watching as the crowd of invited parents, along with the teachers and waitstaff, gathered to the side and took in the spectacle of the dance—then, I noticed you, too, hidden in the crowd, as had always been your way, looking at me and trying not to look, as if afraid of bringing bad luck. . . . Then, when I—accustomed to and trained in dancing— when I went away again, with my first partner—my hand on his back and his . . . on mine—lightly arm in arm and airily arranged above the shiny, polished parquet—touching and not touching, not even feeling anything underfoot. . . . Then, as we carried each other aloft like a breeze, and, when the rules of...