by Leon Silver
‘An anti-Semitic interview,’ Tolek said and laughed wryly, even as he reminded himself to be careful. How did Jan know so much about him? Many knew that he was the Miracle Typist but how did Jan know his background? Had he been snooping around? Perhaps he’d checked the list of the new arrivals from Haifa? Tolek knew Jan had contacts in the government in exile in London and could be a very dangerous enemy if he were crossed. ‘You don’t think I’m going to bother to defend myself against this propaganda, do you? Maybe the Russians are liberators. Under communism there is no race or religious prejudice. Everyone’s equal and free.
‘Look, Mr Correspondent.’ Tolek raised his head and stared Jan down. ‘You can cut out this propaganda crap. I’m not some illiterate Jewish shopkeeper you can bully with your anti-Semitic Endecja “Action” nonsense.’
That only produced a drunken laugh. ‘You educated Jews are the worst. Businessmen and solicitors. And law clerks. The Miracle Typist.’ The Correspondent chuckled, shrugging off the title. ‘Can type without looking at the keys. The poor peasant of a captain was very impressed. Had probably never seen a typewriter before the war.’
‘That’s right – I plan to take Poland over with typing.’
Chuckling, Jan refilled his glass.
Two soldiers rushed up to Tolek, yelling, ‘Tolek! Tolek – fixer!’
Lewandowski and Szymanski. They dragged Tolek to a different table, sat him down, filled glasses with his Australian beer and loudly told the canteen crowd how this soldier had arranged their escape from the internment camp. If it wasn’t for him, they’d still be there. And he’d probably – they laughed and neighed like horses – be the pet of that Eva Ackerman. They winked at Tolek. Thought we didn’t know?
Tolek didn’t care if they’d known about Eva Ackerman. He was just pleased to have comrades looking out for him again, especially now there was a potentially treacherous enemy in his brigade.
* * *
It was late when Tolek parted from his two friends and settled into his cot. By then his stomach and self-respect had settled down. Just as he was about to drift off to an uneasy sleep, Tolek got another shock. The Correspondent waddled in, lit the oil lamp, sat on the cot opposite Tolek and began clumsily removing his boots. Tolek went cold under the blanket. Of course this was Jan’s tent. Not the best soldier with whom to share accommodation.
Jan was very drunk. He hummed and chuckled to himself. Then he stretched lazily, lifting his arms towards the tent’s dark canvas ceiling.
‘End of round one, Miracle Typist,’ he said, confident that Tolek was awake and listening. ‘Welcome to Latrun, comrade in arms. I hope you didn’t mind our little exchange. I haven’t had so much fun in a long time. I’m not a bad fellow, you know.’
‘Write about it in your next article, what an empathetic fellow you are,’ Tolek grumbled from the depths of his cot. ‘Upset all the other Jewish soldiers fighting and giving their lives for Poland.’
With another friendly laugh, Jan wished Tolek a good night.
The Jewish soldier wondered if he would soon be altering the Correspondent’s desertion statistics by deserting himself. What power and influence did this man have at home?
As an administrative corporal, Jan could find out just about anything. Since he was now sharing lodging with him, Tolek decided to make serious inquiries. He discovered that Jan was a heavyweight political and literary opponent. He was known for courageous speeches at nationalist rallies and demonstrations. Jan had had trouble with the police, ending up in court for picketing Jewish shops and beating up Jewish university students. In 1930, as a seventeen-year-old, he had made his literary debut in the pages of the magazine Nasze Życie (Our Life) with a poem titled ‘A Song of Youth’. He then became editor of the Tarnów Czyn Youth. Next he belonged to the Kraków youth union, All-Polish Youth. Jan was a prime mover in the right-wing movement ‘Action’. The goals of this organisation were focused on three issues: defending the autonomy of Polish universities; campaigning for lower tuition fees; and limiting Jewish students from higher education. The movement economically boycotted the Jews and actively campaigned for ‘ghetto benches’ in the lecture rooms as segregated seating for Jewish students.
Jan was elected the president of the Polonist Science Circle. His poems, sketches and literary reviews were printed in the pages of the Kraków weekly papers.
Tarnow at that time had about 25,000 Jews, around half of the town’s total population. Jewish life in Tarnow dated back to the fifteenth century.
Tolek also discovered Jan had a connection to a powerful politician, Stanisław Kot. Kot had studied philosophy in Lwów. During the Great War, he’d worked with Sikorski in the Supreme National Committee, then published a newspaper, Wiadomości Polskie (Polish News). A professor at the Kraków University, he had published many historical books and dissertations. This man was now Minister of Internal Affairs in the Polish Government in exile. He would know everything going on at home.
No matter the pain, Tolek decided he now had to become good friends with Jan, the close associate of Kot. Apart from seeking information, the power of the military press was awesome. No doubt copies of The White Eagle were smuggled back home to encourage resistance. Any article, any word of damnation of the Jews at home, could do enormous damage and cost lives.
Jan was an enemy Tolek could not afford to have.
8 Eliezer’s prophecy
The conflict between the neighbourly support of Lewandowski and Szymanski and the Correspondent’s antagonism wasn’t new to Tolek, it had hampered Poland’s entire Jewish population for centuries.
Life in Poland for Jews had started well enough. In the tenth century, Poland was a welcoming refuge for Jews escaping from Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Prague. Under the tolerant regime rule of Boleslaw III, more Jews were encouraged to immigrate to Poland from Western Europe and bring their trades with them. Boleslaw III recognised the commercial and business potential of Jews to support and develop the backbone of the struggling Polish economy. For many years Jews enjoyed equal rights, peace and prosperity.
The Jews settled in as traders, specialising in the import and export of textiles, food items and metal goods. For hundreds of years, Jewish people were made welcome in Poland, even as the Catholic Church used its growing power to accuse the Jews of ‘blood libel’: murdering Christian children and drinking their blood as in a religious ceremony. The rulers of Poland tried their best to protect their Jewish citizens against these accusations but other European countries expelled their Jewish communities, inciting angry pogroms in many cities. The Jews were also accused of starting the Black Death plague epidemic and became subject to serious further harassment in everyday life, which was supported by competing traders. Jews were hit with many business restrictions and had no access to bank loans and guarantees.
Despite that, in the sixteenth century, Poland became even more officially tolerant to Jews expelled from Spain, Austria, Hungary and Germany. This Polish period became known as ‘The Heaven for the Jews’. Some even called it ‘The Exiled Garden of Eden’. This religious and personal freedom attracted more Jews from Italy, Turkey and Greece, and the Polish monarchy supported these new immigrants. The economy flourished, unemployment went down and many Poles learned useful trades imported from other countries.
Then the decline started. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were several wars in the region, mostly through Cossack uprisings and Russian annexation of territory. It is estimated up to half a million Polish Jews died as there were no laws left to protect them. Once these horrific troubles were over and things started to settle down, the Jews rebuilt their communities. Even though there were fewer than before, the area remained the religious and cultural centre for European Jews. Polish Jews had always supported a free Polish State, and played a significant role in bringing about its existence by enlisting in the army during the Great War.
Mendel Klings, Tolek’s tatte, was born in 1880 to a religious family in Rozd�
�ł, fifty kilometres from Bóbrki. His first wife, Ciwia, came from Bóbrki, so when they married he moved there. They had a daughter, Bronia. When Ciwia died from illness, Mendel married Ciwia’s younger sister Lieba, as was the Jewish tradition. They had Tolek nine years later. Bronia married a man who worked for a while in the Klings’ hotel, then they moved to another town to start their own hotel. They had not stayed in touch.
The Polish population around Bóbrki were mostly agrarian while the Jews were tradespeople specialising in cottage industries – the on-and-off restrictions on Jews purchasing land meant few people wanted to risk losing their livelihoods. They became merchants, dealers, hawkers, tailors and such. Up until the 1920s, most Jewish education took place only at home and in cheder – religious schools taught by the rabbi. Friendships and recreational activities for Jewish children were confined mostly to their own tribe.
In 1916, Tatte was called up to the Austrian Army to fight in the Great War. Tolek was six and Ijio was one. Tolek spent hours at the window waiting for his tatte to return, baby Ijio sitting at his feet. During the war, while Tatte was home on leave, Tolek had sat on the floor playing with a wooden toy Tatte had brought back from Vienna. In his tent in Latrun after his conversation with Jan, he remembered listening while Tatte told Mamme that he was being persecuted by the other soldiers in his outfit. They had threatened to cut off his genitals when he returned from leave. ‘This is your last chance to impregnate your wife,’ they warned him, laughing. ‘Use your three days to spawn a few more little Jewish parasites from your mangled pracie.’ Tolek hadn’t understood what that meant until he grew up.
‘Take out a mortgage on the house and restaurant,’ Tatte had instructed a terrified Mamme, as Tolek looked up from his toy. ‘Send me the money – my only chance of survival is with bribes.’
Then it was 1918, young Tolek was eight, Ijio was three, and the Great War was over. Tolek would never forget being home after school when his father, in full army gear with pack and rifle, burst through the door. Unshaven, dirty and with gleaming eyes, he scooped up his two boys with trembling arms, kissing them so roughly that it hurt. Tatte grinned and produced from his rucksack two small wedge caps and the boys, laughing, put them on. Tatte also brought a backpack full of hope.
Tolek smiled at the dark canvas above him as he made a connection between his army buddies Lewandowski and Szymanski and Mr and Mrs Mazur, the Polish couple who had helped Mamme run the restaurant while Tatte was away fighting. Devout Catholic parishioners, they had babysat the two boys and helped with the shopping, cooking and cleaning up. They asked for no reward, happy to help the family of a patriot fighting for Poland.
When Tatte returned to running the restaurant, the Mazurs – and some of their Polish friends – had often been invited to dinner. Tolek, old enough to understand that wars kill people, listened attentively to the dinner discussion of Poland’s future at the end of the war to end all wars. He’d consumed as much of the political conversations as food and learned that politics were the foundation of war and peace and would be responsible for his tatte staying or leaving.
At the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Poland had regained large chunks of its territory, hoping to become a strong, independent country. The Jews agitated for full citizenship rights, protection of the law and unrestricted access to universities.
‘Piłsudski,’ Tolek remembered whispering into his younger brother’s ear as they listened to the adults praising the new independent Polish Republic, headed by Poland’s favourite patriotic son, Jósef Piłsudski. Poland’s Jews rejoiced; Piłsudski espoused a multi-ethnic Poland – ‘a home of nations’, including indigenous ethnic and religious minorities – that he believed would establish a robust union with the independent states of Lithuania and Ukraine. Piłsudski led the Poles in a struggle of independence that culminated in another war with Russia.
Many patriotic Jews volunteered to fight for their Polish fatherland. The Klings’ hotel became a kind of Jewish travellers’ stopover and young men, army volunteers, all pumped up with doing their bit for this new egalitarian fatherland, complained of being harassed and treated as inferior, being segregated from the rest of the soldiers and assigned to toilet and stable cleaning and land mine defusing. They were often beaten up at night. The supposed enlightenment under Piłsudski’s socialist government had not filtered down to the army.
Tolek was eating Mamme’s plum cake at the dinner table in 1921 when he heard the news that Poland’s constitution had been changed and a democratic government was granted for all its people. Tolek soon discovered that some Polish citizens thought they were more deserving of democracy than others.
He would never forget sitting in the restaurant’s kitchen when his grandfather Moishe struggled in through the back door. ‘Pogrom, pogrom!’ his bleeding zaida had shouted, both sides of his face a bloody, skinless mess. His white collarless shirt and old black suit were soaked with dark red blood.
A Polish Army legion, passing through town, had gone on a rampage, catching religious Jews in the street, cutting their beards off with sharp bayonets.
Grandpa Moishe was from the older generation and the younger Klings were not a very religious family. It was impossible to be orthodox while running a non-kosher restaurant that was open on Saturday. Tatte was clean-shaven and wore normal street clothes, and Mamma had kept her own hair and wore a normal dress and head scarf when out. After seeing what the local anti-Semites had done to his beloved grandfather, Tolek decided to take his personal secular liberation one step further. He yearned to be regular, like all the other boys out in the street.
The barbershop was in a run-down alley in an area where most people wandered the streets shabbily dressed; even the buildings were worn down by the heavy snow of winter. Young Tolek walked down this street, standing out in long pants, a shirt with a round attached collar, tailored jacket and even a bow tie. He looked like a regular little ‘poritz’, a wealthy family’s son slumming it. No matter how many times young Tolek had run this plan through his mind, it was not an easy decision. He walked past the barbershop several times, gathering the courage to go in, looking at the customers sitting on the bench inside, waiting their turn. It was late afternoon and he had one hour between regular school and Jewish school.
Finally, he turned the handle and pushed the barbershop’s door open. The tiny bell rang overhead and everyone stopped and stared at the newcomer. Tolek knew the barber, Pane Zakowski. He often patronised the Klings’ restaurant and was a friend of Tolek’s parents. He was also Jewish, clean-shaven and semi-religious. Pane Zakowski didn’t nod in greeting, he just stopped momentarily while cutting a Polish boy’s hair and stared at Tolek. Of course he guessed why this teen boy was there; Tolek was not the first or last Jewish boy to line up in this establishment, waiting to shed his religious skin.
Tolek sat on the edge of the worn bench, half his backside hanging off, his cloth cap tucked into his armpit, his face burning red. Until this moment, Mamme had always cut his hair.
The Polish boy in the chair watched the newcomer in the large wall mirror in front of him then cackled. ‘What could this hairy Jew possibly be waiting for in a barbershop? Maybe he lost his way.’
The other customers laughed and stared at Tolek in the mirror. They pantomimed having their curly sidelocks snipped off. Tolek felt his sidelocks glowing like radioactive moon rocks. He yearned to curl them around his fingers for comfort as he often did while in deep thought. Instead, he put his cloth cap back on. The smile on the boy’s face broadened to a victory sneer.
When Tolek’s haircut was over, the floor around the barber’s chair was covered with his brown locks. He bent and scooped up a fistful to place in his pocket. Mamme would want to keep them.
Tolek, the newly shorn boy, walked into the sunny day with his cap under his arm. He had never been outside without a cap, even on the hottest of summer days. He rubbed his short hair, clean-shaven temples and neck. Instant liberation! Now he would fit in, be like every
other boy walking past. No one laughed or pointed. Tolek had never felt so light, yet his pockets, harbouring the shorn locks, hung heavy.
The Catholic Polish boys had their own whistle: they formed a circle with thumb and middle finger then stuck it into their mouth, curling their tongue backwards like a wave. The long, sharp whistle was their rallying call, their battle cry; the trumpeting of their street power over the Jewish boys. In Yiddish, this shrill whistle was called a ‘pharpher’. Tolek and his friends practised it in their rooms, much to their parents’ exasperation, but they never dared whistle it in public. That would invite a thrashing.
But now, with Tolek’s newly found freedom, he stuck the circled fingers into his mouth and, pretending to wave to some other boy down the street, emitted a long, sharp whistle. Lack of practice made him dribble over the front of his shirt. But it was worth it – exhilarating. Tolek whistled again and again, and, but for a few brief looks, no one took any notice, he was just another cheeky boy whistling to his mates. Tolek leaned against a shop’s wall a few doors down from the barbershop and lifted his face to the sun. He felt as though he had been reborn.