When Grownups Play at War

... The great strength of this book is Flutsztejn-Gruda's fidelity to the child's point-of-view. Throughout the war years, she is dimly aware of the distant battles and of the political situation in the Soviet Union; it is clear, for example, that many of the refugee families in Uzbekistan are victims of Stalinist purges. But what matters for her is much more personal: finding friends, getting a new dress to wear to school (to replace the nightgown belted with a piece of rope that is all she has to wear), having a boyfriend. Flutsztejn-Gruda remembers some moments of joy — hearing the Russian girls sing as they knit, playing with piglets, seeing little chicks hatch out — and these pleasures are described so freshly that one shares in her delight.

Perhaps the most poignant part of When Grownups Play at War is the epilogue, in which Flutsztejn-Gruda lists ten "vestiges of those years...so deeply rooted in my being that they will probably disappear only when I do. "Among them are such habits as these: "when I see a piece of wood on the ground, I tell myself I should pick it up and use it to make a fire in our wood stove" and "whenever I move to a new apartment, I look for a spot that can be turned into a hiding place."

Originally written in French, When Grownups Ply at War has been translated into limpid, natural English. This memoir seems an excellent way to introduce young adult readers to war and exile, experiences that children still must face in our world.

When Grownups Play at War, by Ilona Flutsztejn-Gruda, is a story of courage and survival recounted with understatement and humour. A young Jewish girl growing up in a Polish village some thirty kilometers east of Warsaw, the author saw her peaceful world fall apart in 1939, at the age of nine, when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland from west and east, respectively. To escape, her family fled first to Vilnius, then when Lithuania became part of the battleground, further east to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The book is particularly touching because the author lends a voice to her perspective as a child. It is through the eyes of the young girl she was then, with the changing interest, fears, curiosity, and desires of her age, that we are shown the terrible effects of war, forced displacement, and physical and emotional hardship. In her respectful and sensitive translation, Sarah Cummins carefully ensures the passage of Flutsztejn-Gruda's story of resilience into English. A short, unsigned, but very helpful introduction ... sets out the key geographical and historical reference points, so that the reader can easily follow the narrative.

When Grownups Play at War is the true-life childhood memoir of author Ilona Flutsztejn-Gruda, a survivor of World War 11 in Europe. She was nine years old, a Jew living in Poland, when the German planes began to drop their bombs. Her experiences of terrible horror, desperation, surviving on little, witnessing both the kindness and the murderousness of strangers, have been fluently translated into English by Sarah Cummins... A telling story of hardship and coming of age amid ruthlessly trying times; highly recommended.

Ilona Flutsztejn-Gruda was fortunate enough to escape the Nazi and Soviet juggernauts that brutally overrran her native Poland in September 1939, which precipitated World War II. However, the road to surviving the war and evading Nazi persecution had Flutsztejn-Gruda and her mother and father endure a long trek from their hometown of Warsaw, to the Lithuanian town of Wilno, to the Russian town of Syzran on the Volga River and finally, to Zarkent in the then-Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, where she lived out the remainder of the war. This miraculous story of survival in the face of the Holocaust is recalled in Gruda's recently published memoir When Grownups Play At War, which is now available in English for the first time.

"I always told my story of wartime survival to my family — first to my children and then my grandchildren," said Flutsztejn-Gruda in an interview with the Jewish Tribune. "Around 1994, I decided to have it written down and a publisher from France named Acte Sud heard about it and encouraged me to send the manuscript to them." Originally written in Polish, the French version was published in 1999 and sold more than 9000 copies in France. Gruda's decision to call the book When Grownups Play At War played upon the ironies of warfare. "As a child, I didn't understand the reason why people went to war. I thought adults treated the idea of war as if they were playing a game, and there's the irony behind it," she said. "In fact, when it was about to be published in Poland, the publisher didn't understand the meaning of the title at all. The Polish people understood quite clearly that war was not a game at all." Flutsztejn-Gruda had to change the title to When I Was a Child to satisfy her Polish publisher.

Her childhood in pre-war Poland was typical. Flutsztejn-Gruda was an only child whose father worked at a watch factory and was the superintendent of several apartment buildings and whose mother was the family disciplinarian. Somehow, when the Nazis and the Russians simultaneously invaded Poland in September 1939, her family had the forethought to pack everything up and flee before the invading armies conquered whichever town or city they ended up in, which is a common thread throughout the first half of the book. "We always had a short amount of time to escape, but we always managed to evade the Nazis because my parents were always afraid that they would eventually overrun every place we stopped at," she said.

For the Flutsztejns, the end of the line was the small town of Zarkent in Uzbekistan, where they settled into a cosmopolitan community of refugees and exiles from Russia and the Ukraine, who like themselves were fleeing Nazi tyranny. Flutsztejn-Gruda admits that although the climate and way of life was completely different from what they were accustomed to in Poland, they felt that this was the right place to wait out the rest of the war.

"I thought it was a good judgment call to go to the warm climate of Uzbekistan. Life was easier there and the Jews were treated as refugees. Although the native Uzbekis were not happy about the fact that we were there, we were treated no worse than any other person who lived in that area. At least they didn't want us killed. We believed that if we remained in Poland, we would have had such a terrible time there. A lot of members of our family who stayed there ended up being murdered by the Nazis," she said. Flutsztejn-Gruda quickly adapted to the Uzbeki way of life on a collective farm called a 'kolkhoz,' where she learned to care for and raise pigs and cows, grow a small market garden in order to avoid starvation and even learned several new languages, including French, Russian and Uzbeki. Her four years hiding from the Nazis in Uzbekistan gave Flutsztejn-Gruda several meaningful life lessons which she lists at the end of the book; having more faith in friendship and solidarity; courage and dignity will most often defeat physical strength, and even the importance of keeping a large supply of good quality toilet paper at home. But one of the most important lessons she took with her was to always keep active. "You always have to do something for your own survival; never wait for danger to come to you," she said.

Her experiences also strengthened her pride in her Polish-Jewish heritage — which she gave scant attention to before the war — as well as her determination to get other Holocaust survivors to tell their harrowing stories on paper for future generations to read about. In 1994, after she retired from her position as a chemistry professor at the University of Quebec, Flutsztejn-Gruda decided to undertake a project to get these memoirs written and published. Working under the auspices of the Polish Jewish Heritage Foundation, she has so far succeeded in getting six books published, in which only 100 copies are printed of each title and are distributed free to libraries. She plans to have two more memoirs published this year including one by a survivor who escaped the Treblinka death camp. Although she gets some grant money from different Polish organizations and from several of her friends to keep the project going, authors still have to pay a fee to cover the production, printing and distribution costs of their respective memoirs. However, the determination is still there to get these stories told.

"It's very important to get as many remaining Holocaust survivors as possible to write about their experiences and to give witness to this tragic period in history," she said.

Since retiring from her position as professor of chemistry at a Quebec university, Ilona Flutsztejn-Gruda has helped numerous Holocaust survivors publish their memoirs; with When Grownups play at War, she tells her own tale of coming of age in the shadow of the Second World War. While lacking in sophisticated literary stylings, her story is commendable for the glimpses of a bygone, strife-ridden time.

For nine-year-old Ilona, life in pre-war Poland is comfortable and happy, but for occasional altercations with her domineering mother. Her best friend is by her side, and their days are filled with games played on the streets of their small village outside Warsaw. Soon enough, however, the threat of German occupation permeates the Flutsztejn household, and Ilona's father makes the widely scorned decision of moving his family to Lithuania — fortuitously so, as it turns out, for many of Ilona's secular Jewish family members and neighbours choose to remain and perish as a result. The harrowing journey that was to end in Lithuania instead continues through six years and many territories and towns, from Tajikistan to Moscow, as the Flutsztejns strive to evade persecution, stay together, and keep fed.

Flutsztejn-Gruda advances her narrative at a rapid pace, with only the sparest of passages devoted to self-reflection, though her attention to the physical details of the foreign lands and situations that she and her family encounter are astute. Yet sometimes cold facts are enough to stir a reader's emotive response. Particularly engaging is the Flutsztejns' term as custodians of a pig farm in Uzbekistan, with scenes of family meals being supplemented by the slop trucked in for the livestock, and the barefooted Ilona making her three-kilometre trek to school over the scorching hot earth because of her mother's staunch belief that "war or peace, cold or famine [...] you had to continue your education." When Grownups Play at War demonstrates the human capacity for bravery and endurance, in a simple but remarkable tale.

The next day we started on the second leg of our journey, on the train to the border at Malkinia. We had been told of the terrible things that had happened to others as they stepped off the train: Germans, dogs, gunshots. But luck was with us: the train stopped at the semaphore signal before the station. The guides ordered us to jump off with them immediately, and they lifted Aunt Liza down in their arms. The train left, and we were spared the danger of running into Germans at the station.

Such was the work and the terror that nine-year old Ilona Flutsztejn-Gruda experienced in 1941 as she and her Jewish family fled the invasion of the Nazis in Lithuania.

As a retired professor of chemistry at the University of Quebec, she has recorded her memories of World War II, which were published in French in 1999 and have now been translated. Originally from Poland, she and her parents survived the Holocaust by travelling east, staying in communal farms and villages, finally ending up in Uzbekistan. She details the struggle for daily survival, her personal difficulties as a child being repeatedly shifted to new situations, the pressures that threatened to tear her family apart, anti-Semitism and the tense political circumstances of the time.

This makes for compelling reading. Little has been known until recent years about the Jews who escaped Hitler by moving eastward through Russia. They avoided death but nevertheless experienced the trauma of disruption, the fear of being caught, of being homeless and starving. Ilona experienced all of this, as well as periods of stability. In her travels, she saw the good and the bad in people. She was forced to adapt to different languages and cultures. Her education changed from one location to another. Separated for a time from her father, she helped her mother tend pigs and keep chickens.

No matter the circumstances, children engage in play and seek out relations. Ilona's relationships with other children and her parents are an important part of this memoir. An only child, she had an even greater need to find friends. Her cousin, Hala, was her greatest friend, and Ilona was devastated when Hala's family left for the United States. She relates her interactions with a variety of children, some of them good influences, some which gave her parents concern. These experiences were the school of life and made her much wiser than she would normally have been.

An important part of the memoir is her observations on the operation of the socialist system in Russia. Although collectivization and rationing helped people survive, there were serious problems. Corruption meant that some people got more than others, from food to housing to positions. Fear and distrust led to many grave actions being taken against ordinary people. She recalls the confusion she and her mother, especially, felt at these events.

Later, I wondered about this situation. Why did Polish Communists, most of who were Jewish, show such scorn for those who weren't one of them? You'd think that in their struggle for the good of humanity, they might have felt a bit of sympathy for the disadvantaged. Instead, they acted like the chosen people, more intelligent and more important than ordinary folk. In fact, they were preparing themselves for their future role in the government. Later on, when I became a member of the Polish youth organization in Poland, I met with the same disdain.

There are some problems with the narrative. She records events very specifically at times, but then leaves out information (for example, who butchered the pig when it died?) In the epilogue, she does not mention what happened to people who figured so prominently in her life, where they went, if and when and how she was ever able to meet them again. When did her parents die? Readers are interested in tying up the ends of a story.

The title of the book reflects the sadness of a child whose life is turned upside down by events she does not understand. The madness of World War II and wars that currently displace millions of people are not rational. Flutsztejn-Gruda's account of the events that stole her childhood adds to the collection that should be preserved for history and taught to today's youth.