by Marci Shore
At the conference the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s hero Marek Edelman had the status of God, whom Edelman distrusted.
“I feel as if I want to touch him,” a woman sitting beside me whispered.
Edelman spoke about the Bund, about the uprising, about the battle for human dignity. Irena Klepfisz, who was in her fifties, had come from New York, and Marek Edelman treated her as a child, as his child.
“He buried her father,” the same woman whispered to me.
And now I remembered the story of Michał Klepfisz, who during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had used his body as a shield so that Marek Edelman and the others in his unit could pass through the wall of gunfire and continue fighting the Germans. There were rows of bullet holes in his corpse, which Marek Edelman and his comrades, singing “The Internationale,” buried beneath the rubble of the ghetto.
“We do not even pause to consider how it happens that Michał Klepfisz jumps straight onto the German machine pistol firing from behind the chimney,” Marek Edelman wrote just after the war. “We only see the cleared path. After the Germans have been thrown out, several hours later, we find Michał’s body perforated like a sieve from two machine-pistol series.”
Before the conference I had spent a day in the little apartment on Piwna Street reading a long interview with Marek Edelman from the 1970s. By then he was a prominent cardiologist who intertwined reflections on the Ghetto Uprising with those on his attempts to save the lives of his patients.
“God is trying to blow out the candle,” Marek Edelman tried to explain, “and I’m quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of His brief inattention. To keep the flame flickering, even if only for a little while longer than He would wish. It is important: He is not terribly just. It can also be very satisfying, because whenever something does work out, it means you have, after all, fooled Him.”
A satisfying radicalism—subtle and ironic: And where was God? He was there, but on their side, Edelman teasingly suggested.
Very few survived—as the ghetto fighters had expected. “It was only a choice as to a manner of dying”—this was Marek Edelman’s refrain. Afterward, when the Germans set fire to the ghetto, Edelman led the last surviving ghetto fighters in escaping through the sewers.
“Everybody got in, I was the last one, and one of the girls asked whether she could join us in escaping to the Aryan side. And I said no. I only ask you one thing,” he said, “don’t make me explain today why I said no then.”
For two days they waited for their contacts, Polish communist partisans. Underground, inside the sewer, the water reeked of feces and methane. They were suffocating. There wasn’t enough air for all of them, and Marek Edelman made the decision to send eight of his comrades to a wider sewer. Finally their contacts among the Polish communist partisans arrived and lifted the manhole cover on Prosta Street. Suddenly there was light and air, and Marek Edelman sent one of the men to get the others. But there was no time. Their rescuers insisted they had to drive off immediately, another few seconds and they could all be caught and killed. And so the eight—plus the one sent to call them back—were lost.
The conference to commemorate the Bund’s anniversary was held in the Hotel Europejski, on Krakowskie Przedmieście. Warsaw’s oldest hotel, broader than it was tall, encompassed a whole square block close to the university. The lobby conveyed an aging grandiosity: the entrance opened to swirled marble floors, marble walls, a marble staircase with faded carpet. A blend of nineteenth-century and communist-era luxury had now become a dated opulence. The hotel was home to an elegant café and a large conference hall where time now collapsed: the Bundists and the Zionists, the Yiddishists and the Hebraists all accused one another. The battles of the 1920s and ’30s again consumed them—and us.
For the elderly Bundists had not forgotten that the new Jewish state had been ashamed of the old Jewish world. Had Yiddish not been persecuted in newly independent Israel? Had there not been laws banning Yiddish publications there? A bombing of a Tel Aviv kiosk selling Yiddish newspapers? A handful of the very last Bundists, old men in their eighties, shouted at the young Israeli professors who had come to give papers on the history of the Bund.
“You persecuted our language, you killed our culture!” an elderly man yelled.
One of the young Israeli professors stood up and answered him, “The Zionists didn’t kill the Bund, the Holocaust killed the Bund!”
After all, it was not as if, had the Bund—or the Zionists—made the right decision, history would have been different. The war was an abyss, inescapable.
Another elderly man stood up with difficulty and pointed his finger in the air. “This is a Bund conference, I want to speak Yiddish!”
“Yes, yes, speak Yiddish, speak Yiddish!” A much younger Yiddishist from New York felt passionately about this. After all, the Bund had been a Yiddishist movement; its leaders had believed in the need to speak to the Jewish working masses in their own language.
Pandemonium. And bitterness. The kind of anger that could never be made okay. And this was only the Jewish-Jewish question. No one had yet even begun to talk about the Poles.
“They forget nothing,” Tamara said, “and they forgive nothing.”
Today I spoke to her in English. I could no longer bear the tension, the dialectics of Polish and Hebrew, Hebrew and Yiddish in this room.
TAMARA INTRODUCED ME to her friend Bogna, the Last of the Diaspora Nationalists, who was teaching herself Yiddish and who hated Israel for seducing Tamara away from her. Later Bogna invited me to Shabbat dinner at her apartment on the other side of the Vistula River, where once the Red Army had waited, watching the Germans burn Warsaw to the ground. It was a small apartment with old furniture. On the table were potatoes and salad and candles. Around the table were the last of the twenty-something Polish Jews—with the exception of Tamara, who had just gone off to Oxford on a fellowship. Hostility, affection, passion. Bogna’s friend Halinka was silent; she spoke to no one apart from Bogna and then only in whispers, and only in Yiddish—the language of the Polish Jews who were no more, a language Halinka had learned at Oxford.
Bogna’s friend Dagmara wore a fiery red sweater and a Star of David dangling around her neck. Dagmara was feisty and saucy and full of anger. She hated the Israelis, who did not even want to talk to the few remaining Polish Jews they encountered on their pilgrimages to Poland. She hated as well the Israeli government, who was so dismissive toward her and her friends, who declined to acknowledge their voices.
“And what are we?” she cried. “Only the guardians of gravestones?” She wanted apologies, trials, vindications.
Their friend Romek rejected this. He was in favor of education.
“And what then?” Dagmara shouted at him. “Maybe my great-great-great grandchildren will see the results …”
Romek wore a jacket and tie and a yarmulke and looked as if he were a child dressing up as an adult. He’d come with Lea, who wore a long black shawl draped over her shoulders and a hat covering her hair, although she was not married, although she might not even have been religious. She paced in and out of the kitchen, smoking cigarettes.
Dagmara continued to shout at Romek, who rejected her insistence on both collective and inherited guilt.
“Should Bartoszewski also apologize to the Jews?” Romek shouted back at her.
Władysław Bartoszewski was now a member of the Polish parliament. During the war, as a very young man—and a Catholic—he had risked his life to save Jews. And he had saved many. Romek did not believe that the Poles were, on the whole, so hostile. He, too, would stay in Poland—unlike Lea, who had spent a year at a women’s yeshiva in Jerusalem and would perhaps make aliya.
“There is no such thing as inherited responsibility!”
Now it was Lea who was shouting at Dagmara. No one could apologize to Lea for her grandmother’s death in the Holocaust: those to whom apologies were owed were dead, and therefore no apologies were possible. In any case, the Poles were
guilty not of extermination but of apathy, which was a responsibility of a different kind. Lea demanded apologies from no one—it was just such collectivized thinking that had led to the Holocaust in the first place.
Dagmara protested: Lea’s was a philosophical argument, and Dagmara was speaking of politics.
“And who am I?” Lea shouted, trembling now. “My father and my uncle built communism. Am I also responsible for that?”
“You’re speaking personally!” Dagmara answered. She was thinking of symbolic apologies, political statements.
Yet of course here the political was always personal.
It was late when I left with Romek and Lea. We waited at the bus stop, talking quickly, Lea and Romek still agitated. Some young men arrived to wait for the bus, and Romek and Lea suddenly, nervously grew silent. On the ride across the river we did not talk at all.
CELINA WAS BEAUTIFUL, as if she had appeared from an old photograph taken in the 1940s: a young woman in a cranberry hat, thick black glasses, a flared cream coat. She felt guilty because it was Shabbat and we were violating the Sabbath by taking the bus the few miles from the synagogue to her apartment. Inside twenty-six candles stood on the table, for today was Lea’s twenty-fifth birthday. We drank tea, and Lea and Celina read their poetry. Lea wrote about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. No, she was not beautiful, Lea wrote of Eve. It was Lilith, Lilith bearing a soul created by Satan, it was she who was the beautiful one.
When Celina was sixteen she had fallen in love with an anti-Semite. In the end he had left her to marry a Christian woman: he did not want his children to be Jewish. Now Celina was married to a Jew, but it was not her husband but rather this anti-Semite who had awakened her femininity, she confessed shyly.
“You are that man whom I don’t want / You are that man, whom I desire,” she read to us.
Celina, like the others, had not been raised as a Jew. She came to Judaism later, as a young woman. For a time, she was a Buddhist, sitting, breathing, meditating, watching her thoughts flow in and out of her mind. The Buddhist master had told her that she was going through life with her hand closed and that this was wrong, for her hand should be open, open so that things could pass in and out, could come and go.
Romek read a poem he had written a few years earlier to his then unborn son. It was the first time I learned that Romek had a child—or that he had once had a wife. He looked like a child himself.
Lea begged Romek to read more of his poems, and I saw now that she was in love with him. Lea who had spent a year in a women’s yeshiva in Jerusalem, where the nineteen-year-old Orthodox girl who was her tutor did not want to teach her about women’s impurity and the mikvah because she was embarrassed. But Lea had insisted. She was not an anti-Zionist like Bogna. After all, it was because of the Holocaust that there was a Jewish state—in Lea’s mind, the Jews did win the war.
Bogna was enraged. How could Lea speak that way about the war? Yes, since the Holocaust there had been no ghetto benches at universities—because there were no Jews! Would she have been baptized had it not been for the Holocaust?
Bogna spoke of her Catholic baptism as of a rape, an unforgivable violation done to her. Lea had been baptized as well. They had all been. It was 1982, martial law, and their parents had given themselves to Solidarity, the great opposition movement, in atonement for the sins of their own godless parents. And Solidarity had given itself to the Catholic Church. It was a sign of moral freedom.
“I was a Catholic, I was religious, I believed!” Bogna cried, consumed with guilt and hatred. She would never forgive her mother.
Celina tried to comfort her.
“Was it Bogna’s fault that her mother did not bring her to the synagogue when she was a child?” Celina asked all of us. There was no synagogue. None of them had been taught how to be a Jew.
Romek and Bogna shouted viciously at each other, and the women began to cry.
“Bogna has no right …,” Romek said.
“And who are you to judge Bogna’s rights?” Lea shouted at him. Their anger was more than anger. In it was a kind of malice and pain and betrayal.
Bogna despised Israel for having stolen her few friends. When she had once visited there, she had met her cousin for the first time. Why was he there and she in Poland? If it had been Bogna’s grandmother who had been the one to make a different choice … She and her cousin said nothing to each other. They just stood and looked at each other, and then walked away, having said neither hello nor goodbye.
Soon Bogna’s lover Halinka would leave for an Orthodox women’s yeshiva in Jerusalem, Halinka who sat with us all silently, who rarely spoke, except to Bogna and then only in Yiddish. When Halinka was out of the room Bogna whispered to me that according to traditional Jewish law Halinka was not really Jewish, perhaps only on her father’s side … She was going to Jerusalem to study for an Orthodox conversion. Bogna would stay in Warsaw; she did not think that Halinka wanted her to come with her to Jerusalem.
“We live in Warsaw,” Bogna said. “The city of two uprisings during the war, and of many uprisings before that. You can never forget that here. Our grandparents were never happy—there was the war, the Holocaust. Our parents were never happy. There was communism, martial law, the memory of the Holocaust. We grew up, and we could never be happy. It was impossible, obscene, to be happy. Anything that gave pleasure was bad. Celina once wrote a poem …”
Romek interrupted her. He did not want to talk about the poetry they had written as teenagers.
Bogna cried out, “I let you talk! Why must you interrupt me if I feel I need to say two more sentences, to explain myself?”
“Read the poem,” Lea encouraged her.
But Bogna could not now, she was too angry at Romek. We all waited until she grew calmer, until she began to read Celina’s poem. It was a poem about swimming, about coming back to the water after having been away for a long time, about feeling her body in the water, “the pleasure between my legs.”
“This poem helped me,” Bogna said. “For years I remembered it and it helped me. When we were growing up, it was as if everyone were in mourning.”
They spoke endlessly at an unsustainable pitch. All the angst of the past converged with that of the present until there was no distinction.
I WAS SITTING in Hebrew school, in the basement of a synagogue in Pennsylvania. It was 1982, the era of Ronald Reagan, of the cold war and the Evil Empire, of demonstrations by American Jews in support of the refuseniks, Soviet Jews who were not permitted to leave the Soviet Union. The teacher was showing us a film about an Israeli kibbutz. The sunniness of communal life. Everyone equal, everything shared. A wonderful world.
And suddenly the question came into my ten-year-old mind; I raised my hand.
“Isn’t that just like in Russia?’ I asked.
I knew so little about Russia then—and so little about communism. I knew, though, that under communism there was no personal property, that everything was shared. And I remembered the teacher’s anger, and my humiliation.
“They have nothing at all to do with each other!”
The teacher’s voice was very sharp.
Now it was 1997. Tamara had given me a list of the postwar Zionist newspapers, and during the day I sat in the library of the Jewish Historical Institute, reading them. And now I saw that, on the contrary, they had everything in the world to do with each other.
More and more it began to seem obvious: socialism and Zionism had grown up side by side in the Russian Empire. The Zionist propaganda posters from the 1930s were nearly indistinguishable from the Stalinist collectivization posters. Theirs was the same aesthetic: socialist realism.
Tamara, I realized, must know this. She had read the same material I had. When I found her in the reading room at the Jewish Historical Institute, I asked her, “What were relations really like between communists and Zionists after the war?”
“Warm,” she said, looking down at the table. She did not want to talk about it.
Michał Mirski expressed the opinion that in Adolf Berman’s left-wing Zionist party something was “not in order.” Mirski added: “This is—as Comrade J. Berman has called it—a conspiracy of silence.”
Comrade J. Berman. J. was for Jakub—Adolf’s older brother who was not a Zionist at all. At the moment Mirski was speaking, Jakub Berman was one of a triumvirate of Stalinist leaders in postwar Poland, in charge of the notorious security apparatus during the bloodiest years. Today his name was anathema in Poland.
A few months later the communist members of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland gathered for a separate meeting.
“I have been criticized as if I had declared that Zionism were progressive,” Szymon Zachariasz said there. “I once claimed that Zionism was a reactionary theory.… The anti-imperialist Zionist wing is currently progressive, but tomorrow it could become unprogressive. Only we are consistently progressive. We were, we are, and we always will be progressive.”
Zionism was now a bourgeois nationalist-cosmopolitan ideology, and Adolf Berman was no longer a good Marxist.
In the Party archives I found Szymon Zachariasz’s notes. Sometimes he wrote in Polish, sometimes in an illegible Yiddish. There were doodles as well: phallic mushroom rockets, a man with a long nose in a tall pointed cap, a faceless head in a similar cap. Rockets and lanterns in a drawing that could be turned a full 360 degrees, any angle was equally probable, it was unclear where was the bottom and where was the top.