Miriam Winter: Trains: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood during and after World War II. Jackson, Michigan: Kelton Press, 1997.
‘The Jew’: a stock figure in European theater, an abstraction. Miriam Winter: a person who was Jewish. Her memoir of her childhood in hiding from the Nazi, under an assumed identity, a fake name, chronicles not only or even primarily her survival—about which her feelings were tortured—but her struggle to rediscover her real identity, her individuality, the personhood she needed to uncover under a layer of salvific lies. “Lies saved my life during the war, and I didn’t stop lying when the war ended.”
“My name in hiding was Marysia Kowalska, but my real name was Miriam Winter…. until the fall of 1941,” when the Nazis took Lodz under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact partitioning Poland, “I was a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, a niece, and we lived like a string of beads, always together. Then, the string broke, and I wasn’t called Mirka anymore.” Mirka is a child’s nickname but also a name of endearment. (My own mother, Rose Wacyra, one of nine children born to a young Polish couple who had moved from Galicia to Cliffwood, New Jersey in 1900, recalled a Jewish lady who lived in the neighborhood who called her ‘Rosala.’) She recalls the strings of amber beads, soft and warm to the touch, the color of “summer fields full of grain” in the Polish countryside, “full of life” because they are the “fossil resin of the prehistoric trees.” “For years my own feelings lay dormant like a fossil insect inside an amber bead. Now, fifty years after the war ended, I want to uncover my past and learn who I was. I want to know a girl called home by Mother,” whom she remembers only by the sound of her voice. “I can’t recall my mother’s face.” In Judaism, Jewishness itself is passed down through the mother. The partial severance from one’s mother means severance from oneself, from the people of whom you are a part.
Trains: trains took Jews to the death camps, but for Miriam Winter they also meant life, life preserved by escape, not in permanence, like amber. Her memory of the war is “a memory of running scared,” running away from her parents, little brother, grandparents, none of whom she would see again. Even after the war, “I didn’t try to find my family,” and although “I didn’t have to hide anymore…I remained in hiding,” refusing to admit she was Jewish. “I wore my mask well and smiled often,” moving from place to place, taking trains, a life “marked by packing and unpacking.” Why? That question serves as a guide not only to the reader but to her, to the author of the memoir. “I have very little memory because I lost my family. Adults pass on a sense of continuity to a child. I had nothing to help me recall life as it once was.” It was only in 1991 that she learned that the Jews in the Lodz Ghetto, Ozarow, were murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp, where they were taken in October 1942. That is what happened to her parents and her brother. But she knew it in her soul before that, which is one reason why she kept on moving, avoiding what her soul knew.
“Fifty years have passed since a loving voice called me Mirka.” She wants no murderous abstractions, none of ‘the Jew,’ the hate-name children taunted her with. The individual name was loving; the generic name murderous. She wants to know through her own senses: “I try to picture, to taste and touch, to hear and smell; I try to catch the image of myself in Ozarow, to recall how it felt to be called by my mother.” She wants to know herself as a person. And she relies on her senses, which disclose things that are solid in a world that passes by, passes through, like a train.
Her parents saved her by sending her away at the age of eight. She does remember some of her life before that: her uncle, Szmulek, who “laughed louder and longer than anybody I knew”; her grandfather, Szymon Kohn, a Hassid; her playing at being a storekeeper, imitating her grandparents; her father, Tobiasz Winter, “short, bald, funny, and fast as a bullet; “the white armbands with the blue star of David”; the Yiddish her parents spoke when they didn’t want the children to know something; the time she broke open a doll’s head to see what was inside. The doll’s head turned out to be empty, with “no dreams or memories or songs or games inside”—even more void of identity than she would become. “I hug the baby and tell her not to worry because I will take care of her.” Taken away from her mother, Majta-laja or “Lonka,” Miriam Winter finally became her own mother, her own caregiver and guardian. During the war, her first adult caretaker outside her family was Cesia, a friend of her family (blond, she didn’t ‘look Jewish’), who took her away from the Ghetto on the train.
This book, this collection of words, is about trains, running for your life, and about words, which can give life or take it away, depending on how they are used or abused. In Polish, the word for Germany is Niemcy, derived from ‘mute’; by contrast, ‘Slovak’ means ‘word.’ For the Poles, the Germans appear as a people without words, the way the ‘barbarians’ did to the Romans, as a nation that shows up not to speak but to kill. In fact, the Nazi Germans did use words, but they used them wrongly, invoking ‘the Jew,’ ‘the Slav” (as when the great chess player, Alexander Alekhine, taunted Aron Nimzovich with “Slav means slave”). Using words wrongly, they murdered. Against this, when her father said goodbye to her in Lodz, he handed her a piece of paper on which he had written the Lord’s Prayer, the words of a Jew commended to Jews and Gentiles, words that would be more than acceptable to the Polish Catholics among whom his daughter must ‘pass’ as a Christian if she is to survive. As for the trains, a train was “my first hiding place.” “Other trains rolled their wheels, and I survived by a roll of dice, pure random luck”—a “life saved by chance, punctuated by train stops.” To her, during the war, life was random, not providential. The Lord’s Prayer, invoking divine providence, came to seem a part of the camouflage, of appearance not the reality. ” Her father also “told me that from now on my name was Marysia Kowalska,” a safe Polish name. Her father did not think at random. He had a plan for his daughter living, not dying. On the train, at a platform in Kielce, a Polish woman named Maryla boarded and met Cesia, “a chance meeting of two strangers on a train.” Cesia gave her to this unknown woman, despairing of being able to care for her; her Warsaw apartment only had room for the child she had come to Ozarov to save, her nephew. “If Maryla had gone to another compartment I would have been killed,” since by the fall of 1941 “the slaughter of Jews in Poland was put into motion in an organized way,” anything but randomly”—death being much better organized than life, in that time and place. “I survived, but I can’t recall my mother’s face, although I do remember the train that took me away.”
Years later, at the Holocaust Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, in Israel, she saw the names of the cities where Jews were herded into ghettoes by the Nazis, including Ozarow in Lodz, “the last place I was with my parents.” she could touch the name of Ozarow, carved into the wall; the warm, solid “sun-bathed stones returned my touch.” The wall is a collection of names of the ghettoes and of the men and women who lived in them before being murdered. A man there told her that he didn’t even know his own name. “Like me, he had many false names; like me, he survived alone. I am still searching, but there are no traces. I have often wondered why I survived.” Was it really just random? “I am all that’s left of the families of Winter and Kohn; if I hadn’t lived, there wouldn’t be a soul to say that they even existed. I am their witness.” As her own mother, now, her own source of remembrance, however tenuous, her life became the meaning of what seemed random.
What she can remember is the Lord’s Prayer, the “Our Father” given to her by her own father for use as a lifesaving mask. As long as she stays with the “Our Father,” lives by her father’s wisdom, she will be safe, her life preserved, as if in amber. But it will also be a fossilized life, removed from real life, lived behind a mask. She would keep the mask on, let it slip, put it back on, not knowing when to remove it. “I kept my prayer note, repeating it again and again, quickly becoming an obedient girl who would memorize her knew prayer and forget the face of her mother.” Jewishness is matrilinear. The “Our Father” consists of words that are indeed fatherly and salvific but recited at the price of emptying herself of herself. In leaving her mother, at her mother’s desperate request to Cesia, “I didn’t know we were parting; I didn’t realize that it was forever; I didn’t know what I left and why.”
For her part, Cesia didn’t know, either—didn’t “know what to do with me,” a child whose “curly, black hair marked me as Jewish,” unlike her nephew, “blond like Cesia.” “I can only guess what motivated Maryla” to accept her. “Don’t let them know that you are afraid,” she tells them, when news of a Nazi patrol “passed through the crowded corridor” of the train “like a telegram on a wire.” “Tall and strong, a handsome peasant girl who had migrated to the city and made her own way” by smuggling food to hungry Poles in her city, Lwow, she “could smell an informer from a distance and knew how to keep him at arm’s length.” Smell: in this case, sensual knowledge in the mind, immediate knowledge, intuition.
Maryla cut that telltale hair and told her to stay out of sight, away from the window. “I missed being talked to and touched.” Eight-year-olds find it hard to follow commands, consistently, and when she peeked out at some children she heard outside, the cry went up: “Zydowa! Zydowa!”—Jewess, Jewess, an abstract word with hateful implication. They moved to another village, where another girl taunted her in singsong, Zydowa. “The song turned to incantation,” a sign not merely of taunting but of domination. “‘Words will never kill me,’ goes the nursery rhyme, except then—in German-occupied Poland,” where “being called Zydowa possessed the power to kill.” Judaism teaches that God calls His creation into being with a word; words create or kill, include or exclude. At a New York gathering of Holocaust survivors in 1991, she objected when a speaker says that European Jews “abandoned their religion in hiding.” His words were too general. She shows her first communion photo to a Christian friend (in America, she can have Christian friends), explaining it as an image that “defended me from Jew hunters.” Such evidence, however dubious, caused salutary doubts in the fully loaded heads of her persecutors.
“In truth my first communion was an unconsummated act. It never took place.” The Catholic priest refused to perform the service. In the future, “you may think that I am forcing my religion on you,” his mouth “curl[ing] onto a grimace as if he had bitten into a rotten part of an apple,” rather as Adam in the Garden. Not wanting her to be killed, he commanded, “You must pretend to take communion.” “I felt rejected, deprived, and fearful,” alive without life. “I had to pretend to be a Christian girl,” which added another burden of complication to her pretending. “I was bound to make mistakes,” and she did.
Moved to a farm owned by a widow named Maslow, with her two sons and daughter, she was terrified by a gander in the barnyard. Sensing her fear, it struck, just as the Nazis preyed upon those who betrayed their identity by fear. To overcome the girl’s fear of animals, Maslow would strike her if she refused to perform chores. “I hardened,” even if “it was harder to live without tenderness,” the blow of the farm woman replacing the caresses of her parents. “My only attachment was to my new religion. I loved Jesus, I wanted to serve him,” hoping to bring herself a loving relation with a person. “My Jewish life was over for me. In the villages where I now lived everyone was Roman Catholic,” the family cow her only companion. In her catechism book she saw a drawing showing Jesus surrounded by Jews chanting “Crucify him, crucify him!” “I was sure that I would go to hell. I was guilty because I were Jewish.” The Catholic children lived with their families, safely, out in the open. “I didn’t want to be Jewish anymore.” Reading the lives of the saints, “moved by their pride and defiance of danger, I wanted to be like them.” She wanted to become a nun, although she was now only “a shepherd girl taking a cow into the pasture,” a girl-David waiting to hear back from God. The farm work hardened her physically, too. She no longer went to bed with illnesses, as she had done many times at home. “Now, running barefoot across a frozen pond without a scarf, a hat, or a coat, I didn’t catch cold or didn’t notice if I did.”
None of it quite worked. In the Catholic Church, confession should be a set of honest words, salvific words, words bringing the worshipper back into the community of God. In still another town, Stykow, in 1943, “I committed a grave mistake.” “That I was not baptized felt like a knife in my heart. I loved Jesus now. This was the only object of affection in my lonely life.” But at the church in Stykow, she needed to continue to pretend to take communion, although “I knew that what I was doing was wrong,” a “mortal sin” that was life-preserving but also a bar against community, preventing her from truly joining the Church. Her mistake was to go to confession and to tell the priest that she had never been baptized, believing that “the sanctity of the sacrament” would protect her. But the priest refused to absolve her, and an old woman overheard, shouting “Father”—no protective father—this girl “didn’t receive absolution!” It was the truth, but the truth not only did not set the girl free, it endangered her life and effectively expelled her from the Catholic community. She ran to the forest, having disobeyed her real father’s wise command, “deserted and betrayed” by the communion-community. There, she calmed herself, embracing a tree (“the bark was rough but warm; behind a hard crust the tree was gentle”) and promising herself “to be smarter now,” never to “admit that I am Jewish,” never to “reveal who I am,” as her father had told her. She would no longer confess the truth but follow her father’s wisdom. From the forest she walked to the town of Hucisko, where Maryla’s sister lived. “Try to remember your way to Hucisko,” Maryla had told her, a long time ago. She did. Remembrance can save.
The sister, Zosia, lived there with her husband, Bartek, and their four children. They took her in, giving her the same chore as previously, tending a cow. Zosia supplemented the farm income (“food was scarce”) by fortune-telling; watching her manipulate the villagers with words, Miriam Winter learned not to be manipulated. She did read a lot, much to the annoyance of the adults, who wanted her only to work. “After my failed confession I kept watch all the time” over herself. “I lived only in the present,” suppressing memories of her family. “I learned to conceal my feelings.” She dreamt, alternately, of being exposed and of being rescued by a knight. “Childhood? Even the name seems ironic.”
By mid-1944, the Germans were in retreat, the Red Army advancing. Everyone hid, emerging when it was safe. “The war was over for them, but not for me.” One boy found a grenade the Germans left behind in a storehouse. He pounded on it, the grenade exploded, and “they found his remains scattered around a tree.” The war was over, its aftermath not—as Poles would learn in subsequent decades of Communist rule.
Maryla arrived and retrieved her, taking her back to Lwow. They pretended to be mother and daughter, with Miriam now “hiding behind a Christian name,” Maria Dudek. “I didn’t look for my family,” as if “I didn’t want them to live even in my memory,” having “survived the hunt” “frozen, with no identity of my own” as a kind of reverse Odysseus, a No-Man who had not voyaged to return home but to escape it. “I should have shouted out, ‘My name is Miriam Winter!’ But I didn’t come out of my hiding, and so no one called me by my real name”—free, alive, but “dead inside.” The opposite of the amber, the opposite of the tree in the forest. She peddled vodka on street corners to Russian soldiers (“vodka was the life of the city,” or at least that of the occupiers). Better, a neighbor introduced her to the novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Polish Nobel Laureate and to the poems of Adam Mickiewicz (author of “Locomotive,” evoking the memory of trains). For the most part, her life remained miserable, as Maryla’s new lover, a pastry chef who “could tell that I was a Jewess” and “didn’t like it,” kept her confined to the shop, first in Lwow and then in Lublin. There, she was finally baptized, now that the war was over and the pretense of priestly conscientiousness had evaporated. They moved still again, now to Warsaw, a city in ruins over which returning Polish soldiers wept at “the once vibrant city now covered with broken relics of the previous life.” (Fifty years later, I can attest, the city was only somewhat improved, with dreary Soviet-style buildings sitting on top of the ground cleared of war rubble.)
Another move, to Zabkowice, where she started writing a diary, careful to make no entries about “my Jewishness, nor about my real family.” There, she also managed to persuade her ‘parents’ to send her to school for the next “three unhappy years.” (‘Father’ “believed that reading was a waste of time,” and yelling, “at the slightest cause,” “You cursed Yid! I’ll kill you like a dog!”) When some relief workers came by, offering to take her to a home for Jewish war orphans, Maryla’s response was, “After everything that I did for you, you will betray me like Christ-killers betrayed Jesus Christ.” In another “wrong move,” she agreed to stay with her tormenters. They let her go a year later, when ‘Father’s’ sister came to work for them and she became expendable.
“And then I was free.” She ended up in a Jewish orphanage in Szczecin, many kilometers north of miserable Zabkowice. But who was this person, now free? She thought of “what I would do, where I would live, but I didn’t stop to think about my true identity.” “Why didn’t I stop and reflect?” She kept her false name throughout those “good-hearted days free of anger and violence.” But the other children had relatives, if not parents; “even in the orphanage, the kids were not alone.” She “was the only one who had nobody,” the mark of Jewishness, then. Everyone knew that, “so it didn’t really matter that I didn’t admit my identity.” “It mattered that I couldn’t admit it.”
At summer camp in 1949, the “commandant” was an atheist biology teacher, possibly selected for her position by the regnant Communist regime. Their conversations “persuaded me that science has all the answers,” and “Other books intensified those doubts until I became a nonbeliever,” including those of Anatole France and André Gide. She continued to attend religious classes to avoid the disapproval of the other girls in high school, “but I didn’t go to church anymore.” After high school, she enrolled in acting classes, where she could wear physical masks she made out of papier-mâché. “My mask fit well.”
Writing in her diary “kept me sane.” She gradually “went from not wanting to know from trying to forget, from leaving everything at once, from not wanting to remember, from discarding the past like unwanted rummage, to a search taken up too late, without a map, with no guideposts and no directions, to slow and painful discoveries.” For a long time, however, “concealing the murder of my family, I said that my parents died before the war,” “liv[ing] my false life as if I were watching a film.” At the same time, the regnant Communists, following the lead of Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev, admitted (some) of the crimes Stalin committed. “Why did we believe all those lies?” Winter asked herself in her diary. The truth “is always hidden” and “what’s more, we passionately believe and then, when the truth comes out, we feel deceived.” Having directed a production of Peer Gynt, with its much traveled, self-deceiving anti-hero, she wrote, “Peer Gynt threw away principles. He followed his impulses without thinking, without control. Looking back at the end of the play, he concluded that he had wasted his life. And I, who seemingly proceeded with self-control, have arrived at the same sorry balance.”
After relocating to Warsaw, she met Romek Orlowska, “a Pole, not a Jew,” another war orphan whose “days in the youth house turned to a beat similar to mine and formed him in a mold not unlike mine.” He was the one who saw through her mask, “want[ing] to see my face.” “Finally I told him the truth and fell in love with this man who could make me real.” “Someone had shown me the real me.” This was in 1963. They had two children, named Daniel and David, Jewish names; severed from her own Jewish mother, she saw to it that her own sons would not be. It was still four years after her marriage, during the Six Day War, when she affirmed herself publicly. The Communist regime in Poland had denounced Israel, which had switched its alliance from France to the United States. At the Culture Center where she worked, when asked whose side she was on, she replied, “I am on the side of my people.” The Communist Party informer in the meeting complimented her, assuming that she meant the Poles. No, “I am Jewish.” “Why did I let these people know that I was Jewish at a time when Jews were being persecuted again?” Was it “a substitution for a funeral rite for my murdered brother, Jozio?” Whatever it was, she “had to scream out: ‘Look at me. I, too, should have been killed. I am Miriam Winter!'”
The Party was not amused. She could keep her job if she wrote a letter to the local newspaper “condemning the Jews”—a Jew condemning Jews, quite the propaganda coup, had she complied. She didn’t. She lost her job and “former acquaintances turned away, pretending not to know me.” After her husband found her birth certificate, and Jozio’s, in the Lodz archives (“the first proof of my identity”) the family left Poland in May 1969, first for Italy (“the Italian Communists marched and shouted; their slogans, carried on large wooden boards, reminded us of why were in Rome”) and then for the United States. “I have never gone back.” “I have found my place.”
Why did she take so long to face herself? I was guilty, she writes. “Guilty for being spared when others were killed. Guilty for surviving when my family didn’t. I listen to the sound of the word guilt, and I can touch its slimy pulp. It holds like glue,” like the flour-and water paste that went into making her theatrical mask. “I wanted to punish myself for surviving.”
Jewish, then, but in what way? At a sabbath service during a Gathering of Child Survivors event in Montreal in 1994, her roommate asked her if she believed in God. “I believe in Jews praying together. I don’t know whether God exists, but even if he doesn’t, he is here.”
“I felt that I had returned to my tent.” “I could remember that I was home.” Not ‘a Jew,’ but a Jewish person. That was when she recognized that she needed to write what she remembered.
In 2014, only a few months before her death, Miriam Winter visited Hillsdale College, not far from her house and garden in Jackson, Michigan. My colleague Robert Eden thought that she might have some good things to say to the students. “When I speak about the Holocaust, I tell only about the things I know,” she said to them—the things she saw, heard, touched, smelled, tasted. As to writing the book, “I think it helped me become a truer person.”
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