The past he had so hopefully left behind returned for Paul, just as it would for my father. “Later on he was not all put together” is how Joe put it. After Lillian died, Joe heard from a Jewish agency in Mexico to which Paul had gone for help. Joe and Barbara wired money and the agency put Paul on a plane to New York. He was again a displaced person.
Barbara found him a place in a Jewish retirement home. “That was a mistake,” Joe tells me. “I didn’t know he really didn’t like Jews. Who could figure that out?” A rabbi came to visit and told Paul he didn’t want him to play the radio or watch television on Saturday, Shabbat. “An argument ensued and Uncle Paul took a chair and whacked the rabbi. So yeah, it was quite a scene,” Joe says. “I went down to the police station and talked to them and had to pay $200 to get him out of jail.”
Joe and Barbara found Paul a place in a home run by Italian Catholics. “He loved it there because there were very few men, mostly women, and the women would try and take care of him.” Joe was Paul’s guardian. “We took care of him until the day he died. Well, I loved him.”
JOE SAYS THERE’S NO POINT trying to figure out why my father didn’t stay with what little family he had left. “You, as a daughter, can start to go backwards and try to figure it out but you won’t. I was present and I can’t figure it out and I’m pretty smart. We can’t undo this.”
But to undo it is what I want. I want there to be a why. On the train to Treblinka my father saw a tiny window he could squeeze through. He jumped down into the snow. When he and Paul got to America they faced the question: What about the others? Joe tells me Sabina was angry that Paul arrived with a few family diamonds still sewn into the lining of his coat. “She had a guilt complex about leaving Poland and having almost her entire family killed. She was critical of him for not having taken care of their mother.”
My father, too, may have felt judged for not saving his mother. Maybe he felt he needed to take to his heels and again run for his life.
PART III
CHAPTER 12
Driving to Treblinka
The extermination of Jews in Poland was not at all a secret: it happened in plain view of everyone, it was an absolutely public affair.
Claude Lanzmann in Au Sujet de Shoah
IT’S THE SORT OF EXCURSION where you find yourself hopelessly lost in the countryside northwest of Warsaw asking a couple of elderly smiling Polish farmers, “Which way to the death camp?” They look at each other. “Treblinki?” they say. “Brok!”They beam.
We’ve been through this little hamlet near the Bug River at least four times now. It’s a picturesque enough place where storks make their huge nests on top of power poles, but there are only so many times you can watch the same scenery unspooling outside the car window on a sunny June day.
The farmers bring out a map. “Dziękuję,”we say. Thank you. Against odds historic, geographic and vehicular we’ve come this far. There’s no turning back.
It’s 2010. We’ve arrived in Warsaw the day before to find we haven’t factored into our crazy schedule—we have only a few days—a major Catholic holiday. The amplified chanting of a priest floated over Castle Square in the rebuilt Old Town and into the window of our hotel room. The whole of Warsaw was out, calling into gold-leaf-encrusted Catholic churches then cruising the shops, every second one of which seemed to bear a sign promising Lody (ice cream) or Alkohole. We’d need a bit of the latter on this sort of trip.
It’s proving almost impossible to find a way to get to the place where, nearly seventy years before, my family was murdered. Unlike Auschwitz, Treblinka isn’t a major tourist destination. It is, for obvious reasons, in the middle of nowhere.
Chris volunteers to drive us there, but on a public holiday no one will rent us a car. The kind woman at our little hotel knows someone who knows someone, so we end up in a dark street late at night taking possession of a small vehicle from a man in a crumpled suit. The navigation device will no longer affix to the dashboard and, as we find when we set off, is out of date when it comes to finding death camps. At one point it directs us to a dead-end road excavation. “Treblinka?” we enquire of an old man and his dog. They look at us as if we’re mad.
If the past is another country, for me that country is Poland. Jews have lived here for a thousand years. Before the Second World War they made up over a third of the population. Ninety percent of them, including close to one hundred percent of my father’s family, were murdered. Half of all Jews who perished in the Holocaust were from Poland. It’s where my roots are. It’s a graveyard.
The only real bitterness I heard my father express was against his fellow Poles. “They wouldn’t give us guns,” he said of the Polish underground. Some varieties of partisans, like the Armia Krajowa, the Home Army, had a virulently anti-Semitic element who were as likely to kill Jews as Germans. The promised support for the ghetto fighters was slow to come and inadequate. Many non-Jewish Poles risked their lives and those of their families—in occupied Poland helping a Jew was a capital offence—but there were also many who hunted down and turned in Jews, looted their property, took their homes.
Meanwhile the world largely turned away. When Polish government-in-exile member Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London in May 1943, he left a letter: “I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being killed. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.” As I write, records from the United Nations War Crimes Commission that have been effectively inaccessible for more than seventy years reveal that the Allies knew as early as December 1942 about the fate of the Jews in Nazi-occupied countries and did little to prevent the slaughter.
The past won’t leave Poland alone. My cousin Joe went there once on the same sort of mission we are on—chasing ghosts. “The Poles were schizoid,” he wrote to me. “German occupying soldiers many times hunted Poles and sent them off to camps, and at the same time Poles hunted Jews and wanted to seize their property.”
Joe’s uncle Bernard, my great-uncle, who didn’t survive, had a farm seized during the Nazi occupation. Joe wanted to visit it. “The current owner, a Volksdeutsche—an ethnic German living in Poland—was really very angry and would not even let me set foot on the property threatening all sorts of violence against me. He knows he stole Bernard’s property and got away with it because Bernard Jonisz was a Jew and the German occupying authorities gave him a deed.” It was 1992 and a Jew was still not welcome.
I had never wanted to go to Poland. Then in 2010 Chris won a press fellowship and we ended up in the UK, living for three months at Wolfson College, Cambridge, the sort of extraordinary place where you find yourself having conversations over dinner about the use of horses in the First World War. I was content riding my bike along the river to Grantchester, the village where Rupert Brooke once lived—”And is there honey still for tea?” But Chris’s study at Cambridge was partly about the architecture of murder and memorial. Architects were involved in the monuments erected to remember the Holocaust. Architects designed and engineered the machines of death. “We’re going to Poland,” Chris said.
We went to Krakow first. I thought I recalled my father saying he was brought up in Warsaw but born in Krakow but any documents I’ve found have him born in Warsaw. Maybe he lived in Krakow for a while.
Standing in the line at the airport there was a feeling of dread. I was stepping on soil where my people were hunted like animals. Going back to Poland: that’s how the children of Polish survivors catch themselves describing it, even if we’ve never been near the place, a place in imagination full of the sepia-tinted lost. To be there is to realise the past is more dynamic and dimensional than you ever thought. In 2010 we breathed it. We stayed in K
azimierz, the district where before the war many of Krakow’s over 60,000 Jewish inhabitants lived. Fewer than 6,000 survived the Holocaust. By 1978 the Jewish population could be numbered in the hundreds. Kazimierz was left to squatters, addicts, bohemians.
By the time we visit, the district has become a sort of Jewish revival theme park. Our hotel featured in the movie Schindler’s List. It has the town’s only mikveh—ritual Jewish bath—and an apparently therapeutic salt grotto in the cellar. The shops are full of dubious tchotchkes, rows of carved wooden figures of stereotypical Jews. Very popular are zydki, bearded little “lucky” Jews carrying a bag of loot, counting money, or just holding a coin. I read there’s a tradition of turning your lucky Jew over on the Sabbath so their money falls out. Some take them along to football games for luck. If your team doesn’t win it’s the Jew’s fault.
Is it nostalgia, as the sales pitch goes, or anti-Semitism? What is disturbing and mesmerising about Kazimierz is that it feels like both: sentimental yearning for a vibrant vanished culture coupled with evasion about what actually happened to all those “lucky” Jews and their money bags.
Kazimierz has Jewish restaurants, klezmer bands: everything but actual Jews. Some Jewish visitors are charmed. Others use words such as “Shtetl chic” and “Jewrassic Park”. It’s funny. It’s grotesque. Polish Jewish journalist Konstanty Gebert put the contemporary experience of Jewish absence in Poland like this: “You cannot have genocide and then have people live as if everything is normal. It’s like when you lose a limb. Poland is suffering from Jewish phantom pain.”
One night we order cholent, a traditional Jewish stew, in a restaurant on Szeroka Street called, mistily, Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz. Several fashionably distressed old Jewish shops have been knocked together and decorated with evocative memorabilia. It’s an example of what I come to think of as the slippage we will find everywhere in Poland. Many things related to Jews and Jewishness are just a little—or a lot—off-key.
The menu promises a “trip down memory lane” to a pre-war idyll when Jews and Gentiles lived happily together. “All barriers between them seemed to just disappear and melt away.”The shop sign boards “still proudly announce their owners’ names, today with their much-weathered paint and names flaking off”: Stanisław Nowak, Benjamin Holcer, Szymon Kac, Chajim Kohan. “Sit down at the original carpenter’s workbench,” urges the menu, “touch the flywheel of an ancient sewing machine.” I turn over the page to read the fate of the owners of the fading names proudly displayed outside, those who built at the bench and worked the sewing machine. Not a word. The truth wouldn’t be good for the appetite.
Are the owners of the restaurant Jewish? I ask our waitress. “No,” she says. There’s the conversation-stopping look I will see a lot in Poland: shutters sliding down. Let’s not talk about that.
I’m familiar with this. In 1968, under the guise of anti-Zionism, a campaign drove thousands of the small number of remaining Jews from the country. A beautiful coffee-table book called Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland came out in the 1980s, when it seemed there would soon be no Polish Jews left. I asked a Polish acquaintance about the dwindling numbers. “Oh,” he said airily, “they all wanted to go live somewhere else.”The look. We didn’t pursue the matter.
Some of the Jewish revival is being led by Jewish organisations and by people finally connecting with their Jewish heritage, suppressed during the communist era. But this renewal runs headlong into Polish nationalism, which thrives on anti-Semitism while denying it exists. There’s a sense that Polish Jews are Jews, not Poles. There’s a refusal to acknowledge pogroms like those in Jedwabne in 1941 and Kielce in 1946.
While we are in Poland the Kraków Post runs an interview with a Polish academic, Aleksander Skotnicki, whose grandmother was killed for helping to save Jews during the Holocaust. The professor was being honoured for his work on Jewish heritage. He was asked about Fear, the second book by a Polish-born American academic, Jan T. Gross, on the subject of Polish wartime and post-war anti-Semitism. The book addresses the hostility and violence—including massacres like Kielce—experienced by survivors who tried to return home.
“What he says is true,” Skotnicki says. But he is concerned about the book. “If it is the only source of information for a reader about Poland and Jews, then of course people will say, ‘Ah, everybody was eating Jews for breakfast, lunch and dinner.’”
Gross launched Fear in Warsaw. Time magazine reported cries of “Lie!” and “Slander!” and a police presence. Gross has described his work as “a confrontation with ghosts in the consciousness of Polish society”. As I write, he is under investigation by the Polish public prosecutor general, who is deciding whether to try him for damaging Poland’s reputation.
In 2010 the Jewish Museum in the Old Synagogue of Kazimierz is busy. It has traces of sixteenth-century murals still visible. The nearby Remuh Synagogue also dates from the sixteenth century. We wander among the broken stones, scanning them for names. They are in Hebrew.
There is an exchange with the caretaker.
“Is there a list of names in English?”
“No.”
Some of my father’s large religious family would have surely prayed here. In the graveyard and the synagogue, Chris, who has a fractured Jewish heritage, puts on a yarmulke. I cry. Later he tells me that while photographing headstones that had been taken by the Nazis for roads or buildings he felt a powerful connection to something he’d always shrugged off. “If I had been here then,” he found himself thinking, “these things would have happened to me.”
GETTING TO AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU is not difficult. Krakow is a buzzing centre of increasingly popular “dark tourism”. People have always done this. Pompeii has been a tourist destination for 250 years. The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo—“The place where the living meet the dead”— offers 8,000 corpses, including some freakishly well-preserved babies. If you want to avoid places where people take inappropriate selfies, you’ll never leave home.
Our hotel offers pamphlets. Touts tout tours in the streets. Go to Auschwitz, Schindler’s factory or the salt mines, or take the whole package. When we are there Schindler’s factory is closed. We go to Auschwitz by van with a nice driver and two other couples. Pleasantries are exchanged. No one says why they are making the journey. A video we are shown of footage taken by the Soviet liberators ensures the rest of the trip is in silence.
“You will see the industrialisation process of murder by the Nazis,” my cousin Joe had written to me. “It is an education like no other.” I had read about this forever, seen the documentaries, grown up with it, but there’s nothing in your repertoire of responses suitable for visiting a machine of death. It starts with the familiar sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work will make you free”), proof that the Holocaust was also a calculated crime against the meaning of words. The more you look the less you understand, because a place like this defies any kind of reason.
In his account of his escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, my Greatuncle Paul wrote of “a house painter, a brutal murderer with the name A Hitler”. It’s preposterous. In If This is a Man, Italian survivor Primo Levi wrote of the absurdity of Auschwitz, the tattered, barely alive inmates made to march to an orchestra that was to Levi “the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness”. He tries to break off an icicle outside the barracks window to slake his thirst and is stopped by a kapo. “Why?” he asks. “Hier ist kein warum,” he is told. “Here there is no why.”
Trooping through Auschwitz with thousands of other tourists sometimes feels like a ghastly parody. Block five contains “Material Evidence of Crime”, heartbreaking displays behind glass of beautifully smocked baby dresses, tiny woollen hats brought along against the cold, hopefully labelled luggage. The hair, some of it carefully plaited, has faded to grey, as if it has carried on ageing in the absence of its owners.
There is a shrine to Father Kolbe, the heroic priest who volunteered to die in the starvation cells to save another p
risoner. We see no tribute to any Jewish hero, such as the woman mentioned in the book Auschwitz by Robert Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork Selected to work, she chose to go the other way. A four-year-old girl was holding her hand and she couldn’t bear the child going to her death alone. I could ask about that but I don’t.
More than a million people were gassed to death at Auschwitz— ninety percent of them Jews. At Birkenau we are relieved to be free to wander. The gas chambers and crematoria remain as ruins. I ask our guide what she thinks about the Jewish revival. She says, “You will have to ask someone in Krakow.”
Here there is no going off script. Auschwitz has been contested ideological territory since the war, bent to the service of either Polish nationalism or communist ideology. It wasn’t until 1968 that the first exclusively Jewish exhibition was mounted here, and 1989 before the genocide of the Jews was mentioned on the monument at Birkenau. There has been an attempt to site a Carmelite convent on the periphery of the camp: a battle between the Cross and the Star of David. History is always up for grabs.
While we are at Birkenau we hardly speak. I have been feeling uneasy at how long it has taken on our tour for the word “Jew” to be mentioned. “The main camp first and foremost preserved Polish—not Jewish—history,” Dwork and van Pelt have written. It’s at Birkenau that the enormity of the crime hits home. This place is the inevitable conclusion of the Nazis’ mad industry.
Chris is troubled by the chronology of the tour. It feels like Birkenau has been relegated to a postscript. The tour, he thinks, should start at this place, with its vast modernist grid of horse barracks, now mostly reduced to crumbling chimney stacks; its ramp; its cattle wagon; the latrine barrack that once served 7,000 prisoners; the machinery of death configured so the victims could save everyone trouble by walking to their deaths. Architects designed this.
There’s an argument that camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau should have been left as they were, not turned into museums and monuments. That’s a difficult position to take when you see new generations walking stunned through the exhibits. It’s a place to subdue even youthful exuberance, although not quite: there’s something heartening about the sight of a group of teenage boys taking clandestine photos of each other in a punishment cell. “The aims of life,” Levi said, “are the best defence against death.”
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