P A R T S I X
Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht
(When I think of Germany in the night, Fm robbed of
my sleep)
—HEINRICH HEINE
26
IN SEPTEMBER 1989, HENRYK HALKOWSKI, THE DIRECTOR of the musty, nearly deserted Jewish social club in Cracow, was eager to show foreign visitors his town. For the first time since immediately after the war, Poland had a non-Communist prime minister. The Polish Communist dictatorship was over, and among the new freedoms was the possibility of showing your town to a Westerner without being watched by the secret police. Halkowski was an enthusiastic man in his late thirties with steel-rimmed glasses and a sardonic smile. On the day that Tadeusz Mazowiecki was installed as the first non-Communist prime minister, a New York University professor was in Cracow and Halkowski wanted to take him to the place where Tadeusz Kosciuszko had first vowed to fight for Polish independence almost two centuries earlier. Halkowski liked the idea that at this historic moment of the new Polish state, he should take someone to this historic spot. He also knew that Kosciuszko was the one Polish patriot whose name was known to New Yorkers—because of the bridge bearing his name on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
Halkowski led the visitor to the large, empty medieval marketplace in the center of town that a few years later would be filled with tourist cafes. As he and his guest stopped at the very spot of the Kosciuszko vow, six young people with shaved heads and laced boots whom he had never seen before pulled him from behind and knocked him down. As they beat him with their fists, they shouted in German, “Jude, Jude, Jude” and then ran off. There was a police station nearby, but the militia that didn't allow youth to roam the streets attacking Jews, let alone curse them in German, had already been disbanded.
THE NEW POLISH STATE, which had for Halkowski so inauspi-ciously begun, was the fruit of two decades of political resistance. The crisis of the Communist state had become so extreme that the military had sought the help of the opposition but in the process gradually negotiated itself out of existence. The opposition had to be legalized, and then parliamentary elections had to be allowed. Power evaporated from Communist hands more rapidly than even Solidarity had been prepared for.
It fell to the former Polityka chief, Marian Turski's longtime editor Mieczyslaw Rakowski, to ease the transition, first as prime minister, then as Jaruzelskfs replacement, becoming the last first secretary of a ruling Polish Communist party. In July, Rakowski appointed the last Communist-led government, but it lacked a following, and in August he had to replace the prime minister with a non-Communist.
The dream had failed. The Communist state for which people like Marian Turski had been working all their lives had collapsed, bankrupt in every sense. Turski and his associates had been fighting this failure for thirty years. Ever since the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 and they saw that the Communism they had dreamed of was betrayed, they had been trying to get it back to what it was supposed to be. Turski said of the final collapse, “It was not a certain must. There could have been a lot of change.” The existing power was to Communist reformers like Turski a monster that used the label “Communism,” although they themselves were never able to mount a successful reform movement. “For myself and many of the people close to me,” Turski said, “the regime was not Communist. It was nothing but a nationalist, imperialist policy of Russia.”
Barbara Gora, another longtime Communist, did not mourn the regime's passing, either. She had never married and had always been absorbed in her work. She had found a position compiling a weekly newsletter on foreign agriculture. The three-page publication was intended to be a serious journal for professionals who wanted to keep up with interesting ideas around the world. She tried to make it her contribution to improving Polish agronomy. But it was difficult to fit all the information into only three pages, and she worked under a man who desperately wanted to embellish his standing in the party by having his own articles published. His studies were usually arcane and irrelevant and sometimes ridiculous. She particularly remembered his pointless study of Swedish bears. When they were that silly, she would simply take the article home with her and never mention it. But she was often obliged to run his pieces. Dissatisfied, she left when the first opportunity to retire came up in 1987. “We all waited for the changes. We were so disappointed with our lives. This was not socialism. It was state capitalism. There was a privileged class, the owners of Poland.”
But the new Polish state would also have its disappointments. Konstanty Gebert understood that in spite of its coalition of Jews, Catholics, unionists, and intellectuals, Solidarity had always had an anti-Semitic element, especially within the Warsaw chapter of the trade union. During the 1990 presidential campaign, a poll indicated that 30 percent of Poles believed “Jews have too much influence in Poland.” Among those who said they intended to vote for Walesa, 50 percent agreed with that statement.
In the local elections that year several small parties expressed anti-Semitism. A small conservative Catholic party with the backing of Polish Primate Jozef Cardinal Glemp produced a poster that showed a happy worker tossing out a barrel-load of people bearing the sinister rapacious faces that have become the standard anti-Semitic stereotype for Jews. The caption said, “Enough of socialism, comrades.”
In the 1990 presidential race, Mazowiecki, having been the first post-Communist leader, appeared to be mounting a major challenge to Walesa's candidacy. Although Mazowiecki was a devout Catholic, his campaign was dogged by persistent rumors that he was secretly a Jew. No public figure ever uttered this, but it appears to have been widely believed. Konstanty Gebert, who by that time had become a well-known journalist, would question people on why they believed this. One person explained to him, “He is sad, and he prays too much,” while another told him, “Well, he did get to be prime minister, didn't he?”
While Walesa had always been outspoken in condemning anti-Semitism, he did nothing to deflate the anti-Semitic tone of the campaign, no doubt since it had turned against his principal opponent. He started playing with Polish anti-Semitism, vaguely alluding to hidden Jewish activities and asserting that he was “a hundred percent Pole” and that he had documents going back “for generations untold” proving his Polishness.
In a speech to a Solidarity group Walesa referred to rumors that “a new clique is at the trough again.” He went on to say that he had heard they were Jews. A group angrily walked out of that meeting and established its own party, the Civic Movement for Democratic Action. Walesa complained that he could not attack the new movement without being accused of anti-Semitism. When Gebert asked him at a press conference if he considered the Movement to be “a Jewish party,” he said no but then added, “Why do they conceal their origins?” As he went on the campaign trail, he was regularly confronted with questions about when he would throw the Jews out of government. Some would shout, “Gas the Jews.”
Walesa did not confront these comments at his rallies and when he later talked about such incidents, latent Polish anti-Semitism lept slipping into his rhetoric. In the meantime anti-Semitic graffiti, which had appeared occasionally even in Communist times, was becoming increasingly common, especially “Gas the Jews” written in Polish and “juden Raus” Jews Out, written in German. Anti-Semitic literature was once again being sold openly on the streets. In Kielce the performance of a Jewish folk group was interrupted by firecrackers and the shouting of anti-Semitic epithets. A month before the election, a group of reportedly more than a dozen youths stormed the Jewish Historical Institute in central Warsaw, smashing windows but failing to break down the door. They tried again one week later. Although the Institute is located near police headquarters, the siege continued for more than an hour without the police ever intervening.
Walesa won the presidency by a landslide. Mazowiecki did not even come in second, trailing behind an unknown return emigre from Canada who promised to improve the life of Poles within one month. Gebert described Walesa as “a consummate opportunist. He used anti-Semitism because it was expedient.” The longer Walesa stayed in office, the more Poles would see this electrician who spoke rough and uneducated Polish as a self-serving egotist focused on power politics with few programs. In 1993 even the Solidarity trade union broke with him. The old opposition had been certain to break up once it came to power, but one of the first rifts in the victorious anti-Communist coalition was when Jewish intellectuals split with Watesa over the 1990 campaign. Shortly before the election, Adam Michnik, who first came to prominence in the 1968 student protests, wrote to Waresa in his paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, “I have never accused you of anti-Semitism, but I do want to say that what you had said—that people of Jewish origin should reveal themselves—and I am a Pole of Jewish origin—was for me as if I had been spat in the face. I will not forgive you this.”
At the same time, the short-lived amity between Jews and the Catholic Church ended over the existence of a Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz. It was foreign Jews and not those in Poland who strongly objected to this Catholic shrine, which had stood just outside Auschwitz since the 1970s. In 1987 the Catholic Church came to an agreement with Western European Jewish leaders to close the convent by February 1989. But no steps were taken to close it down, and as the deadline approached, Cardinal Glemp began vaguely denouncing the accord. Avi Weiss, a Riverdale, New York, rabbi, went to Poland with his group to protest. Barred from the convent, they climbed over the walls to stage a sit-in. Workmen attacked them with urine, water, and paint and had started to beat them when the Polish police reluctantly intervened. Glemp delivered a homily in traditional anti-Semitic language, accusing the Jews of thinking themselves “a nation above all others” and asking them not to use their “power in the mass media.”
The upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks around Poland at the time of this homily was probably not coincidental. Glemp had never been popular because he had been seen as too soft on the old Communist regime (even in his anti-Semitism, he would slip into official rhetoric, such as referring to Jews as Trotskyites). But after this homily he suddenly gained a following. The international controversy over the convent went on for several more years, and in the end the Jews were the great losers. Instead of the convent the Catholics built a far larger visitor complex two hundred yards outside the camp. As the relationship between the Church and the Jews regained its more traditional tensions, the era of Solidarity ended.
As Walesa was losing his mass following, a sign of the confused state of post-Communist Polish anti-Semitism was a graffiti message on a Cracow wall which said “Send Walesa to Madagascar.”
NINEL KAMERAZ had simply wanted to overthrow Communism. She was not disappointed nor did she continue her political activities. Though her building was no longer Jewish, her apartment was unmistakably the home of a Jew, even if the mezuzah was on the inside rather than outside of the doorway. It was a warm dark place in earthen colors, with antique books and a sense of organized chaos. She had taken up painting, and the walls were covered with her slightly macabre tempera paintings. She had an old Victrola with a horn through which she played prewar recordings of Yiddish songs. The one small room—almost filled by a large wooden table with an electric samovar whose on-off switch was built into the table—was her conversation room. She would flip on the hot water for tea and reflect on the changes in her adopted country. “The Poles see themselves altogether differently from what they are. They see themselves as having always struggled for the freedom of all nations, that they waited for centuries, that all around them are animals—the Germans, the Czechs, the Russian, the Lithuanians—who are always stupid or evil or mean, all kinds of things, and about the Jews we know already. But they, the Poles, are pure and wonderful and good. When this was a closed state under Communism, they couldn't go anywhere. They looked in on themselves, they had to analyze themselves. And when the borders opened and they began to travel again, it turned out that people didn't say such nice things about Poles after all. They said they were thieves, that they didn't know how to work. And the Poles said, What? How can that be? We fought for liberty and freedom of all nations. How can you say such terrible things about us?’ It's good that these lessons were learned. They were hard lessons, but they were necessary. And now they are finding out that they are normal people. They are good. They are bad. All kinds.”
HOW MANY JEWS are in Poland remains unknown. It is often said that there are five thousand, and some think there are perhaps seven thousand. There is one operating synagogue in Warsaw, a small Jewish community in Wroclaw, another in Lodz, and two synagogues in Cracow, though only one is used at a time. Lodz and Wroclaw on occasion get ten men. In Warsaw the half-dozen aging Yiddish speakers scour the area near the synagogue three times a day looking for the two or three more Jews they need for minyans, and the Cracow synagogues make their minyans on tourists. It would be difficult to show that there are one hundred Jews in Poland who practice the Jewish religion with regularity. But there are many hundreds more in search of some relationship with Judaism.
After the fall of Communism the three most likely places to find foreign visitors in Warsaw were the old town, the hotel strip by the central train station, and Grzybowski Square. The historic old town, so carefully restored after the war before anything else was, became one of Poland's first experiments in capitalism, with cafes, restaurants, and bookstores all of limited appeal to foreigners, even though they were a new phenomenon for Poland. The hotels by the train station were also an experiment in capitalism. Even before the fall of Communism, they had become a center for prostitution. Most of the hotels were new glass high-rises catering to the few bold foreign businessmen looking for investments in Poland. The Polonia Hotel, that once-elegant survivor where Barbara Gora had followed diplomats up stairways, was no longer draped in flags, but it was still international. Women in the Polonia who were dressed in peculiar and revealing outfits could say, “Let's have a drink,” in Russian, Polish, German, English, or French.
The third tourism center in Warsaw, Grzybowski Square, was the closest there was to a Jewish tourism area. Since a large portion of the world's Jews had roots in Poland, Jewish tourism ironically became the greatest part of the new Polish tourist industry. So many tourists were Jewish that the Poles had to change their little souvenir Hasid dolls. These wooden carvings that were sold in Poland's main tourism centers—such as Warsaw's old town and the center of Cracow—portrayed Hasidim much as in Goebbels's hate films, with sunken avaricious eyes and jagged menacing noses. It was an authentic Polish souvenir but in time the Poles noticed that the tourists, being mostly Jewish, didn't seem to like these dolls, and so they softened their appearance.
With the growth of Jewish tourism, Grzybowski Square, the green triangle on the opposite side of the Culture Palace from the Polonia, became an attraction. The Culture Palace itself—a tower ornamented in the basic medieval/Moorish/art deco/neoclassical architecture that had become a symbol of Stalinism—though hard to ignore, was not an attraction. But a guidebook for Jewish tourists could describe the Grzybowski Square area as offering a synagogue, a Yiddish theater, and a kosher restaurant.
The kosher restaurant, decorated in white and blue, was one of the more expensive restaurants in Warsaw and struggled to survive with a small, mostly foreign clientele. The synagogue also often needed a tourist or two to have a minyan. The Yiddish Theater was of some distinction until 1968, when its director, Ida Kaminska, and most of its actors emigrated. Now it was run by a dramatic white-haired man, Shimon Szurmiej, who was one of the least-liked figures in the Warsaw Jewish community. During Communist times, as head of the Social and Cultural Association, Szurmiej was a token “Jewish leader” and was ready to give credibility to any position that the regime took, from rejecting criticism from world Jewry to establishing martial law.
The Yiddish Theater would not be much of a draw for Polish Jews in any event, since only Moishe Shapiro and a handful of others understood the language. Next to the synagogue was a free lunch program—a very basic lunch weighted with a lot of potatoes—where these few could socialize with each other and speak Yiddish. These people had very little money and went neither to the kosher restaurant nor to the Yiddish Theater. The rarely-more-than-half-filled theater was made up of a few Poles curious about Yiddish theater and schoolchildren who had no choice. Headphones were provided with a monotonous, droning translation into Polish, but many of the schoolchildren did not even put the headphones on. Aside from Szurmiej, his wife, and his son, most of the actors were not Jewish. They had been coached in Yiddish but were not conversant. And since they knew nothing of Hasidim or shtetl life, their attempts to imitate it ended up as buffoonish anti-Semitic stereotypes. It was the performance equivalent of the carved wooden dolls.
Pinhas Menachem Yoskowitz, a Gerer Hasid from Lodz who had survived the ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was brought from Israel to Warsaw by American Hasidim to be the rabbi for the Nozyk Synagogue. He came from an important Ha-sidic family, and a marriage had been arranged between one of his seven children and Chaim Rottenberg's son, Mordechai, who took over from his father on Rue Pavee. Yoskowitz, in his sixties, was a tall, thin, meticulously dressed figure in the long dark garb of Gerer Hasidim with an expensive-looking black broad-brimmed fur hat. His eyes seemed to sparkle with a sense of mischief, and his long white beard caught the breeze and rippled across his chest.
Yoskowitz was given to making outrageous statements to the press, at one point talking about the evacuation from Poland of the Jewish community because of growing anti-Semitism. Many of Poland's Jews, especially the young ones who were just discovering their Jewish identity, found Yoskowitz a difficult man with whom to talk. He appeared to have a short attention span and little patience for lengthy conversations, which was an odd trait for a rabbi. In fact, although he had been ordained a rabbi in Germany after being liberated from Bergen-Belsen, he had spent most of the subsequent years in Israel as a businessman.
When he arrived in Warsaw as the rabbi for the Nozyk Synagogue, he took the title Chief Rabbi of Poland. A second Chief Rabbi of Poland showed up from New York during a service, and their dispute ended up with the two rabbis in a physical tussle. The other Chief Rabbi was Wawa Moreino also from Lodz. Moreino had been the Chief Rabbi of Poland, traditionally a lifetime position, but he had been removed by the regime in 1955 and forced into exile.
Three times a day, Moishe Shapiro and about six other elderly men waited at the Nozyk for a minyan. Simon Heustein, the kosher slaughterer for the restaurant, would walk over to be the eighth. When Yoskowitz was in town, he made the ninth, and they only needed one tourist, any Jewish man. They looked out toward the square and waited to pounce. Tourists did show up full of questions—how many Jews are here, how did you survive the war, what happened to your parents—all very sympathetically posed. “Later,” they would say to the tourist. “Come to the shul. We need a minyan.”
The kosher restaurant was funded by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. Lauder, the heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a Reagan-appointed ambassador to Austria, had an idea that with his considerable financial resources, he could make a difference in the future of Central European Jewry. He made his greatest effort in Poland. But to many of the Jews here, he simply created the illusion of Jewish life. Yes, there was a kosher restaurant, an education program, a summer youth camp, a Jewish youth newspaper, and an organization to help the so-called “hidden children” who were just discovering their Jewish origins after a half-century, but all of this was done by an American financier and without him it would collapse. The idea was to create a foundation on which Jews in Poland could build, but Jews in Poland were skeptical. “Lauder is trying to resuscitate things,” said Ninel Kameraz, “but it won't work. If you want to live a Jewish life, you have to leave Poland.”
Simon Heustein, the shochet, or kosher slaughterer, was born in Przemysl in 1929, and survived the war in Siberia. When he returned, he had found Cracow to be a relatively thriving Jewish community in need of a kosher slaughterer. There he learned the shochet trade and then in the 1950s emigrated to Israel, along with most of his customers. In 1991, Yoskowitz persuaded him to come to Warsaw. “I wanted to do something for the Jews,” Heustein said. He kosherized the Polish restaurant with $6,000 worth of new plates and new pots and pans, and he trained the non-Jewish staff in the dietary laws. Its clientele was a combination of Orthodox Jewish tourists who complained about the prices, and Polish non-Jews who believed that the high quality of kosher food justified the price. It was always a Polish belief that kosher things were better because the Jews knew secrets and took special care and got only the best. On a Friday afternoon in any store, workers in overalls lined up to buy bottles of vodka. While waiting in line, they argued with each other over which kosher vodka to buy. They were not interested in the quality Polish vodkas that are prized in gourmet circles in Paris and New York. They wanted the kosher stuff because the Jews really know how to make it. It's cleaner. It's stronger. It's healthier. It gets you a better drunk. These were all commonly offered reasons for drinking kosher, and they consumed the vodka with frightening speed.
Kosher vodka was also one of the issues in the fight between Yoskowitz and Moreino: which of them had the right to put the seal of the Chief Rabbi of Poland on a profitable line of kosher vodka? Yoskowitz, who was, after all, a businessman, wanted to expand his line to more than just vodka, and he even offered a kosher mineral water with the brand name Chaim.
Still, Poland's only kosher restaurant barely survived. The shuffle of Simon Heustein, the small disheveled shochet, in his limp gray suit and hat, with his scruffy beard and dust-clouded eyeglass lenses, making the minyan and going back to the restaurant three times daily, became one of the Jewish sights of the Grzybowski Square area.
“Hello, Mr. Heustein. How are you?”
“Oiy,” he said. “It's slow, this kosher business.”
‘That's because you charge too much. The Poles can't afford it.”
“No. The Poles come. If it wasn't for the Poles, we would have been out of business two years ago. But the Jews—”
THE MARKET FOR KOSHER PRODUCTS was only one of the signs that Jewishness, along with anti-Semitism, had become fashionable in post-Communist Poland. Jewish studies became one of the fastest growing fields in Polish universities, and Jewish books grew in popularity. Every sidewalk bookstand offered Polish translations of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels. Poles with only one possibly Jewish grandfather were saying they were really Jewish. But most Jews suspected that this philo-Semitism, or Jew-loving, was simply the newest trend in anti-Semitism. It was also something that was left over from the old Solidarity days. The anti-Zionist campaign of 1968 had fixed in people's minds the idea that sympathy for Jews was an anti-Communist act. A young man from Cracow who had never before met a Jew—in itself something that would have been unimaginable in Poland even one generation earlier—took the opportunity to apologize on behalf of Poland to the first one he met for the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, which he termed “Poland's greatest disgrace.” He apparently knew of no earlier disgraces for which Poland should apologize to Jews. It was the Communists who had destroyed Polish Jewry, he believed.
At the same time, to walk around Poland in Hasidic garb is an act of physical courage. Yoskowitz was assaulted more than once by skinheads punching him in the face, shouting “Zyd.” The few religious Jews left in Poland do not even go outside with a yar-mulke on—that is only for the house or synagogue. Mezuzahs are placed inside, not outside doorways. A New York rabbi, not understanding this world, walked into a small-town store in southern Poland in search of a soft drink. The local peasants, who were already visibly drunk though it was still morning, spied his small knit yarmulke. One of them said, “You're a Jew, aren't you?”
“Yes,” the rabbi replied.
“Give me your money.”
“I'm not going to give you my money.”
“You owe me your money.”
In the back a few were angrily chanting, “Zyd, Zyd, Zyd.” But the rabbi was able to leave with no more than a little shoving.
Yoskowitz, however, was not only assaulted, he was also frequently assailed by young Poles who wanted him to convert them to Judaism. He refused. He did not want Christians. He wanted to find the hidden Jews, people like Barbara Gruberska who had been placed in non-Jewish homes by Jewish parents who did not survive. Nobody could be certain how many now-middle-aged people like her there were, who had not yet discovered the truth.
A YEAR AFTER Mateusz's bar mitzvah, Moishe Shapiro prepared a second bar mitzvah for Barbara Gruberska's son, Andrzei. Barbara had wanted very much to give her son and daughter the Jewish identity out of which she had been cheated. Her husband, a non-Jew whose family had been socialists since the nineteenth century, despised the Catholic Church but had no ill will toward Judaism.
Andrzei would have been perfectly suited to continue the cover-up in which Barbara had been raised. Tall and blond, with pale blue eyes, his appearance could be described as that of “a typical Pole,” which is what he was until his mother took him to Moishe Shapiro. Andrzei approached this Jewishness with considerable ambivalence. He had never needed any identity other than being Polish. What initially made a difference for him was the charm of this small elderly man with his permanent hat and his Yiddish-accented Polish. Andrzei, always a good student, had never had a teacher he enjoyed so much. The bar mitzvah was a great moment in his family's life. His non-Jewish father started talking about the family moving to Israel. But Barbara knew that as a doctor, she would have to work much harder in Israel than she did in Poland, if she could get work at all. It was even more doubtful that there would be any job for her husband, an electrical engineer.
Andrzei was pleased with his bar mitzvah, and though he started calling himself Avram, he still felt ambivalent, especially about the news that his foreskin should be removed. Assurances that it would not hurt did not completely convince him. A Bobover rabbi was impressed with the former Andrzei and wanted to take him to New York to join his Hasidic community, but Barbara adamantly refused to let him go, a refusal that came as a tremendous relief to Andrzei.
For the next two years Andrzei drifted back into his Polish life in the small town near Warsaw. But then he was offered a scholarship to a Jewish high school in Paramus, New Jersey, by the principal who happened to be passing through Warsaw and who recognized in Andrzei an unusually likable, curious, and intelligent boy. Andrzei accepted. His second day in America, he was circumcised in a Brooklyn hospital—a simple surgical procedure with a medically qualified mohel. It didn't hurt. In New Jersey, living with a religious American family, Andrzei for the first time learned what traditional Jewish life was, observing the Sabbath, praying three times a day, eating only kosher food, and keeping his head covered even on the street. He was living in a world where Jewishness wasn't hidden. After a snowstorm he built a larger-than-life snowman on the front law of the house where he was living in Teaneck. The snowman was in the shape of a long-bearded Hasid and for a hat he had a huge shtreimel. It wasn't a provocation—just fun. This wasn't Poland.
What most affected Andrzei in America was a new version of history. To him, World War II had been a struggle of Poles against Germans. No one had told him that not only Germans but Poles had been involved in the murder of Jews. He began studying about Polish Jewry, and one day he ran across a photograph of Jews in the 1930s purging themselves in a river for Rosh Hashanah. In the picture he could see thousands of Jews on the riverbank. He recognized the spot. It was in his town. “I started thinking about all those people, the Jews that are no longer here. There are no empty houses. No burnt-out houses. Every place in town is full. And yet all those thousands that were in the picture are missing.”
After high school Andrzei went to Yeshiva University in New York. By that time, he spoke almost flawless American English. He sometimes worried about his ability to fit in and thought that he was sometimes too easily influenced by the people around him. He was faced with a difficult decision: Did he want to be an American or a Pole? The choice was not easy for him, because he had always felt very comfortable in Poland. No one had seemed to whisper about his Jewishness there. He could play sports and drink with friends. “I love Poland. This is my country. I can walk down any street and act like a Pole,” he said. But could he walk down that street and act like a Jew, with his head covered and tassels hanging off his hip? Could he find kosher food? Could he openly act Jewish and still fit in, or did he fit in only because he didn't look or act Jewish? He reached the sad conclusion that if he wanted to be Jewish, he could not live in Poland anymore. “You can be Jewish and American, but you can't be Jewish and Polish,” he concluded. It was still the way it always had been. You were a Pole or you were a Jew. The phrase “Polish Jew” was still only used in Western countries.
It was very different for his younger sister, Maigorzata, who started calling herself Malka. She was not a tall, blond athletic Pole. She was short and dark, with what in Poland is called “Jewish hair.” Like her mother, she grew up with few friends. Her one friend was Catholic, and she never discussed being Jewish with her. But by then, the entire town knew her mother's history. Perhaps they had always known it. Children shouted “Zyd” at her before she ever knew what it meant. No one ever shouted “Zyd” at her brother.
“Boys are different,” explained Andrzei. “If you can play sports, that's all they care about. I've never experienced anti-Semitism. American Jews see something written on the wall, and they call it anti-Semitism. But I've never experienced what a Jew in Poland calls anti-Semitism.”
Malka also went to school in New Jersey. For her, one of the deciding factors had been the mounting power of the Catholic Church in Poland. It was able to get mandatory Catholic religious classes into the school system in 1990. Malka was allowed to skip the classes, but that fact was noted by her teachers and might be reflected in her grades. She also felt set apart. She, in fact, was put back into the same dilemma in which young Barbara Gora had found herself in the 1930s. There were other signs that the Catholic Church was again going to be controlling life in Poland. Priests were denouncing the concept of a separation of church and state as Communist. The Church succeeded in getting a law passed reversing the liberal abortion policies and making Poland one of the most difficult countries in Europe in which to obtain an abortion.
In America, Malka felt free to be Jewish without being set apart. But she missed her parents and came back after the first year. It only took a few weeks back in Poland to decide: “I know I don't want this,” she said resolving to return to New Jersey.
Barbara Gruberska felt she had to square things away with her mother, who she couldn't even remember. When she saw her children become Jews, she felt she had done that. The price, however, was losing them, shipping them away to a distant country whose language she could not even speak. She could no more imagine living in America than in Israel. “I'm too old to go to America,” she said, though she was only in her fifties. “Too old to move.… Well, maybe to raise my grandchildren.”
WHEN THE WAKS FAMILY made their trip to Lodz, they went directly to the cemetery to find what was left of Jewish life in this city whose population had once been one-third Jewish—home to the Wakses, the Turskis, the Yoskowitzes and the Moreinos, the Finkelsztajns, the Silbermans. Jewish families from Lodz were part of every Western Jewish community. Where else to find Jews on a Saturday morning in Poland but at the cemetery? Lea chatted with what was left of the Lodz community, none of whom remembered any Wakses or Lessers. Then Lea and her family went to the area that had been the ghetto, in search of the houses in which she and Aaron had grown up. The closer they got to Lea's house, the more distraught she became. She had not wanted to take this trip. She found her old building and struck up a conversation with a woman in the back, where the housekeeper had lived. When the woman explained that she was the housekeeper's daughter, Lea introduced herself and recalled that they had played together as children. The woman did not seem to remember her.
The building, the entire neighborhood, was exactly the way Lea Waks remembered it, except for the deterioration from almost fifty years of neglect. The Jewish owner of the house had fled to Canada before the war. By coincidence, Ruwen Waks knew a relative of his in Tel Aviv. But the tenants only knew that the owner had left a long time ago, and they were still hoping that one day he would return and repair his property. The sukkah—the little hut for celebrating the Jewish harvest-time holiday, Sukkot—was still on the balcony where he had built it. It had not been used since 1940, and when Lea pointed it out to residents, none of them seemed to have any idea what it was for. Apparently, no one had ever asked why there was a hut on the balcony.
The people in Lodz did not see Jews very often anymore. In Communist times the few Lodz Jews had had a second-floor cockroach-infested canteen in the once-Jewish neighborhood that claimed to offer kosher meals. Their only noticeable dietary concession, however, was that they did not serve pork. The staff was non-Jewish and wanted Sundays off, so the canteen stayed open on the Sabbath. With the change of regimes, the canteen lost its state funding and got even dirtier and more infested. Finally, the Warsaw Jewish Community insisted that it be closed.
Lodz had one restored synagogue. The fact that it was concealed from street view in an alleyway behind a building was not significant. Many buildings in Lodz have a tunnellike entryway, with two iron gates leading to an alley full of shops. The real life of the city is in these alleys. The synagogue, a rose-colored building of distinctly Jewish architecture, was behind the buildings on Rewolocja Street, one of the last streets to retain its Communist name. Een on a Saturday morning the synagogue was usually locked up, because there was rarely a minion. A man working on his car in the same alley on a rainy Saturday morning said that the synagogue was sometimes open but certainly wouldn't be on this morning. He looked up between the buildings at the gray sky and said, “It's raining. Besides, it's Saturday. Maybe on Monday.” Though there was not always a minion, there was a cantor. In the nineteenth century, the student of a famous Bobover rabbi had a son who assimilated and survived the war as a Pole in a small town. After the war the son's daughter also grew up as a Pole. She married a Polish engineer and had a round-faced blond son named Krzysztof. Krzysztof Skrovronski played the flute and had a lyric singing voice that in time matured into a rich baritone. When he was 16 years old, his grandfather—the man who had survived the war by concealing his Jewish identity—was dying. He looked up at Krzysztof from his bed and said, “Do you know who you are?”
“Who I am? What kind of question is that?”
“There is something you need to know. Me, your grandmother, your mother—we are all Jewish.”
The news did not have the anticipated impact. It didn't change his life, his flute playing, his friends. But more than ten years later, in 1985, when the Communist regime was losing its grip on society, Krzysztof started studying Hebrew with the last knowledgeable Jew in Lodz—a ninety-year-old man. Krzysztof's parents warned him that it would not be good for him to be Jewish. But he continued his schooling and eventually went off to Israel to study and become a cantor and a religious Jew. When he returned to post-Communist Lodz, his parents began to feel proud of him. Being a cantor in a community with at most twenty practicing Jews did not seem like much, but people noticed his voice and soon he was riding the commercial crest of philo-Semitism. A Warsaw producer contracted him to record Jewish songs, which were becoming a big seller in the Polish record industry. He had television singing appearances. He became a celebrity. Jews had been as essential to Polish culture as Blacks are to American culture, and Poles missed Jewish culture. But still, Krzysztof would not wear a yarmulke on the streets of Lodz, because, he said, “I want to live.”
He did not see any Jewish future for Lodz. His wife was Jewish, and they decided that when they started having children, they would move to Israel.
IN THE POLISH SUMMER the rolling hills of the south near the Slovak border are plowed in quilted patterns of yellow and chartreuse. Distant ridges appear blue on the horizon. Wild raspberries grow along the curving roads that lead to little villages of wooden houses with statues of saints carved into the gate posts. Bulbous church towers stick out from thick green foliage of fruit trees, and the fields are studded with flame-colored poppies and violet and yellow wildflowers. In this setting, in an abandoned hilltop estate, the Lauder Foundation set up a summer camp for Jewish teenagers to learn about Jewishness.
Most of the teenagers had only recently discovered they were Jewish and were trying to learn something about it. Most had been raised as socialists; a few even as Catholics. Even those not from Catholic homes knew much more about Catholicism than Judaism just by living in Poland, and the bells of summer masses echoing off the blue hills, and the shrines and churches that punctuated this rural countryside seemed far more normal to them than the exotic rituals and practices they were learning about at the camp. For most of them, Judaism was a new idea. One girl first heard of it when her mother told her their family was moving to Israel.
“But they won't let you unless you are Jewish,” pointed out the daughter.
“We are Jewish,” said the mother.
Some of the children had discovered photographs of a grandfather in a long black coat with a beard. Sometimes they did not even know what that odd clothing meant. A few of the teenagers were not Jewish but were simply curious. They, too, were welcomed, because it was hard to say who was Jewish. One non-Jewish girl who had come out of curiosity afterward told her mother how much she had enjoyed the camp. The mother only then confessed that she was Jewish.
A teenage boy who had only learned that his mother was Jewish when he was 12 said, “The funny thing is, the Poles knew first. They always know before the Jews. I don't know how they do it. Kids used to call me Jew, and I didn't know why. How do they always know?”
After a month the teenagers would go home. Some took up praying. Some tried to keep kosher. But they found that out in Poland, they could not continue to live the life they had learned about at the camp. At least at the camp these young Poles had experienced what Jewish life would be like. The food was uncompromisingly kosher. The men wore yarmulkes even outdoors, though it wasn't required. They sat around with their yarmulkes on, talking about how they could never do this in their home town. Two boys from Warsaw estimated that in the Praga section, a notoriously tough part of Warsaw on the other side of the Vistula, “someone with a yarmulke on would live for about two minutes.” Another boy told a story of a family he knew in Praga that drew blackout curtains every Friday night so they could light Sabbath candles.
These teenagers had had socialist educations in which equality of the sexes was a strong belief. As they learned about Judaism, they had hard questions. They wanted to know why women didn't wrap tefillin, why they were not called up to read the Torah, why they were separated from men. They would consider abandoning atheism but they would not give up equality of the sexes.
The camp forged amazingly good relations with the locals in the aiea. There was a farmer who let them milk his cow so that they could be assured it was kosher milk. Michael Schudrich, the American rabbi who ran the camp, talked a baker into setting aside a separate room with separate mixing bowls and pans, where he would bake for the camp, under rabbinical supervision, an excellent round, crusty Polish peasant bread. The camp ordered dozens of loaves, and the baker was pleased to have the business.
One day in the summer of 1992, two men from a nearby village rode their ten-speed racing bikes to the door of the main estate building at the Lauder camp. One had the broad, rough, beat-up hands of a farmer. The other, who looked a little more refined, started speaking in Polish to an American who asked the nearest bilingual teenager to translate—a good-natured fifteen-year-old with shaggy long blond hair and a borrowed Lauder yarmulke. The two bicyclists looked around admiringly at the wood-paneled manor house. They talked about how it used to be in a complete shambles. Then it had been rebuilt with glass and aluminum. Now it looked like the old manor. Very nice, they both agreed.
After a few minutes they said, “Well, thank you,” and shook the long-haired boy's hand, got on their ten-speed bikes, and pedaled off to continue their trip.
“What strange men,” said the boy.
Why?
“They don't hate Jews. He even shook my hand!”
NOT FAR AWAY from those flowered summer hills is Cracow, whose untouched medieval center makes it Poland's best bid for a tourist destination. Cracow also has location going for it. When tourists get off the train from Warsaw, they are greeted at the platform by eager taxi drivers offering, “Taxi? Hotel? Auschwitz?”
The splendidly preserved walls of this rare city are papered on seemingly every available eye-level space with posters that say “AUSCHWITZ” in large block letters. “Go to Birkenau and be back in Cracow at 4 P.M.” one of them advertises.
A thirty-minute taxi ride away is the most famous death camp of all. It may also have become Poland's biggest tourist attraction, with some half-million visitors a year and growing. While Poles think fondly of their country's variety of cultural and historical attractions, in the West Poland is largely thought of as the killing ground. Foreigners come to see what is left of the ghetto, the Jewish cemeteries, and the death camps—Sobibor, Maidanek, Belzec, Treblinka, Chelmno, Stutthof, Auschwitz-Birkenau—Poland was the site of the Holocaust. In Warsaw there is a heroic monument to the resisters of the Warsaw ghetto. Tourists come by the busload, sometimes even posing for group pictures on the steps. Nearby, a man sells assorted souvenirs, mostly books. The vendor is ready with an ink-pad and stamp to mark the endpaper with his souvenir “Warsaw Ghetto” stamp.
Some of the Jewish tourists, the groups who go to see death in Poland and then life in Israel, were understandably irritating to the Jews in Poland who prefer not to think of their home as the absence of life. But for the other Poles in the new Poland trying to embrace capitalism, it was good business. When a Cracow taxi driver got an Auschwitz fare, he would merrily inform the others at the stand, “I'm off to Auschwitz. Bye!” It was far better money than going back and forth to Kazimierz, the Jewish section on the other side of town.
The landscape between Cracow and Oswi^cim has probably not changed much since the camp was operating—rolling farmland, yellow strips of harvested hayfields, orchards with branches drooping from the weight of summer apples, towns with traditional log houses, and even some horse-drawn carts. Coming into Oswi^cim a wide railyard is passed, a junction of so many tracks it appears to be set on the outskirts of a major city. That is why the Germans chose this spot for a death camp. For all those tracks only twelve thousand people had been living there. The majority had been Jewish. There was still one Jew left in Oswi^cim, and he, not surprisingly, was a recluse.
Outside the death camp is a parking lot filled with tour buses. There is a bookshop and a snack bar and a pretty green area with rows of two-story brick barracks and a small gateway in the shade of a slinky willow with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” in decorative ironwork overhead. In the summer, the wildflowers are in bloom, and the seedlings that the doomed prisoners were forced to plant are now rows of tall straight shady trees, thick with leaves. Different tour guides are available in different languages and with different agendas. Some talk about martyred priests, others about the heroic antifascists. There are also survivors walking as though in a trance, leading their families.
Auschwitz shows things that are beyond commentary—the human hair, the eyeglass frames, the piles of toothbrushes, and an unremarkable-looking oven, like a bread oven. And there are gallows where prisoners were hanged and walls where they were shot and laboratories where they were worked on.
Somehow people drifted through all this. A little French girl, perhaps eight, sat down outside one of the display barracks and refused to go in. “Come on,” pleaded her parents, pointing to the sign identifying the display. “This is about the life of the prisoners.”
“I don't want to see that,” said the little girl, hunkering into the wooden stoop.
Many of the visitors were weeping, others looked stunned, some looked like bored tourists shuffling from exhibit to exhibit, taking snapshots to mark each spot.
Birkenau, the sister camp down the road, was far more devastating. There were no exhibits, little documentation. Just the barbed wire, sentry towers, and a few barracks, though most had been stripped for their wood so that only the chimneys remained. Through Birkenau ran more than a mile of train tracks, with platforms for selections and at the end the caved-in crematoriums that the Germans tried to blow up at the last minute. It was a factory, designed for efficient mass production.
But at Auschwitz, many of the intact barracks had been turned into national pavilions, each displaying the suffering of its country, some with cold documentary style, others almost artsy. Auschwitz had become a kind of world's fair of genocide. The new Catholic visitors’ center outside the camp, the result of the fight over the Carmelite convent, was just one more attempt to claim the moral high ground here on the killing site. Who would be the voice in this place? That was to be a seemingly endless struggle, first with the Communist state, which called the site “A Monument to the Martyrdom of the Polish and Other Nations.” Their information was mainly about antifascism, with little mention of Jews. The plaque was later changed. Exhibits were changed. Literature was rewritten. Then there was the fight over the Carmelites and the resulting visitors’ center offering the Catholic Church's interpretation.
Every institution with any pretense of moral authority wants the last word on Auschwitz. The problem is that there is very little that a truly moral voice can say. It remains incomprehensible. But if there is nothing that can be said, then the moral voice falls to the greatest victims, which were the Jews. To cede the moral voice to the Jews was an intolerable notion to some Polish Catholics. As Konstanty Gebert said, “The world owes us the right to exist because we have suffered. However, on the pinnacle of suffering, there is room for just one.”
The spectacle of Jews wrestling for the mantle of martyrdom could be seen, theologically, as a Catholic victory after all. Martyrdom is a Catholic thing. It is the Catholics who chose as their symbol of faith an implement of torture, the cross of martyrdom. Judaism, however, has always been a religion with relatively little to say about death, other than that it should be kept clearly separate from life. Synagogues and cemeteries are not to be on the same site. For the Jews of Lodz to go to the cemetery on Saturday morning instead of to the synagogue is very contrary to Jewish law. Kohenim are not supposed to go to cemeteries at all. Priests should not gaze on death.
But Jews are forced to contemplate Auschwitz, because otherwise someone else will speak for them to hundreds of thousands of visitors and to history. Auschwitz survivors like Marian Turski do their duty and sit on the International Auschwitz Committee and are thereby regularly forced not only to think about but to visit the site of their nightmares. The International Auschwitz Committee tried to reach a consensus on what to do about Auschwitz. Turski, who for twenty years would not even allow his mind to remember what he had seen there, became an active member. Now he had to go with some regularity for speeches, conferences, and meetings. In time he no longer found it difficult. “Of course, when I am there, there are two or three places which have special bonds to my memory. There is something there in myself, in my heart. I would say it's a sore spot. I go there. I sift through the archives,” Turski said, and then added with self-amazement, “I am really an expert!”
The well-landscaped Warsaw neighborhood where he and his wife lived for three decades, in a comfortable but not palatial apartment, indicated the limited measure of privilege he had enjoyed as a party member, albeit a troublesome one. His study was decorated with his collection of antique wooden carvings of Catholic saints. But there was no escaping who he was and what he had seen. In 1993, Turski appeared on a British television panel with three neo-Nazis from France, Austria, and Germany. One of them would not even shake Turski's hand because he was a Jew. The oldest of them was 32 and the youngest 21, and they sat across from him and, quoting from Faurisson, claimed that the Holocaust that Turski had survived had never really happened. Turski's wife had pleaded with him not to do it, fearing he would get so upset that he would have a heart attack. But he believed that these people had to be faced. “I was so quiet, so absolutely fully organized,” said Turski. “She was amazed.”
EVEN THOUGH MORE PEOPLE in Poland declared themselves Jewish every day, the community remained small. In the fight to at last receive German reparations after the fall of the Soviet bloc, applications in Poland were only in the hundreds. There was a loneliness to Polish Jews living in a non-Jewish world with non-Jewish friends. Even if it was known that they were Jewish, their colleagues, being broad-minded, would include them in Christian holidays and give them flowers and cakes on the saint's day of their name, forcing them in misguided friendship to act out a charade that to the non-Jews was simply being Polish. Only among other Jews did the few Jews of Poland feel safe being candidly what they were. Many would admit their Jewishness only to other Jews. No matter how many non-Jewish friends you had, it was only with a Jew that you were always sure, no matter what happened, that you could still say, “I am a Jew.” It was only with Jewish friends that you didn't have to pretend to care about your saint's day or Christmas, lest they be offended. Your Jewish friends were never going to slip and say one of those things that are just part of Polish culture. But the Jews saw their valuable Jewish friends vanish, emigrate, and die. Survivors clung to distant cousins as though they were siblings, because it was all they had. An impoverished elderly woman who ate at the lunch program by the synagogue would gather scraps of food and give them to a middle-class Jewish woman in her thirties because the young woman's father had given her food during the war, and this was the only connection she had left.
Konstanty Gebert married a non-Jew, which meant that according to Jewish law their four children were not Jewish. With the help of Lauder programs, he was bringing them up with Jewish instruction in the hope that they would convert. “I don't want to make their decisions for them. I do desperately hope that they will make the decision to formally convert,” he said.
He recognized that even he was a kind of artificially constructed Jew. In the anti-Communist underground days when he was working with Marek Edelman, Edelman would question Gebert's Jew-ishness, saying, “You invented it, you made it up.” The Gebert household observed the Sabbath and most of the holidays. Gebert was not kosher because it would be too arduous a discipline in Poland. But he did not eat meat, a practice that was not necessarily Jewish except that it precluded the risk of mixing meat with dairy. “Why can't we be free like Dad and not eat meat?” his children asked.
Gebert wore a yarmulke indoors. Sometimes he forgot to take it off when he left the house, but nothing happened. Still, he was uneasy about his role in Poland. “The problem is there are so damn few of us. I don't want to be turned into a professional representative.” He recognized that there were limits to how Jewish he could be in Poland. He too had made his choice. “I would prefer to live in circumstances that would make more observance possible, but if that means leaving Poland, I'm not about to do it.”
Jakub Gutenbaum, who lost faith in Communism in 1968 but did not want to be a foreigner in Israel, became a full professor in 1977. He had never been a party member and was not political. Science was his religion. But he said that after the fall of Communism, “I thought maybe I could do something about problems outside of my field.” In 1991 the Lauder Foundation was trying to organize an association for Jews who had survived the war because they had been hidden as children, and Gutenbaum became involved, eventually becoming the head of a group of 140 people. There were twenty older ones, like himself and Barbara Gora, who had survived the ghetto and concentration camps. The rest had been hidden as babies. All but fifteen of the 140 members were women. It had been too dangerous to hide a boy with the telltale circumcision. The people in Gutenbaum's organization had experienced a broad range of childhood traumas. One woman spent her infancy in the bed of a prostitute who serviced German soldiers. One child had been living with Christian peasants, and after the war a Jewish committee came to claim him. At night he escaped through a window and ran back to the peasant family, crying, “No, I'm not Jewish!”
Most of these children grew up to be achievers. The majority of people in Gutenbaum's group held advanced degrees. Many were doctors. Four were medical professors. But very few had stable family lives. Many were divorced. There was a high rate of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.
For Gutenbaum, the work was therapeutic because it forced him to talk about his own experiences. After a time he could calmly talk about the fire overhead as he hid in the ghetto, about being led through the charred ghetto at gunpoint, about the selection process at Maidanek. These were all things he had never spoken about, not even to his wife or their son. There were other things he still would not speak about—things he would never utter, even though he had learned that the more he talked the better he felt. His nightmares became less frequent. He was looking for activities to throw himself into because soon he would have to retire. He feared the day when he was no longer absorbed in his scientific work and his mind would be free to wander. This was why the hidden children had been achievers.
Barbara Gora had her own reasons for joining the hidden children group. “I decided to join because, you know, I have a lot in common with them. I am alone. I am alone not only because I didn't marry. I want to have my own social group, and this society is not typically Jewish because they are people brought up like me. Some of them are even Catholic because they were brought up like that. I have more in common with them than with typical Jews. I never wanted to be a member of this Jewish cultural society. I have nothing in common with them. I am a hidden child.”
Barbara's sister, who was ten years older, had married a Greek Communist immigrant. They visited Greece every year and raised their daughter to be Greek. When the girl was nine, she read a book about the Warsaw ghetto and asked her aunt Barbara about it. But when Barbara told her that her mother was Jewish, her niece didn't believe her. A cousin of Barbara's father was spending three months in Paris, and while she was there she looked up relatives who lived in a Paris suburb. She discovered, to her amazement, that they were Jewish. She came back and told everyone in her family, “We are Jewish!” To Barbara she said, “Did you know that we are Jewish?”
“Yes,” said Barbara. “I know.”
“Then why don't I know?”
The story makes Barbara laugh. “Now everybody knows. Now it's all open. It was silly. It was stupid. It doesn't matter!” The fact so amazed her that she repeated it several times. “It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter!”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1992, Henryk Halkowski hosted the last meeting at the old Jewish club in Cracow. After forty-six years they were abandoning the musty rooms and auditorium for a small, one-room meeting space. “Smaller, but without the mold,” said Halkowski. Four people showed up, and they made tea and drifted from room to room. They still had the red velour flag with gold embroidery, with the Polish Communist party marked on one side in Polish, their local chapter marked on the other in Yiddish. One of the four said he had heard that an Israeli had recently come to town and told Czeslaw Jakubowicz that they should all move to Israel. They snickered. They weren't going to move to Israel, just to a smaller space.
Although Halkowski's family was originally from Lodz, he became a local historian in Cracow and enjoyed studying the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Jews from Germany and Bohemia had migrated to this city where they could live in peace. The Cracow Jews were so secure in their home that many believed the name Poland was of Hebrew origin. Their popular theory was that it came from the Hebrew words po and lin, which together mean “stay here.”