A Silver Lining
Noreen Plen
This story starts in 1939 in a small town called Mielec, in southeast Poland. It was the hometown of my father’s family, which at that stage consisted of my grandfather, his four sons, two daughters, three daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren. My paternal grandmother had already passed away and the eldest son was living in France with his wife and family.
One branch of the family consisted of the second eldest son, my uncle David, his wife Erna and his two daughters, Cila and Hania. David fled east, spending most of the war in Russia, and survived. Erna and Hania were murdered by the incoming Germans in 1941, but my cousin Cila survived. She was a child of only 15 when she was separated from her mother and sister and, like so many others, her story is a mixture of bravery, luck, and fortitude. My father, Jan, who was son number three, had also fled east to escape the German occupation and spent a few years in a labour camp south of Siberia, having been arrested by the Russians. At the end of the war the only survivors from this branch of the family were David, Jan and Cila. My father returned to Poland to look for any surviving relatives. He managed to locate Cila, who was then reunited with her father whom they found in Russia. David and Cila emigrated to Palestine in 1948, in time for Cila to put into practice her training in Czechoslovakia and fight with the Israeli army in the War of Independence. My father worked in Warsaw as an accountant for the Polish government. He met and married my mother, who was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and in 1948 they managed to escape via Prague to Paris and then in late 1949 to England. I was born a few months later in Newcastle upon Tyne and hence was raised as a Jewish Geordie. David remarried and lived happily in Israel until his death a few years ago. Cila married and moved on to Canada where she still lives, currently in Toronto.
I have deliberately given only a skeleton outline up to now, as the story picks up again in 1994. My cousin Cila was mulling over the past and feeling her losses when she started to think about the chances of finding anything in Poland which had belonged to her parents. Why had she waited so long? She could only offer the explanation that as she got older she became more sentimental, and longed to hold and possess anything connected with her late mother. She approached the Polish Consulate in Toronto and received the address of the City Hall in Mielec. She wrote to them, giving details of the name and last known address of a family called Lojczyk, who had been the caretakers in the small apartment house where her family had lived until 1941. She remembered that her family had lived in a first floor flat, that their neighbour had been a Dr Kauffman and that the two flats downstairs had been occupied by a lawyer’s office and the caretaker’s family. A reply came from Poland that, over 50 years later, one of the four sons of the original caretaker was still living in the same house and a current address was provided.
Correspondence started between a Jewish survivor in sophisticated Toronto and a modest Polish man called Zbigniew Lojczyk in a small town in Poland. Cila remembered Zbigniew, as he was of a similar age to her and they had played together as children. She wrote a few letters, reminiscing, and started asking him about things that she was beginning to recall from those childhood days. She asked if he knew anything about a large oil painting by a local painter called Fenichel, which used to hang on the dining room wall opposite her seat at the table. At the end of this letter, which described this painting in detail, she added a postscript. Did he have any memory of the day that his father helped her mother bury a bassinet containing the family silver in the backyard?
The yard was mainly concrete but there was a flower bed on either side and the bassinet had been buried there before the Germans arrived. There was no reply for quite a while to this letter but then an answer came. Zbigniew was very sorry but there was no painting, as the Germans had sold all the possessions from the flat after her family had left. He then mentioned that he did have some silver and that my cousin was very welcome to come to Poland as their guest and collect the items. He gave no details, but it was clear that at some stage his family had dug up the bassinet and stored its contents in their cellar, where they had remained during the intervening years.
One can imagine how my cousin felt. She was extremely happy and excited and again questioned herself as to why it had taken her so long to make this attempt. She still couldn’t give a firm answer but said that perhaps the climate was better now that the regime in Poland had changed; previously Mr Lojczyk may have been afraid even to answer her letters.
A new dilemma now arose. Cila had absolutely no intention of returning to Poland, even to recover the silver. She could not face a city full of the ghosts of her family and it was at this stage that I learnt of the existence of this invaluable and unique part of our family history. As can be surmised from my brief description earlier, the surviving members of both sides of my family came to their adopted countries as refugees and had no material items whatsoever from their lives prior to the German invasion of Poland. The concept of a family heirloom had not previously existed in my mind, and I too was very excited to learn that amongst the silverware were some items from our mutual grandparents’ home, as well as that of Cila’s parents. Thus I in London started thinking about this Polish treasure, while Cila was doing the same in Toronto. She kept on writing to Zbigniew enclosing a little money in each letter, even though he never asked for anything. One day she received a letter in his handwriting but postmarked Toronto. Zbigniew had given it to a cousin of his wife who was visiting her son in the suburb of Scarborough. This cousin had brought with her a little silver box and three sets of cutlery, and now my cousin broke down emotionally when she realised she would soon hold something which had belonged to her mother. Cila went to Scarborough armed with flowers and came home with some of her childhood. A few weeks later another visitor to Canada brought a small candy basket and a beautiful, round fluted box. From the next few letters a list was gradually compiled of the silverware remaining in Poland. This comprised seven candlesticks, two cake servers and some fish and fruit knives and forks. I think it was the knowledge of the existence of the candlesticks which really speeded up our efforts at retrieval.
I spoke with every Polish contact I could think of and started to investigate the possibility of my going with my husband Brian to Mielec. I spoke to one of the only surviving Polish friends of my late father and he was adamant that we should not go. He considered Poland to still be a dangerous country, he felt it was unsafe to travel so deep in the countryside (Mielec is a four-hour train journey from Krakow) and asked how could I trust these people? He made me realise that if we did go we needed to have with us a Polish-speaking companion. We learned that someone would first have to go to Mielec to obtain an accurate description of the goods, especially as we had no idea of the financial value of the silver. To us the emotional value was the only one which counted.
The next stage was to go to a dedicated office to obtain official permission to take the silver out of the country. The nearest such office was in a place called Rzeszow, which again was a considerable distance from Mielec. The next problem could come at the border with the custom authorities.
Altogether it was not an easy project, either for us or for a courier. However, we decided to work along the lines of persuading Cila to come to England in the spring of 1996 and then, hopefully, the three of us could make the trip together.
Meanwhile, in early 1995, the Polish-born father of one of my friends in London had offered to try and help as he in turn had a friend who had some trading links with a company in Warsaw. A courier had been approached and had tentatively agreed to bring the silver, as long as we could get it as far as Warsaw. This was a problem in itself as Mr Lojczyk was too old and sick to make this journey. Meanwhile my cousin was worried that the courier could prove untrustworthy, and started experiencing great anxieties about various scenarios in which everyone involved would change their minds or get into trouble or have the silver confiscated by the customs officers, and the precious silver could be lost forever. After several more months of letters and conversations the courier in Warsaw changed his mind. He agreed to travel to Mielec, collect the silver and bring it with him on his next trip to London. More letters were exchanged, my cousin struggling all the time as her standard of written Polish had remained at that of a teenager and she felt her language was neither mature nor of adequate quality. She had to send instructions to all the parties concerned; we sent a copy of her passport for identification, and the Polish contact eventually confirmed he would make the trip by the end of the year. His plan was to bypass the official procedure and cross the border at a time when he knew a friendly guard was on duty. For this purpose he would take with him some vodka and some cigarettes. Tensions began to rise, and this project started to feel real.
One day last December I received a telephone call at work. It was from my friend, who asked me to telephone an office in London at once as the courier had arrived! There had been no previous agreement on payment and any discussion of money had been pushed to the side. The man could have named almost any price, and I would have paid. It also transpired that his journey had not been totally smooth. The customs in Poland had worked exactly as planned, and the officer on duty had been very happy with his vodka and a few cartons of cigarettes. The customs in England decided that this man was suspicious and had kept him up all night while they stripped his car and examined everything in detail, obviously looking for drugs. Luckily our precious candlesticks were hollow, so it was clear that nothing was hidden inside, and they were thus of no interest. Even after all this irritation the courier merely asked for his travel expenses to and from Mielec, together with the cost of the bribes. This seemed not only too good to be true but palpably unfair, so I negotiated the price upwards, and he went home for Christmas a very happy man. He left behind an elated English family who still had trouble believing it when the silver was delivered by hand the next morning to our home in Finchley. One of the first things we did was to take photographs of everything, develop the film using a one-hour service and post the photos ‘express’ to Canada. My cousin had waited over 50 years, but I did not want her to wait any longer than necessary!
On instructions from my cousin I kept the silver untouched in our loft and in May she came to England as we had planned. As we now had no need to go to Poland we had a marvellous holiday in Prague instead, and the silver has now returned to its home in Canada. Sadly my cousin did not remember the candlesticks from her youth, but she did know that at least one set had been from our grandparents’ house. She has let me keep two individual candlesticks which I am currently having restored, and I will be able to pass these on to my two children as a small but invaluable piece of their family history.
