Halina Siwak

Halina Lewkowska in front of the house on Mączna Street, 1943

Halina Lewkowska in Iaroslava Muzyka’s apartment at Czarniecki Street, 1945

Iaroslava Muzyka, Portrait of a Girl with a Dog, 1946

My mom, Halina Siwak, née Lewkowska, was born in Lviv on September 18, 1939. Both the date as well as the birthplace are ominous. As a child, for reasons unknown to myself, I would stare at the entry “Place of Birth: Lviv, USSR,” on Mom’s identity card, examining it again and again. For me, born in Warsaw, this always stirred an unease, a vaguely threatening feeling. It is hard to say today what sparked it, whether this fear had roots in stories I had heard as a young child, or whether it appeared once the date of September 17, 1939 became as significant to me as September 1, 1939. (1)

In the area of Polish stylistics Mom was my oracle. Her speech, with the characteristic “ł” and voiced “h” resembled prewar pronunciation; she paid careful attention to diction, and tried to impart that care to me. This could seem somewhat ostentatious, smacking of the careful education of a “girl from a good home.” True, Mom’s intelligentsia roots played a very important part in her identity, but she never let others feel like they lacked in education or manners. Through her attention to linguistic formations and social formalities she was fighting her private war. It was a war she had declared against the glut of mediocrity and coarseness (a reflection of those times was the saying “crooked, straight—who cares as long as it’s a short-cut”). Doing so, she was expressing her love for her mother tongue, which she strove to share with both her immediate and more distant surroundings. (3)

Directly after the war Iaroslava Muzyka painted a portrait of my mom, which critics labeled as “a French girl.” Their interpretation was not entirely in error; it was in Paris that the artist developed her polished style, so it is not surprising that critics looked to that milieu in order to identify the roots of her work and artistic associations. Well, though the critics spotted French charme in the painting, my mom did not like the painting at all. Half a century later she wrote in her reminiscences: “In my portrait Mrs. Slavtsia painted a stain instead of the beautiful white collar, handmade by my mom, that I was wearing.” The artist tried everything to console her promising to correct the collar as soon as the painting returned from an exhibition and to give the portrait to Mom as a present. The painting did return, but could be reunited neither with the model nor the artist, as by then they were separated by thousands of miles. (17)