by Marci Shore
At the Jewish Historical Institute I continued to read the files of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. It was now 1949, and Michał Mirski was especially vicious toward Adolf Berman and his Zionist comrades—for their “lack of vigilance,” for their failure to combat “right-wing deviation,” for their nationalist inclinations.
That April Szymon Zachariasz told Adolf Berman that he had very much wanted to help him be a Marxist but that Adolf Berman was digressing from Marxism. The communist members of the Committee, Zachariasz explained, were now forced to depose him from the chairmanship of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland.
Adolf Berman stepped down without a word. The communist Grzegorz Smolar took his place.
An era drew to a close: the communists and the Zionists, a brief love affair brought to an end with Stalin’s “anticosmopolitan” campaign. Now Adolf Berman decided to leave Poland. In January 1950, on the eve of his departure to the new state of Israel, he wrote a farewell letter to his communist comrades: “A common battle for peace, progress and Socialism, for the freedom and independence of nations, against imperialism, reaction, and reformism, united us and will continue to unite us unto eternity.”
Once Adolf Berman was deposed, the legacy of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising belonged exclusively to the communists. Now they told the story of the uprising in their own way: it was communist partisans who had brought the idea of battle to the Jews. The Jewish resistance movement became a movement for Poland’s liberation. When the Central Committee of Jews in Poland’s new chairman, Grzegorz Smolar, spoke on the anniversary of the uprising, he alluded to the possibility that purges of Jewish nationalists would follow: “And when we find among ourselves people who, like annoying flies, make noise about some higher and more essential allegedly Jewish national goals, we will eliminate those people from our society, just as the fighters in the ghetto cast away from themselves those who were fainthearted and cowardly.”
The allusion was an ominous one: the first people the resistance fighters in the ghetto had killed were not Germans but Jews—Jewish collaborators.
A Jewish communist historian who had spent the war in the Soviet Union, who had not been in the Warsaw Ghetto at all, returned from Moscow after the war to become the director of the Jewish Historical Institute. When he wrote the official history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it no longer had anything to do with Zionists or Bundists, it no longer had anything to do with Jews at all. Instead it had everything to do with Polish communism.
This was the time when Adolf Berman’s older brother Jakub was the member of the Politburo responsible for cultural policy.
SZYMON ZACHARIASZ DIED in 1970. In 1997 his daughter was still living in Warsaw. Pani Ryszarda had been born shortly after the war; recently she’d been among the founders of the confidential hotline for Poles struggling with their Jewish identity. She greeted me with tea and raspberry cheesecake; we sat at her table and she talked to me about her father. While he had never spoken to her about his life before the war, there were some things she knew from her mother: that her father had come from a poor Orthodox family with some dozen children; that at least one brother had remained a religious Jew, while another had become an anarchist. In 1917, when her father was still a teenager, he joined the same Marxist Zionist party as Adolf Berman did. The following year, though, Szymon Zachariasz changed his mind: in 1918 he became a communist. He remained deeply attached to Jewishness, but he came to believe that the Jews’ fate would be improved only when all men could live as brothers.
Pani Ryszarda’s mother was educated. Her father was not—or rather, he never finished school. When he was a child his parents sent him to a traditional religious school—until one day the teacher caught him reading a Yiddish translation of Robinson Crusoe under his desk and expelled him from the kheyder, leaving the thirteen-year-old to be sent to work in a factory. Szymon Zachariasz’s real education came only later—during his time in prison. The period between the two world wars lasted two decades; half of that time Szymon Zachariasz spent in a Polish prison, together with other communists, studying Marx and Engels and Lenin.
When he was thinking about something he would pace diagonally between the window and the door. He said he had learned that in prison. This was typical, Pani Ryszarda told me; many of his friends had the same habit.
“Rigid,” Pani Ryszarda described him. Firm in his beliefs, and in his behavior.
The only guests in their home were Jewish communists. Her parents taught her to address everyone as “comrade.” The first grown-up word she learned was revolution.
“How was he as a father?” I asked her.
“As a father he was … he wasn’t. He didn’t engage with me. He was there, I knew that he was there, that he loved me, that he gave me a certain stability. Of course I knew that he loved me, but it was as if nothing followed from that, because all the time he sat and read. He went into the bathroom with a book, he went on a walk with a book. When I would go on a walk with him, he would read the paper. I would hold his hand, looking around.”
Szymon Zachariasz was a man who cared only about politics.
“He didn’t have anything to talk to me about,” she added.
Pani Ryszarda was still living out the clash between the world presented to her in childhood and the world as she later came to understand it.
“In the Stalinist period—that is, until 1956, until the time when I was ten years old, the world was very homogeneous in my eyes. The whole world that I knew, it was these comrades, and they were almost all Jews. I knew that somewhere out there, there was a different world, but that different world was not good, or at least it was foolish for not subscribing to communism. And so it was natural, everything was homogeneous—communism, Jewishness, Polishness.”
Pani Ryszarda encouraged me to eat more cheesecake.
She was thinking of the Stalinist years, the years of her childhood. These were the years of the brightest colors—and the brightest conviction: that they were right. They were ushering in a new and happier and more just world for all. About the trials of the Polish Home Army soldiers who’d heroically fought the Nazis, the torture in prisons, the executions, she’d known nothing—during her childhood there was no terror, it didn’t exist, it didn’t penetrate.
“At that time,” she said, “we were the avant-garde of the world. Such a Jewish feeling …”
Perhaps, she added, it was simply that everyone remembered her childhood as colorful and harmonious. But I knew this was not the case: I didn’t remember my childhood that way.
It was only later in her life, when she was no longer a child and had made Polish friends, that she heard about the 1940 Soviet massacre of more than twenty thousand Polish citizens near the forest of Katyń. And even then she did not believe it, she thought it must be anticommunist propaganda.
Her parents had felt themselves to be Jews. But they had also felt themselves to be Poles. Even her father—a native Yiddish speaker who never learned Polish well, who until the end of his life spoke with a heavy accent and made grammatical mistakes—was very attached to Poland.
“The only thing was,” Pani Ryszarda added, “he didn’t know Poland at all.”
The year 1968 was the caesura. But even then, during the “anti-Zionist” campaign, her parents did not leave the Party. Her father was enormously pained—but unable to accept that he had given his entire life for nothing. That he had wasted it. Or worse.
This was what Pani Ryszarda believed her father had felt and thought—by nature, though, he was a closed person. He didn’t speak to her about what had happened in 1968, when the Party embraced anti-Semitism and purged itself of Jewish communists, purged the army of Jewish officers and the universities of Jewish professors, when some thirteen thousand “Poles of Jewish origin”—including my Polish teacher Pani Hanka and the historian Jan Gross—left Poland.
After the “anti-Zionist” campaign of March 1968, Ryszarda’s father did, though, go to Israel for the first time.
Szymon Zachariasz, who had attacked Zionism so harshly in the Stalinist years, found himself warmly received in the Jewish state: so many of his old comrades were there. He marched with them in the May Day parade. Yet in the end he returned to Poland, where he lived for only another two years.
I had the impression, I told her, that many of the Jews who remained in Poland today were—or had been—communists.
“Of course, the majority,” Ryszarda said. “Of course, because anyone who wasn’t a communist would have left.
“The reality was such,” she added, “that there were very many Jews in the Communist Party both before and after the war.”
In the Stalinist years, it was a pleasant thing to be the daughter of someone so respected. Since then it had not been so easy. Time and time again she was asked the same question: “Are you the daughter of that Zachariasz?”
“And I have to answer: Yes, I am.”
Ryszarda lived alone, in what had once been her parents’ apartment in Warsaw. She was here, in this room where we now sat, when Stalin died. She was in kindergarten and she heard it over the radio, she saw her father grab his head with his hands.
“Thousands of years of Jewish history,” she told me, looking at the place where the radio had once rested, “led to this …”
LEA TOLD ME that she woke up every morning in Warsaw and asked herself: “Should I be in Poland—in the diaspora—or should I be in Israel?”
“And when you were in Jerusalem?” I asked her.
“And when I was in Jerusalem I woke up every morning and asked myself the same question.”
Her real home, she felt, was on the flight between Warsaw and Tel Aviv, when she was suspended in the air between Poland and Israel.
Lea’s father was a communist who had survived the war in Soviet Russia. Later—like Milan Kundera and Arnošt Lustig and Karel Kosík—he became a revisionist Marxist. Like her father, Lea too believed in socialism—if it were to be an authentic socialism.
Lea’s father, who was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw, had not wanted his daughter to be Jewish. When he’d died in 1979, Lea had been seven years old. We were sitting in the loft in the café by the synagogue. Today we spoke in English and pretended not to understand the drunken conversations among the Mafia men and prostitutes taking place in Polish alongside us.
When she was a child Lea would hear her father singing quietly to himself in Hebrew, but when she asked him to sing these songs aloud, when she told him she wanted to learn them too, he would sing only “The Internationale,” and only in Russian. Everything had been a mystery to her then, including the small Torah, which her father had told her was “stories for adults.” She converted to Judaism only after his death, when she was a teenager. She felt that she must be Jewish, that she was already Jewish, that her father’s burial in the Jewish cemetery had marked her for life.
I WENT TO see a young professor of literature. I asked him about the Jewish Historical Institute.
“Between us,” he began. All important conversations were “between us” in Warsaw. The institute’s history was bleak; its leading figures had compromised themselves under Stalinism. Now, of course, there were new people—still, they were bound to the past, laboring under its burden. I would find no openness there, he warned me.
In Toronto Stefan M. had given me a letter of introduction to his colleague at the Jewish Historical Institute, a historian named Paweł. When I went to see him it was not yet evening, but inside his apartment it was dark; we sat at a wooden table in a kitchen with no lights. On one of the shelves in the kitchen sat a small menorah—although he celebrated nothing, he told me.
Paweł stood up and began to pace around the kitchen. About everything he was passionately negative. A world with no meaning.
I asked him about the communists and the Zionists, and about the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.
He told me that it was only the communists who bestowed the word uprising upon the Jews who fought in the ghetto. In Polish uprising was a sacred word, a word the Poles would never have shared with Jews. Even under communism, the head of state never attended the commemoration.
At the Jewish Historical Institute I bought a copy of Paweł’s most recent book: an annotated collection of articles from Poland’s wartime underground press. The material was striking: in the spring of 1943 it was clear that it was the Left—the communists, but also the socialists—which was unequivocal in its support for the Jewish resistance fighters. At its center, the Polish underground was restrained. The Polish government in exile in London was supportive, yet cautioning: the revolt against the Germans could not be allowed to spread beyond the ghetto walls, the time was not yet right for the Poles—the Home Army was still lacking in weapons, the Germans were still too strong. The nationalist Far Right was still more ambivalent, its compliments prefaced with anti-Semitic qualifications:
We are not, and never have been, philo-Semites. The Jewish question in Poland was a sore point in our domestic politics. There existed a good number of reasons for the distaste of the broad Polish masses toward the psychically and culturally alien Jewish element. This question had to be resolved and undoubtedly would have been settled in the new independent Poland in consideration of the interests of the Polish nation. Yet today, at the moment when the remaining Jews are fighting for their lives, we declare that the whole of Polish opinion, regardless of personal sympathy or antipathy, feels deeply the tragedy of this battle.
Very few of those who fought in the ghetto survived. One of the survivors was the Bundist Marek Edelman. Two others were his friends, a young couple, left-wing Zionists named Yitzhak Zuckerman and Tzivia Lubetkin. After the war they went to Palestine and founded a kibbutz dedicated to the ghetto uprising. Yitzhak Zuckerman, an extraordinary hero in Warsaw, did very little else for the rest of his life. Eventually he agreed to speak his memoirs into a tape recorder—under the condition that they be transcribed only after his death.
Now Yitzhak Zuckerman was no longer alive and his memoirs had been published. I found them at the National Library and read of the Polish Home Army’s cold response in April 1943, its failure to provide more weapons, to offer more support:
Even if I don’t attribute that to clear antisemitic intentions, even if I don’t accuse them of this Nazi sin, of wanting to annihilate us—it’s clear that as a battling bloc, we were like thorns in their flesh, they didn’t need us. They wanted peace in Poland, in Warsaw, to amass forces, until they found the right moment. History paid them back.
But Yitzhak Zuckerman felt no schadenfreude. On the contrary: he went on to fight in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 himself. As did his wife. As did Marek Edelman.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out on 19 April 1943—as the Germans began the final liquidation of the ghetto. By then Yitzhak Zuckerman was no longer in the ghetto: his comrades had sent him to the “Aryan Side,” where he was in contact with Polish communist partisans, coordinating possible military support.
The young poet Miron Białoszewski was also in Warsaw then. Later he recalled that “famous, beautiful, late Easter eve of 1943. The Aryans—we were still called that—were in the churches, dressed up for the holiday, but over there, in that hell, we knew, there was no hope. There were those who helped. There were well-wishers. There were even some who were indifferent. The height of the conflagration was on Easter eve itself. There was fire in the sky.”
Inside the ghetto the young Zionist Mordechai Anielewicz led his small, poorly armed unit in battle against the Germans. On 23 April he wrote a final letter to Yitzhak Zuckerman:
I can’t describe to you the conditions in which the Jews are living. Only a few individuals will hold out. All the rest will be killed sooner or later. The die is cast. In all the bunkers where our comrades are hiding, you can’t light a candle at night for lack of oxygen.… Be well, my friend. Perhaps we shall meet again. The main thing is the dream of my life has come true. I’ve lived to see a Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its gre
atness and glory.
Adolf Berman translated the letter into Polish.
In September 1942 Adolf Berman and his wife, Basia, had escaped from the ghetto to the city’s “Aryan Side.” Inside the ghetto, Adolf already had contacts with Polish communist partisans. Now outside, he assumed the name Adam Borowski and became a founding member of a group named Żegota, the Council for Aid to the Jews. It was a small, conspiratorial group, supported by the Polish government in exile. Among the founders was a twenty-year-old Catholic named Władysław Bartoszewski who had recently returned to Warsaw after having been imprisoned in Auschwitz. Adolf Berman knew him by the pseudonym Ludwik. The two men became friends; it was with Żegota’s aid that Adolf and Basia Berman survived in hiding.
On 16 May 1943 Jürgen Stroop reported that “the former Jewish quarter in Warsaw no longer exists.”
After the war, the Zionist Adolf Berman’s brother Jakub was the member of the Polish communist Politburo in charge of overseeing the security apparatus. These were the years of a lingering civil war between communists and former Home Army partisans loyal to the London government. The communist-sympathizing writer Jerzy Andrzejewski wrote his greatest novel about this moment: the novel’s protagonist, a young, handsome Home Army soldier, has been ordered to execute a communist. In 1958 the director Andrzej Wajda made Ashes and Diamonds into one of his greatest films. It was set during an era when thousands of Home Army officers were imprisoned. Among those who sat in prison during Jakub Berman’s reign was Władysław Bartoszewski.
Just before Jakub Berman’s death, a Solidarity journalist asked Jakub Berman why his brother, who had survived the war with Władysław Bartoszewski’s help, did not speak up when his friend was imprisoned. There was time: Bartoszewski spent nearly seven years in prison.