The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  Pani Irena had spent the war years in the Soviet Union, where she had nearly died of hunger. It was Jakub who’d helped her to survive the war. And it was only later, when the war was already coming to an end, that she met her brother Adolf in Lublin and learned what had happened in Poland: that the Nazis had murdered 3 million Polish Jews, among them most of her family.

  After the war, when Warsaw was still in ruins, Irena gave birth to a son. The baby survived for only three and a half months. Later she had two daughters—both of whom had by now emigrated to the United States, leaving their mother, in her old age, alone in Warsaw.

  It was sad for her that Adolf and Basia had left Poland for Israel. And very sad for them, for Basia did not live long in her new homeland. Soon after they arrived in Israel, she fell ill and died. They had been a couple very much in love.

  Adolf had then been left alone with their young son, Emanuel, who’d begun to teach his father Hebrew.

  “I often think,” Pani Irena said, “that in Israel Adolf didn’t achieve what he wanted to achieve. He wanted to achieve some kind of peaceful life, where no one would be killing anyone else.”

  She was sorry Adolf and Basia had gone so far away, but she also understood there were problems in Poland: that Poland was a very strange country, that there was much anti-Semitism here. Even now, it was returning.

  Among communists, though, there hadn’t been such problems.

  “If someone was a communist, he wasn’t an anti-Semite. He couldn’t be. Among communists there were a lot of Jews. That’s a different matter. There were a lot of mixed marriages. There was no problem. Even Gomułka had a Jewish wife—a hideous one, after all. She was very primitive; she came from a Hasidic family.”

  It was Władysław Gomułka, the Polish communist who had married into a Hasidic family, who had presided over the “anti-Zionist” campaign of March 1968.

  THE BUNDIST REPRESENTATIVE to the Polish government in exile in London, Szmuel Zygielbojm, was familiar to me. A few years earlier, in the Hoover Archives at Stanford, I’d found a letter he had written during the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. The uprising had begun on 19 April 1943. The letter was dated 11 May, and it was brief: “My dear friends, should you ever see Mania or one of my children please tell them that I never could forgive myself for having left them behind.”

  He enclosed a signed telegram he had written in English. Would they cable it to New York?

  The responsibility for the crime of murdering all Jewish population in Poland falls, in the first instance, on the perpetrators, but indirectly, also weighs on the whole of humanity, the people and Governments of the Allied States, which, so far, have made no effort towards a concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime. By the passive observation of this murder of defenceless millions and maltreatment of children, women and men, these countries have become accomplices of the criminals.… I cannot be silent and I cannot live while the remnants of the Jewish people in Poland, of whom I am the representative, are perishing. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto perished with weapons in their hand in their last heroic impulse. It was not my destiny to perish as they did, together with them, but I belong to them and to their mass graves. By my death I wish to express my strongest protest against the insensitivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth, especially to-day. But as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to the breaking of the indifference of those, who are able and should act in order to save now, maybe in the last moment, this handful of Polish Jews, who are still alive, from certain annihilation. My life belongs to the Jewish people in Poland, and therefore, I give it to them. I wish that this handful which remained from several millions of Polish Jews could live to see, with the Polish masses, the liberation, that it could breathe in Poland, and in a world of freedom and in the justice of socialism. For all its tortures and inhuman sufferings. And I believe that such a Poland will arise and that such a world will come.

  In December I went to what was once the ghetto to see the new monument to Szmuel Zygielbojm. A shimmering black, the vaguest outlines of bodies, all modernist abstraction. “I cannot be silent and I cannot live while the remnants of the Jewish people in Poland are perishing.” Visitors had brought flowers; their reflections glistened upon the black wall of the most contemporary of office buildings in Warsaw.

  BOGNA’S MOTHER WAS a teacher. Every year on Teachers’ Day her students would bring her flowers. And every year she would give the flowers to Bogna and tell her to take them to Umschlagplatz—in memory of the Jews who had boarded trains there to Treblinka.

  The evening of Christmas Day I spent with Bogna, at her small apartment on the other side of the Vistula River. We talked about her father, who had spent his childhood in a Siberian orphanage, where he was constantly hungry and where he was treated as “an enemy of the people.” Like so many Polish communists, his communist parents had fallen out of Stalin’s favor.

  I asked Bogna about her grandparents, her father’s parents.

  “My grandparents? They built communism. They built it before the war. And they also built it after the war.”

  Her father was a Jew by birth, her mother was not. In the 1970s he became involved in the opposition. In 1979 and 1980 he was a political prisoner; in 1982, during martial law, he was again imprisoned for over a year. Afterward her father was periodically detained, and their apartment was wired to aid the secret police in eavesdropping.

  Many of Bogna’s friends, twenty-something young Jews, had parents who had belonged to the opposition, casting their lot with Solidarity—in rebellion against, and perhaps atonement for, the choices made by their own parents, who had been among the builders of Polish communism. Pope John Paul II was Solidarity’s greatest patron; for the parents like Bogna’s who baptized their children, this Catholic ritual was an act of freedom.

  Bogna, though, remained bitterly resentful of having been baptized: had she lived in a free country, there would have been no baptism. She would have been a religious Jew, she would have had a bat mitzvah. Or so she believed. Now it was too late for a bat mitzvah, but not too late to learn Yiddish, the language she saw as preserving the essence of her identity.

  Communism Bogna described as a “frozen time.” The ideologies and emotions she had encountered as a student in the 1990s, she believed, were the same ones that had been frozen some half century earlier, “as if that time hadn’t been, as if there hadn’t been those fifty years.” The anti-Semitism of the present day she understood as prewar anti-Semitism. Like so many other ideas and attitudes, after 1989 anti-Semitism had thawed, emerging in the same form in which it had been frozen.

  Yet in some way Bogna, too, lived in the prewar years; she had recreated those years in her mind. Her way to Jewishness was through not only Yiddish but also Yiddishism: she was ideologically committed to the Yiddish language; she defined herself as a diaspora nationalist and took impassioned part in debates against the assimilationists, the Hebraists, the Zionists. In fact the greatest of her wrath she reserved not for Polish anti-Semites but for Zionists.

  Yet Bogna was close to Tamara—despite their ideological antagonism.

  “When I talk with Tamara,” I told her, “often I have the feeling that she feels as if her entire life here were a mistake. That she should be in Israel … that in a certain sense she was thrown off the current of History.”

  “I feel this entirely differently,” Bogna said. “I consider myself as having been absolutely in the center of the current of History—and this I can only regret.”

  Regret was at the heart of both Bogna’s and Tamara’s very different sentiments. Bogna did not lament that her grandparents had not crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and from there gone on to the land that became Israel. On the contrary: it would have been terrible if they had.

  When the Jewish tours of the Nazi camps called Marches of the Living began, Bog
na was a teenager, and by some conjuncture of events found herself invited along. She accepted—she thought the program was about the Holocaust; no one had told her it was a Zionist program. When, after visiting the death camps, she left with the group for Israel, she thought they were going to the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. Instead she learned that the time for talking about the Holocaust was over. The group’s time in Israel was a time for celebration, and there were songs and marches—in which Bogna refused to participate. When it was time for her to return to Poland, the young Israelis told her she was betraying her country. Bogna was offended. The truth was precisely the opposite: she was returning to her country.

  Later she met more Israelis, and more American Jews, as they passed through Warsaw on the March of the Living. She was not fond of them: they were aggressive, they hated Poland, and they couldn’t understand why Bogna and her friends remained here.

  “But that’s their problem,” she added.

  Bogna knew who she was—and this was the most important thing.

  “Well, and now I’m twenty-five, and only now am I learning to be happy,” she told me.

  We were sitting on her worn sofa, drinking tea.

  “Because when I was a child, it wasn’t a time for childhood. It was actually a war. When I was ten years old and they announced martial law, that was a war in my life. And had it not been for martial law perhaps it would have been okay for me to laugh. Things were so bad that it wasn’t okay to laugh. And all the more so for children whose parents were in prison. It’s very hard to learn how to laugh. That is, we were always laughing, but it was a terrible laughter. I was raised in a tradition in which we had to identify with the situation of our country. That situation was horrible, our country was unhappy. And so it wasn’t okay to be happy.”

  So she was only now learning to be happy—although if she had to choose she would have rather lived in another time.

  “I’d like to have lived before the Holocaust,” she told me.

  AT THE UNIVERSITY I met Kostek’s friend Staszek, whose father had remained a Stalinist even after, in Moscow during the Great Terror, his own mother and father—Staszek’s grandmother and grandfather—were killed by Stalin.

  When Staszek and his wife had first met in the 1970s, Staszek had been a hippie, interested in Eastern philosophy and involved with the opposition, watched by the secret police. Discovering Judaism became part of a larger project, a search for freedom. It all began in the seventies, spontaneously, at Kostek’s apartment, at the apartments of Pani Ryszarda and a handful of others. When Staszek and his wife hosted their first Passover seder, the atmosphere was euphoric: they were doing it for the first time, perhaps making mistakes, but that was of little importance—they were doing it themselves. During the seder, when they said the prayer that included the phrase “Today we are slaves, tomorrow we will be free,” they added a prayer for a free Poland.

  Today Staszek was a mathematician preoccupied with moral philosophy. He was also the leading activist in a society for Jewish-Christian understanding. For many years he had been struggling with one of the most painful issues between Poles and Jews: the relationship between Jews and communism. Even after the fall of communism, Polish anti-Semitism was fueled by the stereotype of “Judeo-Bolshevism”: the impression that communism in general and Stalinism in particular had been a Jewish conspiracy against the Poles.

  Staszek was the son and grandson of Stalinists; his great-grandfather had been among the founders of the Polish communist movement. For Staszek “Judeo-Bolshevism” was much more than an anti-Semitic stereotype. Jews were like a family, Staszek believed, and when someone in your family did something wrong, you felt bad as well. And so perhaps the Jews could collectively …

  “I did not use the word apologize,” he insisted, “but perhaps acknowledge, engage in dialogue …”

  The Jews who had survived the war had usually survived by themselves, without their families. After the war they had found themselves alone, in a void, surrounded by emptiness—the result was a desire for radical change. This was such a large phenomenon, it should not be taboo to speak about it.

  Pani Ryszarda’s mother had told her that when she returned to Poland after the war she felt as if she were in a cemetery.

  Staszek spoke to me as well about Jewish tradition, a tradition he had acquired as an act of will—through much effort and study, for there had been no one to pass it on to him. It had happened when he was already an adult, during the Solidarity years, the years of the underground Jewish Flying University: seminars held in private apartments, where Staszek and his friends studied non-Marxist philosophy and traditional Jewish texts. He began to see the deep affinities between Judaism and Marxism: the role of the tsadik, the tradition of textual commentary, the messianic hope. Stalin had become the messiah—at a time when it seemed that one had to choose between Stalin and Hitler. For Staszek the tragedy was not that the Jews chose Stalin over Hitler but rather that they confused Stalin with the messiah. Only in 1968 did they learn that communism and fascism were alike.

  Before he left the café at the university, Staszek put on a black yarmulke. Poles respected him more, he believed, now that he was openly Jewish.

  “Otherwise it’s much worse,” he said. “They accuse you of ‘concealing your origins.’ ”

  As he began to walk away, Staszek turned to me one more time.

  “The locomotive of History,” he said in parting. One was about to collide with the locomotive of History.

  Cemeteries

  In June of 1998 I returned to the small apartment on Piwna Street. In the end my landlord, the painter, had survived his gruesome car accident in Łódź, but his face was disfigured, and he was now blind. And yet he was somehow unchanged. Unable to paint, he had begun to write. He had written a story about Adolf Hitler, his rejected application to the art academy in Vienna, and his unfulfilled artistic ambitions—instead of Mein Kampf, it could have been Meine Kunst. Gallery openings in London and New York. If only …

  IN THE WARSAW archives I found Jakub Berman’s notes for his memoirs, which had never come into being. By now I recognized his handwriting. The notes had been composed in telegraphic form, on scraps of papers of various shapes, staccato, abbreviated, tiny, torn.

  In 1956, Jakub Berman was in Moscow for the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where Nikita Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” about Stalin’s “cult of personality.” When Jakub Berman returned to Warsaw, he submitted his resignation to the Politburo. It was less that he accepted his guilt—and more that he accepted himself as a scapegoat for the “excesses” of the Stalinist era. He offered to sacrifice himself so that the Party could remain strong.

  At the Politburo meeting devoted to his resignation, Jakub Berman denied having known of the methods employed by his security apparatus. Jakub Berman, I had come to believe, was a deeply principled man. Yet his claim of ignorance could not have been true. He had been a Party member since the 1920s. He had seen the purges of his comrades in the 1930s; he had spent the war years in the Soviet Union. He knew what Stalinism was.

  Jakub Berman accepted being cast out of the government, but what was still to come was much worse: in 1957, the Central Committee revoked his Party card. This he could not bear. He had never needed to be in power, but he did need to belong to the Party. He understood that he should bear some costs of Stalinist crimes, but he could not accept the loss of his Party card. In the archives I found his response to the Central Committee: “I cannot reconcile myself to the thought of being excluded from the Party to which I have been joined for thirty-four years.”

  I found a second letter, dated three years later. This one was addressed to Władysław Gomułka, now—in the wake of de-Stalinization—the general secretary of the Party. Jakub Berman was pleading for his Party card back.

  “In the course of these three years,” he wrote to the man he had once imprisoned, “I have felt, as in the years preceding, indissolu
bly joined to the Party, to the Party’s daily efforts.… I beg to be accepted back into the Party, so that in the ranks of the Party I can serve the cause that is the essence of my entire life.”

  Jakub Berman had considered the wording very carefully: there were several drafts.

  Władysław Gomułka said no.

  In the archives I did not find, though, what I had been looking for: a letter from Adolf Berman about Władysław Bartoszewski.

  “Adolf told me about Żegota, but only after many years,” Jakub Berman had said to his interviewer at the end of his life.

  But of that missing conversation I found nothing.

  I went to see Kostek at Midrasz’s editorial office on Twarda 6, the gathering site of what was still a nascent Jewish community in postcommunist Warsaw.

  “Fascism, communism, Zionism—the three great utopian ideologies of the twentieth century,” said Kostek. “You can’t understand communism with the arcane apparatchiks of the Brezhnev era, you have to think of the forties—in the forties, communism was sexy.”

  Then Kostek suggested I visit Adam, the longtime editor of a small Yiddish-language periodical.

  Adam’s office was across the street—not even a street, but rather a path through the grass—just a few yards away at Warsaw’s Yiddish Theater. The Yiddish Theater was the alter ego of Midrasz’s office on Twarda 6: it was the old Jewish community, the meeting place of the elderly, the Jews who had stayed in Poland after the war because they believed in building socialism.

  The year before I had come for the first time to the Yiddish Theater, where I saw scenes from Fiddler on the Roof and listened to the whispered conversations among the American Jewish tourists seated around me.

  “Treblinka, that’s what I really came here to see,” one middle-aged woman told her neighbor. “Last night—the Hotel Bristol. Today—bread and cheese in the car on the road to Treblinka. It’s good for the soul.”