Free Her Mother's Daughter by Marilyn French Page A

around. Children wandering in the mountains would come across a hand or a bit of leg. One found half a head, with an ear. Pieces of human bodies littered the mountains and the villages. The old folks had returned to the main room, where we are eating, to tell this story. Their faces are white and drawn, even now, thirty years later. Their voices have the tense hush of people who speak the unspeakable.
    I hold myself in restraint, knowing the continuing anti-Semitism of Poles. But the horror in the faces of the old folks is not moderated by relief at the fact that the feet and hands were Jewish feet and hands. The old folks are probably not much older than I, although they would not believe that. They were only children when the Nazis came. But their parents may not have opposed the Nazi plan to solve finally the problem presented to Christians by the existence of Jews. Still, a foot hurled miles, landing at your front door, with one toe missing, and the heel bashed in from the impact of landing at such velocity—well, that would be a joke if you did not have to think about the people who arranged the situation that caused this joke. The breathlessness, the pale drawn faces, the hushed voices arose from remembering that this thing was done by people, by humans. Of the same race as oneself: the human race.
    The Nazis killed one-third of the population of Poland and 99 percent of its livestock; they burned Warsaw to the ground, and destroyed other cities before they left. All that is left of them now is the prison they used to interrogate and hold people in the center of Warsaw. It has been left as it was: the Poles understand monuments. The Jewish ghetto has been covered over with grass and concrete, and holds a park in which parents wheel their infants in carriages, and children play. They are not Jewish children.

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    T HE PEOPLE OF ZMEGRUD were annihilated in the fall of 1943; in May of that year, my grandmother died. So it makes no sense to talk about survival. The others were dead long before that: Dafna Pasek in 1937; her husband, my father’s father Stefan Dabrowski, in 1939, the year Hitler set out on his triumphal project designed to ensure the supremacy of the Third Reich for a thousand years. Michael Brez intended to return to Poland in 1914 and settle down to be a gentleman—his true profession. Unfortunately, he died the year before. Or perhaps that wasn’t unfortunate, given what happened in 1914.
    The only photograph of Frances as a young woman is her wedding picture. She has a round placid face; my own resembles it a little, except the placidity got lost over the generations. She is small and delicate and beautifully dressed, but she seems stiff beside her taller, thinner, arrogant young husband. He has something fierce in his aspect that reminds me of myself. And he loved to drink and laugh, to enjoy himself, something I also identify with.
    But the next photograph is shocking. They are older: three of their children appear in it with them, so it must have been taken about 1907, perhaps just after Frances lost her fourth child, which was born dead. Wally looks to be near two. And that arrogant man has become pure tyrant: his chin and mouth are set and thick, his eyes glare outward as if what he saw before him day by day was outrageously unworthy of his glance. And Frances! How can it be I never saw this before? She is a little thicker, a little older, but only about twenty-six, after all. It is a side of my grandmother I never saw or imagined. For there are lines of anxiety in her forehead and her mouth has a hard set. She looks enraged, fixed in anger.
    Still, I guess there are worse things than anger, because the next pictures I have of her show her old, worn, defeated. She is only in her forties and fifties, but her body has become shapeless, her hair thin and grey and pulled back in a little bun at the nape of her neck. She wears cheap cotton housedresses and she smiles, but there is no life