by Andrew Potok
Probably no more than a few weeks later, W. H. Auden wrote a poem he called “September 1, 1939”:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. . . .
Later that day, Max drove us back to Warsaw, soon to be leveled by bombs. Much of my family gathered in my parents’ apartment to decide on their next move. I was allowed to stay up while they talked late into the night. Under the dining room table playing with my toy soldiers, I listened to the outbursts, the tears, the scraping of the chairs, and the shuffling of feet. My mother said quietly, “Men and children go. I stay.”
“I won’t go without you,” I cried from under the table, speaking up for the first and only time. The radio played the Polish national anthem. I could not stand up as I always did when the chorus sang. “The British and French will come to our defense if the Germans attack,” the radio announcer said and I moved a column of my soldiers to a border of the Persian rug.
“Yes, yes, they will come,” my father said, and my uncle Max yelled at him, calling him an idiot. My uncle Stash then yelled at Max, using a word that made me blush.
“How long can it take before the monster is crushed?” my grandfather Solomon asked. “The French army is the strongest in Europe, and Britain rules the seas,” my mother’s sister Eva said.
The French offer was not a bluff. They did declare war on Germany but they were in no position to provide serious help. Poland itself had a million-man army and another million in the reserves, not nearly enough.
What went through my family’s minds? Did they know the true risks? Having been alive during the previous war, could they envisage what was about to happen? They must have assured one another that a slaughter like that could never happen again. On the other hand, they might have been sensitive to the human capacity for folly and evil. Our apartment was safe, full of lovely furniture, damask draperies, a baby grand piano, an old grandfather clock. But they read the newspapers. Surely they knew that next door in Germany, as early as 1933, anti-Semitism was beginning to be enforced by law? What about in 1935 when the Nuremberg laws prohibited German citizenship for Jews? As I played in the Warsaw parks, did they not hear the glass crashing on Kristallnacht? Why did they wait so long? Even in Germany, by the start of the war, around 250,000 of 437,000 German Jews had emigrated to the United States and Palestine. Many of my family’s friends in Poland emigrated during the 1930s. How unwelcome did my mother and uncle feel as they continued to design and sell fur coats? Polish policy, well known to all, was not to kill Jews but to get them off Polish soil to Palestine. The German plan was to starve all the Slavs as well as the Jews, the former because Slavs were racially inferior, sub-human; the latter a step worse than sub-human. Jews did not even make the grade. They were non-human.
My family must have heard of the Germans screaming about lebensraum, proclaiming that, as the Aryan master race, they were forced, no, entitled to expand eastward where the inferior races lived. Didn’t my family realize that they were members of the most hated of the inferior races? They lived just one country east of Germany.
As I was growing up, did my parents worry about their happy little Jewish son playing in the Warsaw parks, supervised by his Catholic governesses? While I gamboled through my peaceful childhood, didn’t the fear of Jew hatred cloud their assimilated existence? Did they consider leaving the country or did they simply put it off until airplanes above us made German intentions clear?
As I try to comprehend what makes some people leave everything behind, and when it becomes clear that the moment to flee is now, I’m awed by my family’s decision to leave, even late, and to accomplish the leaving as successfully as they did in spite of all the odds against them. How wrenchingly, impossibly hard it must have been to let go of their beautiful apartments, factories, and houses in Bedzin, a thriving business in Warsaw, the new suits bought on Savile Row in London, the dresses from the House of Worth, the Empire furniture, all those precious fur coats. Saying good-bye to home, comfort, daily life, and language requires the acceptance of unheard-of risk, a huge jump into the unknown.
Is it only the rich who had such choices? It is unlikely that poor people without connections could have done it, especially as late as a week into September of 1939. One would have needed cars, money for bribes, contacts in other countries, some knowledge about the world. And then, rich or poor, who can ever be sure if a present danger will or will not blow over and life will or will not resume as before? Now, eighty years later, there may be people in America who don’t want to live inside the belly of this beast, with its ultranationalism, right-wing populism, the fervor of ignorant fundamentalism, the glaring inequality, and a policy of endless war. A rich person can buy a condo in Canada; the rest can only hope for change, a return to democracy.
One day in the 1920s when the writer Stefan Zweig was traveling in Germany with a friend, the two men visited an exhibition of antique furniture at a museum in Munich. Zweig stopped in front of a display of enormous medieval wooden chests. “Can you tell me,” he asked, “which of these chests belonged to Jews?” To his friend, they all looked to be of equally high quality, with no apparent marks of identification. Zweig smiled. “Do you see these two here? They are mounted on wheels. They belonged to Jews.” He went on to explain: “In those days, as indeed always! the Jewish people were never sure when the whistle would blow, when the rattles of pogrom would creak. They had to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice.”
I have no idea if my family thought of themselves as Jews who had long been targeted by Germany for destruction, or as Poles whose country was being bombed. In school we made paper gas masks, a crafts project, and a few days before Germans crossed the border into Poland, I jumped with glee on my bed as the radio played a song, “May Cholera Take Hitler,” and sprained my ankle. Except for a child’s mindless patriotism, I was clueless. But did they suspect that a German invasion meant not only the conquest of their country, but also the annihilation of the Jews? That should not have been merely a suspicion. They were educated. Even if the Polish newspapers did not tell the entire truth of events in Germany and Austria and Czechoslovakia, they must have heard of the Anschluss in Austria or the destruction of Jewish lives and property during Kristallnacht in 1938. As we raced for the border, did they think of themselves only as Poles, as Polish Jews, or just as Jews? I was unaware of Jewishness as a concept or identification, and I wonder if they realized what their fate would have been as Jews had they failed.
3.
In 1979 I traveled from Paris to Poland, my first time back since the war. Though I had studied and worked in Paris for several years, boarding a train bound for Warsaw had never occurred to me before. Best to leave it alone, I’d thought, best not to tempt the night terrors. But 1979 was the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of my war and the end of my charmed childhood. I boarded a train from the Gare du Nord. Uncle Max’s daughter, my cousin Anita, so close to me that we consider each other brother and sister, was going to meet me in Warsaw a couple of days after my arrival. She was six and I was eight when we got out of Poland in 1939, and our memories of the war sometimes differed. Her interest, like mine, is to piece it together as best we can,
though we both acknowledge the unreliability of memory and try to honor each other’s version.
Until the train crossed into Germany, I was happy to flex my French language muscles in conversation with a middle-aged Parisian couple. In the morning, the train stopped on the outskirts of Berlin. Our car was shunted to a sidetrack, awaiting, I supposed, a new locomotive. I thought about my mother, who two months before the war began had traveled to Paris for the fall collections. Coco Chanel urged her to return to Poland earlier than she had planned. “Madame Coco told me,” my mother said, “that I must rescue my son when the war begins.” She had to be urged? And by a virulent anti-Semite like the famous Coco? It doesn’t seem possible that during the summer of 1939 my mother felt secure enough to make a business trip through Germany, but she did manage to get on the train back to Warsaw, the same Paris-Warsaw train I was on and, just like mine, her train stopped in Berlin. “I try to be invisible,” she told me. “I was so afraid that Germans take me off the train and look in my passport which says I am Jewish.” But not only did my mother go to Paris in 1939, but Uncle Max had flown to New York earlier that year to exhibit Apfelbaum’s furs in the Polish Pavilion of the World’s Fair.
A fellow passenger on my Warsaw-bound train informed me that we were in a Berlin suburb called Wannsee. Oh my God, not Wannsee! I stood up and shivered. This is where, in 1942, at the so-called Wannsee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich, the SS-Obergruppenfuhrer whom Hitler called “the man with the iron heart,” together with the elite German High Command, first proclaimed “the Final Solution,” the destruction of European Jews. My stomach began to hurt. Forty years after the Wannsee Conference, in Christian Democratic Germany, I feared for my life, Germany being Germany. Our railway car stood quietly for hours. Like my mother, I dared not look out the window, dared not move. I awoke as we sped toward the Polish border, rumbling from the frying pan into the fire.
The Warsaw Central Station felt familiar, not that I remembered its dungeon-like echoes, but surely my governess and I stood on this platform, then boarded trains to the mountains or the seashore. My mother must have walked this platform; my father may have come to meet her; my grandparents must have walked where I now walked, their shoes squeaking as they boarded their train back to Bedzin.
During my first eight years, 375,000 Jews lived here in Warsaw, one-third of the total population. Now a few thousand remained. In the street outside the station, once alive with horse-drawn buggies, there were no doroczkas, no comforting smell of horse manure. A taxi drove me to the Hotel Europejski where my uncle Stash used to take me some Sundays for cocoa and cakes. Once elegant, the lobby was squalid now, smelling of cabbage and mold.
A day later, Anita arrived. We roamed the city partially rebuilt from the rubble of the 1939 German bombings (the devastation equal to that of Dresden, fire bombed by Allied planes during the war) and from the total house by house German destruction during the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising of 1944 as the Soviet Army waited patiently across the Vistula for the job to be done. Since then, parts of the city were reconstructed according to old plans and paintings, and much of the rest rebuilt in the cheap ugly Soviet style architecture. Not only did the city seem depleted of energy, but the people wandering in the streets looked gray and lifeless. Anita and I walked into the Saski Gardens, where the sensuality that accompanied me for the rest of my life was born. I remembered the ladies sitting on park benches, their hands inside fur muffs, watching as I scoured the ground for the spiky green meaty shell that contained the treasure, the slippery glossy horse chestnut. Now the gardens looked desolate and barren. A path led past the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with its little eternal flame, and I spat, hating all allusions to heroes, patriots, warriors.
Number Four Moniuszki, where I was born and lived until the beginning of the war, was still standing, though pockmarked with bullet holes and listing to one side. “Let’s go in,” Anita said, but when we pushed and tugged at the large wooden front door, it did not budge. No one went in or out. I tried to imagine myself wheeled by governesses in my baby carriage until I could walk and pump the pedals of my tricycle, the boy who jumped and skipped and ran, yelped, hummed, and jabbered. But nothing here stimulated my memory. Nothing looked the way it had. In front of an adjoining building, in worse shape than Number Four, a wreath of flowers had been left, “in honor of some fucking apparatchik,” a friend later told us. We took a short walk to one end of Moniuszki, which opens into the once-splendid boulevard, Marszalkowska. Flattened by the Germans, it was now in the shadow of the hideous Palace of Culture, Stalin’s gift to the Warsaw he helped destroy, the gift as welcome as a hemorrhoid. A short distance from this monstrosity, Apfelbaum’s, the family business, once stood proudly among other smart, elegant shops, the crown jewel of European fur salons, beautifully appointed with Persian carpets and satin couches, the walls hung with silver sconces, a gorgeous ironwork French elevator transporting royalty to the showrooms above. Marszalkowska was a haven, and their salon a place of sumptuous, luxurious objects I loved to touch. There at Apfelbaum’s, I was shown off, patted and praised by workers in the factory, and salesmen and models in the showrooms. Right from the beginning, I was eager for adulation, always prepared to smile, though the charm that served me badly most of my life has now been supplanted by anger and revenge fantasies.
Anita and I hired a taxi to take us to Wieliszew, about sixteen kilometers north of Warsaw where, forty years earlier, on the first day of the war, three German planes had dropped their bombs all around me. Once in the village, we didn’t know how to direct our driver to the site; we knew only that the house stood alone, surrounded by fields and forests. The taxi stopped arbitrarily, trees to one side, a plowed field on the other. Somewhere near us was the spot where I once stood, my bicycle at my feet, and saluted three Junker dive bombers, or whatever they were. Anita and I were desperate for a marker, the remains of a structure, a foundation, a garden gate, but there was nothing, no sense of home, not here, not in Warsaw, no hint of a visual memory.
A stooped old woman appeared at one end of the mown field and walked toward us, dragging a scythe behind her. When she stepped onto the road, I asked in my nearly forgotten Polish if she remembered where a summerhouse or two had been before the war. She looked us up and down. “The Jews.” She showed her teeth and spat. “That’s where the Jews lived,” she barked and went on her way, transforming my melancholy to fury. I had wanted a few bricks, a corner of a roof, broken cement, and I got a shot of virulent Jew hatred as never before in my adult life. Searching for life-changing mementos seemed to be a dead end.
How immensely different were the stories of the few surviving members of my family. One of my cousins, another Anita, this one living in London, five years younger than I, was taken with her parents to a camp in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war. Her diplomat father was treated more kindly than most of the Polish Jews incarcerated in dread Russia. Sick from malnutrition, she spent months in the camp hospital. After four and a half years in the Soviet camp, they were allowed to go back to their residence in Sosnowiec, an industrial city not far from Bedzin, where they stayed for the next four years. In Sosnowiec, where all the Jews had been herded into a ghetto and subsequently sent to Auschwitz, eleven-year-old Anita witnessed a large crowd of Poles shouting and throwing stones at the few returning Jews, the terrifying scene becoming an old-fashioned pogrom, the kind that had plagued Jews in this part of the world for generations, not only in Poland but in all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Very frightened, Anita ran home and, a short time later, her father, on an economic mission in London, applied and was granted political asylum. She was fourteen and a half when she began her new life in England.
4.
In 1988, the year before Solidarity took over from the apparatchiks, with the city still glum, joyless, and gray, my ex-wife Charlotte, my first Seeing Eye dog Dash, my son Mark and I went to Warsaw, my last time until now. The police goons were still cracking skulls, the intelli
gentsia just coming out of prison or hiding. We met many smart and politically engaged people. One of them, a prominent activist in the Solidarity movement, explained Polish collaboration in the destruction of Polish Jews by saying, “People do crazy things during Holocausts.” I couldn’t believe what I had just heard and didn’t know what to say. After an uncomfortable pause, I asked if she was Jewish. “Yes,” she said, “but you must understand that really I am Polish.” I understood well because my super-assimilated parents considered themselves Poles and believed in the Polish values of gallantry, honor, and patriotism, and looked down on shtetl Jews as dirty country people who didn’t speak Polish but rather that ugly language called Yiddish and lived in the stupidity of pre-industrial rituals and laws.
But “crazy during Holocausts?” It didn’t compute. “Crazy is a disgusting modifier of people who lived through the Holocaust,” my son said as we walked back to our rented apartment.
Next on the list of interesting people recommended by a writer friend who was fascinated by Polish history was a non-Jewish, Polish woman who, by reputation, was not an anti-Semite. “You see,” she said as we drank tea in her crowded little apartment, “in our Polish house, we were Jews and Poles living together. When the Germans came, we Poles helped our kind first. It’s only natural.”