by Andrew Potok
After hanging up the phone, I sit at my desk and daydream Paulina into existence. “I need to know so many things from you,” I whisper. “Did you ever live in that apartment house on Stradomska? You can be sure that you wouldn’t want to live inside those walls today.” Paulina says nothing but I go on. “What did you think of your nephew Edward?” There is something more that I should know about this man who, a year after the war ended, lied about an ugly building and stole Stradomska Thirteen from the rest of the family. I’m wondering what I would have done in the Poland of 1946? Edward Prokocimer’s betrayal may have been the only way he could have saved himself. How to judge any action taken seventy years ago in the chaos of post-war Poland? The nation was destroyed and depleted, more than three million Poles and the same number of Jews slaughtered. When Edward Prokocimer swore to the Polish court that he was the family’s sole survivor, he could have been dazed or driven mad by whatever he experienced during the war. Though I know nothing about him or his life, no one survived without deep scars. I imagine myself standing in front of some Polish judge, not knowing if I could trust him to be fair, not knowing if he had collaborated with the Germans or joined resistance fighters in the woods. If I had lived through the war in Europe as I suppose Edward did, and stood in front of a Polish judge, I’m not at all sure if I would have bothered to think of who else was alive. “Did you call him Edek or Edzio?” I ask my grandmother. “Can you believe that he betrayed his brother Bronek and your children, my father Leon and uncle Stash?” The silence of time pulls me into its impenetrability, as nightmarish as the huge blackness that once inhabited my dreams. I think I am losing my mind as the list of impenetrables overwhelms me. “Did you even know you had a heritable disease?” She doesn’t speak. “I am blind from it,” I tell her and still not a sound.
3.
Thousands of miles from the vanished Warsaw Ghetto, I sit at my computer during another Vermont mud season, and listen to an article from the day’s New York Times, which describes the nearly finished Museum of Jewish History being constructed on the site of the former ghetto. The article distinguishes between present guilt regarding anti-Semitism in Germany and in Poland. Though German society has accepted collective guilt for the genocide of European Jews, Poles consider themselves equally victimized and do not accept their role as happy onlookers and sometimes active participants. In researching the article, the Times’s Nicholas Kulish interviewed 1,250 Warsaw high school students and asked them who, in their opinion, suffered more in the war, Jews or Poles, and nearly half answered that they suffered equally. What if they found out that a boyfriend or girlfriend was Jewish or if they discovered that there was a Jew in their family? Well over half said they would be unhappy. Ironically, the numbers were similar when Israeli high school students were asked the same question regarding Arabs.
Probably I am one of the few readers of the New York Times article who doesn’t respond to the building of the museum with a sigh of relief and hope for a better future. Building the museum, financed mainly by American Jews, seems a better idea than not building it. Because of the new structure, Poles have at least stopped denying the impact of Jews on Polish history during the thousand years of cohabitation. However, with very few Jews living in Poland, this acknowledgement no longer threatens Polish identity as it would have in the past.
At times, I do allow myself a more moderate view: poor Poland. What a tragedy to be plunked between barbaric Germany and barbaric Russia, between Hitler and Stalin, or to be neighbors of the Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, Jew killers all. After all, at the end of the eighteenth century Poland was carved up and occupied by the Russian Empire, by the Kingdom of Prussia, and by the Austrian Hapsburg Monarchy, not becoming Poland again until the end of World War I, and that for only twenty years. And during World War II, there was less Polish collaboration and the most active resistance of any of the occupied countries of Europe. Still, the so-called Home Army and the many partisans in the forests did not welcome the Jewish fighters who wanted to join them. Not only did they not want Jews to participate in the guerilla action, but these brave defenders of Poland often killed the Jews who tried to participate in ridding the country of its German occupiers. In fact, during the occupation, Poles killed more Jews than the Germans did.
The immediate post–World War II years were a period of social upheaval on a monumental scale. More than a million Poles were repatriated by the end of 1946 from the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belorussia, while another quarter million returned from the Soviet interior, more than half of them Polish Jews. The huge movement of peoples had been decided by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the conferences of Tehran in 1943 and Potsdam in 1945, with similar unforeseen consequences to the nations involved, just as the Allied decisions that followed World War I to create new borders, even new nations, led to enormous brutality and loss of life. In Tehran, Churchill proposed to move the western parts of Poland farther west into industrial German lands while ceding much of Poland’s eastern land to the Soviet Union, providing a territorial buffer against invasion to the delighted Stalin. In Potsdam, the Western powers agreed to Soviet control of Poland, a terrible unjust sellout from the Polish point of view, offering them as an unearned prize to the Communists and condemning them to another more-than-forty years of brutal occupation.
The post-war fate of that part of the world, after unimagined years of bloodthirsty behavior, combined an ugly nationalist fervor with an atmosphere of chaos and hunger for vengeance. The Ukrainians set upon the Poles, the Poles upon the Ukrainians as well as the Germans who had lived for many generations on land now given to Poland as a kind of reparation. The Polish Jews who had repatriated from areas of the Soviet Union were greeted by pent-up hostility; many were murdered as Soviet sympathizers or simply for trying to reclaim their abandoned homes.
By 1946, 500,000 Soviet troops were stationed in Poland. Some 150,000 Poles, including prominent leaders of the Polish wartime underground, were imprisoned, and all opposition parties were banned. Nevertheless, there was plenty of venom left in the Polish heart, enough to sponsor little pogroms in Krakow and elsewhere, including the big one in the town of Kielce.
4.
I saddle up my Gabriel and we slosh our way to a coffee shop in town where I sit surrounded by cheerful Vermonters. At least for now, this Polish business won’t let go. Apartness and aloneness won’t loosen their grip on me. I’m like a zombie amid talk of weather and last night’s episode of Modern Family. And here I sit, recalling a Jewish survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising saying, “The Germans, they shot you, that’s all. The Poles murdered you with axes. Poland is probably the only country in the world where practically the whole society betrayed and handed over to the Germans each hidden Jew, their fellow citizens. Thousands of Jewish children were caught this way, handed over to the Germans and sent on to the gas chambers. The entire Polish society is to be blamed, and the Polish clergy most of all.”
A book I am reading, Neighbors, by Jan Gross, describes an incident that took place in July 1941. Jews had lived in the town of Jedwabne since 1660. At the end of the nineteenth century, they made up eighty percent of the town’s population. By the start of World War II, the balance of ethnic Poles and Jews was more or less equal. After two years of German occupation, half the population of Jedwabne murdered the other half, the Jewish half, an estimated 1,600 men, women, and children.
The massacre began on the morning of July 10, 1941, when eight Gestapo members arrived and had a meeting with town authorities. When the Gestapo asked what their plans were with respect to the Jews, the Poles responded unanimously, saying that all Jews must be killed. When the Germans proposed to leave one Jewish family from each profession, local carpenter Bronislaw Sleszyliski answered, “We have enough of our own craftsmen, we have to destroy all the Jews, none should stay alive.” Mayor Karolak and the others agreed with his words.
Among the killers, mostly small farmers and seasonal workers, were two shoema
kers, a mason, a carpenter, two locksmiths, a letter carrier, and a former town hall receptionist. Some had children, some not. The youngest was twenty-seven years old, the oldest sixty-four. They armed themselves with axes and special clubs studded with nails, and chased all the Jews into the street. They selected seventy-five of the youngest and healthiest Jews, whom they ordered to pick up a huge monument of Lenin that the Russians had erected in the center of town. While carrying the monument, they were forced to sing until they brought it to the designated place. There, they were ordered to dig a hole and throw the monument in. Then they were killed and thrown into the same hole. Beards of old Jews were burned, newborn babies were killed at their mothers’ breasts, people were beaten and forced to sing and dance. In the end they proceeded to the main attraction, a barn donated for this purpose by a farmer named Sleszpiski, in front of which Jews were forced to line up in a column, four in a row, the ninety-year-old rabbi and the Kosher butcher put in front, then beaten and ordered to sing as they were herded into the barn which, with its exits secured, was doused with kerosene and lit. All the town’s Jews inside the barn were burned alive.
The deed done, the townspeople searched Jewish homes for anyone who was left behind. The sick and the children were carried to the barn and thrown onto smoldering coals. And that was that. By the time the sun set, the task was completed and everyone went back home for the evening meal.
For those who say that 1941 was a long time ago and that the butchery happened during a brutal German occupation, and claim that since the war Poland has changed, the story of Jedwabne has not yet ended. In Anna Bikont’s monumental book The Crime and the Silence, she writes that a monument to the Jews killed in 1941 was erected in Jedwabne in 2001 as a reminder of what took place there. This monument has been vandalized and covered with swastikas. People on the street still maintain that when old Jewish men, women, and children did not fight back against those Polish men who beat them with guns and clubs, those Jews deserved their fate. To be burned alive. Now, the Poles of Jedwabne maintain that if Jews seek to uncover exactly what happened in July 1941, it is another sign of their historic greed for gold, not of their desire to learn the truth. Thus the Jews are seen as ruining Poland’s reputation as a country of honorable Christian people. In fact, copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are still being distributed outside the church at Jedwabne.
How can the argument that Poland is not a special case in the world of hate, of anti-Semitism, be made in light of Polish denial to this day that Poles were not responsible for the deaths of Jedwabne’s Jews? It is not only in rural Poland where it is still dangerous to blame Poles. Reading Anna Bikont’s book, how can one not acknowledge her bravery in facing the anti-Semites while traveling throughout Poland for research purposes? In Warsaw, where she lives, her newspaper is inundated with denials. It doesn’t sound all that different from pre-war times when the most assimilated Jews, my family among them, suffered constant indignities in the streets, shops, and restaurants. The Polish nation, wrapped in its primitive Catholicism, seems unable to stop defending itself from victims or commentators regarding its history of hatred, which is cited on every page of The Crime and the Silence. It’s not easy to accept Polish failure to admit complicity; they deny their own guilt so as to preserve a false national pride, often accompanied by professions of faith in some higher morality. Even that Solidarity hero and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Lech Walesa, when asked for comment about Jan Gross’s book, Neighbors, said, “Gross was out to sow discord among Poles and Jews. He is a mediocre writer, a Jew who tries to make money.”
The cancer that is Polish anti-Semitism stems from the country’s self-image as “the martyr of Europe, the Christ among nations.” When I visited Auschwitz in 1979, the place was considered a symbol of Polish martyrdom. Celebrated in Auschwitz’s annals of victimhood, though a horror in its own right, were 74,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and 12,000 from all other nations. The million Jews gassed there were considered a peripheral, trivial matter.
5.
It isn’t much fun to be with me these days, especially for Loie who would welcome a bit of cheerfulness in the house. But where to find it? I poke around the Internet and find Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” in Polish, an act I have always cherished, then Lennie Bruce, Tom Lehrer, Jonathan Winters, old stuff, my stuff, but I need more. Mort Sahl, Shelly Berman, Woody Allen. I try reading Mark Twain. All of it helps, but I can’t shake being more attuned to the world’s disasters, its racism and classism, its pernicious violence and hatreds. I am mired in memoirs of Auschwitz, histories of slaughters, the struggles of all minorities, and I wonder if Jews are any more hated than, say, the Chinese by the Japanese or vice versa, more than Mexicans by Americans, Tutsis by Hutus, Shia by Sunni, Catholics by Protestants, one stupid belief system versus another. Because tribes were threatened by neighbors in the Pleistocene, are we forever genetically predestined to carry human hatred toward anyone not a member of our own tribe? Are we bound to forever protect, mistrust, kill?
At times, I not only hate those who lust for power—the anti-Semites, the Tea Party, and the one percent—but, being the armchair hater and freedom fighter, a paper tiger, no threat to anyone, I hate most, not all, singer-songwriters—not knowing Joni Mitchell from Joanie of Arc—all Irish music, French-Canadian music, military drum rolls, national anthems, accordions, harmonicas, Andre Bocelli—all kitsch, lukewarm on the palate, repeating themselves ad nauseam.
William Hazlitt wrote one of my favorite essays, “On the Pleasure of Hating.” “Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible.”
“You have to learn not to hate,” Loie says, always the moderate one, the normalizer who needs to pluck things out of craziness. I know intellectually that there is an obverse side to rage and depression. I know that they do not have to dominate my life, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be capable of minimizing or neutralizing the war criminals or racists, the believers in astrology and angels. I must transform “may they die” or “stand them up against the wall” into generosity and compassion. Even knowing that anger might be a dead end, probably not a contributor to longevity, I fear that without it, I would lose my identity. “You can re-story your identity,” Loie says sweetly. “Anger isn’t the most attractive identity.”
At the beginning of the eighth century, an Indian Buddhist named Shantideva wrote, “All the virtuous deeds and merit, such as giving and making offerings, that we have accumulated can be destroyed by just one moment of anger.” Hmmm, maybe. He goes on to write, “There is no evil greater than anger, and no virtue greater than patience. If I harbour painful thoughts of anger, I shall not experience mental peace, I shall find no joy or happiness, and I shall be unsettled and unable to sleep.” You betcha, Shantideva.
From Aristotle to Martha Nussbaum, philosophers have given anger a bad name, but anger has its healthy sides. It’s on a different moral scale than a wish for payback or violent retribution, though sometimes it leads to private fantasies such as mine: imagining a bit of German soil being ceded to survivors of death camps. But just as acceptance of the reality of despicable human behavior is, in my mind, far better than forgiveness, anger is a more honest and heartfelt response to injustice, intolerance, greed, or corruption than a meek turning of the other cheek.
Though art has hardly ever changed the course of history—art being largely a conversation between the artist and the viewer or listener or reader—when we look for solace from having been bruised by the world situation and we feel impotent after joining a movement, going to meetings, or calling a legislator, a committed artist will make art, an angry art that tries to spark a larger conversation, one about fear and hatred, about racism, torture, an
d greed.
In America, the righteous rage of black people regarding their continued oppression would be well served by reparations, not retribution, that would legally assure black populations a first-rate education, top of the line health care, and an end to redlining housing, with a non-racist government’s assurance that interference or negligence would be punishable by strictly enforced law. The new society, just and principled, would go a long way to right the wrongs inflicted for hundreds of years of slavery, plus many more years of racism, legal and illegal, the inhumanity of which has deprived generations of equal opportunity. This is not payback or retribution. It would punish no one, though it might hurt the feelings of racists and realtors. Serious racist criminals of any nation should be confined to institutions, either for possible rehabilitation or, if faced with irremediable criminality, locked up for as long as it takes. Truth and reconciliation commissions have been noble attempts at dealing humanely with perpetrators—a little truth not a bad idea in identifying war criminals in several American administrations as it has in South African ones—but allowing war criminals, predatory bankers, racist police, ignorant avengers, rapists, slayers of innocents to go unpunished is dangerously anti-social, deterring the construction and maintenance of a humane society.
For the most part, we torture and kill only under orders from elderly heads of state pursuing glory and power, or because of religious dogma, intent on preserving and protecting its claim to speak for the really, really true God. Functionaries and bureaucrats, as well as priests and Imams, whether German, Polish, or Russian, whether Saudi, Egyptian, or American, justify mass murders in the name of ideology, profane or sacred. It is clear to me that this phenomenon applies not only to the Hans Franks or Eichmanns of the world but to the corporate heads of insurance companies who deny coverage to the sick; to bailed-out bankers who, while amassing enormous fortunes, force people out of homes, not unlike the cautious eighteenth-century bookkeepers in Liverpool who had no trouble simply noting the profits and losses from the Atlantic slave trade in their tidy ledgers. They all kill with impunity, and whether they do so out of stupidity or thoughtlessness or for pleasure makes little difference to their victims.