Sharon Cameron. The Light in Hidden Places. A Novel Based on the True Story of a Polish War Heroine. London: Penguin/Random House, 2020; originally 2015. 405 pp.

 

The author’s note from pp. 393-405 gives a brief historical background and context for this novel, as well as some photographs of the main characters. The rest of the book is a fictional tale “based on” a true story. The additional cover blurbs indicate that the author normally writes for children and young adults and that is how this novel is marketed.

The novel is a fictional autobiography of a young Catholic girl, a goyika, Stefania Podgórska (known variously as Stefi, Stefusia or Stefushka, but mostly as Fusia) in a small Polish city called Przemśl who finds herself increasingly enmeshed with the fate of a Jewish family when she arrives from the countryside looking for work just about the time of the Non-Aggression Treaty between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Things aren’t too bad under Soviet rule, though Stefania Podgórska is separated from her mother and sisters, but turn nasty when Hitler’s armies sweep across all of Poland. Though as a Christian she could have been relatively safe in a place where Jews are harassed, sent to a ghetto, beaten and murdered on the streets on the flimsiest grounds, then transported to the work and death camps run by the Nazis, her loyalty to the Diament family and sense of fairness and humanity makes her take enormous risks in bringing food to the ghetto, rescuing and hiding escapees from the Holocaust.

A young teenager reaching the age of sexual maturity, Fusia’s first-hand account of life under German occupation during the early 1940s is also a coming-of-age story geared towards a youthful English-speaking audience. Although there are occasional nods towards the ideological and political distortions of Hitler’s Third Reich, the focus is on everyday dangers, playing cat–and-mouse games with the Polish police and the SS that patrol the neighbourhoods and seek out anyone trying to give aid to the doomed prisoners within the ghetto. Fusia learns to care for her six-year-old sister Helena (known also as Hela), bargain with market venders for food, clothing and furniture, manipulate suspicious neighbours, bribe and cajole bureaucrats and factory managers, avoid intimate entanglements with handsome young Polish police officers, and feed and protect the Jews who seek refuge in her small apartment. Fusia becomes a frightened but clever adolescent, able to manage and provide for a large household of strangers (thirteen at one point, as well as a flock of chickens). While brutality and death are imminent every day and the work to earn money exhausting, her life is full of excitement and adventure, even moments of pleasure.

As with Anne Frank’s Diary which ends just when the famous teenager is arrested with rest of her family and friends and has to leave her hiding  place, eventually being transported to Bergen-Belsen where she dies of typhus, thus leaving an image of herself as a bright, optimistic person, and thus taken as a model of sentimentality and universal hope for the triumph of goodness in the world, so with Fusia’s now novelized story of heroism and survival, is there a danger in leaving a relatively white-washed account of the Holocaust? Does the good shiksa who marries one of the Jewish Diament brothers in November 1944 cancel out the vast majority of Germans, Poles and other Europeans who participated in the Holocaust, even if only by looking away and profiting by the goods, properties and businesses stolen from Jews by the Nazis and their collaborating allies?

Fusie and Hela are later recognized as Righteous Among the Gentiles by Yad Vashem.

Listening to her more than three-hour testimony of her life as someone who hid Jews from the Nazi occupiers of Poland, it became evident to me that Sharon Cameron followed closely the story—and many features of the personality of Mrs. Stefania Podgorska Burzminski (as she became after marrying Max who changed his name to Joe Burzminski). The narrative is cleaned of Fusia’s hesitations and little speech tics. Contextual details are given and other characters filled out. At most, however, the depths of her moral character are implied rather than fully articulated, not just because the events she lived through occurred when she was still an adolescent, but the primary audience is assumed to be adolescent as well. 

During her life in rural Poland, she is seen going to mass with her mother, and, later after moving to the city, she occasionally seeks refuge in churches but only when running from SS officers, hangs images of the Virgin and Jesus where she lives, and never questions her identity as a Christian. Despite the lack of religious instruction from family or priests,  Fusia reveals an inherent sense of what is right and wrong, what is her duty as a human being in the face of barbarism, and, in moments of danger, she tells lies, disguises her herself, and works against the laws and attitudes of the German and Polish officials and neighbours she deals with in everyday experience. She feels fear, senses that she may be killed for what she does, and yet never hesitates. If circumstances require she flirts with SS guards,   kisses Polish Policemen, and undergoes without complaint painful medical procedures performed by Nazi doctors.[1] She accepts danger as the price for being human. Unlike Anne Frank, often taken as the model for how young people should conduct themselves under horrible conditions, Stefani makes no portentous statements nor indulges in sentimental ideals.[2]

The most poignant scene is when barely seven-year-old Helena is questioned by a Nazi thug; he slaps her, punches her, and knocks her to the ground and kicks her; and the child does not betray the thirteen Jews hidden in the attic above her head nor her shocked sister Fusia standing in the next room.

When Fusia first encounters the name of “Jew” and observes prejudice in action, she rationalizes away the bigotry, observing, like Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, that Jews have the same skin, hair and activities as Poles; and she passes on this level of explanation to her younger sister Helena when the question arises in the face of physical abuse and killings on the street. Jews have a prophet named Moses, Christians someone named Jesus, but all worship the same God. Other than personal and family names and a few Yiddish expressions, there is no significant difference in Jews and she cannot understand why the Nazis want to murder them all; nor, even after the war, why many of her fellow Poles want to finish the job the Germans did not complete. The Jews themselves, in Sharon Cameron’s novel, do not express any particular beliefs or attitudes that would distinguish them from ordinary Poles.

When we attend closely to Fusia’s testimonies, however, something does stand out in this regard.[3] While recalling how confused she was by the maltreatment and badmouthing of Jews she meets, she does say several times she and her sister “had to help the Jews.” But not only was there this unquestioned imperative evident to her without any explanation. There were also a few instances where something external and mysterious speaks to her. Once it is “my mind” who tells her to help the thirteen Jews hidden in her attic, and we can easily understand that as her conscience speaking. Another time “a voice” tells her what to do, and “The voice was strong, a woman’s voice.” Perhaps was that of her own mother, acting as the super-ego of family responsibility; a version of the Virgin Mary, since the voice occasionally follows her attempt to pray; or again her conscience.  Near the end of her oral testimony, explaining how difficult it was to write her life story—Stefania lacked a proper education and found English difficult—and found editors unwilling to accept yet another Holocaust book. She becomes angry and says her story does not belong to the Holocaust.

I had to sit with a person from Boston University and pay her seventeen dollars an hour because my spelling and grammar is so bad that she couldn’t know what I wrote, And when I came to the part where the SS man came to live in my apartment, I thought I can’t finish it. I went and I lay on the floor and I prayed like I prayed that other time, and this time a man’s voice, deep and strong, said to me, “This is no time to pray. You must get up and go finish your writing. And he picked me up and I felt like a feather as I sat down in my chair,

Her anger continues, now through the secret voice of something other than sentimentality or vague ideals. Editors, rabbis and other Jews did not understand what she was writing about. This is the gritty personality that allowed her to do good in the face of evil. To persist against the odds, to prove herself a moral person in the midst of selfishness and ignorance.

I wrote my memoirs. I wrote how I struggled to bring food, and everything I did. But publishers refuse. They say they have enough Holocaust books. I said that it is not Holocaust. This is not killing. That was killing but this is saving. You have to show people a good example. Who will teach people humanity if they see only killing and nothing else?

Then she lets loose in what is most unexpected, more than refusing to marry Max until her was baptised as a Catholic.

A Christian person helped me to back to Poland for a visit. A Christian helped me. But where are the Jews? I didn’t help Christians. But sometimes I think the Jews are sleeping. I have a medal from Yad Vashem, but I have no tree planted because I have no money to go to Israel. I think Israel should pay for me to go there to plant the tree.

Her conclusion, as it were, is: “I never regretted what I did. Some people are ugly and miserable, but that’s human character.” To some she might now look ungrateful and bitter, as though she were just another Polish ant-Semite. Fusia’s irritability does not fall into that classification. Her disappointment both at not receiving the support she needed to travel to Israel to plant a symbolic tree in Yad Vashem and at the reluctance of many Jews she approached to publish her autobiography to accept her reasons for wanting to remain a Christian shows that her story is more complex than she was able to articulate in her memoirs and, certainly, than the novelist could envisage in telling her story. I can see why her story did not come into the light and had to wait for Sharon Cameron to prettify it up to serve the purposes of a still frightened and confused Jewish community.

My story should go to schools to teach youngsters because when there is chaos in a country, it’s very easy to be a bad boy or bad girl. But to be good is very difficult. To think separately and not like other people tell you to think, but everyone doesn’t think like I do.

Her words are particularly relevant in this annus horribilis of 2020,

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[1] In order to obtain a certificate that will keep her from being deported to Germany along with other workers at the factory where she earns her money, she submits to the intimate injections administered by doctors in an SS hospital across the street from where she lives. Never explained, these medical interventions make us think of the grotesque experiments indulged in by the infamous Dr Mengele. In that she was pretending to be pregnant to avoid the deportation, this was a sexual humiation as well as a sadistic act; the pains go on for weeks.

[2] Marek Halter, La force du bien, translated as Stories of Deliverance: Speaking with Men and Women Who Rescued Jews from the Holocaust.  Halter finds that most of the righteous gentiles as individuals came from strict Protestant homes, and that the collective efforts to hide and protect Jews by traditional Protestant villages. Stefania Podgorska’s case is doubly unusual in that she was a secular Roman Catholic who was willingly absorbed into a non-religious Jewish family.

 

[3] Stefania Podgorska Burzminski” in Gay Block and Malka Druker, eds, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust (Ghent: Ergo, 1992) pp. 180-185.