Revolution Baby Read Free Page A

not given the opportunity to learn to read or write. At home they spoke Yiddish. Gui wanted to go to school, to speak Polish, to live a different life. The older she got, the more she hated her rigid father, and she dreamt of getting away.
    At the age of ten she was sent to work at a dressmaker’s. Although it was difficult work, Guitele was delighted to leave the house and meet people from other backgrounds. All the workers were Jewish, but most of them were from less pious families than her own. Gui listened to girls of fifteen or sixteen telling of their encounters with boys, or the parties they went to. She thought of Tobcia, her elder sister, who had never been allowed out in the evening and who had left home with the first man to give her a smile. And she began waiting for her turn.
    Guitele was thirteen when she joined the seamstresses’ union. The union leaders were her first heroes. She viewed them as models of uprightness, determination, and courage. Whenever there was a demonstration, she was in the front row, shouting louder than all the others; whenever there was a strike somewhere, she would be outside the gates every morning to stop the bosses going in, support the morale of the troops and ladle out hot soup. But in those days, that sort of militant behavior led straight to prison.
    From the age of sixteen on, my mother was sent to prison several times over. If I’d had more of a chance to know what a mother’s love is, I would surely have been very proud of her. She was a brave woman. A woman who created a new family for herself among the unions and, later on, in the Communist Party. A family for whom she was ready to make every sacrifice.
    Prison played an important role in my mother’s life. It is where she made her first goy friends and where she broke her ties with Judaism for good. To mark the break, she took a Polish name: Helena. She became known everywhere as little Lena. It was also in prison that she learned to speak Polish and then to read and write, and she developed a habit she would maintain all through life, that of doing regular gymnastics, which is surely why she was in such good shape right up to the time of her death. My mother spent just over four years in the Pawiak prison.
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    One gray morning in the spring of 1925 Helena was set free. And that same morning, under the same gray sky, a prison guard opened the gate and said goodbye to Emil Demke, who had just finished his sentence.
    Emil saw a young woman sitting on a bench on Pawiak Square. Her face was vaguely familiar. Very timidly—she had just seen him leave the prison, he mustn’t frighten her—he went up to her.
    â€œGood morning, Miss. I don’t mean to bother you, but I think I’ve seen you somewhere before . . . ”
    â€œYes, yes, I remember you,” answered the young woman with a strong Yiddish accent. “It was at a party at Magda Spychalska’s. I think I’ve also seen you at a Party meeting. Maybe five years ago, before I went to prison.”
    Emil looked at her, stunned.
    â€œYes, I’ve just been released,” she said, pointing to her suitcase.
    I had just entered the realm of the possible.
    The man who would become my father, who was scarcely taller than five foot two, was instantly charmed by this tiny little woman with her long braids. Oh, my mother’s braids . . . She didn’t cut them until the summer of 1940, shortly after France surrendered to the Germans. For years afterwards she would speak of them so nostalgically, as if, by cutting them, she had put an end to her youth, to a certain carefree time.
    As neither one of them had anywhere to go, Emil invited Helena for a walk in the Bielany woods to see the trees in bloom. My father often told me of his meeting with my mother. This was how his story always ended: “And we went for a walk in the Bielany woods.” Obviously, you might wonder what two people straight out of