MICHAL GOVRIN
557
who was murdered), get-togethers so different from the humorous, confi–
dent gatherings of Father's family (members of the Third Aliyah and the
leadership of the Yishuv and the state). At night, in Aunt Tonka's modest
apartment, I was the only little gid-"a blonde, she looks like a
shiksa"-in
the rniddle of the Polish conversation of "friends from there." And every
year there were also the visits of Schindler, when you could go all dressed
up with Mother's cousin to greet him at the Dan Hotel. And once, when
Mother and I were corning back from "the city" on bus number 22,
Mother stopped next to the driver and blurted a short sentence at him for
no reason. The driver, a gray-haired man in a jacket, was silent and turned
his head away. "He was a ca-po," she said when we got off, pronouncing the
pair of incomprehensible syllables gravely. All that was part of the cloud that
darkened the horizon, yes, but had nothing to do with what was mentioned
at school or on the radio.
Poland and Krakow weren't "real" places either, no more than King
Solomon's Temple, for instance. I remember how stunned I was when I
went wi th Mother to the film
King Matthew the First,
based on the chil–
dren's story by Janusz Korszak which I had read in Hebrew.
In
the film, the
children spoke Polish! And it didn't sound like the language of the friends
at Aunt Tonka's house. "Nice Polish," Mother explained, "of Poles." Poles?
They apparently do exist somewhere.
Yet, a few events did form a first bridge between outside and inside.
One day, in a used book store in south Tel Aviv, Mother bought an album
of black and white photos of Krakow. "Because the photos are beautiful,"
she emphasized, "they have artistic value." And indeed, the sights of the
Renaissance city in the four seasons flowed before my eyes. A beautiful,
tranquil city, full of greenery and towers. Jews? No, there were no Jews in
that album, maybe only a few alleys "on the way to Kazirnierz."
At the age of ten, my parents sent me for private lessons in English,
because "it's important to know languages." And thus I came to Mrs.
Spiro, a gentle woman from London, married to Doctor Spiro, Mother's
classmate from the Hebrew high school in Krakow. One day, when the les–
son was over, Mrs. Spiro accompanied me to the edge of the yard of their
house on King Solomon Street. I recall the sidewalk wi th big paving stones
as she talked with me. Maybe I had complained before about Mother's
strict demands, or maybe she started talking on her own.
"Of course, you know what your mother went through; she was in the
Holocaust. You have to understand her, the tensions she has sometimes,"
she said to me directly.
That was an earthquake. A double one. The understanding that
Mother was in "the Holocaust," that awful thing they talk about in school
