Come Spring: an autobiographical novel

By Maria Lewitt

'I wasn't happy. I wasn't unhappy. I was there at that time and that was all. I didn't involve myself in philosophical reflections, but my mind was like a camera, imprinting forever the idyllic beauty of the European summer of 1939.'

The idyll does not last long. Within days a young Jewish girl and her family are engulfed by the Second World War in Warsaw, Poland. Outside the concentration camps and mostly outside the ghetto, the adolescent heroine and her family experience the war with a secret. Living in a country house, they survive on false papers and 'good looks', while hiding four of their close relatives in the cellar. One day they have to cope with waves of German soldiers bursting through their houses; the next moment the Warsaw ghetto burns; another day they wake to find the front line in their front garden.

The author recreates this inhuman world though the eyes of her adolescent self. There are moments of poetic vision and moments of searing pain, but the book is a testament to heroism and concern.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Mar 4, 2002
• ISBN: 9781925113877

Maria Lewitt

Maria Lewitt is a Melbourne writer. She is the author of No Snow in December and numerous short stories.

Book preview

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Introduction

First published in 1980, Come Spring is a classic of Australian Jewish life-writing, and one of the earliest and finest examples of Australian Holocaust literature. It is tempting to call it an autobiography, but the narrative’s sub-title—’an autobiographical novel’—cautions against this categorisation. A note on the fly leaf of the first edition explains why: ‘Of this book Maria Lewitt says: The events are true, as are the characters; although I have allowed myself the liberty of manipulating both.’

In fact, this kind of ‘manipulation’ is common in works that announce themselves as ‘autobiography’. Given the frailties of memory, even the most scrupulously accurate autobiographer must sometimes resort to speculative reconstruction, even invention, of aspects of the past. Often autobiographers will ‘manipulate’ memories in order best to convey the ‘essence’ of what occurred. They might fuse elements of several scenes into one, tinker with chronology, change a detail here and there, invent a piece of dialogue that captures the nature of a relationship between two people, and so on. But none of this need undermine our confidence in the writer’s integrity, nor in the authenticity of the narrative. Good writers persuade us that they are giving us the essential, if not invariably the literal, truth about things. Maria Lewitt is a good writer in just this sense.

She is also an accomplished literary artist. Come Spring recounts turbulent, sometimes traumatic, experiences in a style that is unaffected, unsentimental, yet sombrely evocative. Departing Lodz, her childhood home, for the last time, the young Maria looks out on the winter landscape from the taxi which carries her, together with her mother and sister, to Warsaw:

Winter: there was some unique beauty in its dismal melancholy. The trees kept hitting me at even intervals. They sat by the road naked and lonely, some branches covered by patches of snow, making the rest of the trees even more black and lifeless. The crows jumped in the fields, covering the snow with a birdish pattern. They flew away and their cawing seemed to magnify the gloomy emptiness.

With deceptively simple power, Lewitt conjures those ‘naked’ trees—mute, melancholic, forsaken by the world of which they seem an immutable part. As we read on, those trees take on a second, symbolic life: their forlorn, forsaken condition comes to mirror that of European Jews, engulfed in unimaginable catastrophe in places they have long considered ‘home’. Another sort of writer might have elaborated on the patterns that the crows make in the snow but, typically, Lewitt keeps the description chastely simple: ‘birdish pattern’ sounds vague but is in fact strangely precise. Lewitt trusts in the reader’s grasp of ordinary things. Rather than paint an elaborate picture, she provides suggestive cues and leaves much of the work to the reader’s imagination. There is unassuming artistry in such poetic understatement.

As the title Come Spring suggests, seasons play a prominent part in the narrative, which begins in summer 1939 and ends in summer 1945. Throughout the darkest days of war, spring figures as the season of hope: ‘One day, Next Spring, the war would end’; ‘Spring came and I found … that the warmer weather made me feel better.’ But in these grim times, as in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the promise of spring can be cruelly deceiving: ‘April is the cruellest month …’

Spring came, the ice on the Vistula cracked and the torrent of water broke loose.

Spring came. On the Eastern front the snow melted and the might of the German army broke through deeper into Russian land.

The Germans planted loudspeakers throughout Warsaw and, several times a day, we were subjected to reports from the front line preceded by the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

TA, RA, RA, RAAA,

TA, RA, RA, RAAA …

THE GERMANS ARE WINNING ON ALL FRONTS. HEIL! HEIL!

What hope of spring-like regeneration when the greatest creative spirits of European culture are invoked by those who are reducing Europe to barbarity?

And yet there is something profoundly reassuring about the seasons. A glorious spring day might be poisoned by the chaos and stench of war, but the seasons will shift according to their primordial rhythms, paying no heed to the crazy caprices of human history. Come Spring reminds us that time moves at many levels: the time of nature; the time of human history; but also the time of the human heart—perhaps the most subtle time a human being can know. Lewitt’s book is a distinguished example of what might be called the narrative of the curtailed life. Such narratives constitute an important sub-genre of Holocaust literature. They recount the forms that life takes in hiding or in other situations of deprivation occasioned by war; the ways in which people—often young people—adapt, make do, put a fuller existence on hold, during the traumatic cessation of normal life. Surely the greatest example of such writing is the diary of Anne Frank.

One would not want to press the parallels between The Diary of a Young Girl and Come Spring too hard, because there are significant differences between the two works. One is diaristic, written day-to-day, and unaware of the final fate the war had in store for its author; the second is autobiographical fiction, written long after the events in question, and so able to give us a glimpse of the author after the war, and to ‘round out’ the narrative in a more composed, conclusive way. (That post-war glimpse was to be expanded into Lewitt’s second autobiographical novel, No Snow in December.) The two girls’ stories diverge in important respects. Lewitt’s father is murdered by the Gestapo early in the piece; both of Anne’s parents are with her in hiding. Both of Anne’s parents are Jewish; Maria’s father is a Jew and her mother a convert who has little real identification with Judaism. And, of course, Maria survives; Anne does not.

Having said this, there are some striking similarities between these narratives of the curtailed life. Each gives us the world through the eyes of an adolescent girl during the Holocaust. Anne is thirteen when she goes into hiding; Maria is fifteen at the outbreak of the war. Each girl has a complex relationship with her mother which must be managed in an artificially confined and stressful situation; each comes to sexual maturity in that situation and becomes emotionally involved with a young man who is confined in the same place. Both girls are intense, bright, unusually self-aware, literary, and have an immense appetite for life. The miracle of Anne Frank’s life in hiding is that in many ways her life is not curtailed at all. Her inner life unfolds as if by some instinctive rhythm of the heart. When she is becoming emotionally attached to Peter, she writes (12 February 1944): ‘I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul.’ Spring—it portends hope, the life of the soul that history, even in its darkest hours, cannot finally annul.

Anne’s relationship with Peter is never consummated, but Maria and Julek become lovers during the war and are married in an informal Jewish ceremony by her uncle Vitek. (They were to be formally married after the war, and live together in Melbourne to this day.) On the night of the wedding, Maria’s aunt Olga brings ‘a few twigs of jasmine’ into the room in which the couple are to spend their wedding night. The jasmine ‘filled the whole room with its perfume. The fragrant, white miracle of spring.’ The description that follows is beautiful in its intimacy and affirmation of rebirth, human continuity, the power of love:

Light came in from aunt Olga’s room, diffused light, which allowed us to see each other. We breathed stupid little words into each other’s ears; we wrote messages on each other’s bodies; but, above all, we loved. We gave, we took, we became one. There was pain and serenity … willingness … consideration. And love.

The house in which the wedding and its blissful aftermath occur is the hermitage, a property outside Warsaw in which aunt Olga lives with her husband Boyarski, an impoverished anti-Semitic Polish aristocrat. Early on, Boyarski will not acknowledge history, will not let the thought of war violate the tranquillity of his elegant sanctuary: ‘There was no war in Boyarski’s hermitage.’ But Lewitt writes that when news of Treblinka and the vicious activities of Polish collaborators comes via an Underground Socialist Party Bulletin, ‘We listened to uncle reading the Bulletin. So the war had penetrated Boyarski’s walls; I couldn’t believe how he had changed.’ Boyarski turns a blind eye to the fact that his house is being used to harbour Jews. He dies from cancer during the war, and so is spared the horror that the others in the house live to see. The house takes on a symbolic importance of its own: at first emblematic of class inequity and anti-Semitism, it becomes home to a cohesive community of threatened beings. When retreating German troops torch most of the houses in the district, the hermitage is spared—a battered but enduring monument to resistance and survival.

The spirit of resistance is beautifully captured in an early scene which also reflects the book’s preoccupation with time. Each Sunday Maria’s father would wind the grandfather clock in the family home, cautioning Maria and her sister, Tania, that ‘You can’t move the hands back … Because you can’t bring back the time which has passed.’ After his death, Maria takes the key to the clock and

Rattling the lock, I opened the door. ‘Remember, never backwards’, my father said many lives ago. So I turned the large hand in the opposite direction, feeling the resistance of the movement. Faster, faster. I cried for my father. Silent anger couldn’t bring back to me times which had passed, so I pushed the hands backwards until they clicked and hung loosely, swaying lifelessly.

The symbolism here is complex. The clock resists the girl’s attempts to wind back time and recover her father, an innocent victim of the remorseless march of history; but her attempts are themselves a form of resistance, a refusal of the horror of the historical moment in which she finds herself. Resistance, this moment seems to tell us, must emanate from each individual human heart. It is one of many key moments in which Lewitt takes us inside the consciousness of her younger self, giving the reader an internal history of her own moral being. Another such moment occurs as a distressed Maria walks the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. She takes her father’s photograph with her, and together they ‘absorbed the misery and mystic vitality of our people.’

With her mother she feels no such ethnic affinity. Indeed, when her mother’s composure under pressure and Ayrian looks convince the Gestapo that Maria is not Jewish, the girl feels extraordinarily ambivalent towards her parent: ‘She was a beautiful woman, but at that moment I almost hated her non-Jewish face.’ Again: ‘My clever, daring mother—her face, her pass to life.’ After Maria, the mother is perhaps the most vibrant and memorable figure in the book: passionate, canny, enlightened, superb under pressure, reckless, but vulnerable as the truly soulful always are. The mother-daughter relationship is fraught but, as we learn at the end of the narrative, fundamentally fond.

Come Spring does not attempt to provide lengthy philosophical reflections on the world. Lewitt’s method is to show rather than to tell. And how well she does it, as in the scene in which she encounters a fun-fair in Warsaw, just near the ghetto wall. On the other side of the wall the ghetto is burning. Yet families are enjoying a day out at the fair, some of them pausing to note details like ‘Jewish bugs jumping from the window’ of burning houses a few hundred yards away, or to complain about the smoke that is getting in their children’s eyes:

Guns and colourful balloons … burning houses and merry-go-rounds … laughter and the final death cry … dry, sonorous detonations and gay music.

How is this possible? Arthur Koestler, one of the greatest Jewish autobiographers, writes of the profound divisions in the human mind and of the mind’s terrifying capacity for compartmentalisation. He sees the mind as split between higher and lower, savage and civilised, propensities. His view of the species is grim.

As the fun-fair scene shows, Maria Lewitt, too, knows the divisions of the human psyche; yet she is a less pessimistic writer than Koestler. By the end of the narrative, spring has indeed come, both in its literal and its metaphoric manifestations. Lewitt has survived and her book reflects a wish she felt, many years earlier, when four SS men surrounded her and her mother on a train before taking them for questioning: ‘I wanted to live so that one day I would learn how to respect people.’ Come Spring is often sombre, but never bitter. It is a respectful book that implicitly urges us not to lose faith in human kind—not even after the Holocaust.

Richard Freadman

Professor of English

La Trobe University

1

The leaves tremble above me as if a shiver has gone through the whole tree. Blotches of the sky play hide and seek, exposing bluest of blue among the clusters of green. And the sun sends its rays through, a spotlight in the theatre bringing the whole scene to life.

I screw up my eyes and rock in my hammock, encircled by colours and the appeasing quiet of nature around me. If I shut my eyes tight I can feel the dancing shadows. If I open them ever so slightly I am surrounded by a rainbow. And if I shut them again a multitude of coloured circles swims in front of me.

The late summer is still, pregnant with all the right sounds and scents, rich in shades, kind in warmth.

And there I was, half hypnotised by continuous rocking, voices and colours. A bird flew into the tree and chirped, twisting and lifting its tail up, wiping its beak in a jerky way, ignoring my presence. The wind, or rather a suggestion of it, swayed the cornfield in a multitude of waves. The shadows of the clouds moved slowly, followed by the beam of the sun’s rays: the light chasing the gloom away.

Snatches of words came from a distance, fading and gaining in strength: ‘Irena … lazy … selfish … disasters … worries … don’t know …’ I knew that my mother was discussing me; some of her words had hit me dead centre. It was true that I spent most of my days in the hammock, or walking around in the fields and the forest. She was concerned about my lack of communication and my selfishness. I was moody because I wanted to be with Irma and my other friends, while my parents had decided to send my sister and me for a summer holiday away from Lodz, our home town. They were waiting for ‘the political situation to clarify’, as they explained to us.

But I was not concerned with the political situation, and was sick and tired of hearing it discussed at our home. I was fifteen and wanted to live, to experience, to know. And there I was, planted in that hole, my only company being Tania, my elder sister, who was beautiful and freckled. She looked down on me, which irritated me. She spent her days sun-bathing, probably hoping to tan evenly all the spaces between her freckles. The result was devastating and made her unapproachable.

There was a boy of seventeen who was my only hope for romance, and not bad to look at. My mother said he was a ‘very intelligent, brilliant student’. She was right, too. He was brilliant and intelligent, always starting a sentence with, ‘As you probably know’, which most of the time I didn’t. I felt awful, getting myself entangled with my nonchalant replies, ‘Of course I know!’

He always quoted Latin, which I detested and didn’t know very well; and he had a beautiful chocolate tan, while I looked like a boiled beetroot. There was one thing, however, which I knew better: poetry. So I recited to him whenever he allowed me. It wasn’t easy; it wasn’t easy at all. He knew exactly what he wanted to say, precise in every word, preaching all the time about obligations and self-discipline. He was an expert in every field. He called poetry escapism and memorising, a waste of time.

So we drifted apart, he on his Latin quotations, I on my ignorance—romance and companionship unfulfilled.

I wanted something to happen during that summer, something to carry me from everyday boredom. But nothing happened. What my mother called ‘laziness’ wasn’t really laziness. It was a peculiar search for values and answers. What she called ‘a lack of concern and selfishness’ was really me looking at myself and trying to sort out what was going on around me.

I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t unhappy. I was there at that time and that was all. I didn’t involve myself in philosophical reflections, but my mind was like a camera, imprinting forever the idyllic beauty of the European summer of 1939.

My father cut our holidays short. He was apologetic, but preferred to have us all together in the city. Germany and Russia had just signed a non-aggression pact. Father was very worried that the Pact would assure Russia’s neutrality, making Hitler even more militant and dangerous than he had been. His next objective would surely be Poland.

My father looked tired, and his words made mother very quiet. Tania went to pack her things. As for me, I ran outside, overwhelmed with joy and, while breathing in the warmth of the late summer evening, performed an atavistic dance. I was going home to my friends, to my normal life.

When we returned the whole city was in a frenzy. Patriotism was riding high, with flag-waving and flowers for the soldiers. Troops were marching and singing:

We’re going to fight in Berlin

where we’ll kill Hitler,

the son-of-a-bitch.

The streets carried the people along as though on a conveyor belt. It was a happy and noisy crowd, exchanging victorious glances, boasting of our strength, suspicious of spies, laughing at Hitler’s army with its cardboard tanks and margarine instead of butter.

I threw myself gladly into that whirlpool. Every morning I met my friends and we would spend the day digging trenches and shelters. We joked and we sang army songs:

Oh, how beautiful the War is,

and when you fall off your horse,

we won’t stop.

Because when you die,

you’ll see our beloved Poland

in your last sleep.

It was great. Radio programmes overflowed with patriotic speeches and gay military music. Each day was eventful. In the evenings the whole family assembled at home. In contrast with myself and the life outside, my parents were strangely unenthusiastic and quiet.

One evening my mother arrived home with a big tin box, put it on the table, and said quietly: ‘I want to make a wish. Let this box be always full of bread in the years to come’. She left the room in her calm way, followed by my father. Tania and I looked at each other without understanding, some uneasiness creeping in around us.

And then it started, with a noise of aeroplanes and the radio announcement. We were at war. The sirens measured the fragments of our days and nights, between one alarm and another.

We spent most of the time in the cellar; however, my father stubbornly refused to join us and the other residents of our flats in the safety of a damp and stuffy refuge. For the first time I met all our neighbours. It was exciting, because before the War I had hardly known the people around me. Our janitor was jubilant—at long last the mighty ones from ‘above the ground’ had come to join him and his family. He kept the door of his wretched flat wide open, not even trying to conceal his satisfaction; he would sit in his chair, his children in bed, his wife endlessly patching one garment or another, while we felt lost and uneasy in the strange surroundings.

Lodz was hardly bombed; but news, official and whispered from ear-to-ear, was depressing. Apparently the German army was moving swiftly; our own soldiers looked dirty and tired. The various women’s committees set up hot kitchens for the boys. The soldiers were frightened to touch the food, claiming that some of their friends had been poisoned by German spies. So we sampled the food in front of them.

There were no more flags, no more flowers.

Curfew was introduced, and prices soared, but our bread bin was still full. At night we heard a constant thumping of soldiers’ feet and horses’ hooves. We waited for the promised victory, cursing our beautiful cloudless sky, hoping for a drenching rain which would, surely, bog and ruin the German offensive.

And then the night came when we stood in the entrance to our flats. An ‘expert’ in building construction came to the conclusion that the arch of the entry was the soundest structure in the entire building. Our janitor wasn’t too happy. We heard approaching planes; we could hardly hear each other. Some people disagreed with the general opinion and decided to go to the cellar, which made our janitor happy and the building expert angry.

My mother put her arms around Tania and me. ‘I wish your father was with us.’

‘Would you like me to fetch him?’

‘No.’

The noise was growing but it wasn’t planes any more: it was a mixture of voices and an uneven stamping of feet. I looked through the opening. The entire width of the street was covered with people carrying children, suitcases, bird cages, pictures, bundles.

‘Where are you going?’ Someone fired the question.

‘Running from the Germans.’

‘Going towards Warsaw.’

‘All men should join the Army, haven’t you heard?’

The voices were grave, mixed-up. I didn’t want to hear any more. I ran upstairs, ignoring my mother’s protest.

My father was sitting in his chair reading a book. He looked up at me, his eyes questioning.

‘Have you been listening to the radio?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

He turned the radio on, twisting the knobs with his long, nervous fingers. How I had missed him, how good it was to be with him again.

Attention, attention. Radio Warsaw speaking. The enemy is gaining on our territories. The Army has decided to redeploy our forces in Warsaw. We need new recruits … This is an urgent announcement. All men are instructed to leave their homes and join our forces in Warsaw … Our Victory depends on you. Men of the Polish Republic, join us. Before long, you’ll be back in your homes, bringing victory to your families … Attention, attention.

My father switched the radio off. He got up, took his raincoat, and kissed me. I followed him down. My mother and Tania ran towards him.

‘I knew it.’ Mother’s voice was dry. ‘Shall I prepare something for you? A suitcase, food?’

‘No, nothing.’ Father kissed Tania, then mother, then me, threw the coat over his shoulders, and left us. He disappeared almost immediately, was lost among the moving, terrified crowd, the flowing lava of an erupted volcano.

We watched the people and then went to our flat, each of us to her own room. I snuggled into my bed and, for the first time, fully realised what war really meant. My father didn’t say good-bye, he didn’t say that I was a big girl, he didn’t tell me to look after my mother and Tania. He didn’t tell me anything.

I cried.

I saw the bent figures of people marching towards Warsaw, with their indistinguishable faces; and I heard the tumult of voices, the shuffling, shuffling of feet. And my father was among them, one of them.

My father was dead. We were going to his funeral. All of us were dressed in black. My mother’s face was hidden behind a veil. Her hands in black gloves lay lifeless on her lap. The only sound was the rhythmic clip-clop of horses’ hooves and Tania’s restrained sobs.

The carriage was going slowly. The driver hit the horses, urging them to trot. Why was he hitting them? My father was dead. They hit him, too. They hit him until he lost consciousness and died. My father was dead and the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and I wished I had a black veil; it would have deadened the day too bright and beautiful for a burial.

People were walking, trams passed by. The sound of the city grew in volume, reaching a piercing, intolerable crescendo. My city was

Reviews for Come Spring

[heatherlinc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Based on the author's real experiences, this story is about a family trying to survive the holocaust in Poland. Fifteen year-old Irina, her mother and sister have the "good looks" and with the help of false papers struggle to hide and feed four of their closest family members. I found this book interesting but hard to read as it jumps around a lot and I didn't really like the style of writing.