The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  If I really wanted to understand the war, I began to realize, I should be in Warsaw. For Czechoslovakia, the trauma of the betrayal at Munich was very real. Yet what had happened in Poland was a trauma much deeper.

  Yisrael Gutman spoke to me about the Jewish resistance, the radical youth who rose up not only against the Nazi murderers but also against the existing Jewish authorities. In the ghetto—he was clear about this—the Jewish policemen had been a tool of German power, and the Jewish resistance had had no choice but to liquidate them. The Judenrat was similar—in the beginning the Jewish council’s intentions had been good: the council members, like the Jewish policemen, had wanted to do what they could for their people. But power corrupted them, they came to believe in their superiority, and in the end this absence of solidarity demoralized the entire community. It was a community that, in any case, was decomposing with each passing moment: in the ghetto people grew more and more absorbed in their personal misery, and the social structures that held human relationships in place disintegrated. The underground emerged as a symbolic demonstration, a miniature society invoking past values.

  Yet to most Jews in the ghetto, the demonstration by this handful of young radicals was incomprehensible. There was a complete disconnection, Professor Gutman insisted, between the Jewish underground and the surrounding Jewish society.

  I saw how, all these years later, his heart remained with the Jewish resistance, the radical youth who were not understood.

  And the uprising? I asked him.

  The uprising was “something like a revolution”—but not a revolution to bring about a better future. Everyone understood this was the end.

  And Israel?

  Israel was the ghetto’s foil, the Jewish future contrasted with the absence of any future. Zionist ideology had long ensured that our sympathy was more for the young radicals who rose up against the Nazis than for the majority who boarded the trains to Treblinka. Today, Yisrael Gutman believed, even Israelis were beginning to face the truth: that the entirety of the Jewish resistance represented only the smallest fragment of the Jewish population. The vast majority chose not to fight. Israelis had long preferred not to think about those in that majority, not to identify with them.

  AFTER I RETURNED to California in January 1997, an unexpected postcard came from a ski resort in Vermont. Jarmila—now Todd James—was there, hoping, he wrote to me, to qualify for the U.S. Ski Team. No longer was he a Catholic: after Jarmila had become Todd James, Todd James had become an Orthodox Jew. He did not explain why.

  Galina, my fellow teacher in Domažlice, wrote too. Some months earlier the headmistress of a gymnasium in Plzeň—a small city closer to Prague—had offered her a job, and she and Mara had set off from Domažlice to begin life anew. Mara had been reluctant to move yet again, but Galina had insisted. In Plzeň Galina had embraced her new life but soon felt disillusioned.

  Every time I meet new people I’m ready to open my heart to everybody, trust everyone, ready to love anyone. In the end: I usually cry, I’m upset, disappointed, misunderstood, punished by isolation, coldness if not worse.… Trustworthy, reliable recipe is to escape (here it is, finally, my favourite word!).

  It was true: escape was her favorite English word.

  With my widowed landlady, Paní Prokopová, I corresponded about the war. She had been fourteen years old in March of 1939, when the weather was gray, the spring would not come, and German soldiers occupied her small town. Everyone was afraid. The whole town was dimmed, quite literally: in the evenings the windows were darkened. There were rationing coupons and food shortages; in order not to go hungry people had to buy flour and butter on the black market. Trade happened by night. Paní Prokopová no longer remembered if anything had played at the cinema, but she doubted that anything had: life had simply come to a halt. Radio reports came from London and Moscow, but people were afraid to listen to them. The Germans were the rulers, although some Czechs cooperated with them, not many—but still, there they were, the others called them collaborators. They informed on their neighbors, denounced other Czechs to the Germans. Many of those other Czechs went to prison: the Czech patriotic Sokolové and the communists and the organizers of domestic resistance. It was enough for the Germans to catch one of them—they could extract by force the names of the others.

  “It was worst for the Jews,” Paní Prokopová continued.

  In our town there was one doctor, a fabric merchant, and several who dealt in clothing and leather gloves. They had to wear a star until in the end all of them were deported and ended their lives in the gas chambers. We were sorry for them, we’d lived with them, but no one helped them. I don’t recall that any of them returned.

  SOON AFTER I received Paní Prokopová’s letter, Jan Gross came to give a lecture at Stanford. Jan was a Polish historian who, like my Polish teacher Pani Hanka, had emigrated after the “anti-Zionist” campaign of 1968. His first book was set in German-occupied Poland during World War II. There he told the heroic story of the Polish wartime underground that created not only a partisan army but also a parallel society, which preserved values in a time of terror. His second book was set in Soviet-occupied Poland during World War II. There he told the story of the hell wrought upon eastern Poland: of hundreds of thousands deported to Soviet labor camps; of Poles shot and buried alive in pits; of noses, ears, and genitals cut off and eyes gouged out.

  Now Jan wanted to talk about Polish Jews. He spoke about the rapid collapse of civility under the impact of war, about the plague of denunciations. He spoke, too, about how the Holocaust was not confined to gas chambers: in the east, executions of Jews took place in public, in the presence of their Polish neighbors—who by and large said nothing.

  IN TORONTO THAT February of 1997 I went to see my former professor Stefan M. I was soon to leave for Warsaw, and he had offered to give me letters of introduction.

  I sat down in his office. We talked about Poles—and about Poles and Jews.

  “I feel like I’m sending this delicate young person into a nest of snakes,” he said.

  That struck me as improbably dramatic, if only given the demographics of present-day Poland. “But there can’t be very many Jews left in Poland today—how bad could relations between Poles and Jews really be?”

  “Imagine,” he answered me, “that you have a little brother, and imagine that this little brother dies in some kind of horrible … ‘accident.’ For which you feel—partially responsible. Now, can you imagine how at subsequent family gatherings such an event could spoil the family atmosphere?”

  The Locomotive of History

  In March of 1997 Warsaw was cold and gray. It felt like what it was: a city that had been burnt to ashes and rebuilt in Stalinist architecture. I had come to stay for nearly a year: I wanted to understand the war, that abyss out of which Stalinism arose in Eastern Europe. I loved the bleakness.

  On the streets sat men and women, mostly older, some with horrific deformations, boils, missing legs and arms; a man in a suit jacket with only a head, arms, and a torso, wheeling himself on a scooter down Krakowskie Przedmieście, Warsaw’s most elegant shopping street; a man outside the Palace of Culture with half of his face grotesquely deformed, a form of an eye hanging where a nose should have been. Gypsy mothers and their children and refugees from the Balkan wars begged for money. The children chased after me. In the early evening when the stores closed, the streets quickly emptied of all but gangsters and drunks, staggering and falling. The gangsters wore gold chains under their Adidas track suits.

  On certain days packs of young men wearing peacock-like headdresses prowled the streets. They were gangs of fans—often violent, each attached to its own soccer team. A taxi driver advised me not to leave my apartment on the days of soccer matches: barroom fights easily spread onto the streets.

  “Poland for the Poles,” someone had written in spray paint on a building near my apartment. A Star of David was hanging on spray-painted gallows. On other gallows hung the names of soc
cer teams. Polish graffiti: a discourse of gallows.

  At the Miodowa bus stop on Krakowskie Przedmieście I read the black writing on the red wall. “Adolf Hitler was right about the Jews. He murdered them. No mercy for the enemies of Polishness.” Nearby there was more graffiti: “Jews to the gas chambers.”

  But there were no more Jews here. Only the elderly could have remembered the time when there was a Jewish quarter of Warsaw, and graffiti was the expressive medium of youth.

  All during the day I heard the tapping of horses’ hooves on the cobblestones beneath my window. The scent of urine and horses and vodka. On Good Friday I looked out the window onto the narrow cobblestone street and watched hundreds of people singing in Latin, carrying enormous wooden crosses, holding fire on sticks. Walking, chanting, kneeling, rising.

  In the Old Town, on Piwna Street, I rented a one-room apartment from a middle-aged couple, who before Solidarity’s 1989 victory had used the studio as an underground art gallery. Now capitalism had arrived, and the former site of democratic opposition had become a real estate investment: they rented the studio to foreigners. With the additional income they had bought a car—and for the first time in his life my landlord had begun to drive. In the beginning he had been fearful, but the thrill quickly overshadowed the fear. He became passionate about driving and infatuated with speed.

  My landlord was a painter who liked to talk about philosophy. Once he sat by the window in the studio and told me of a conversation he’d had with his students at the art academy—a conversation about numbers, and about numbering, about the many ways in which we were all numbered: our apartment number, our passport number, our bank account number. Then someone brought up the numbers tattooed onto the arms of inmates at Auschwitz.

  “And suddenly,” my landlord said, “the joking came to an end. Some of those victims were undoubtedly, by chance, bad people, thieves or criminals. It doesn’t matter, we forgive them everything, we forgive them because it was such an inhuman situation.”

  He paused, then said, “It’s easy for me to talk—how can I know how I would have behaved in such circumstances?”

  I, too, had no confidence that I would have behaved well. On the contrary—I suspected I would have been a coward.

  IN POSTCOMMUNIST POLAND, as in the Czech Republic, a criminal underworld had come into being. There was a new trend: teenage hooligans and Mafia-style gangsters, not infrequently wearing Adidas track suits, murdered one another with newly imported baseball bats. Around the city billboards began to appear with pictures of baseball bats and a rhyming slogan: “Służy do grania, nie do zabijania” (This is for playing, not for killing). As if the misuse of the baseball bats were, perhaps, only a misunderstanding.

  To the Polish graduate student Mikołaj, Warsaw’s violence seemed almost natural. He had moved to the capital from a smaller town in 1988 to begin studying at university, and he remembered the Warsaw of those last days of communism as “dangerous, impoverished … but with some charm.”

  “That time was really exciting,” Mikołaj wrote to me from Budapest, “demonstrations, happenings and cheap bistros with vodka served with a heavily oiled herring.”

  I wrote to him about the graffiti and the billboards.

  “Envy, insanity, racism and hooliganism,” he answered me, “… the pillars of the Polish reality.”

  In March 1989 he had been knifed in Warsaw, Mikołaj told me.

  Who had knifed him?

  “It’s hard to identify the f——rs who knifed me 8 years ago,” he answered.

  “I guess they thought of themselves as cool skinheads though after some years I think they were simply some asswipes trying to get my precious GDR-made reporter’s tape recorder. I had my short moment of triumph before the 2nd of them knifed me (which I discovered a few minutes after, bleeding like a slaughtered pig). I smashed the prodigious balls of the 1st assailant. Hey, old good Rumanian military boots.

  Now Mikołaj was spending weekends in Zagreb, where his girlfriend lived.

  “Croatia,” he wrote, “reminds me of Poland in the late ’20s and early ’30s. Freshly achieved independence, strong man’s rule and the overwhelming battle spirit. Let’s hope they won’t pay the same price as we did. Memento mori and death to our friends!”

  IN APRIL I took the train from Warsaw to Bratislava, where I visited Zora Bútorová, the sociologist who had once come to Stanford. Three years earlier, she and Martin had returned to Slovakia after a year in the United States. Their homecoming had not been a happy one. She and Martin had arrived full of impressions and new ideas from their yearlong stay at Princeton—but no one wanted to hear any of that. Their friends and colleagues were resentful that Martin and Zora had abandoned them for the West. Leaving was a betrayal—even if one returned—and they learned to say nothing about the United States, and nothing about their time there.

  About Slovak politics, Zora despaired. Vladimír Mečiar, in and out of power, often ruled as a quasi-dictator. People were easily manipulated, accepting of absurdities: a recent survey had revealed that a majority of Slovaks looked favorably upon the clerico-fascist wartime state—and that a majority of Slovaks looked favorably, too, upon the Slovak National Uprising of August 1944—which was against that very same collaborationist state. It was a wholly uncritical affirmation of Slovak identity: any show of Slovak power was good. Zora feared that the next generation would be raised with a similar understanding. Under Mečiar schoolchildren were memorizing nationalist slogans.

  Now, in the spring of 1997, Zora told me that Slovakia’s new history textbooks described the transports carrying Slovak Jews to the gas chambers as if they were trains to a summer camp. She didn’t want her son Ivan learning from those textbooks.

  I thought of my friend Miloš, so amiable and warm, so undeniably a part of all this.

  WHEN I RETURNED from Bratislava to Warsaw, I walked out of the train station to face the monumental Palace of Culture, Stalin’s postwar gift to the Poles, built with the labor of prisoners. Stalinism rising from Warsaw’s ashes. “The whole nation builds its capital,” announced the communist slogan carved into the stone building at a prominent downtown intersection. Today prostitutes with brightly dyed hair and tall spiked heels walked the corridors of the Hotel Warszawa. The dark dining room in the hotel where I felt as if I were still among the balding apparatchiks now served as an ersatz brothel. Blikle, an old literary salon before the war, was now overdone and artificial, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Krochmalna Street in the heart of Jewish Warsaw, a street so full of color in his novels, remained so only in my imagination.

  In her 1934 guidebook for English-speaking tourists, Grace Humphrey wrote of the maze of streets connected by short, crooked alleyways that was the Jewish quarter. “Shabby and smelly and sordid this section of Warsaw is,” she wrote, “yet full of character and interest.”

  Sidewalks and doorways are crowded with people crying their wares, trading and bargaining, doing their business in the streets—this for five days a week. But go on a Friday evening or on Saturday, and what a difference! Dignified men and women in their Saturday best, moving along slowly, carrying striped prayer shawls and well-worn books, talking quietly.…

  A circle and you swing into Marszalkowska, past the railroad station, then west and north via Karmelicka, Dzielna, Gęsia, Franciszkańska. The crowds on the sidewalks and the signs in Yiddish will tell you that you’re in the heart of the Ghetto—the Jewish district of Warsaw. The men in long black coats, high boots, very small black caps with tiny vizors, with corkscrew curls hanging in front of their ears; the women in brown wigs; everybody talking at once, bargaining, gesticulating, doing all their business on the street; the numerous little shops, plastered over with advertisements, price marks, and pictures of their wares—that is the Ghetto.

  This was when “the ghetto” was simply a Jewish district of the city, when no one could have imagined that it would one day soon be indelibly associated with trains to Treblinka. Now, in 1997, no l
onger were there men in long black coats and high boots with corkscrew curls. And no longer were there signs in Yiddish. Instead the site that was once a ghetto was marked by the communist-sympathizing sculptor Natan Rapaport’s enormous granite monument, his homage to the ghetto fighters—and by a wall of names at Umschlagplatz, the place from where trains had departed for Treblinka fifty-five years earlier.

  The war was complicated in Poland: Jews were not the only victims, and Germans were not the only enemies. In August 1939 Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the west. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Both occupations were merciless. In the beginning, Polish citizens in each occupation zone tried to escape to the other, convinced that the other could not possibly be as brutal as the first.

  Now, a few blocks away from Umschlagplatz on Muranowska Street stood a bronze cast monument: enormous railway tracks, a wooden cart overflowing with staggering crosses, a small Jewish tombstone among them. Names of towns were carved into the tracks. These were places where Poles deported to the Soviet Union, to Stalin’s labor camps, had met their deaths. A monument to those “murdered in the East.”

  IN THE EVENINGS I took walks through what had once been the ghetto, through a neighborhood called Muranów, which was now full of communist-era apartment blocks, wholly unexceptional. On the way home to my apartment on Piwna Street, I vomited into the bushes. I felt numbness and nausea, and I did not even want to escape it. On the contrary: I was looking for a way to enter the war.