Easter in Katowice
I'm an anthropologist who works on governance and development problems around the world. Using my personal experiences and observations I write about how economic processes and human relationships build (or destroy) social systems and the institutions of governance.
It was a quiet, unseasonably warm mid-April evening in Silesian Katowice. Dinner was over and fourteen year-old Gabor and his nine year old little sister Myrka were still seated at the table in their small apartment in the Stary Rynek quarter of the city, playing a word game with their parents while their maternal grandmother quickly tidied up in the tiny kitchen. She was in a hurry to catch the bus home to her husband, Gabor’s maternal grandfather, across town. It was the middle of the week and the buses would not be operating very late, this week before Easter.
A soft but urgent knock on the door froze Gabor’s parents into immobile blocks of fear. They realized immediately that none of the official agencies or violent roving partisan groups would have knocked so softly. But still, Gabor’s mother instinctively pulled him and his sister beside her and pushed them into the kitchen, closing the door behind them but leaving it open a crack. When the soft, rapid knocking was repeated Gabor’s father opened the door to the small two-room apartment.
This sort of tension was not unusual those days in Katowice. The town had been established in the late 1500’s by mining settlers in the province of Silesia, which at the time was a rural part of Austria. Within a short two hundred years Prussia wrested control of the area and a large population of Germans moved into the outskirts of the village, which had become known for rich coal reserves. Entrepreneurs who owned Katowice’s large mining claims advocated that the settlement be accorded the formal status of a city, thereby establishing a more orderly governance structure and institutions that Katowice had not had as a village. However, though this greatly formalized administration of the community and its resources, Prussia’s institutions of governance hardly satisfied the interests of the local communities. The area around Katowice’s urban core was more German, while the center of the community was more Polish. The growing town’s laws were imposed by government to justify its ethnic and linguistic preferences rather than those of the patchwork of mining and farming communities, each of which cherished its own traditions and nourished its own grievances. By 1917 the city of Katowice had grown a great deal in political and social complexity, as well as conflicts, and no one was happy with any of the solutions.
During this period Gabor’s paternal grandfather quietly supported individuals who sought safe haven because of their political, economic or ethnic backgrounds. After the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, conflicting claims for the Silesian territory were superficially addressed by the chief Allied powers, which divided the area between Czechoslovakia, Germany, and a reconstituted Poland. By the time the war ended in 1918, three-quarters of Silesia’s coal production and nearly two-thirds of its steelworks were incorporated into Poland, leaving lower Silesia to a disgruntled Germany in a political reality into which Gabor would be born just 8 years later. But the population was still divided. Gabor learned from his grandfather about the three great zaburzeny, the “troubles”, - later known as the Silesian Uprisings- that plagued the city between 1919 and 1921, just five years before Gabor was born.
By the time he was ten years old Gabor had developed a particular sense of being both an observer and a participant in the history he learned from his grandfather’s colorful stories. Tales about how the tragical musicians, brilliant mathematicians, eloquent writers and sad ballerinas who streamed through their small apartment brought Katowice’s constant backdrop of street clashes, pogroms, workers’ strikes, football matches, and attempted assassination attempts right into Gabor’s home in living color. History was very real and happening around him, frequently interrupting or shortening his school days.
Gabor was as fixated with his grandfather’s stories as any ten-year-old boy, especially as he met, face to fact, so many of the actors who nervously drank strong glasses of tea with his grandfather until late in the night and quietly left before dawn. It was only when he was twelve years old, as Poland and Czechoslovakia fought over unresolved parts of Silesia and whole populations were being expelled from their communities, that he learned where his grandfather’s guests had spent the night.
He learned about the attic.
Half of the top floor apartments in the small residential buildings in the Stary Rynek, the old quarter of the city, had drop-down ladders to their own portion of an attic, which were generally used for drying clothes or private storage. The ladders to the attic were typically folded into the ceiling of a storage closet crammed with brooms, mops, rain gear, gloves, hats and cobwebs. During the zaburzeny days Gabor’s grandfather had moved a heavy oak wardrobe whose back became, in effect, a doubled door to that closet. He built a latrine in the attic and connected it to the apartment plumbing. The hideout was rustic, crammed, uncomfortable, but effective. Over the years the family eventually forgot about the concealed stepladder, using the small sunny balcony off the kitchen to dry their clothes in the same way most of the other apartments did.
As his father opened the door Gabor immediately recognized Raila, his sister Myrka’s best friend from school, and her parents. In spite of the country’s troubles the quiet April evening had brought a pleasant, warm lull in what had been a harsh winter. A new Pope had just been elected in Rome barely a month ago, everyone was looking forward to Easter, and the drama of unexpected guests gave Gabor warm memories of his grandfather’s stories.
The two fathers spoke softly and sparingly while Gabor and his sister were allowed back to the table. Myrka and Raila, both nine years old, looked like sisters and even had the same sense of humor. Myrka’s grandmother always called “mawa Raila”, little Raila, her second granddaughter. Raila’s mother joined the women in the kitchen while the two girls tended to their dolls as they always did, but Gabor sat with his father and listened as Raila’s father quickly explained that they had been warding off increasingly dangerous threats from powerful local gangs and needed refuge for two nights while waiting for passage out of the province. They had not left their apartment with any clothes or possessions, bringing only a small bouquet of flowers and Raila’s doll. To even the most curious fellow travelers on the bus their bus trip would have seemed like a casual family visit to a friend’s apartment after dinner during Holy Week, and would not have attracted attention.
Raila was feverish, and needed rest. The family’s immediate concern was the flu, of course. After a hot bowl of soup that Raila could hardly force herself to drink, Gabor’s grandmother hurriedly said goodbye to her granddaughter and mawa Raila and left for her bus. She would see Myrka when she returned for Easter Sunday dinner, but Raila and her parents would already be safely on her way on Saturday.
Gabor’s father led Raila and her parents through the old oak wardrobe. Pushing aside the clothes and stepping over the boots and buckets into the closet, Gabor’s father opened the forgotten door to the step ladder, pulled it down, and showed Raila’s parents the dank room his father had set up over twenty years ago, where they would hide pending the next leg in their journey. It was the first time Gabor saw the attic for himself, and he was immediately struck by a feeling that this year, 1939, was going to be an important year, and that this was going to be an important night.
The next morning brought both good and bad news. On the radio it was announced that Britain and France agreed on a mutual assistance pact with Poland, but little Raila’s fever had grown worse. Though she did not show signs of the dreaded flu, the fever was now accompanied by severe pain in her belly, and the parents felt she should be seen by a doctor to make sure she would be ready for their Saturday departure. This caused great concern because medical attention would need to be reported to the authorities, and it was decided it would be safer to consult a doctor who was not known to the family in order that that Myrka’s identification card would be used without causing questions. The mothers took Raila to the hospital. It was Holy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper. They returned to the apartment in great distress without Raila, reporting to their husbands that they had to check Raila in at the hospital because the doctors strongly suspected she had appendicitis and might require surgery followed by a week of hospitalization. They returned to the hospital to spend the night with her. The next day Raila’s condition rapidly worsened and an emergency appendectomy was carried out on Saturday.
During which little Raila died.
A death certificate dated Saturday April 8 1939 was issued for Myrka. The families were utterly devastated. On that day Raila’s parents left Katowice without their child and everything they knew.
The pretense that Myrka had died had to be upheld to protect both families. Myrka had to hide in the attic during her own wake, at which her friends and their families gathered to mourn. Through the keyhole in the closet door the nine year-old Myrka watched her grandparents grieve and heard her friends’ and relatives’ elegies. Myrka’s mother could not tell her parents that their granddaughter lived, and experienced their pain as if it were her own. She knew that if her parents knew the truth, a feigned grief would not be genuine enough to conceal the fact that Myrka was alive, and the family would be immediately arrested. Grief was the only acceptable cloak, one they would wear until they passed away during the second world war, which began just six months later.