Citation de MegGomar
She walked to the dresser and lifted the protective cover off the radio,
revealing its compact body, the dark, smooth wood glistening in the light.
We placed three chairs around it and sat down. Mother pushed the black
button and carefully adjusted the indicator. At first there was nothing but a
low crackling. Then there was music, a flute playing a jolly tune. Then the
music ended, and I could feel Mother’s and Granny’s bodies tense. A voice
began to speak:
“This is Radio Free Europe, broadcasting live from Munich, West
Germany. News at 8 o’clock. Monday, the twenty-first of June 1968.”
The man’s voice was different from the voices that usually came out of
the radio. It was calmer, less aggressive. He wasn’t shouting or proclaiming.
Mother and Granny sat frozen, their hands holding up their chins and
covering their mouths. I tried to concentrate like them, but I didn’t
understand much of what was said. He used many words I didn’t know,
acronyms that meant nothing to me. It was like another language. At one
point he mentioned “Israel,” those jagged syllables that had become so
potent in only a day. I tried to guess the meaning of it all but only saw
blanks. When the program was over, Mother moved the indicator back to
another station and turned up the volume. This, I discovered, is what she
would do every night, so no one would ever know they had listened to the
forbidden station. And while the music played, they began to explain. They
explained about the Jews, that there had been many in Poland before. For a
thousand years. That most had been killed in the camps that the Germans
had set up during the war. Granny recalled seeing her neighbors forced onto
trains, never to be seen again. Of course we weren’t really taught this at
school. We were taught that the Germans had suppressed the Poles and how
our Russian brothers had saved us. Jews weren’t Polish, of course. Some
Poles still blamed them for the war. That year, Mother said, there had been
unrest, student strikes all across the country. So the Party had turned on the
Jews. They had called them traitors, dismissed them from their jobs. This
was why Beniek’s family had left. Once they were gone, no one ever spoke
about them again. One day your country is yours, and the next it isn’t.
Beniek’s departure spelled the end of my childhood, and of the childhood
of my mind: it was as if everything I’d assumed before had turned out to be
false, as if behind every innocuous thing in the world lay something much
darker and uglier. Every evening now Granny and Mother would let me into
the little room. We’d huddle together by the speaker, silent and serious,
leaning forward, listening to the voices from across the Wall, and after the
program was over, Granny and Mother would explain something new about
our history. How for over a century the country had been divided by Russia
and Germany, how it had ceased to exist on the maps. How our culture had
survived in the underground, parents teaching children their forbidden
language and history, and how the country had finally gained independence
after the First Great War. They taught me about the second one too, the side
we were never told. How, after years of occupation, the people of Warszawa
rose up against the Nazis, how the Soviets arrived, and how, instead of
helping the Uprising, they stayed on the other side of the Wisła and waited.
They knew they’d win the war, knew the Germans would retreat eventually,
so they let them take revenge on the Poles. The Soviets watched on as the
city was decimated and its population slaughtered or deported. When the
Germans finally left, there were fewer than a thousand survivors in the
capital.
I guess you believed what they told us in school, that the Soviets were
our liberators. That they were the good ones. Our allies. Sometimes I wish I
could have been as light as you. Because I didn’t enjoy those nights in my
mother’s room, those terrible truth-spills. They were a ritual, their pull too
strong to resist. Even if I didn’t understand it all, I understood enough for
anger to collect at the bottom of my stomach. The fact that I couldn’t tell
anyone made it all worse. I’d been handed a poisoned gift, powerful truths I
could never admit to knowing. Mother had made me swear never to
mention anything to anyone, lest they sack her—or worse.
I suppose the scariest thing was the lack of certainty. The fifties were
over, and people no longer disappeared for speaking out. But in the sixties
—and even later—things were more arbitrary. Almost anything was
possible, depending on who happened to denounce you and what they
thought they could get from you. Even with my childish intuition I sensed
that a single mother was more vulnerable than most.
revealing its compact body, the dark, smooth wood glistening in the light.
We placed three chairs around it and sat down. Mother pushed the black
button and carefully adjusted the indicator. At first there was nothing but a
low crackling. Then there was music, a flute playing a jolly tune. Then the
music ended, and I could feel Mother’s and Granny’s bodies tense. A voice
began to speak:
“This is Radio Free Europe, broadcasting live from Munich, West
Germany. News at 8 o’clock. Monday, the twenty-first of June 1968.”
The man’s voice was different from the voices that usually came out of
the radio. It was calmer, less aggressive. He wasn’t shouting or proclaiming.
Mother and Granny sat frozen, their hands holding up their chins and
covering their mouths. I tried to concentrate like them, but I didn’t
understand much of what was said. He used many words I didn’t know,
acronyms that meant nothing to me. It was like another language. At one
point he mentioned “Israel,” those jagged syllables that had become so
potent in only a day. I tried to guess the meaning of it all but only saw
blanks. When the program was over, Mother moved the indicator back to
another station and turned up the volume. This, I discovered, is what she
would do every night, so no one would ever know they had listened to the
forbidden station. And while the music played, they began to explain. They
explained about the Jews, that there had been many in Poland before. For a
thousand years. That most had been killed in the camps that the Germans
had set up during the war. Granny recalled seeing her neighbors forced onto
trains, never to be seen again. Of course we weren’t really taught this at
school. We were taught that the Germans had suppressed the Poles and how
our Russian brothers had saved us. Jews weren’t Polish, of course. Some
Poles still blamed them for the war. That year, Mother said, there had been
unrest, student strikes all across the country. So the Party had turned on the
Jews. They had called them traitors, dismissed them from their jobs. This
was why Beniek’s family had left. Once they were gone, no one ever spoke
about them again. One day your country is yours, and the next it isn’t.
Beniek’s departure spelled the end of my childhood, and of the childhood
of my mind: it was as if everything I’d assumed before had turned out to be
false, as if behind every innocuous thing in the world lay something much
darker and uglier. Every evening now Granny and Mother would let me into
the little room. We’d huddle together by the speaker, silent and serious,
leaning forward, listening to the voices from across the Wall, and after the
program was over, Granny and Mother would explain something new about
our history. How for over a century the country had been divided by Russia
and Germany, how it had ceased to exist on the maps. How our culture had
survived in the underground, parents teaching children their forbidden
language and history, and how the country had finally gained independence
after the First Great War. They taught me about the second one too, the side
we were never told. How, after years of occupation, the people of Warszawa
rose up against the Nazis, how the Soviets arrived, and how, instead of
helping the Uprising, they stayed on the other side of the Wisła and waited.
They knew they’d win the war, knew the Germans would retreat eventually,
so they let them take revenge on the Poles. The Soviets watched on as the
city was decimated and its population slaughtered or deported. When the
Germans finally left, there were fewer than a thousand survivors in the
capital.
I guess you believed what they told us in school, that the Soviets were
our liberators. That they were the good ones. Our allies. Sometimes I wish I
could have been as light as you. Because I didn’t enjoy those nights in my
mother’s room, those terrible truth-spills. They were a ritual, their pull too
strong to resist. Even if I didn’t understand it all, I understood enough for
anger to collect at the bottom of my stomach. The fact that I couldn’t tell
anyone made it all worse. I’d been handed a poisoned gift, powerful truths I
could never admit to knowing. Mother had made me swear never to
mention anything to anyone, lest they sack her—or worse.
I suppose the scariest thing was the lack of certainty. The fifties were
over, and people no longer disappeared for speaking out. But in the sixties
—and even later—things were more arbitrary. Almost anything was
possible, depending on who happened to denounce you and what they
thought they could get from you. Even with my childish intuition I sensed
that a single mother was more vulnerable than most.