by Marci Shore
I wrote to David, “Zionism is an ideology of modernity and can never be an antidote to it.”
IT WAS THE first day of August 1997, and time was suspended as the city remembered that just over half a century before, after five long years of unbearable waiting, the Polish Home Army’s general had said yes, now, and so began the Warsaw Uprising—the Polish uprising. An ecstatic, desperate sacrifice. A sacred martyrdom. Sixty-three days later what had been Warsaw would be ruins.
The Polish Home Army, the anti-Nazi resistance subordinate to the Polish government in exile in London, had waited as long as it could—Stalin’s Red Army was camped just on the other side of the Vistula River, and waiting any longer would mean losing the chance to liberate their own capital. When I came to Warsaw and saw the Vistula River for the first time, its narrowness startled me: the Red Army had been right there.
In London, Polish prime minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk and Polish ambassador Edward Raczyński pleaded with the British for support. I had read the correspondence in the archives. Winston Churchill was firm. “An accommodation should be reached between the Polish Government in London and the Soviet Government,” he told Mikołajczyk and Raczyński during a meeting on Downing Street. That was on 31 May 1944.
But the Polish prime minister and the Polish ambassador knew better: the Soviet Union had already invaded and occupied Poland once during this war at its very beginning. Moreover, during that spring and summer of 1944 Polish leaders in London had been receiving reports from Polish Home Army divisions in the east. They knew that when Polish partisan soldiers encountered the Red Army they were treated as enemies, not allies. They knew that, east of Warsaw, Soviet soldiers heading westward had disarmed Polish soldiers, arrested them, at times murdered them.
The Polish prime minister appealed to Churchill and Roosevelt to intervene with the Soviets. By the end of July, Stanisław Mikołajczyk could wait no longer.
On 28 July 1944, Polish ambassador Raczyński heard from the British permanent undersecretary for foreign affairs: “I am afraid that, quite apart from the difficulties of co-ordinating such action with the Soviet Government, whose forces are operating against the Germans in Polish territory, operational considerations alone preclude us from meeting the three requests you made for assisting the rising in Warsaw.”
On 1 August Warsaw rose up.
“We were all talking,” the Polish poet Miron Białoszewski wrote in his memoirs, “suddenly we heard shouting. Then, it seems, heavier weapons. We could hear cannons. And all sorts of guns. Finally a shout, ‘Hurrahh …’
“ ‘The uprising,’ we told each other at once, like everyone else in Warsaw. Astounding. Because no one had ever used that word before in his life. Only in history, in books.”
In the days that followed, the Red Army sat in Praga, on the other side of the Vistula River, and watched. On 4 August, the Polish Home Army command appealed to London: “Request categorically immediately assistance.”
The English-language report from Warsaw read:
The Germans are setting the City on fire constantly. Numerous fires are raging, all attempts by the civilian population to extinguish them are opposed by the enemy. There are more cases of murdering civilian population. German bombers are very active and operate with no interference from the Soviet Air Force.… Incessant appeals addressed to the Allies since the first day of the Battle for dropping ammunication has given no result as yet.
In London, Polish prime minister Mikołajczyk begged Roosevelt and Churchill for help. In response Roosevelt and Churchill insisted that Stalin would come to Poland’s aid, that the Poles should cooperate with the Soviets. It was the Soviets who were so close to Warsaw—just across that narrow river—surely they would come to help. After all, they were all allies in this war against Hitler.
But the Red Army did not cross the river, and the Soviets did not come to help. Days later, Prime Minister Mikołajczyk’s emissary, in awkward English, made another appeal to the Western Allies:
I am proud to state that nobody, not even in the least, has collaborated with the Germans. We were first to fight the Germans and fight them on end, though we are lonely. The present tragic battle of Warsaw is the best evidence. I say it with great sorrow because I am aware of the fact how great hopes our country put on America and England and what sufferings it must cause to our people to know that the Allies have not recognized the Polish Underground Army as a combatant and that they did not protest against the German mass murders on the civilian population.
Polish literature had a great romantic tradition, and uprising in Polish was the most romantic of words. Yet the poet Miron Białoszewski—like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commander Marek Edelman—was not a romantic, not even about uprisings.
That a short period of time appeared long is no cause for wonder. Every day people would say, “It’s already the twelfth day of the uprising.…” “It’s the thirteenth day of the uprising already.…”
It seemed as if we already had entire years of this behind us, and what was there ahead of us? As if there never had been, nor would there ever be anything else—only the uprising.… People kept track of time incessantly.
People lost each other as suddenly as they found each other. They’d be close for quite some time. Then others became close. Suddenly these were lost and new people became important. That was common.
On 14 August, Polish ambassador Edward Raczyński received another letter from the British government:
In general, while His Majesty’s Government are, of course, anxious to give every assistance in their power to Polish forces fighting against the common enemy, they cannot overcome the serious geographical and other operational difficulties which unfortunately hamper the provision of such assistance. They are, therefore, reinforced in the view which they have consistently held and frequently represented to the Polish Government, as also to the Soviet Government, that it is most desirable in the general interests of the allied war effort to promote practical means of cooperation between the Polish and Soviet forces.
“After that, I just ran on,” Miron Białoszewski wrote, “a long time. Through streets. But they didn’t. They were afraid. Because they weren’t used to it. To shells and bullets. It really was a matter of becoming used to them.”
During the uprising, in the working class-neighborhood of Wola, Germans had murdered tens of thousands of Polish civilians and burned their bodies in pyres. Now, in 1997, in a Wola amphitheater, the elderly came to remember this. A military band marched back and forth across the grass, and a veteran took the microphone, believing himself to be a hero. But the host cut him off: the former resistance fighter had been talking for too long.
“For Poland, the most important thing about Warsaw was that it was burning,” wrote Miron Białoszewski.
On 10 September 1944 Polish prime minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk wrote to Roosevelt and Churchill:
Mr. President, The Reports which the Polish Government receive from Warsaw show that the situation is desperate and that the fight against the overwhelming German power may cease at any moment, unless sustained from outside.… I therefore beseech you, Mr. President, and you, Mr. Prime Minister, to take a bold and immediate decision which could save Warsaw and its inhabitants from total destruction.
Franklin Roosevelt did not take a bold and immediate decision. Nor did Winston Churchill. On 2 October, the Polish Home Army commander signed the capitulation. Like the legendary Polish uprisings of centuries past, this Polish uprising, too, ended in failure. After the Polish Home Army surrendered, the Germans went from neighborhood to neighborhood, from block to block, burning down those buildings that still stood.
In January, after the survivors had been sent away to German prisoner-of-war camps, the Red Army walked from the other bank of the Vistula River and took the empty city. When the war finally ended, there were those who proposed to leave Warsaw as it was, a monument of ruins and ashes.
“Everyone is gray,” Miron Białoszewski
wrote, “From the ruins. Covered with smoke.”
Then communists came and rebuilt the little streets in the Old Town to look as if they were old. In Warsaw’s downtown, Stalin came and built great tall buildings on top of the ashes. Half a century later the city remained the color of ashes, and I loved the grayness. It was bleak and beautiful.
A YOUNG WOMAN my own age escaped Poland for a new life in Israel, only to find herself at a Jerusalem market that just minutes later would explode. It was her first experience of the terrorist attacks that colored everyone’s life in Jerusalem. The man who sold her bananas the day before was no longer alive, her husband, who came from Minsk and was now Israeli, told me. In his eyes there was the vaguest trace of sparkle, as if such were the arbitrary malice of fate, which must, in its own way, be respected. A youth spent in the Soviet Union had left its mark.
The young woman’s husband led groups of Russian Jews on tours of Jewish sites in Poland. Those on this trip were young—teenagers, men and women in their early twenties. They cared nothing for Judaism and very little for Jewishness. Poland was the West to them—they wanted to go shopping in the capital.
Their guide was disgusted.
He took the group to Treblinka. Seth and I came with him. When we arrived we were nowhere. We walked through the forest until we came to a clearing. Treblinka was unlike Auschwitz. It was only a cemetery in the woods, a symbolic graveyard and fields of green earth surrounded by dense trees. Vastness. Once upon a time Treblinka had been a forest.
It was impossible to see the gas chambers. They were gone. The Germans had dismantled them before the Soviets had arrived. The crematoria, too, were gone.
Afterward Seth and I took the train to Lublin, southeast of Warsaw, then a city bus to Majdanek. It was quite close to Lublin’s center.
I looked up into the sky, into the colossal monument that now stood in place of a gate leading into Majdanek. Poised, precarious, dizzying. It was everything Natan Rapaport’s monument to the ghetto fighters was not: by 1969, when the Majdanek monument was unveiled, socialist realism was over; this was all abstraction.
There was a plaque thanking God for salvation.
Obscene, I thought.
I walked underneath the monument, down the hill, into the abyss that was Majdanek. The death camp was now a kind of public park; children were riding their bicycles through Majdanek. There were few cars and wide open spaces. At the bottom of the hill two boys were playing with a graceful wooden airplane.
There was a mausoleum—a disc and inside, a mound of ashes. For Seth this was Poland: an enormous mound of ashes, ashes and anti-Semites. Like the young people on the Marches of the Living, Seth, too, saw coming to Poland as a pilgrimage—and like them, he resented the Poles for living as if their country were not what it was: a Jewish graveyard.
It was a long walk along a dirt path encroached upon by weeds to the crematorium. The barracks were wooden, but the crematorium had cement walls and a long chimney reaching toward the sky.
Outside the crematorium a young woman in a short, tight dress, her blond hair teased and set with hairspray, was flirting with the guard.
I walked on, into the crematorium. Inside there were signs: corpses were baked at 700 degrees Celsius. I looked inside the ovens. A capacity of a thousand corpses daily. I reached through the metal grating to touch the shoes. I smelled my hands, inhaled the dust on my fingers.
I moved backward from the crematorium to the gas chamber, Hannah Arendt’s “factories to produce corpses.” The ceiling was very low, and I could see the rat-size opening for the gas. The walls of the gas chambers were made of cement. Inside it was dark and cool and quiet. Enclosed.
I looked through the small window built into the cement: this was how the guards had watched the gassing.
Vertigo. Outside blackbirds were descending. Hundreds of blackbirds.
IN KRAKOW I saw the historian Jan Gross again. We took a walk through the city and he made a suggestion: at the Jewish Historical Institute archives there was a little-known collection, papers of the postwar Central Committee of Jews in Poland. He had looked at some of the material; it was very interesting.
Later in Warsaw, at the Jewish Historical Institute, the archivist gave me the files. I started from the beginning: the Central Committee of Jews in Poland had come together shortly after the Warsaw Uprising, in November 1944, with the goal of presiding over the remnants of Polish Jewry. It was an ecumenical committee, including Jewish communists, Zionists across the political spectrum from the center to the radical Left, and Bundists who were Yiddishists and diaspora nationalists and who sought a Jewish socialism here in Poland, alongside their Polish neighbors. The committee members represented a handful of activists, many who had fought in the resistance, including devoted communists who had survived the war in the Soviet Union: Grzegorz Smolar, Michał Mirski, Szymon Zachariasz.
Among the committee’s tasks was organizing commemorations of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Even as they struggled to find resources to rebuild a devastated community in a city of ruins, the committee, under the labor Zionist Adolf Berman’s leadership, undertook an international fund-raising campaign for the purpose of constructing a monument to the ghetto fighters.
There were only a dozen or so active members of the committee’s presidium, and from the transcripts of the meetings their personalities emerged. The communist Szymon Zachariasz was harsh and dogmatic. The Marxist Zionist Adolf Berman was energetic, in fact inexhaustible, and idealistic. He cherished visions of solidarity, and believed that the worst was over and that the new world was about to be born. Striking about those meetings was something else: the warm relations between communists and Zionists. Communists were supporting the creation of a Jewish state. Left-wing Zionists were speaking of a Soviet Palestine. Having passed through hell, they, the avant-garde of the world, were all about to live happily ever after.
This was my first glimpse into how the Jewish question was hopelessly entangled in the communist question. The closeness between communists and the many Zionists who embraced socialism of some kind was only one part, I began to see, of a desperately complicated story about the involvement of Jews in communism. In April 1948, on the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the sculptor Natan Rapaport’s enormous granite monument was dedicated in a grandiose unveiling ceremony. Here was the posthumous glory of the ghetto fighters, portrayed as epic heroes. There was a touch of classicism, a likeness to Zeus. The men carved in granite exuded valor and virility. Natan Rapaport’s monumental creation represented Jewish socialist realism rising from the ghetto’s ashes, dedicated atop a field of ruins. The ruins had been too heavy to shovel away, so before the ceremony began workers had poured cement over them.
In the few years following the end of the war, communists came more and more to dominate the story of the ghetto uprising—and the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. The usurping of the narrative—the emphasizing of the role of the communists, the downplaying of the role of Bundists and Zionists—was subtle. After all, the Zionists and the communists shared an aesthetic, and a manner of speaking.
I wanted to know: Could relations between communists and Zionists really have been this close? I asked a Polish graduate student writing about the postwar Zionist movement in Poland.
Her name was Tamara, and the first time we met we sat in a café on Nowy Świat, near the gates to the university, and Tamara cried. She cried because her grandfather had not crossed the border into Czechoslovakia after the war, because he had not crossed the border to Czechoslovakia from where he could have gone on illegally to Palestine—as had so many others, whose children and grandchildren, unlike Tamara, were now Israelis.
Tamara was consumed with self-pity because her own family had not left for Israel after the war. And so she was born in Poland, where she did not feel like a Pole. She could not escape from this moment of her grandfather’s refusal to cross the border, this moment of decision, the moment when her life might have been a dif
ferent one. She could not forgive her grandfather for having misunderstood History, for having made the wrong choice—and so, having thrown Tamara from the current of History.
THAT FALL GAZETA WYBORCZA—a very successful daily newspaper, many of whose editors and journalists had once been opposition activists—published an article about university students who earned extra money through unusual part-time jobs. One of these students belonged to the collective “Ten Religious Jews.” The members rented themselves to other Jews who needed extra men to make up the ten-man minyan required by Jewish law for certain occasions—for instance, when a family wanted to have a proper Jewish funeral. The charge was several hundred złoty per hired religious Jew—about $200.
I told Seth that this was prostitution, that the Jewish community had made a mockery of itself. He was furious and would not—could not—speak to me. He hated the Poles for printing this, for laughing once again at the Jews. I told him that the editor of the paper was Adam Michnik—a Jew by birth himself.
Seth was disgusted with me.
“You think it’s a joke?” he asked. “This is what happens when you decimate a community.”
When Tamara arrived she told us that yes, it was true—but Gazeta Wyborcza never should have published it. The collective “Ten Religious Jews” represented a certain demoralization that was unavoidable in today’s Poland.
At night Seth cried in his sleep that I did not love him, that I would never love him because he was a Jew and a Zionist and I was a rootless cosmopolitan—and a self-hating Jew.
THE POLES WERE fascinated by cemeteries. On 1 November, the Day of the Dead, all were drawn to the graveyards where the stones glowed in the candlelight. It was something extraordinarily beautiful: the city coming into its own, baring its soul.
Now it was late in November, and the conference commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the mass Jewish workers’ party called the Bund began in the morning with a tour of the grave sites of Bundists. So Polish. And so Jewish.