#6 - The daughter who was(n't) there

One significant thing that has always haunted me about Paulina's testimony is that her daughter is not identified by name and is rarely mentioned in the text. She appears briefly and suddenly in certain passages — easily missed — like an apparition, a ghost. There are numerous hints that mother and daughter were together for the first part of the war, so why is the daughter’s presence so tentative, so elusive?

The mystery and vagueness around Paulina's daughter shifted meaning over time. Upon the first reading of the testimony with Patrycja in 20171 — the intro blurb was interpreted to state that Paulina (at the time of the testimony) was alone, her husband had been killed, and her daughter and son-in-law were taken to the Aryan quarter.2

I lived with this interpretation for about a year, and with the possibility the daughter survived and had not yet been reunited with her mother at the time of the testimony in 1945, right at the war’s end.

Another key passage from this original reading describes a series of events in the Warsaw leg of this story. Paulina's employer – an artist/professor who hired her (based on her false papers/ assumed identity) as the nanny to his children – discovered, by way of his children, that she was Jewish. In response, he sent Paulina with his youngest child to stay with his family in the countryside, where she fell ill, and he gave her a decent amount of money for a holiday and rest. Originally, the main takeaway from this substory was that this employer showed remarkable kindness/generosity and that this was another instance of Paulina's seemingly miraculous good luck.

The ‘official’ text had obscured the facts
Over a year into researching the testimony, the full truth was revealed (on the same close read that revealed Paulina's lost hat). As explained in installment #2 there were discrepancies between the typewritten and handwritten versions of the testimony. While the typewritten was often easier to decipher and therefore referred to first, the original handwritten text contained information that was sometimes missing or altered in the typed version, which is what happened here:

One: Paulina's daughter and son-in-law were taken from (not to) the Aryan quarter.

Two: Paulina’s employer learned Paulina was Jewish when her children (her daughter and son-in-law) were arrested. In other words, they too, like Paulina, had been hiding in plain sight, outside of the Jewish quarter/Warsaw Ghetto. And they got caught. This explains more clearly why Paulina had to leave the city immediately, and why she was feeling very unwell. Her pain is hidden in the formality of the text, but once it was made visible, it was all I could see.

I moved to Poland
With the revelation that while Paulina was navigating on her own during the last years of the war, she was suffering the loss of her daughter and her new son-in-law3, I moved to Poland to retrace her steps. At the time I was trying to process my own grief over never having had the daughter I believed I would one day have. I was compelled to connect and commune with Paulina, who found the strength to keep going, alone. It became my mission to find out about her daughter. To name her, give shape to who she was.

While researching in Poland4, I learned Paulina’s daughter’s name: Irena. Born 1922, died ~1943. She had been a student in Lviv. I searched for photographs of her and found the ID of another Irena Hirsch around the same age, but she was not this Irena.

However, on my travels throughout Poland with Patrycja, we would discover something of/about Irena more than we imagined possible — something that would lead me to understand, in a deeply felt and visceral way, Paulina’s choice of silence around her daughter in the text.

An experience that would shape the future of this story and my life. But more on that to come soon…

Paulina Day draws from the constellation of stories surrounding the ever-evolving PAULINA: a performance and film-in-process centered on a life-changing journey investigating the Holocaust testimony of Paulina Hirsch and its aftermath.

Thank you for reading this reflection inspired by caring for the stories of those who can no longer speak for themselves. This project focuses on the potential of each other’s stories to provide a vision of hope, possibility, and deeper understanding.