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Refugee in Lemberg
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In Lemberg I immediately became one more of that city's thousands of homeless refugees constantly strugglingto find a place to sleep at night. Luckilyfor me, my sister Lucy and I had attended a student camp the summer before where we had met a couple from Lemberg, Herman Zozowski and his wife, who was also a pianist. When I telephoned them, Herman acted as if he had been expecting my call. His maid had just left, he said, so I could have her bed in the kitchen. That was worth a fortune, I assure you. People were sleeping on benches in the park and anywhere else they could find a place to put their head down. I heard stories about people renting space in big dresser drawers and sleeping with their feet hanging out. And I had a place to stay with a bed! The next day when I found Professor Drzewiecki, he told me, "Now you are going to graduate!" He immediately took me to the Conservatory office, where I filled out the application form. The next morning he asked, "What did you put down as the profession of your father?" 34 Refugee in lemberg Refugee in Lemberg 35 "Businessman." "No, no," he said. "They'll throw you out of the Conservatory. This is communism/ Let's go back." So we went back to the Conservatory office, where he retrieved my application, tore it up, and had me fill out a new one. I wrote that my father was a worker. Otherwise , I would not have been accepted. At first, the Soviet system seemed pretty good to me. Rents were low, and I got to hear for free the great artists Moscow sent to perform at the Conservatory. However, we soon found out what Russian communism wasreally like. They always had to know everything about you. "Political officers" were stationed everywhere, including at the Conservatory, watching and listening to every little thing you did and said. After a while you became afraid to open your mouth for fear somebody would denounce you, and then off you would go on the next train to Siberia for no reason except that you had expressed an opinion. In early 1940 Professor Drzewiecki told me he had enough and had decided to return to Warsaw.Not legally,of course. People were being smuggled across the Bug River. He told me he had written a letter to the rector of the Lemberg Conservatory, a Ukrainian by the name of Dr. Vasyl Barvynsky, a very fine composer, saying that his mother wasdying and that he was leaving to attend her funeral but wouldbe back. Of course, his mother wasn't dying,but if he was caught at the border between the Russian and German sectors, he would have a somewhat legitimate excuse for trying to go west. By then I had become his assistant, so he told me to take his class and keep it going so that it looked as if he would return. He would then let me know when he made it to Warsaw,even though the mails were very uncertain. When I took over his class, all the other professors were very upset—"He's only a graduate student! What right has he to teach?" Professor Drzewiecki had the best students, which I inherited, so the other professors wanted to kill me. I taught the class for about two weeks until the news arrived [3.239.162.98] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:50 GMT) 36 Fires of War that Professor Drzewiecki was safe in Warsaw and wasn't coming back. So the class was disbanded. I was in constant danger of being picked up by the Russians and sent to Siberia. The Russians did not accept the concept of Polish refugees. They declared that either we had to stay in their sector and become citizens, or they would send us to the Germans in the western part of Poland. Nobody knew for certain how much validity we should give to this declaration. People survived more by following rumors than official statements, and Soviet statements could never be trusted, anyway. A now familiar joke about two Soviet newspapers summed up our feeling at the time: there were two main papers, Pravda (Truth) and Isvestia (News). People said, "If you buy the Truth, you can't find the news in it, and if you buy the News, you can't find the truth in it." Everything was very unsettled, and on...