13 Stradomska Street

by Andrew Potok

  And now I wonder why no reparations money ever came from the properties in Bedzin. Though not willingly, the Germans did pay reparations money to my mother and uncle in the 1950s, but the Poles who took over the Bedzin houses and factory that belonged to my family refused to pay, even though the expropriations were undeniable. Potoks had inhabited the place for generations, with ancestral houses and a factory that produced oils exported even to America. In fact, Poland never repaid anyone anything, at first claiming poverty, then, after joining the European Union and becoming the wealthiest among Eastern European nations, considering itself the apogee of victimhood, Poland simply refused to acknowledge that it took possession of property, especially that of murdered or displaced Jews.

  Back in Krakow, I ask Artur why we’re suing a relative of mine to get possession of an ugly little apartment house rather than suing the Polish government for taking over the factory and making offices from a beautiful old mansion where my family lived. “I advise you to forget about the Bedzin property. You could hire a Polish lawyer,” he says, “who would charge you a lot of money and then,” he says, “I promise you that nothing will come of it.”

  “Nothing will come of it? Why?”

  “I think because they do not have to.” He says nothing for a moment, then, “Because once that starts, there will be no end to it. Believe me, Andrew, there is nothing to be done.”

  7

  THE AMBIGUITY OF BETRAYALS

  1.

  Back in the Hotel Rubinstein, as Loie sleeps and a hint of klezmer music wafts in from a few blocks down Szeroka Street through the badly fitted Hotel Rubinstein windows, I have a conversation with my grandmother Paulina and grandfather Solomon on whose streets I have been walking for days. They are sitting on the two chairs in front of the hotel windows. In his deep gravelly voice, my grandfather tells me that Bedzin was so close to the German border that the Wehrmacht was on the Bedzin streets the first or second day of the invasion. “It was a cloudy, dark day,” Solek, my dziadek says. “I knew that those Germans were beasts but I needed a cigarette. Can you imagine anyone so addicted to tobacco? I thought I could make it to Kaminska’s store, not very far from our house. My voice was beginning to sound like that of an old man. I coughed and wheezed. You would think I was smarter than that.” I think of my own addictions. I could not have resisted, just as he could not, perhaps not a cigarette but a late afternoon martini or a woman awaiting me. “The German was not very young,” my grandfather continues, “perhaps a decent man, maybe a teacher or salesman or mechanic, but with a cruel thin mouth and hollow eyes. He stuck out his chest and yelled ‘Juden!’ Is he talking to me? I thought. Then he shot me and I was gone after the third bullet.”

  My grandmother’s hair is swept back into a neat gray bun. Her face is lined with age, her soft arms cool as they were in the heat of a Bedzin summer. “My poor Solek never knew how lucky he was to get it over so quickly,” she now tells me. “After he was gone, they dragged me to the woods where Jewish old men with their prayer shawls and side-locks as well as two Jewish children hung from trees. The soldiers pointed and laughed. I screamed and they poked their guns into my stomach, and dragged me into a ghetto. I am hardly Jewish. You know, my Jendrush, we were never practicing Jews. We were—how do you say it?—agnostics. And then, from the ghetto to Auschwitz. I will say no more.”

  “Before all that, did you shop in their shops? How did you manage to live and work among the people who hated you?”

  “No, no,” my grandmother objects, wagging her finger at me. “Not all of them hated us. We had friends among them.”

  I turn to one side and try to sleep, knowing that there are no Jews left in Bedzin, very few in Krakow. I cannot comprehend those who survived the camps or exile elsewhere, then chose to return, reminders of the largely forgotten past, the once despised minority, a challenge to the concept of Polishness, a puzzling presence, Zulus or Eskimos, clowns with their yarmulkes and sidelocks.

  Shortly before this trip, I read Fear, a book by Jan Gross, in which he writes that approximately 250,000 Polish Jews returned home immediately after the war, mostly from the Soviet Union, and were subjected to a wave of violence and hostility; up to 1,500 were murdered in either individual actions or in pogroms. With most of the three million Polish Jews already slaughtered, a pogrom flared up in Kielce, after that town had been completely “cleansed of Jews.” Two hundred former Jewish residents who had survived the concentration camps returned, forty of them, accused of “blood libel,” were clubbed to death by a mob of workers from a nearby steel mill and gunned down by police and soldiers. The mob then stormed the hospital, where they murdered injured Jews and, during the next few months, killed thirty more, while Catholic priests, bishops, and cardinals condoned the killing, blaming the Jews for their involvement in the Communist hierarchy, as well as citing their belief that the “blood libel” accusation was never proven false. Even Pope Pius XII, still going strong in spite of his friendship with the Nazis, refused to admonish the Polish church.

  When friends remind me that I should not make black and white proclamations about Polish guilt, I cannot get the images of Kielce out of my mind. Surely not all Poles were capable of this level of brutality. Surely Jews returning to other towns or villages were not slaughtered. And then I wonder, does this degree of violence happen elsewhere, not just in Poland? Of course it does. For starters, take the Greenwood section, all black, of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921—a mere twenty years before some of the Polish brutality—where up to three hundred people were slaughtered and eight hundred injured, all by white fellow residents of Tulsa. Human hatred knows no bounds. Many Poles seem to resent that Polish behavior during and after the war gets reduced in the minds of many Westerners to a narrative about the fate of the country’s Jews. That was not the only story, they say, nor was the Jewish story generally confined to Poland. All of that is true. Poles have had more than their share of suffering, and many Poles risked their lives by protecting and saving Jews. There are many sides to every story, but as a Jew affected by the history of World War II, I can only write what is apparent to me and what has always been apparent to Jewish populations in this part of the world. Certainly a lot more anger and blame are due the Germans and Austrians, the perpetrators of unimaginable hate and violence, but that fact does not translate into letting Polish anti-Semitism off the hook. Poland was not responsible for the war or for a policy of annihilation of Jews. Conditions and choices were absolutely horrendous for all sorts of peoples in the wretched eastern European lands, and perhaps the main motivation in looking at Kielce and Jebwabne and other murder sites in Poland should be to probe the depths of the human, rather than just the Polish, capacity for bad faith and outright evil. To be sure, the events in Poland had a specific history, which needs to be accounted for, but not in the mode of those people being distinctly evil, and the rest of us smugly not. As regards American behavior in the world, the number of war criminals at the very top of the US government disallows judgment of the behavior of any other nation. When we accuse other nations of blatant criminal acts, spouting platitudes about American exceptionalism, the hypocrisy is blatant, laughable. Nations tend to perform criminal acts, with very few exceptions. Even though one can point to the decency of the Danes in protecting Danish Jews in the war, heroic acts in face of the probable punishment from the Germans, even little Denmark cannot be counted on to continue moral behavior throughout its history. Danish attitudes toward Syrian refugees tilts even them toward the other side of the morality scale.

  The great Polish poet Zbygniew Herbert, in the wake of the Second World War, warned his fellow countrymen of the need for precision about the millions murdered.

  . . . it was a long time ago

  a wind mixed up the ashes . . .

  but in these matters

  accuracy is necessary

  one can’t get it wrong

  even in a single case . . .

  ignorance about those who are lost

&n
bsp; undermines the reality of the world . . .

  2.

  Learning from Artur that the Potok born in 1830 had sixteen children by two wives is worth a smile, nothing more, but knowing that not only my father but a nephew of my grandmother’s, Edward Prokocimer, was capable of betrayal is not easy to live with. As I have learned so painfully during my more than eighty years of life, practically no one escapes betrayal, small or large.

  Is it just that there is a rotten egg in everyone’s family? I have tried to vindicate my father’s act by questioning my memory and then, in my last book, I fictionalized him into the father I might have had, a father whose betrayal I made ambiguous and pardonable, a father I could love.

  Uncle Max, not exactly an innocent in the betrayal camp, was a rager and a brawler, a man among men; a card playing, handsome, womanizing man, as well as a hand-kissing valet to the rich, at times backstabbing and mean. Maximilian Apfelbaum, who became Michael Maximilian in New York—“for business reasons,” my mother said—had a checkered history. Years later, my mother told me that Max had not even wanted to save Zosia from the Germans by taking her with us in the Citroen van in Warsaw. “Not until I told him that Zosia is the mother of Anita, his own daughter, and we must pick her up and save her.” I will never know who was telling the truth, since the troika of uncle Max, mother Anna, and father Leon preferred secrets and lies to openness and clarity.

  Though no betrayal can compare with the big one that haunts this part of the world, the European betrayal of Jews, memories of past betrayals flood my mind after another day in Krakow. Is it the need for a final reckoning at this late time in my life or the hostile March winds or my awareness of Loie’s discomfort about being in Poland? I wonder how much my family’s betrayals, their secrets and lies, their need to dismiss the past have influenced my bad decisions, my leaps into and out of marriages, careers, moods, whatever seemed right or captivating at the moment. I wonder how the parenting I received has affected my feelings about human capacities, the depth of my loves and hates, my commitment to art, friendship, marriage, and my own parenting abilities.

  I was still in architecture school when, in 1954, Joan and I married. Her parents, my in-laws, never came to terms with their Oklahoma daughter marrying a Jewish refugee artist. After a year, Joan and I moved to Paris where I found a job drafting the most boring of interior spaces for the first ugly high-rises to be built on the outskirts of the city. My beautiful wife and I played house, both of us too young and stupid to do otherwise. Shortly after we settled in a dingy apartment near the Trocadero, we discovered Joan was pregnant. Although my given reason for not wanting children was the madness of nuclear proliferation and the armaments race, it’s clear to me now that, having had the kind of parenting I wish I could forget, I did not want to indulge in the questionable activity of child rearing. My mother came to Paris for the fall collections, and when Joan told her that she was pregnant, my mother’s immediate response was, “My dear, I know a very good abortionist.” That did it. Joan carried our son Mark to term.

  We moved to Italy for the summer. While Joan was unknowingly pregnant again, she rode on the back of my motorcycle while Anita drove baby Mark in her English Ford to Barcelona from which we all sailed to the island of Mallorca. Soon after we rented a house in a suburb of Palma, we heard that people were fleeing the Communist regime in Hungary. Anita was the first to go. “I need to be there,” she said. “It’s up to us refugees to help.” A week later, I took a boat to Barcelona, then traveled twenty kilometers south of Vienna by train to the Traiskirchen refugee camp, which was already crowded beyond its capacity. Anita ran a kindergarten and I helped distribute clothing. We were both shocked when, some days later, Joan arrived. She had left our one-year-old son with nuns. “With nuns?” I asked, incredulous.

  “They’ll take good care of him,” she said, but when we returned to Mallorca a few weeks later, the nuns, thinking we would never come back, had given Mark to a local family. When we finally found and claimed him, the expression on his face was surely a replica of mine when I saw my father standing at the side of the road in Lithuania. My little one-year-old baby was betrayed, and I will never forgive myself for being even an unknowing part of it. For the first time, I thought about the anguish that must have entered my father’s heart for the remaining twenty-seven years he lived after the Lithuanian border incident.

  When Mark was six and our daughter Sarah was four, Joan and I moved to the island of Mytilini in the northeast Aegean and, a year later, rented a house in a suburb of Athens. Toward the end of our second year in Greece, as I was about to fly back to New York with a bunch of rolled up paintings to be stretched on wooden frames and exhibited, Joan asked me if I intended to come back. I said I didn’t know, and she didn’t seem particularly upset. We were getting bored with each other, outgrowing our nine-year marriage, and soon after my arrival in New York, Joan wrote that she was falling in love with an American marine archeologist. She moved in with Peter, and it didn’t take long for her to become pregnant. She was much happier, as it turned out, with a warrior-sailor-archeologist than a still-unrecognized painter. She soon extolled “men and machines,” and became Peter’s lieutenant, learning to map the remains of sunken ships at the bottom of the Aegean and, later, the Adriatic. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” said Captain Peter to a friend, describing the breakup of my marriage and the establishment of his. By mutual agreement, Mark and Sarah, now eight and six, flew back to America with me.

  In New York, I bought an old Renault and we drove up to Vermont to visit Anita, who had settled there a few years before. As Mark, Sarah, and I pulled up to a Texaco station in the village of Plainfield, Charlotte, who became my second wife a few years hence, happened to walk by on her way to a meeting at the local college where she worked. My crappy little Renault, bought a week before from a car lot in Queens, had just barely made it all the way north and, cooling down, began spitting parts of itself onto the pavement. Charlotte approached, smiled, and, as she passed by, ran one finger from my wrist to my elbow with just the right amount of pressure, the hottest of promises that, over very little time, blossomed into a rich relationship.

  Not long after I arrived in Vermont, Joan wrote asking for a quick divorce. She wanted the first child of her second litter to be legal in the eyes of her church. “The Greeks will agree to it if you have the divorce papers well decorated with wax seals and ribbons,” she wrote. After the legal documents were exquisitely beribboned, waxed, and stamped, we agreed that the kids would continue to live with me and spend every summer with Joan and Peter, sailing and diving for treasure on the bottom of the sea.

  I fell in love with a run-down farmhouse and the hundred acres that came with it. The old house’s clapboards were rotting, its roofline was concave, the bricks of its former chimney were mostly gone. Inside, the windowpanes were hand blown, bull’s-eye marks refracting the sunlight that poured in. Spidery gas fixtures hung on many walls, which were insulated with corncobs. There wasn’t a right angle in the place, not the unpainted clapboards, not the old roof, not a window or a door, and yet it was a refugee’s dream, with a multitude of trees, meadows—American soil. I loved the entire package for its decrepitude and its distance from my father’s depression, from Maximilian Furs, from the whole fucking Upper East Side; a safe distance from the fancy ladies, their overbred dogs, children and husbands. From both the front and the back of the house, I could see for miles downhill. Neither fashion world limousines nor unfriendly tanks could surprise me. But it did not take long to discover that the woman who owned the General Store in the village hated Jews, though she did it nicely by suggesting that we spend Sundays at her Methodist church. People here still “Jewed you down.” The local progressive college was “a nest of Jews, while the lovely hills were beginning to be transformed and polluted by downcountry Jews. Still this was not Poland. A little patience was required, a little waiting and smiling before taking one’s place as artisan, farmer, artist; to doff
overalls and shitkicker boots, attend their town meetings, buy lawn mowers at Montgomery Ward’s, grow zucchinis, sit in trees waiting for deer.

  In back of the house, past a few butternut trees and an old stone fence, the kids and I sat in the middle of a huge meadow, the village way below us, blue mountains on the distant horizon. We heard the sound of a truck downshifting in the village, then a freight train on its way north, whistling at a far-off railroad crossing. These spare, discrete counterpoints of comforting noises, together with the visual arpeggios of sunlight lighting up tin roofs one after the other, and a line of poplars introducing an architectural order into the unruly woods below, were as reassuring to a city dweller like me as a traffic light in a busy intersection.

  It was a joy putting Mark and Sarah on the yellow school bus every morning and waiting for them to be dropped off every afternoon. Giving them a home, reading to them, playing games with them, but especially giving them a language, a language we could speak together, play with, explore, has always been in the forefront of my mind as the greatest of all gifts. Every June I drove them to New York and put them on a plane bound for Greece where they spent the summer with their mother and her new husband. Men and boys being favored by both Peter and Joan, Mark’s summers were happy, with sailing and diving, while Sarah, a dispensable female, was left to fend for herself. When she came home at the end of each summer, gloomy and angry, I didn’t understand the seriousness of her neglect and abandonment. Who knows what to call Joan’s leaving one-year-old Mark with the Mallorquin nuns or her neglect of Sarah? As I did, Joan wanted our kids to grow up strong, independent, fearless.