The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  Mo, whose father survived in the Warsaw Ghetto, was also among Rachel and Yonah’s guests that Saturday. He told us of how in April 1943, during the uprising when the ghetto was in flames, his father had encountered a man covered in burns, crying out from pain. The man handed Mo’s father a knife and pleaded with him to kill him. It would be a mitzvah, the man whose skin was burning pleaded.

  Mo’s father stood there before the burning man and deliberated: Was it a mitzvah or was it not? The man claimed it was … yet if it were not, to kill a man would be an unforgivable sin. In the end Mo’s father did not take the knife. He walked away. But the picture of that man, tortured by his burning skin, dying a slow and agonizing death, tormented Mo’s father for the rest of his life.

  DARIUSZ TOLD ME that I was a true product of modernity: I was homeless. It was spring in Warsaw and we were sitting outside at the Hotel Europejski café. Dariusz was the only one to have ever asked me why I felt so close to Władysław Broniewski, Aleksander Wat, Adam Ważyk, and these other angst-laden futurist poets, to their lives defined by idealism and disillusionment, by faith and betrayal. And so I told him.

  “It’s a beautiful story,” he said.

  We talked of the provinces, and I told him of my stay in Domažlice, of how the townspeople had treated me as if I were not quite a person. And Dariusz told me that I could not blame them, for only intellectuals could be held accountable for their prejudices, we could be held accountable. But simple people, people in villages—theirs was an innocent xenophobia. They were not responsible.

  “At least,” he said, “unlike you, they are not homeless.”

  Dariusz was a Catholic, a believer, a liberal wary at moments of his own liberalism, a historian who lived in enormous gratitude toward his ancestors, who had given him so much while asking for nothing in return. He believed in both God and the devil. When he began to speak of God I thought of the Hasidim doing somersaults, singing of their faith in the coming of the Messiah, dancing along the path to the gas chambers. This, too, was unbearable. It was not their passivity that humiliated them, it was their faith. At this Dariusz smiled.

  “Now I finally see,” he said, “that you are a believer. I can see it: you accuse God. An atheist would be indifferent.”

  STEPHANIE BECAME INVOLVED in a documentary film project about Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. One day I went with her to meet an older woman named Pani Jadwiga. I went as her translator, although Stephanie’s Polish was getting better every day and soon she would no longer need me. She had a talent for languages. Her mother, herself a hidden child during the war, was a Belgian Jew, a cosmopolitan woman who knew many languages and had spoken French to her daughters.

  Pani Jadwiga had two dogs. One of them, whom she had found on the street some fifteen years before, was shy, recovering from an operation. There were bits of yellow around her tail. I talked to Pani Jadwiga about her dogs; they looked as if they were sisters, although they were not.

  Gently, always gently, Stephanie began to ask Pani Jadwiga how she had survived the war.

  Pani Jadwiga was ashamed that she had to talk to Stephanie through me, she, who had come from an intelligentsia family, a multilingual family: her mother a translator of English literature, her father a famous teacher of Polish philology. Pani Jadwiga, though, had never attended a university. She knew no other languages, she spoke only Polish. After the war, people who had known her father found it shameful that the daughter of the famous teacher had remained uneducated. Pani Jadwiga had become a seamstress.

  I wanted to disappear then, so that she would not be ashamed. Instead I looked away from her, toward the small dogs.

  Pani Jadwiga showed us a photograph of her mother as a child, dressed up very augustly for such a young girl. In another photograph her father was a toddler, wearing a cape and a cone-shaped hat that made me think of Szymon Zachariasz’s strange doodle.

  Stephanie was so warm and so sympathetic, and Pani Jadwiga began to slip back, unwillingly yet more and more easily, into the time when she had been a child, into the war. Her family was living then in a village outside Krakow. One night the Germans came for her parents. She clung to her mother’s legs, but her mother said, “Już do cioci!” She was sending her daughter away: Right now—to Auntie’s house!

  I knew before she told us that these were the last words she ever heard her mother say.

  “And that was all,” Pani Jadwiga said, but felt she had to explain: She had been taught that when her parents told her to do something, she was to listen. She hadn’t wanted to leave them, she had never wanted to abandon them to save herself, it was only that it would have been unthinkable to disobey. Her mother told her, “Już do cioci!” And that was that. She ran right under the legs of the German who was holding on to the edge of a washbasin, she ran in her nightgown to the aunt who was not really her aunt but rather a close friend of her family, who lived not so far away, in any case no farther than a few kilometers. And so in the middle of the night little Jadwiga—who was not Jadwiga then—arrived in her nightgown.

  Her aunt took her in. She changed the girl’s name to the less-Jewish-sounding Jadwiga and fastened a large bow in her hair to distract attention from her Jewish face. But the bow proved inadequate: a local seamstress surmised the truth and blackmailed Jadwiga’s aunt and her family. And so Jadwiga was led to a Catholic orphanage carrying a container of sugar and a figurine of the Virgin Mary as a signal to the nuns. Later the nuns told her that her parents would come for her. They never did.

  After the war ended Jadwiga boarded a train back to Krakow. She slept on the floor of the train car, using candle wax to kill the mites beneath the wooden planks.

  When fifty years later a support group for child survivors of the Holocaust formed in Warsaw, Pani Jadwiga joined it. She did not go to the meetings, though. She was afraid someone—a neighbor, perhaps—would notice her, that someone would spray-paint her door with anti-Semitic graffiti, that around her people would begin to whisper that she was a Jew.

  HER NAME WAS Nitzana, and I liked how it sounded at once: it conjured up a graceful Jewish femininity. She was fortunate to have close friends. They were a threesome of young women—Nitzana, Malwina, and Izabela—and when they graduated from high school, Nitzana and Malwina went to Warsaw to study French at the university. In the capital, they shared a room. Yet after a month Nitzana left, returning to their small hometown in the eastern provinces. Perhaps she felt insecure about whether she would succeed at the university, where most of the students came from urban intelligentsia families. Or perhaps she disliked city life or was simply homesick. In any case, she returned home, married, and began to study agriculture.

  It must have been that same year, or perhaps the next, when the war began. In September 1939 their town in eastern Poland was occupied by the Soviet Red Army. Then in June 1941 the Red Army retreated, and the Wehrmacht arrived. Nitzana, her husband, and their infant daughter were herded into the ghetto. Then the ghetto was sealed. Nitzana escaped with her baby; she ran to her friends, to Malwina and Izabela, who hid her. But Nitzana could not bear life in hiding—the isolation, the claustrophobia, the confinement in the apartment she could never leave, not even for a moment. She returned to the ghetto, to her young husband who was among the Jewish policemen there, and whose fate—her friends believed—she wanted to share to the very end. The baby girl, though, she left with her friends.

  Nitzana’s parents were among the first to be taken. Her mother died during the transport; her father survived the transport to die in the gas chambers of Treblinka. Then they came for Nitzana and her husband. When she reached the train, Nitzana poisoned herself—and Izabela thought this was as it should have been. I didn’t learn if Nitzana had offered to share the poison with her husband, if he refused it, or if she needed it all for herself. He did not take his own life as Nitzana did, though: he boarded the transport to die in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

  Their baby remained with Malwina and Izabela,
who arranged to take little Esterka to an orphanage and then to come for her. They wanted to disguise her past, to erase all traces of the ghetto. And so they did. Malwina and Izabela took care of Esterka in turns; neighbors whispered that the little girl had been born out of wedlock. Perhaps before the war the two young women from the small town would have felt wounded by the gossip, but now it no longer seemed important.

  It was spring in Warsaw and Stephanie and I sat in the living room with Pani Izabela and Pani Malwina, who cried, as did Stephanie, as finally did I. Nearly sixty years had passed; Izabela and Malwina were elderly women now. Pani Izabela was sharp, energetic, and dignified.

  Pani Izabela’s sister had a young son, who became Esterka’s older brother, as Stefanek, Pani Malwina’s nephew, became Esterka’s younger brother. In photographs Esterka and Stefanek had their arms around each other; as young children they were in love. Esterka was a stubborn child who would relent before no one—except for Stefanek. She melted before Stefanek.

  Today they no longer remembered each other at all.

  Eventually the war ended. Malwina and Izabela found Nitzana’s brother, who before the war had left Poland with a group of young Zionists bound for Palestine. Izabela wrote to him, and he answered: yes, he did want his sister’s child. In Warsaw the rabbinate was gathering orphaned Jewish children to send to Palestine. The children set off from Warsaw but were detained in Paris: Israel did not yet exist as a state, and the British had blocked Jewish immigration to Palestine. Malwina, who had resumed her study of Romance languages, won a French government grant and went to Paris, where she managed to visit Esterka in the temporary children’s home. Esterka seemed to her very unhappy there.

  When Esterka finally arrived in Palestine, her uncle was waiting for her. She went to live with him, yet soon he and his wife had their own child, and Esterka was terribly jealous. Esterka’s aunt and uncle began to fear that their niece would do harm to the new baby, and they abandoned Esterka to a communal upbringing on a kibbutz.

  As the women told the story, I understood how much they regretted having offered Esterka to Nitzana’s brother. More than half a century had passed, and they had not forgiven themselves. At the time, though, they had believed it was the right thing: he was the only family the little girl had left. And family was important.

  When Malwina returned from her studies in Paris, she went to work at the French embassy in Warsaw. There the Stalinist security apparatus approached her. Would she cooperate? She refused. They threatened her. She lived in perpetual fear and in the end could not endure it. She fell ill with schizophrenia, and I watched the tears well in her eyes, the eyes of a woman now nearly eighty.

  I WATCHED ANDRZEJ Wajda’s film Korczak, now for the second time, with my friend Amelia from Harvey’s Yiddish class who had come to visit on her way to Vilnius.

  “Za pietnaście minut. Idziemy na wycieczkę …” In fifteen minutes. We’re going on an outing.…

  At Umschlagplatz Janusz Korczak and the children from his orphanage boarded the train that would take them to Treblinka. In the film’s last scene, the camera suddenly shifted into slow motion, the unrelenting realism was broken, and the cattle car carrying Korczak and the children floated away from the train. The doors opened, the children jumped down, and together with Dr. Korczak they bounded into a lush field, toward a sunlit clearing.

  The ending was not in color—I had colored it in my mind, yet even so I agreed with the critics: I did not like the aura of redemption the fantasy ending implied. The walk to Umschlagplatz, the trains—the film should end there, with this abyss.

  A few days later I joined Amelia in Vilnius. In 1897, when the Bund had been born there, Vilnius was a city in the Russian Empire. Later, when Czesław Miłosz was a university student there writing catastrophist poetry, it was a city in interwar Poland. Now it was a post-Soviet city, the capital of newly independent Lithuania. Like Bratislava, Vilnius was a small and unintimidating capital, for Eastern Europe a bright and cheerful city, its university painted in pale peaches and yellows. Amelia and I jogged through the city and into an expansive green park filled with trees and flowers. In the evening we went to the Soiuz Pisatelei, the Writers’ Union club that by night turned into a small disco where people waltzed to ABBA songs and danced cheek-to-cheek a bit like cartoon characters. There was a soft wildness to the dances, conjuring up an Andy Warhol–like aesthetic. Smoky air and Lithuanian-accented Russian.

  In the stores of Vilnius everyone spoke Lithuanian, yet when Amelia and I entered the large restaurant where a Passover seder was being held, I heard only Russian: the language of Lithuania’s atheist Jews. Everyone began to eat at once, and soon I realized there would be no seder, per se—no one even read the Four Questions, although the text was distributed in Cyrillic transliteration of Hebrew. After the kiddush over the wine, a woman in gold lamé with spike heels took the microphone and began to sing. She was accompanied by flashing lights, fake smoke, and a disco klezmer band playing pop versions of Red Army war songs.

  “Israeli kitsch meets Soviet kitsch,” a professor of Yiddish remarked to us, although I saw little that was Israeli about it. There was something almost degrading, and yet at once strangely appealing, about these post-Soviet remains of a once-vibrant Jewish tradition. The band played “Rock Around the Clock” and Amelia and I joined in the dancing. It was a disco seder.

  THE MOST SIGNIFICANT issue of Bogna’s magazine, Jidełe, appeared in print only after her departure to Israel: it was the issue devoted to “the grandchildren of Judeo-Bolshevism.” The twenty-something editors of Jidełe—Bogna and her friends—had organized a discussion among Polish Jews of their own generation on the topic of Jews and communism. Bogna coauthored the introduction:

  Often it is repeated to us that a Jew who becomes a communist ceases to be a Jew. Not wanting to become entangled in a futile discussion about the Jewishness of Jewish communists, we must be aware of a fundamental fact: a considerable, if not the dominant, portion of ourselves, people regarding themselves as young Polish Jews, have grandfathers and grandmothers who were once engaged in creating a communist system.

  Bogna’s coeditor began the discussion with a vexed question: “If we’re proud of Freud, how, then, should we treat Jakub Berman?”

  A decade had passed since the revolutions of 1989 had opened the Pandora’s box of Poles, Jews, and communism. And yet the discussion was only beginning. The most painful part was still to come.

  That spring Jan Gross was visiting again from New York; he and Stephanie were staying with me in Warsaw. One afternoon Jan came back to my apartment carrying a large box: the first copies of his new book, Neighbors.

  The book was a microhistory. The story took place in Poland’s eastern provinces, in a small town called Jedwabne, within just a few days in early July 1941. Hitler’s Germany had just broken the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression treaty and attacked the Soviet Union. The Red Army had retreated and the Wehrmacht had just arrived, although the new occupation regime was not quite yet in place. The small town, caught between two totalitarian occupiers, experienced a window of semianarchy. And in that window the newly arrived Germans told the Polish townspeople: they had a few days, they could—or perhaps should—take care of the Jews. It began with stonings and lynchings, with murders by farm tools. Later the townspeople forced several dozen of the strongest Jewish men to take down the Lenin statue; to carry it to the cemetery; to dig a grave for its burial. Then the Poles threw the bodies of those Jewish men into the same grave. Germans were there, not participating, but rather observing, taking photographs—as Franz Konrad would when the Warsaw Ghetto burned.

  Then, on the afternoon of 10 July, the local Poles forced Jedwabne’s several hundred remaining Jews from their homes and into the town square. The townspeople herded their neighbors into a barn. Then they set the barn on fire.

  Neighbors was a “postmodern” book. The graphic details—the burial of the burnt corpses; the brothers playing a clarinet and accordion to
drown out the cries of Jewish women and children; the murderers’ plucking out a Jew’s eyes and cutting off his tongue; the children picked up by the legs and hurled into the fire—Jan himself did not describe. The truly vile images emerged not from his own words. Rather Jan let his sources—the Polish peasants of times past—speak for themselves. The book was a mosaic, a dialogue between the author and his sources, and the contrast between Jan’s self-reflective, literary Polish and his sources’ rough spoken dialect—full of grammatical mistakes and crude formulations—itself told a story about the historian’s position vis-à-vis the ghosts of the past.

  That night I joined Stephanie and Jan at the very fashionable Qchnia Artystyczna café attached to a modern art gallery. My former landlord, the painter who was now blind, had recently exhibited there a collection of miniature human figures named Geonauci, pensive and smooth and cast in bronze. He had sculpted them in the years since the car accident in Łódź, his hands shaping what his eyes could not longer see. Now at Qchnia Artystyczna Jan saw a colleague who joined us for a time. They spoke about Neighbors.

  “They’ll resent this coming from an outsider,” the colleague said to Jan.

  “I resent being thought of as an outsider,” Jan said.

  IN JULY MY eccentric and delightful Yiddish teacher Harvey came to Poland. He wanted to see the shtetl where his father had lived before the war, and he had managed to learn that in that small town of still no more than a few thousand people there lived an unofficial town chronicler.