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It may very well be the truth, and I think indeed it is, that thanks to my mother’s consummate language skills, she escaped murderers, jails, and concentration camps. The bonus being that therefore I exist, and she lived on well into her nineties.
My mother would casually refer to the plethora of languages she spoke and heard in Lwów, Poland which is present day L’viv where she lived from the 1920s to the 40s; Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian, German, and as did all the intelligentsia in Europe, French. The English language was not an important prerequisite pre-war. The city itself has had many names: German: Lemberg, Polish: Lwów, Ukrainian: L’viv.
My mother’s father (my grandfather) was born in Constantinople (Istanbul), he was an accomplished lawyer. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1922, the year of her birth, perhaps he felt that the winds of change would not bring good fortune for those who did not belong to the majority. The family decamped with high hopes to Europe. L’viv was still an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, less than twenty years later, my mother narrowly escaped with her life from the Nazis, and her father, the secular Jewish lawyer, was hung to die in the town square.
L’viv, that elegant Hapsburg enclave in the province of Galicia in western Ukraine, bounced back and forth between Austria and Poland for years. Finally, as a result of border changes following World War II, the region of Galicia was divided between Poland and Ukraine. Modern L’viv is the nucleus of historic Galicia. Galicia consists of other regions of western Ukraine as well and sits in a large basin between the Baltic and Black Seas. Like most cities of the old world, L’viv possesses a long and storied history. Founded in the mid-13th century, its position controls east-west passes and routes across the Carpathian Mountains and thus, it is entitled to that stormy past.
Accounts of history may vary according to the predilection and national paradigm of each individual writer. Even when presenting the same events, such histories differ radically in their interpretations. One thing is clear, however: those mighty empires and their power grabs are ultimately transitory. Ukraine is and has always been a mixing place of peoples and ethnicities. The name itself, “ukraine,” has Slavic etymological roots meaning “border region”. In addition, the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives the example of a royal census charter from 1350 that lists the ethnicities domiciled in the region of Galicia, mentioning, among others, Armenians, Tatars, Jews, Slavs, Karaites, and Turks.
The Soviets marched into Galicia. L’viv became a part of the Soviet empire. My mother recounted how in 1939 she went to school bright and early one morning and was greeted by two Russian soldiers in full regalia standing at attention in her classroom. They proclaimed that heretofore all lessons would be in the Russian language. My mother was young, she was optimistic, she was bright. All right, she thought, so I’ll learn Russian. And learn Russian she did. Then the Nazis followed two years later. Consequently, her German language skills were perfected with this next round of occupiers. One must be adept at linguistic survival.
L’viv was a multicultural city just before World War II, with a population of 312,300.
At the time of the sudden German attack on the Soviet Union, about 160,000 Jews lived in the city; the number had swelled by tens of thousands due to the arrival of Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland in late 1939. On June 22, 1941, in violation of the Nonaggression Pact, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The Pact had been a German ploy and the war on the eastern front had begun. There were those Ukrainians who welcomed the Nazis with flowers as they believed it would relieve them from the Soviet yoke. They were sadly mistaken as more death and destruction ensued. On June 29, 1941, the German forces, having already launched their invasion of Soviet territory, invaded eastern Galicia, in Ukraine, slaughtering thousands. L’viv was occupied and captured by the Wehrmacht in the early hours of June 30, 1941. Four years later, in 1945, L’viv was annexed back to the Soviet Union as part of territorial rearrangements granted to the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, resulting in a population exchange between Poland and Soviet Ukraine. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became an independent state.
The big boys played their violent games and afterwards they were obliged to clean up their mess by drawing arbitrary lines on the ground and pushing people around. The dictator Stalin is gone. Another horrible dictator replaces him now. This is precisely what happens whenever fascists bemoan their nation’s glorious past and blame its demise on the corrupting influence and infiltration of democratic principles and minority populations. Here we go again.
My beautiful mama spoke beautiful Polish, French, Russian, German, Ukrainian, and English in order of acquisition. She knew sufficient Spanish to enjoy voyages. When I was 17 years old, we travelled together, the two of us, to visit Madrid, Spain. In a local restaurant we espied a young, frocked priest eating a dish that looked enticing. My mother raised an eyebrow, she gazed longingly. The priest blushed. He interpreted this move as a bold flirtation from an older woman. In fact, Mama simply wanted to know what he was eating, and she told him so, in Spanish. We had never seen Paella before!
As to the many times multilingual ability saved my mother’s life, I will relate only one event for now. In 1942, in order to escape mass deportations and killings in the Ghetto, she travelled out of occupied Poland by passenger train. It was a very risky move for a young woman on her own. Sure enough, shortly after the train’s departure, Nazi police guards boarded the train, checking tickets and ID cards. They began dragging poor souls off the train. Thinking quickly, she dropped her ticket on the floor and ever so sweetly in her best Russian asked the man sitting opposite her, “Sir, I would lose my head if it wasn’t attached, would you mind holding my ticket?” speaking like a true Southern belle. In this manner, she appeared to be travelling with a comrade and therefore she would be much less suspect.
It worked.
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” — Elie Wiesel (b. 1928, d. 2016.)
Reference
Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, ©1984-©1993
