The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  I was not the only one. Hundreds of Jewish teenagers, from the United States, from Israel, from dozens of other countries, were coming to Poland. They came to Poland wearing Stars of David. They came on tours of the death camps, to mourn the dead in the country they regarded as a cemetery. The tours were called Marches of the Living, and they concluded in Israel: the new world, the new hope, the land of the New Jew. The Jewish teenagers did not want to talk to Polish journalists—they did not want to talk to Poles at all.

  They didn’t come to Poland for dialogue, one boy told a Polish reporter. They came to say kaddish for their dead.

  A Polish girl who lived today in the town the Germans called Auschwitz and the Poles called Oświęcim said to the visitors who were her own age, “My grandmother remembered that when the wind blew, they could smell the stench of burning Jews.”

  The visitors were angry. They wanted to know: “Why didn’t you say—the stench of burning people?”

  Yet they themselves had come as Jews.

  When Poles tried to talk to them, these young Jews wanted to know how they could live there—in a land that was a cemetery. They wanted to know why the Poles had not saved the Jews. They believed it was not by chance that the Germans had chosen Poland as the site of the death camps. They didn’t know about the heroic Polish underground. They didn’t know that Poles had also died in Auschwitz. They didn’t want to know.

  The young Jews who came to Poland and wanted to see nothing more than the remains of crematoria did not offend only the Poles. They also offended the few remaining Polish Jews.

  A Jewish university student in Warsaw joined a March of the Living and traveled to Israel with the group for the journey’s conclusion. The final evening the students spent on an Israeli army base. They were all young, they held hands and danced.

  In Poland we were reviving a memory, here we were to feel like Jews. In Poland we’d suffered, here we rejoiced, tasting the flavor of Israel. And suddenly everything revealed itself to be an illusion. When representatives of forty-three countries, participants in the March, were called to the stage so that they could each say a few words in front of the microphone, Polish Jews were passed over. It was the greatest humiliation of my life.

  The student was part of a nascent Jewish community, supported by the New York–based Lauder Foundation. The foundation sponsored, too, a new Polish-Jewish magazine called Midrasz.

  “Do you have Jewish roots?” I read there.

  Is it a problem for you? Or a secret? Or perhaps a passion, a pride, a hope? Perhaps you feel shame because of your Jewish origin? Perhaps you’re afraid? Does it happen that you conceal it? Perhaps you don’t know what to say to your wife or husband? Or to your friends from school, your boyfriend or your girlfriend? And what should you tell your children?… Perhaps something about this is painful for you, perhaps you feel alienated? Perhaps you think that anti-Semites have something of a point?

  You did not have to face these problems alone, the advertisement promised. For those struggling with their Jewish identity, a confidential hotline was now accepting phone calls.

  “We promise discretion,” the advertisement concluded.

  IN POLAND THERE had been too little working through of the Jewish question; in Czechoslovakia there had been too little working through of the Stalinist question. In 1952, three of the fourteen defendants in the Rudolf Slánský trial were sentenced to life imprisonment. Eleven of the fourteen were sentenced to death. All went to the gallows with the same last words: “Long live the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia!” Rudolf Margolius was the exception: he went to his death in silence.

  Now, in 1997, I took the overnight train from Warsaw to Prague. I was going there, on behalf of the journal my former Czech teacher Vlasta edited, to interview Heda Margolius—the widow of Rudolf Margolius.

  Heda had left Prague after the 1968 Soviet invasion. The next quarter century she had spent in the United States, working at Harvard. Now, in her old age, she had returned to Prague, and I visited her in a light-filled apartment not far from Wenceslas Square. Rudolf Margolius’s widow was animated and articulate. Just before he went to his death, in the prison during their last meeting, Rudolf Margolius had told his ill and despairing wife that she looked beautiful. Nearly half a century later Heda Margolius still radiated traces of her younger beauty.

  I’d just arrived from Warsaw, and as I asked her questions I mixed up the Slavic languages, the Czech words and the Polish words becoming entangled in one another. I began to apologize, but Heda stopped me: it wasn’t a problem at all, mixing up Czech and Polish. When she was in Auschwitz—she said reassuringly—she used to talk to the Polish girls in Czech, and they spoke to her in Polish, and everyone always understood one another.

  She spoke of these girls warmly, almost with nostalgia, as if she were speaking of her girlfriends from childhood: the Polish girls she met in Auschwitz.

  Heda survived Auschwitz. Late in the war, she escaped from a death march and made her way back to Prague—where her old friends would not take her in. It was not that they didn’t care whether she lived or died. It was only that they were afraid: during the German occupation, sheltering a Jew could bring the death penalty.

  I wanted to know: How could she not hate them?

  But it was true: she did not hate them. She bore no resentment. Rather she was full of a philosophical equanimity: she had a right to try to save her own life, she explained, but not to ask others to risk their lives to save hers.

  LATER, STILL IN Prague, I talked to Vlasta about my interview with Heda Margolius, and Vlasta wanted to know: Had I asked her about the earlier show trial of Milada Horáková? After all, Rudolf Margolius had been a high-ranking member of the communist government then, and his wife, too, had been a Communist Party member. Had they believed in Milada Horáková’s guilt?

  “I wanted to ask her—but I couldn’t …” I told Vlasta. After all, this was a woman who—as she was once described in a Czech novel—had been to hell twice. What right had I to judge her?

  “I understand,” Vlasta said.

  Digging around in the Institute for Contemporary History, I found a newspaper clipping of an interview with Heda Margolius during the expansive days of the Prague Spring, the days when the rehabilitations of Rudolf Margolius and those who went with him to the gallows had been belatedly made public. In the interview Heda spoke of how she and her husband had survived the Holocaust and come to join the Communist Party. It had been in the Nazi camps that she had come to so admire the communists:

  They were in fact the best people in those camps, they were the only ones who didn’t think only of themselves and of the horrors confronting them personally, but actually about what kind of world there would be when the war was over. And that gave them such strength and they were such wonderful people, they simply enraptured everyone around them. All of us … above all my husband … in ’45, it was the first thing that we did, when we came back from the camp, we applied for membership to the Party.…

  ONE DAY AFTER I’d returned to Warsaw a policeman came to see me in the studio on Piwna Street. He was looking for my landlord’s wife.

  I told the policeman where they lived; it was not far away.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  There had been a car accident: my landlord had been driving, undoubtedly too quickly, and he might have been drinking as well. He was in the hospital now, in critical condition; it was uncertain whether he would survive.

  IN WARSAW DURING the day I sat in the archives. It was July of 1951, and the Polish communists whom the war had brought to power had put on trial the German officers who had “liquidated” the Warsaw Ghetto. The final liquidation of the ghetto had come in the spring of 1943. By that time most of the ghetto’s 350,000 original inhabitants had already been gassed at Treblinka. Only some 60,000 remained.

  Now eight years had passed, and SS officers Jürgen Stroop and Franz Konrad pleaded not guilty.

  Slowly I read the t
ranscripts of the trial of Jürgen Stroop and Franz Konrad, the “liquidators of the Warsaw Ghetto.” Next to me the women working at the war crimes archive who had brought me the files drank tea and played ABBA tapes on an old cassette player.

  The trial was victor’s justice—and communist theater.

  “One must think dialectically,” one witness for the prosecution said.

  Marek Edelman, the Bundist commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, also testified. Edelman, a hero, was not a romantic; his account was devoid of pathos or grandiloquence. He talked about the burning of the ghetto.

  “I won’t describe here,” Marek Edelman told the judge, “the scenes that took place, because it’s obvious that if a house is burning, then people are burning alive.”

  The whole ghetto was in flames. Corpses were lying on the streets. Nothing was mystical to Marek Edelman—neither having led the ghetto uprising nor having watched Warsaw Jewry consumed by flames. Everything was crudely human—even when it seemed not human at all. He described how the Germans succeeded in finding the last Jews hiding in the remains of the ghetto: “With the aid of a horsewhip it’s possible to find out everything from a five-year-old child. By beating the child with the horsewhip, the Germans brought him to such a state, that, dripping with blood from head to toe, the child crawled to the stairs and showed them that they needed to remove the beam and here were the Jews.

  “The only way out was the sewers.” That was how Marek Edelman himself survived. But this was a different story.

  On 18 July 1951, the prosecutor questioned the accused Franz Konrad about his membership in the Nazi Party.

  PROSECUTOR: For how long had you been a member of the party?

  FRANZ KONRAD: Since 1932.

  PROSECUTOR: Then you, the accused, were familiar with the theory of the party, with the party’s ideology?

  FRANZ KONRAD: I was uninterested in that.

  “Dancing Queen” was playing in the background as I read the trial transcripts: Jürgen Stroop was aloof, proud of his good breeding and refined manners. He insisted he’d always conducted himself as a gentleman.

  “In my life I’ve always tried to behave chivalrously,” he said. “This is the most important asset my wife and children possess. I have tried during my life to extend to other women the chivalry with which I relate to my wife.”

  During the uprising Marek Edelman came upon what had been the hospital on Gęsia Street.

  In one bed lay a newborn suffocated with a pillow, in another lay a woman with her stomach ripped open, in a third lay a woman who had probably given birth and been killed together with her child. That’s how the gynecological ward looked. And how did the surgical ward look. There were wounded people lying there, they had their legs in plaster, all of the wounded were burned alive on the beds that were set on fire.… What I’m going to say I saw by the entrance to the ghetto on the corner of Gęsia and Zamenhof: A woman was sitting with a child in her arm, likely she’d no longer been alive for twenty-four hours, but apparently someone with a keen sense of humor had halfway undressed the woman and pushed her breast into the child’s mouth. That’s how it looked.

  “Jürgen Stroop,” testified one communist historian, “is responsible for the organized murder of the last part of Warsaw’s Jewish population.”

  “It wasn’t so important, what I did,” Jürgen Stroop told the court.

  Another witness took the stand. His Polish was awkward, un-grammatical.

  As the flames gradually spread through the house, the fire began to go out to the balcony, and a young woman was talking to General Stroop. I still remember some fragments: that he should be ashamed, that this is a nation that has such great ancestors as Goethe, and what is it that you’re perpetrating, I’m not asking here for any mercy, because I know that none will come to me from your hand, but remember, for what is happening to us, it’s you who will pay, not me. That’s all I remember, after all I was vulnerable, the police and the SS were there, and it wasn’t good for me to be listening to that. By then the fire had gone out to the balcony and begun to roast them and those people didn’t have any choice but to jump: first an old woman, an old man jumped behind her, and a mother took her child by the hand and jumped from the balcony with the cry “Long live Poland”; behind her jumped a man. It was Stroop, he was sitting down, then he stood up and advised the SS men to go finish off those who’d jumped from the balcony.

  The witness added that he had seen Franz Konrad taking pictures.

  In his closing statement SS General Jürgen Stroop elaborated: racial matters had always been incidental to him. He had been raised as a soldier, and as a soldier he had carried out his duties, duties he had believed necessary for his fatherland. He had merely obeyed orders; it was the responsibility of his superiors to examine their content. That he had found himself in Warsaw—he added—was purely by chance.

  General Stroop’s defense attorneys pointed to mitigating circumstances: The first asked the judges to consider that “Jürgen Stroop’s intellectual capacity is in fact less than paltry.” The second asked the judges to consider that “Jürgen Stroop was a wretched servant of dark capitalist powers.”

  The attorneys’ pleas for clemency were halfhearted, pro forma.

  Through the windows of the archive I could see the clouds moving. The sky was growing darker. In a few minutes it would rain again.

  The verdict was delivered on 23 July 1951. It was summer, and Jürgen Stroop and Franz Konrad were sentenced to death.

  IN LATE SPRING of 1997 I flew back to Israel. It was already summer there, and I wanted to stay by the water forever, feeling the heat and the sun. On the bus the religious Jews with their ringlet peyes, their tall black hats, and their cellular telephones, did not—would not—look at me.

  In the Old City of Jerusalem, watching the sunset, I wanted to read the notes that those who came to pray tucked inside the cracks in the Wailing Wall. A voyeuristic impulse.

  There in the Old City a pretty young woman told a man with a very long beard that her parents did not approve of him. He was gaunt, thin, unattractive. To my left another man lit a cigarette for a woman and told her that here, in this spot, there was no one else between himself and God. “In all other places there is someone else,” he said to her. I didn’t feel God this way, and I found him pretentious.

  When in the summer of 1989, as a seventeen-year-old, I’d gone to Israel, I’d studied history there with a teacher named David. Like Seth, David was an American who had become Israeli. Now, eight years later, David came to meet me at a café in Jerusalem.

  We talked about history. For David there was a single historical narrative: the narrative of anti-Semitism, proceeding inexorably and inevitably toward the Holocaust—and necessarily resolving itself in Zionism.

  “You understand nothing!” I told him. “You obscure from your students what the war really was: the cataclysmic event of modernity, the failure of the Enlightenment, that which forces us to question the meaning of modernity—has it meant civilization or has it meant terror?”

  David only smiled. Perhaps I was right, but would his students understand anything if he were to tell them that?

  “And besides—” he laughed “—what is going to make them good Zionists?”

  Yet it seemed to me that the Zionists, in appropriating the Holocaust this way, had paradoxically marginalized it.

  WARSAW AND JERUSALEM: the dialectic of the Old World and the New World was draining. Now in Warsaw all around me I saw broken pieces of gravestones, fragments, dislocated pieces of the past.

  Professor Tomaszewski, a kind, liberal-minded historian who had been born nearly a decade before the Second World War, described the postwar years as a Time of Missing People.

  “For instance,” he said to me, “there were no tailors.”

  Modernity, a Time of Missing People. Missing People and Former People, the byvshii liudi of the Stalinist years: people who not only were no longer but were considered never to have been.
The presence of absence, this was Warsaw.

  A letter arrived quickly from David, continuing our conversation at the Jerusalem café. The Zionist movement and the waves of East European Jews emigrating from Europe to Palestine were the product of anti-Semitism, David wrote.

  In other words, when they realized that the Enlightenment was a farce as far as they were concerned, and that they would never be accepted in the Christian world, they began the modern Zionist movement. Therefore, it should be no wonder that the Enlightenment reached the pinnacle of its failure with the Holocaust.

  At Warsaw University I watched Andrzej Wajda’s film Korczak, the story of the Polish-Jewish pedagogue Janusz Korczak, who became the beloved director of a Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto—and chose to go to the gas chambers with the orphans. The film was not a romantic one. By the time he led the children to Umschlagplatz, the Janusz Korczak in Wajda’s film was a broken man.

  In Wajda’s film Korczak lowered himself to collect money for his orphanage from the ghetto elite: a handful of wealthy Jews, some collaborators, others smugglers and businessmen who had managed to profit from the misery around them. A friend was appalled: did Korczak have no dignity?

  “I don’t have dignity,” Korczak answered, “I have two hundred children.”

  When it was their turn for the transport, the orphanage’s directress told the children: “Fifteen minutes. We’re going on an outing.… Put on your best clothes, take the most essential things …”

  She knew where they were going—and that even the most essential things were not essential there.

  I left the university through the main gates and thought of David, and the Zionists’ ideology of redemption. One missed the point: there was no redemption, the war was an abyss.