“No, I guess they freed your hands. It was never so wildly uncontrolled in England.”
“Oh, yes, it was,” Katerina corrected. “There was a firestorm of arrests and executions after the invasion. They were rather secretive about it; nevertheless,they wiped out anyone they termed an enemy of the state. Including your entire Jewish population.”
She seemed to think he was ignorant of his country’s history, and that annoyed him. “Yes, but England didn’t have that many Jews in the first place.”
“No, you dealt with them early on in your history, didn’t you?” she countered condescendingly.
“Didn’t you?” he responded, automatically assuming history that he did not know.
“England expelled the Jews in 1290, dear boy, whereas in our kingdom they were granted autonomy and guaranteed their liberties under the Statute of Kalisz in 1264, and in the fourteenth century, during the reign of Casimir the Great, those fleeing persecution in other lands were welcomed here. With the Reformation, tolerance was extended to all religions via the Confederation of Warsaw in 1573. I think you will find that is not only early, but unusual. While the rest of Europe tore itself to pieces with religious wars, here we maintained our diversity and let each keep his own conscience.”
She closed her eyes as if recalling something, then said, “We who differ in matters of religion will keep the peace amongst ourselves and neither shed blood on account of differences of faith, or kinds of church, nor punish one another—” She stopped suddenly. “It is a loose translation and I don’t remember it all. Anyway, many, many Jews found refuge in the old republic and remained throughout the period of partitions and into the new republic. That is one reason why there were so many of them here for the Nazi invaders to persecute. That is why the Germans based their extermination camps here—this is where most of their victims lived.”
“Are you saying, then, there was no anti-Semitism?” he pressed somewhat illogically.
“I said nothing of the sort, child,” Katerina chided. “Squabbling between and among neighbors, religions, political parties, and social classes is completely normal in any heterogeneous society. What is not normal is the view we hold of such things nowadays.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you have swallowed far too much Nazi education. You view disagreements in the past as a prelude to what followed, and you write history backwards. The Jews were a people like any other, they had a rich culture and history, they had strengths and weaknesses and divisions among them. They were no more lambs waiting patiently to be slaughtered than the gentiles here were slaves waiting to be worked to death!”
“I don’t understand your point.”
“You honor these Nazis,” Katerina hissed lightly, “by ascribing such importance to their asinine racial theories that you even look for their roots in normal human disagreements rather than in a madman’s rantings. Do you think we laid ourselves open to invasion and the complete destruction of our country just to solve some political disputes? You give credence to Nazi propaganda by neverquestioning their assumptions. To oppose them is not just to spout opposite nonsense, it is to know the truth and to defend it!”
“You’ve certainly heard a lot in my few words,” he responded unsteadily.
“Are you saying that wasn’t your implication?” Katerina asked with tightly controlled anger.
“I don’t know what I meant,” he answered honestly. “I am tainted by my times, I admit it. I have only one view of the world and it’s a very ugly one, but remember, I had no choice in the matter.”
Katerina nodded as if accepting an apology, then she sighed. “I grow old, too old for this fight. You are right, we have failed you by handing you this world so devoid of morality. You children, you children must fight battles you cannot even understand. This war we have given you, it is yours to fight, but you do not know what it is about. You have suckled at the breast of war, yet even so, you do not fight, you just survive.”
He gave her an uncomprehending look.
“Yes, I mean you. I suspect your story is true, and like so many others you are indeed guilty of nothing. Unjustly condemned, you are innocent of any blood in a time when innocence is in itself guilt. You will know no peace until you accept the guilt of war. You cannot stand idly by.”
“I haven’t been idle!”
“Your resistance has been ineffectual. You have not killed in an age that requires killing.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done!”
“I know what you haven’t done. This man, this man who owned you. He was a murderer, a torturer, wasn’t he?”
“I would guess so, from what I know,” Peter answered with reluctant honesty.
“Yet you left him alive to murder and torture others?”
“I am not judge, jury, and executioner,” he replied defensively.
“Over there”—Katerina waved her arms to indicate an area of books—“we have the volumes documenting the specific measures taken against Jews, all of which were legal.”
She said it as if the connection to their conversation was obvious, and he realized that it was. “Killing is wrong,” he muttered helplessly.
“Blessed is the world in which that is true, but that is not our world, is it?”
He turned away from her and walked over to the books she had indicated. Stroking their backs with his fingers, he asked, “So it is documented?” since he did not know what else to say.
“Oh, yes, we’ve done some digging. Quite literally. I would suggest, though, that you don’t eat anything before you look at the evidence we found. If you think you’ve suffered . . .” She paused, then in a controlled voice continued, “These are just copies; the original evidence has been smuggled to America for safekeeping. And that’s exactly what they’re doing with it, keeping it safe. They don’t want to upset the political balance.”
He said nothing, aware of how close to a flashpoint of anger she was.
She sighed heavily, then added, “You know, they weren’t alone. There were others who for political or religious or ethnic reasons were pursued to their deaths, but for the sheer volume of people involved, the variety in their backgrounds—social, cultural, ethnic, age, health, gender—nothing mattered—there is nothing to compare with what was done to them.”
“Nothing?” he asked pointedly. “What about the tens of millions in the Soviet Union who disappeared into the earth? Or the eight million or so murdered in the Congo? Or don’t they count?”
“Ah, so you are not without some history,” Katerina remarked more mildly than he had expected. “Well, perhaps I betray a prejudicial interest.” She cast her eyes down and fell silent.
He studied her. Her silence seemed almost prayerful, and so he did not interrupt.
Quietly, so quietly that her words were almost lost to the susurration of the ventilation fans, she said,“My family was Jewish. We were urban, cosmopolitan, assimilated into Warsaw society. When the Germans penned us into that ghetto, with all those transportees, all those villagers and people with their strange customs—”
“You were there?”
“Oh, yes. When the transports started, I left—”
“You could get out?” he asked in astonishment.
“Oh, yes, there were ways. Cellar passages, bribery, the sewers. Individuals could slip in and out. The problem was, where to go? Our enemies held the entire country, controlled most of Europe. But of course, you are aware of that.”
He nodded.
“I went into hiding, first one place then another, hidden by people who did not even know me. Brave people, all of whom risked death, not only their own, but those of their family. I was moved out ofWarsaw to the countryside and then eventually, through the son of one family, joined a partisan group.”
“There were Jewish partisan groups?”
“Yes, after the ghetto uprising, remnants of the ghetto fighters regrouped in the woods and they fought bravely, but that is not what I joined.”
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“And these partisans—they just accepted you?” he asked almost jealously.
“At first they did not want to bother as I was just another mouth to feed, but then I acquired two Wehrmacht rifles and that sufficed as proof of my usefulness.”
“What happened to your family?”
“I lost everyone. After the German and then the Russian invasion, some fled to the east, into Soviet territory. I don’t know what became of them. Of those that remained, all died. Every single one of them.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.” He replayed his last few comments to see if he had said anything really insensitive. After a reasonable silence he asked gently, “You say ‘they’ when talking about your people. Are you not Jewish?”
Katerina laughed. “Depends on who you ask. The Nazis would say yes, the religious would say no.”
“What do you say? What do you believe?”
“I believe in nothing,” Katerina stated coldly.
It was probably an accurate summary of his own religious beliefs, or rather lack of beliefs, but somehow when Katerina said it that way, it seemed much colder and emptier than what he felt. Did he, then, believe in something? The disturbing thought got shoved aside, and he pressed on with another question. “Was there any organized resistance? I mean before the uprising?”
“Yes and no. It’s easy to underestimate the terror and confusion of that time. And until 1941, it wasn’t even clear that we were targeted for special treatment.” She used the Nazi euphemism without irony. “Before then, more were killed because they were part of the intelligentsia rather than specifically for their religion. Later, after the Wannsee conference, things changed, but that wasn’t clear at the time, and there were the usual disagreements about what to do. You see, in the ghetto the Nazis created in Warsaw, there was an incredible diversity of peoples and opinions. The consensus opinion, before 1942, was that complete submission was the only way to survive. Guerrilla warfare or coordination with the Polish Underground was ruled out; obedience to the German authorities via the Judenrat was encouraged. The leadership was afraid of giving the Germans an excuse to turn their machine guns on us. So they waited. Such a passive approach had served my people well throughout history, and most of them were convinced that once more they could wait things out. Well, in 1942 the first transports out of the ghetto were begun, and in two months three-quarters of the people had been taken. Then it was clear that obedience and submission would not satisfy the Nazis, that they needed no excuses, but it was just too late.”
I’m not giving him any excuses. Peter felt a tremor as he recalled his words to Roman, not even a year before. “What about outside help?”
“Lack of information has always hindered us, that and an unwillingness to believe the unbelievable. Very early on, the Polish Underground, on behalf of the Jewish Resistance, sent emissaries to the unconquered lands begging for help and especially for passports and money to smuggle people out. At least one such emissary was smuggled into the ghetto so that he could return with an eyewitness account—I know, because I saw him. I heard he got through all the way to London, then America, but there was no real response. They didn’t want to hear about it. The government also established a Council to Aid the Jews and managed to hide some people and smuggle some people out and a few arms in, but as always, they were hampered by lack of resources—even as they were during the general uprising and even as we are now. As for individual actions, little is known of the anonymous martyrs. Those, like me, who survived can offer our paltry gratitude, but for all those who did not, we have no words nor can we thank those who died trying to save them.” Katerina sighed. “In any case, everyone was limited by confusion and terror.”
“And antipathy and indifference?” Peter had a sudden memory of how his mother had told him about their good luck in getting their first flat when the previous owners had been deported or arrested or, as she had said, “something like that.” Because he had shared her joy, he had never stopped to think what her words must have meant until his grandmother had whispered something to him years later.
“Yes, that, too,” Katerina agreed, “but we were also the only land that had the death penalty imposed for helping a Jew in any way whatsoever. I can show you the German directives, if you wish.” She pulled down a book and paged through it.“Here’s one: ‘In view of repeated instances of Jews being hidden by Poles, anyone who shelters Jews and gives or sells them food will be punished by death. This is the final warning.’ I myself saw a man shot to death simply for throwing a sack of bread over the ghetto wall.”
She handed the book to Peter and he looked at some of the directives therein. Edict after edict—each growing more dire, each more annoyed by the obvious civil disobedience. Each contained commands not to supply Jews with food or shelter or documents, each contained the word Todesstrafe, death sentence. He flipped through some pages and stopped in the middle of a list of people convicted under one of the diktats. The entries leapt out at him: October 25, 1942, Zosia Wojcik, along with her two children, aged two and three, executed along with a Jewish man she was harboring. November 1942, Oborki—twenty-two families, the entire population of the village, murdered for giving aid to Jews. He flipped ahead: February 1944, the entire village of Sasow burned alive for aiding Jews hiding in the nearby forests. He turned back a few pages: Maria Rogozinska and her one-year-old son shot for harboring Jews.
A one-year-old? He closed his eyes and shut the book. Numbly he asked, “What about denunciations? Active support of the Nazis’ policies?”
“Oh, yes, that happened, too. Some people gloated, and there are always people-who want to make money or settle old scores or ingratiate themselves. In every society, there are immoral opportunists, as I am sure you are aware.”
He remembered what had been said about his father only the day before, and he felt himself redden.
“And there was not much coordination between allies.” Katerina was still answering his question. “You know how it is, what could have been done, what should have been done, what wasn’t done . . .”
“Do you think it would have helped?” he asked uncomfortably. For personal reasons he hoped Katerina’s opinion would be that it would not have helped. He was painfully aware that in his own family history there was no indication of any heroics. Would his grandparents have risked their lives for casual acquaintances? For strangers? And what about his parents? With them, indifference might have been the best he could have hoped for. He had a dreadful fear that they had collaborated, and a concomitant fear that he was wrong and damning them for things they had not done.
He also had nagging doubts about himself. Would an external observer have said he was indifferent, rather than terrified, when he had watched the woman gunned down in the plaza? Was knowing that he was helpless sufficient excuse for his inaction? Or was it that he had no reason to risk his life for her? Did he then expect of others a courage he had not shown himself?
Katerina was studying him, her lips pursed. “Probably not,” she answered at last. “There was very little opportunity for heroics. Now, in retrospect, it’s hard to realize how much of a shock the whole thing was. To have predicted the events of 1942 just ten years earlier would have been considered fanatically anti-German.” She paused, looking pensive. “Now, it is obvious what their intent was, but then, then we believed better of the world. We were naive.” She looked at him with sorrow. “You, you children of this war—you can’t ever understand. You’re scarred from birth and some part of you will always believe that what we have around us now is normal.”
Again that same accusation; he shook his head slightly but did not disagree. He was still too absorbed with wondering about his parents. Whatever they had done, he reassured himself, whatever their choices, they had not initiated the whole thing.
“And let’s not forget,” Katerina continued, “whatever heroics or indifference or collaboration the local populations showed, they were not the ones perpetrating the crime. Our conqu
erors were very determined in their efforts, and it is they who carried out the murders and it is they who bear the guilt. And,” she added, pausing to make sure she had his attention, “it is difficult to risk your life for a stranger. I guess you can appreciate that.”
“Yes, I do.” After an awkward silence, he finally said, “I want to thank you all for giving me this chance.”
She ignored his expression of gratitude. “There were some, though, who were too willing to capitulate, who volunteered assistance, who blackmailed people. Those bastards . . .” She stopped as though she had finished her thought sufficiently clearly.
“What happened to them?”
“Elsewhere? I don’t know. Perhaps in England they lived out their lives in peace. Perhaps they worked in the government and lived in a cozy flat with a wife and three children.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed with quiet helplessness.
“Here, the Resistance imposed the death penalty for such actions and publicized their executions and . . .”
“And?”
“And those who were not found immediately were tracked down later”—she smiled—“and killed.”
Zosia’s words about Katerina came back to him. He looked at her lined face, imagining a young girl whose entire family had been murdered. “Were you a part of that?”
“Oh, yes. In my youth, I was quite good with a knife. A secret liaison, get them into an embrace and come in from behind: they never knew what hit them. More’s the pity, they should have suffered.”
The room felt hot and stuffy and he wished they would leave, but Katerina seemed fixed to her place and her thoughts. To try to change the direction of the conversation, he asked, “Your people in the field—do they live as Germans all the time? Or do they switch roles, German one week, Polish the next?”
“It depends on how well established their position is. Most, if they can, switch; otherwise they’d go mad. But of course, not quite as fast as every week. When our Germans can’t stand strutting and saluting anymore, they come back for a break, and when our Nichtdeutsch get fed up with hunger and manhunts and risking continual arrest, then they return.”
The Children's War Page 61