The Taste of Ashes
Page 20
Adolf had spoken to him about it only many years later, Jakub Berman answered.
This year, in 1997, Władysław Bartoszewski was elected to the Polish parliament.
TAMARA HAD GONE to Jerusalem because she no longer wanted to be different, and because one could no longer be a Jew in Poland. In Jerusalem, Tamara thought, she had found herself. Really she had lost herself, though, lost herself in her dissertation, lost herself in her own narrative of determinism. She hated her grandfather for not crossing the border into Czechoslovakia, for not emigrating to Palestine. She was obsessed: here was the fatal error, the moment before her own birth when she was thrown off the train of History and became lost, exiled, an aberration.
Now she was determined to leave Poland. Her life was a szpagat, she lived in a split. In Israel her friends could not understand why, each time she was in Jerusalem, she used her return ticket to Warsaw.
At a café with Tamara and Seth, I asked Tamara again about relations between the communists and the Zionists after the war. I knew that in my question there was something almost cruel: she did not want to talk about it. And I did not want to let it go. She looked down into her cup of coffee. Now she turned to Seth and they spoke in Hebrew, as if I were not there, and I supposed that for them I was not.
I went to see Kostek Gebert, the editor of Midrasz, the new Polish-Jewish magazine that publicized the confidential hotline for those struggling with their Jewish identity. It was not a joke: the magazine, Kostek explained, was aimed at Jews who were still in the closet.
I’d subscribed to Midrasz. Each issue arrived in my mailbox in an undistinctive brown envelope with no return address.
“Tamara feels as if she’s been thrown off the train of History and must, at all costs, get back on,” I said to Kostek.
“I’m not on a first-name basis with History myself.” He said this with a smile.
We spoke about fascism, communism, Zionism.
“And Israel exists,” I said to him.
“Yes, it exists.”
“Every time I go there I’m surprised that the country exists at all.”
“Me, too. Only I am also surprised that Poland exists at all.”
We spoke about the war. Kostek told me that for the Polish Right the war was a war between nations. For the Left it was a war between ideologies. If I were a Jew in Poland in September 1939, wouldn’t I, too, greet the arrival of the Red Army with cheers? The Poles could never forgive them.
Or did he say, “The Poles could never forgive us”?
Kostek told me about his friend Staszek Krajewski, also a Jew and a former Solidarity activist, and the son of Stalinists. Staszek believed that the Jews should make a collective apology for communism.
I was fascinated. But Kostek, who was also the son of Stalinists, did not agree.
“Fascinating? No, it’s stupid. I feel responsible for communism as a person on the Left, but not as a Jew.”
I asked him about Adolf Berman, who had watched Władysław Bartoszewski imprisoned under his brother’s rule and apparently said nothing to his brother.
“Perhaps he was silent as a gesture of goodwill,” Kostek said with irony. “After all, he might have spoken out against Bartoszewski.… There were Jewish communists who did speak out against Poles who had saved their lives but who had now become the political enemy. They must have thought of it as a gesture of selflessness, self-sacrifice, political faith—to turn against those to whom you were closest and most indebted in the interest of the greater political good.”
I would never understand, Kostek insisted, how betrayal was not really considered betrayal at a moment when lives were expendable. To not betray, to be silent—as Adolf Berman presumably had been—indicated some special decency, but to betray was simply a mandate of History.
Kostek remembered Jakub Berman: he had put Kostek’s communist father in prison when Kostek was a child. Afterward Jakub Berman would visit their apartment, bringing Christmas cards and candy for the children.
“My father did sit in prison for a while, but then he was released …”
Overall, Kostek’s childhood—like Pani Ryszarda’s and like those of other children of prominent communists—had been a privileged one.
Kostek suggested I call Marek Edelman, who through all these years had remained in Poland. After the war he’d become a cardiologist in Łódź. The choice bore a certain logic: After all he had been through, how could any stakes lower than life and death have any meaning? For years Marek Edelman was quiet and inconspicuous. Then in the 1980s he reemerged, engaged again in the political world, this time on the side of Solidarity.
“He loved the comradely brotherhood. At that time, Solidarity wasn’t a trade union, it was a new utopia,” Kostek said. “Edelman drinks a lot. He still loves chasing skirts. He might be willing to talk with a young woman, if you catch him in the right mood.”
I TOOK THE train to Łódź to visit Marek Edelman. He spoke like my Yiddish-speaking grandfathers had: sarcastic, crude, devoid of sentimentality. Yet underneath there was a kindness and a warmth.
“And you suggested that God was there, but on their side?”
“It was a joke. Anyway, God is an invented thing.”
For Marek Edelman, the legacy of the Holocaust was nihilism. Before the war, “to destroy human life—that was something.” By the time the war was over, to destroy human life—this was very little. But Edelman himself, a cynic, was not a nihilist: on the contrary, for Marek Edelman the moral imperative in the wake of the Holocaust was to resist nihilism by valuing human life—and human love.
The loss of the Jews was sad for Poland, he told me, because a single-nation state was never a good thing. This applied to both Poland and Israel alike: Zionism remained for him now, as ever, rather stupid. The history of Jews in Poland was over. There were no more Jews. It was sad for Poland. There was nothing to discuss.
I thought about Kostek, the son of communists who now wore a yarmulke and observed the Sabbath, the Solidarity journalist who now edited Midrasz. What about the Jewish revival, the new Jewish community in Warsaw?
“But how many? Twenty people. That’s a performance, a kind of folklore, entertainment.”
I asked him about the Central Committee for Jews in Poland, about the relations among Zionists, Bundists, and Jewish communists, about their convictions that they were the avant-garde of the world.
“I can say that, too. I’m the avant-garde, too, everyone can say that. Hitler said it, too.… It’s nothing so great. It’s insolence. Or arrogance. It’s not a nice thing if someone considers himself the avant-garde of the world.”
I wanted to talk about Adolf Berman. Marek Edelman must have known him.
“Adolf Berman, he was an idiot.”
“Did you know him?”
“I knew an idiot.”
“And what did Adolf Berman do that was stupid?”
“Everything he did was stupid. First of all he was dishonest.”
Żegota, the Council for Aid to the Jews, was the initiative of the Polish government in exile in London. Adolf Berman was simultaneously an active participant in the Soviet-dominated, Polish communist protogovernment formed while Poland was still under German occupation. By this time the Nazis were nearly defeated, and the Polish Home Army loyal to the London government and the Polish communist partisans were on the verge of a civil war.
I didn’t believe Adolf Berman was dishonest, only perhaps quixotic.
Marek Edelman put it another way: “You can’t dance at two weddings with one tukhes.”
The hero of the most hopeless of all the hopeless Polish uprisings, Marek Edelman had nothing of a romantic in him.
“A person is a very poor creation,” he told me, “he only has three hundred billion of those brain cells.”
THE YEAR 1897, which saw the founding of the Bund in Vilnius—then Vilna—in the Russian Empire, also saw the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. At a 1997 conference in Warsaw marking
the hundredth anniversary of Zionism, a Polish historian named Dariusz told the story of Ignacy Schwarzbart, the last Zionist of the interwar Polish Republic, loyal to the Polish government in exile until the end. A hero who lost all battles. Only two Jews had sat in the Polish government in exile in London: the Zionist Ignacy Schwarzbart and the Bundist Szmuel Zygielbojm. They hated each other and did not speak. Theirs was the animosity still—absurdly—felt at the conference marking the hundredth anniversary of the Bund.
At the conference Władysław Bartoszewski spoke with great animation, while Tamara, who so wished her own grandfather had been a Zionist, paced nervously outside the conference room, circling the table of coffee and greasy Polish doughnuts.
“After the war,” she said, when it was her turn to present her paper, “the Jews left because they had no one, because they felt alone.”
Afterward I asked Władysław Bartoszewski if he would be willing to talk about Adolf Berman. He said yes with no hesitation.
When I arrived at his office a few weeks later, Władysław Bartoszewski, now a member of the Polish parliament, greeted me with a yellowed folder of Adolf Berman’s letters. Bartoszewski, despite his age, was intensely energetic. He spoke quickly and emphatically; about both the war and the Stalinist years, he spoke with no defensiveness. He was, I realized, one of the very few people who feared nothing, who had nothing to hide. The moral clarity he must have had as a young man—as a teenage boy who had joined the Polish Home Army, who had survived Auschwitz only to jump again into the resistance—was still there, like a calming presence in the room.
He showed me postcards from Israel and Switzerland, from Australia and Argentina. Adolf Berman had signed them “Adam Borowski,” or sometimes only “A.”
“If someone travels around the world and for years continues to think about that other person and send him postcards,” Bartoszewski said to me, “that means that there’s no opportunism or obligation; it means that he feels in some way connected to this person.”
During the war “Ludwik” suspected that “Adam Borowski” was working with the communists as well as with Żegota, the Council for Aid to the Jews. It bothered him, but he said nothing. He had tried to justify it to himself: the Jews were in such a desperate situation, they were looking for contacts absolutely everywhere possible.
Only after the war did “Ludwik” and “Adam Borowski” learn each other’s real names. “Adam Borowski’s”—that is, Adolf Berman’s—wife, Basia, was pregnant then, and Władysław Bartoszewski was very happy—it was a sign that life went on. Adolf offered him a job in the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, any position he liked, but Bartoszewski politely declined. He did not want to tell Adolf Berman that he was still connected to the former Home Army, taking orders from London.
In 1945 Bartoszewski was arrested. He was not detained for very long, yet the following year he was arrested again—and this time released only some eighteen months later. On both occasions a friend alluded to Adolf Berman’s intervention on his behalf. Bartoszewski never spoke to Adolf Berman about it. Then in 1949 he was arrested for the third time. This time he sat in prison for five years. A Polish Catholic, he was accused of, among other things, collaboration with the Zionists. These were the years when Jakub Berman was overseeing the security apparatus.
By the time Władysław Bartoszewski was freed, in 1954, Stalin was dead, and Stalinism was coming to an end. The young resistance fighter became a historian and set to work collecting accounts of Poles who had saved Jews during the war. He resumed his friendship with Adolf Berman. Bartoszewski traveled to Israel to do research; Adolf Berman helped him there.
Władysław Bartoszewski was at once manic and calm. His voice was full of warmth, even nostalgia. Even after the war, all the way until Adolf Berman’s death, Bartoszewski told me, he and Adolf Berman always called each other by their wartime pseudonyms. I wanted to know the answer to the same question I had asked Heda Margolius, whose friends in Prague had declined to shelter her after she’d escaped from the death march: Was he not resentful?
Bartoszewski seemed not to understand: Why would Adolf have had an obligation to free him from prison? He never would have expected any such thing. Neither would he ever have turned to Jakub Berman for anything—he regarded Jakub as a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of people: his friends and acquaintances, as well as strangers, decent people.
“I didn’t know Jakub Berman and I never met him,” he told me. “But he knew about me, their whole family knew about me. Well, and I continued to sit in prison, although I must say—and I don’t know whether there’s a causal connection—I wasn’t among those treated the worst. I was subjected to all kinds of severities, I experienced all kinds of unpleasantness, I was beaten—but I wasn’t tortured. And it’s one thing to punch someone in the face or to kick him, and another thing to break his arms or rip off his nails. There’s a difference. So I wasn’t tortured. And further: all the investigating officers who interrogated me were Poles, not Jews. They never let a Jewish officer around me.”
Yet in fact Władysław Bartoszewski did meet Jakub Berman. Once. Much later. In the 1960s and 1970s Adolf Berman would make trips back to Poland. He always got in touch with Bartoszewski, and they always saw each other. During one of these visits, Bartoszewski saw Adolf with his brother Jakub at the theater, and Bartoszewski meant to walk by silently; after all, they were family and he had no place there. But no, Adolf called him over: “Panie Ludwiku! Allow me to introduce you to my brother.”
And Władysław Bartoszewski was in some way moved. He told me the story so that I would understand how close they were, how genuine the friendship was, that he would be included on a rare family evening.
IN DECEMBER I went to the edge of the city to see Stefan M.’s colleague, a historian of the Polish underground who spoke dismissively about the uprising in the ghetto. Uprising remained for him a sacred word. What had happened in the ghetto, he told me, was no uprising, it was self-defense. He was resentful: during all those decades after the war, all those decades of communism, the true Warsaw Uprising, the Polish uprising, was falsified and neglected. It was only in 1964, twenty years after Warsaw had been burned to the ground, that the communist government issued the first commemorative postage stamp of the real Warsaw Uprising—and this was after three had already appeared to commemorate the much lesser event in the Warsaw Ghetto. No one spoke of the Polish underground; his schoolteacher reacted with indignation to the suggestion that there might have been anyone in Poland resisting the Germans apart from the communists. The harshest trials in the Stalinist years were those against the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising—the uprising whose existence was de facto denied, when it was not explicitly condemned.
“A famous communist principle,” he said, “as long as something is not spoken of, it does not exist.”
Before I left, his wife came into the library, and the historian’s tone softened. I asked him a question then: The current director of the Jewish Historical Institute, who under communism had been the director of the Party archives, did he know anything about Jewish history? Or was he simply a bureaucrat? An apparatchik?
“Married to Jakub Berman’s daughter,” he told me, “between us.”
“Did she change her name?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“And what is she like?”
“A very nice person.”
“She didn’t choose her father,” his wife said sympathetically.
AT THE JEWISH Historical Institute, I finished reading the files of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. I was about to leave the archive, when I had another thought: the inventory listed a collection of one of the Committee’s leading communist members, Michał Mirski. I asked to see Michał Mirski’s correspondence.
The archivist returned with the file. I sat down by the window and began to read. The first letter was dated 10 July 1956, from Tel Aviv.
Dear Comrade Mirski!
Twenty years ago, in
1936, we met for the first time. As you remember, this was during the time when together we created the Progressive Cultural Front. In my consciousness it’s as if it happened in a former life, before the bloody deluge. Yet it happened and it had its own meaning. Do you remember our visits together to Wanda Wasilewska, to Wiktor Alter.… I send you warm greetings on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Cultural Front.
It was signed by Adolf Berman.
Now for the first time I cried for the Zionists. For the Zionists and for the Marxists, for the believers. Tamara hated me, had grown to hate me, for my unbelief, but she did not understand that I hated myself as well—for the same reason.
READING ADOLF BERMAN’S letters to Michał Mirski, I realized something else: that these postwar relationships I was trying to understand were not really postwar relationships. That it had all begun long before the war.
Adolf and Jakub Berman were not the only children in the Berman family. In the beginning there were five siblings. A brother and a sister were murdered in Treblinka. Adolf Berman died in Tel Aviv in 1978. Jakub Berman died in Warsaw six years later. Only the youngest sister was still living.
Pani Irena was elderly and frail. She was also a lifelong communist who remained distinctly bourgeois. Certain things she wanted to impress upon me: she, her brothers, and her sister were from a good family. They spoke pure Polish, the very best, without a Yiddish accent. They always took care of their parents. Every year on Passover, her brothers all came to the seder, even though they did not believe in God. And even Jakub, active in the Communist Party at the time, even he was married under a chuppah, because it was important to their mother. And they loved their mother very much. Their Yiddish-speaking Jewish mother who had done so much for her children: her sons went to the very best Polish schools in Warsaw.