The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  About the tragic death of Ewa’s stepfather in 1940 in Lvov, Ewa Wasilewska’s mother never said a single word. To the very end that taboo remained in place between them. And it—the murder, Marian Bogatko’s absence, the silence—remained painful: Ewa Wasilewska had loved him very much.

  “He was my father,” she told me.

  Her biological father had died when she was not more than two or three years old; it was the handsome and charming Marian Bogatko who had raised her.

  As for her mother’s third and last husband, the Ukrainian playwright whom Khrushchev had sent to solicit Wanda Wasilewska’s understanding concerning Marian Bogatko’s murder—Ewa had not liked him very much at all. After the war, he’d had one affair after another—all of Kiev knew, his wife alone chose blindness to his infidelities. In the end Wanda Wasilewska lived her last years as a tragic figure—a betrayed wife, a foreigner who always spoke Russian with an inelegant accent, a woman without friends in her adopted country.

  “I cried when Stalin died,” Ewa Wasilewska said to me before I left, “although I quickly calmed down. Those traces of Sovietization, they’ll be in us until the very end, making us different from people in the West.”

  Files

  In fall of 2002 Piotr Sommer, a Polish poet in his fifties who had translated poetry by Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, came to Bloomington, Indiana, to give a poetry reading. Piotr reminded me of Jan: his expressive hand gestures, his soft disposition, his gentle eloquence. In Indiana Piotr read a poem called “A Visit.” It was a poem about Piotr’s friends who had left Poland after March 1968. In the poem one friend played the violin, another friend played the cello.

  “Oh, everyone played,” Piotr read, “until they went away.”

  THAT SPRING OF 2003 my colleagues at Indiana, where I now taught, organized a roundtable about the politics of cultural expression after communism. I invited Paul Wilson, the Canadian who had been the lead singer of the Plastic People of the Universe and who since then had been Václav Havel’s English translator. I’d last seen Paul seven years earlier, when he came to the Czech Living Room Seminar at Gordon Skilling’s apartment. By now Gordon was no longer here. In January 2001 he’d written to me, telling me of how much the seminar had meant to him those past years. Six weeks later, he died in his Toronto apartment. He would have turned ninety on his next birthday.

  Now it was spring of 2003, and I spent the evening at a bar in Bloomington with Paul Wilson, listening to tales of the Plastic People of the Universe’s legendary band manager Ivan Jirous. Paul was not at all pretentious; on the contrary, he was self-effacing—with respect to his singing, but also his understanding of the work he had translated for many years. Paul was not a philosopher; he had always struggled with Havel’s Heideggerian allusions. There was a deep irony in Havel’s literary career: only now—when communism was over, and Havel had become president—did Paul feel self-censorship in Havel’s writing.

  A singer and actor named Florian, who wore his pale gray hair tied in a ponytail, had come for the roundtable from Bucharest. He spoke of how, in Romania in the 1950s, he would go to see news clips about America’s exploitation of blacks—news clips showing the Harlem Globetrotters and Bill Haley and Comets singing “Rock Around the Clock.” Florian hated Creedence Clearwater Revival because their music was played on the official Romanian radio station—and they must be stupid if the communists were playing them.

  Florian spoke, too, of literature: the novels that could not be written during the communist years—the novels Romanian writers had dreamt of writing—were not being written now either. The moment had passed: they were novels that had existed only in their impossibility.

  After the roundtable we all went to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Fourth Street in Bloomington. As I talked to Florian, I remembered Vera from Bucharest, the folk rock band playing at the open-air jazz club on the roof of a tall building in the city center, the Romanian Bob Dylan with the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard.

  “Oh my God,” I said to Florian suddenly, “you’re the man on the roof!”

  And it was true: he was.

  I HAD NOT answered Jakub Berman’s daughter’s letter, telling me she saw little sense in a conversation between us. A year and a half later, though, when I returned to Warsaw, I wrote to her again. This time she left me a phone message: “I am ready to talk to you. Call me.”

  Now I sat in the living room while Pani Lucyna made tea. Most of her family, she told me, had died in the Holocaust, including her six-year-old cousin, a little girl named Lena. Until today, every time she passed Umschlagplatz, where sixty years earlier trains had gathered before setting off for Treblinka, she saw Lena’s face.

  In person Jakub Berman’s daughter was condescending but not hostile. Her feelings about me had not changed: I was someone who understood nothing. She did not know how I had been taught history. In Poland, though, historians were trained to approach their sources critically—which I had obviously not done. I had not tried to understand the motivations of her father and his generation—she told me—their sensitivity to human suffering, their selflessness, their devotion to a greater cause. She did not believe I could ever appreciate the sincerity of her father’s idealism, his faith, his nobility of purpose. Nor did she believe I could ever understand the torment, the schizophrenia, of being both a Pole and a Jew.

  Nearly a half century earlier, Pani Lucyna had learned she was pregnant. It was just after the trial of Rudolf Slánský, when her father knew he could be next in line—Wanda Wasilewska had even traveled from Kiev to warn him. Jakub Berman wished then only that he would live long enough to see the birth of his grandchild.

  Pani Lucyna was hurt by what I had written; it was—she told me—“ethically unfortunate.” She had loved her father very much. I could feel, as she talked, that he must have been a very good father to her.

  JAKUB BERMAN’S DAUGHTER told me that even after her father was cast out of the Party in 1957, Janina Broniewska still came to their apartment for dinner, that she was faithful to Pani Lucyna’s father.

  It was rare in Poland to find anyone who had a kind word to say about Janina Broniewska—or about Wanda Wasilewska.

  “Wanda Wasilewska was a mean bitch,” Kostek told me.

  I had gone to visit him in his spacious apartment not far from the university; we were sitting in his study, surrounded by books. Kostek’s mother had served in the second Polish division that had fought alongside the Red Army, the Polish division whose existence Wanda Wasilewska herself had brought about. Kostek’s mother had lain in the trenches and shot at Germans.

  “It was her division,” Kostek told me, “who was present at the liberation of Majdanek. When she arrived, the ovens were still hot. For her the choice was clear: the gulag or the gas chambers. And people came back from the gulag …”

  And I thought about what Aleksander Masiewicki had said to me in Brooklyn: yes, people were dying in the Soviet camps, but not in the ovens.

  IN DECEMBER 2003 I received permission to see Jakub Berman’s secret police file. It was only then, sitting in the reading room of the Institute of National Remembrance, where the communist-era Ministry of Interior files now were kept, that I appreciated for the first time the primitivism of the secret police, their reliance upon uneducated functionaries who could not write in correct Polish and who themselves did not understand what Trotskyism meant, what Zionism meant, what Marxist revisionism meant.

  In Jakub Berman’s file from 1968 I found a forged speech, attributed to Jakub Berman and dated April 1945. It was written with spelling mistakes, in miserably awkward Polish, a Polish that no one as educated as Jakub Berman ever would have used. In the forged speech Jakub Berman advised Jews on how to take power from behind the scenes:

  Jws [sic] have the chance to take the whole of state life in Poland into their own hands and extend their control. Not to push themselves into representative positions. In the ministries and agencies to create a s
o-called second team. Take on Polish names. Hide their Jewish origins. Create and disseminate among Polish society the opinion—and confirm Polish society in the conviction, that it’s the Poles thrust out front who are ruling, and Jews are playing no role.… Regard anti-Semitism as the primary betrayal and condemn it at each step. If it’s claimed that some Pole is an anti-Semite, liquidate him immediately with the aid of the security organs.

  An informer quoted a comment Jakub Berman allegedly made during the events of March 1968: “After all, half of the room wanted heads to throw to the lions. Because that’s how it is here.”

  In November of 1968 Jakub Berman was followed to Powązki Cemetery, where he was seen laying flowers on Bolesław Bierut’s grave.

  “Berman gives the impression of a man depressed, lost in thought,” the informer noted.

  The agents’ reports revealed their authors to be generally neither knowledgeable nor savvy. The seemingly omnipotent secret police, who terrorized so many for so long, seemed to rely not on acumen but rather on large numbers: everything appeared more or less indiscriminately to interest them. They conducted extensive surveillance of enormous numbers of people. They noted that even though an aging former futurist had one affair after another, his wife continued to love him. They kept lists of writers and artists suspected of homosexual proclivities. They noted what their “figures under observation” ate for breakfast, who sat with whom at the cafés, whether they looked happy or sad.

  And very often it seemed to the agents that the “figures under observation” did look sad. In 1963 the poet Adam Ważyk, who in 1939 became the editor of a Stalinist newspaper in Lvov and later wrote the bitter “A Poem for Adults,” gave a poetry reading in a small town. An informer wrote that Adam Ważyk’s tone created a depressive mood among the listeners there. At the conclusion of the reading a local poet asked Adam Ważyk why, as a former avantgardist, he avoided this topic, and also why all his work seemed to have a depressive character. Adam Ważyk, according to the report, “provided no concrete answer, making it understood, however, that he’d become disillusioned with life.”

  The same year an informer noted that one of Adam Ważyk’s friends had encouraged him to write his memoirs but that Ważyk was disinclined. He felt “disgust for all of that.” “All of that”—his own past.

  Thirteen years later, a 1976 report repeated verbatim the words of a report from 1965: “From Adam Ważyk’s words it ensues that in his own work he’s always aspired to pure art, to art of justice, to art without ideology, to the ‘full freedom of the writer.’ ”

  Perhaps the functionary had simply run out of things to write, the life of this broken old man having ceased to provide new material.

  In another 1976 report an informer wrote that, as ordered, he had made contact with one of Adam Ważyk’s daughters and had succeeded in learning that because of her dislike for her father she had moved out of her parents’ apartment. A few months later, a different informer submitted a report. This second informer had learned that Adam Ważyk’s daughter on the contrary had very good relations with both of her parents. She had moved into a different apartment in order to have better working conditions but visited her parents two or three times a week for dinner.

  A 1964 report stated that “people who until recently had harbored many resentments toward one another are presently uniting.” An example: an informer had reported that Antoni Słonimski did not like Adam Ważyk, yet yesterday Słonimski and Ważyk had been seen sitting at the same café table.

  Another memo contained the information that every year on the Jewish New Year Antoni Słonimski received oranges and lemons from the Israeli embassy. In March 1964 Słonimski received a package of matzo and wine. In August 1967 an informer reported that Słonimski, “in a conversation with his close acquaintance, expressed by way of an allusion his solidarity with Israeli aggression against Arab countries. When the acquaintance noticed that Słonimski looked wonderful and was surely feeling well, Słonimski answered: ‘I look and feel the way victors do.’ ”

  The files were not as useful as I had hoped. Even excluding the issue of deliberately forged documents—like that of the speech Jakub Berman had allegedly given in 1945—there was the issue of the questionable judgment and competence of the reports’ authors. Reading them, it was impossible to know how Jakub Berman had really reacted to the events of March 1968, what Antoni Słonimski had really said about the 1967 Six-Day War, how close Słonimski and Adam Ważyk had really been in the 1960s, or why Adam Ważyk’s daughter had really moved out of her parents’ apartment.

  “Everything Was So Unattractive”

  In the summer of 2004 I left Indiana to spend a year in Austria. When my friend Kasia came to visit from Poland, we went to the Vienna Museum on Karlsplatz, where there was an exhibit devoted to John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev’s 1961 summit meeting. In the photographs Khrushchev’s plump, dowdy wife was pictured alongside the glamorous Jackie Kennedy—and it was the aesthetic contrast that struck Kasia. Memories of the communist years came back to her: the absence of fashion, of variety, of color.

  “Everything was so unattractive,” she said to me.

  In Kasia’s memory communism was above all a visual ugliness. Now she was delighted by Vienna: the Ringstrasse architecture, the art nouveau of the Viennese Secession, the high ceilings and chandeliers in the coffeehouses. Vienna was everything that communist—and even postcommunist—Warsaw was not.

  Yet even in Vienna I remained more drawn to Warsaw. The first time I returned there from Austria I ran into Kostek in a bookstore, and we went downstairs to the café on the first floor.

  “Warsaw,” Kostek said to me, “Europe’s ugliest capital.”

  The poet Piotr Sommer once tried to describe Warsaw for an American audience: “Even when you specify—in terms of space and chronology—your relation with the city, that is when you make it more intimate, Warsaw is a bit big and a bit intimidating: not instantly translatable into my small-scale categories. It is immediately historical in a multilayered way, and as a matter of course.”

  “I love this city,” I told Kostek.

  And I knew that Kostek, who could live anywhere he chose, did too.

  Tim, who by then was my fiancé, had come with me to Poland. We had met because of Poland; he’d sought me out because he too was interested in writing about the Berman family. Unlike myself, though, Tim already knew Jakub Berman’s daughter, Pani Lucyna. The director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw was an admirer of Tim’s first book—a biography of a nineteenth-century Polish socialist, a bright young intellectual who died in 1905, at the age of thirty-three, his hands clean. The director had offered to introduce Tim to his wife. When he did, Pani Lucyna trusted Tim—more than that, felt toward him something like affection. They had agreed to do a series of interviews. Now, though, Tim felt he had, in some sense, betrayed her, and felt compelled to write to her.

  “Your father was our matchmaker,” he told her.

  Pani Lucyna telephoned him and said she understood. She declined his offer to burn the notes from their previous conversation. But they understood they would not see each other again.

  IN VIENNA TIM and I were fellows at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. The institute had been formally founded in 1982, but the more significant date in its origins was 1977: the death of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. The director, a Polish philosopher named Krzysztof Michalski, had been among Patočka’s last students. When, after the appearance of Charter 77, Patočka died under interrogation, Krzysztof and some of his friends sought to smuggle the philosopher’s papers out of Czechoslovakia. Austria was the closest neutral country, and Krzysztof created the institute both as a home for Jan Patočka’s archive and as a meeting place for East European and West European intellectuals, otherwise divided by the Iron Curtain.

  There at the institute in Vienna I met Pavel, a Czech political theorist in his forties who had once been an underground bass player in the M
oravian city of Brno. Then, when he was twenty-nine, the Velvet Revolution came and Pavel decided to return to the university. His parents, who were no longer alive, had both been communists.

  “How can you not believe in anything?” Pavel’s mother had asked him in the 1980s, when her son had made clear his rejection of communism. She had joined the Party in 1947, at the age of twenty; in the Party she had seen a continuation of the Protestant values of equality, hard work, and care for the poor with which she’d been raised. The man she married was much older: Pavel’s father was a prewar communist who had spent the war in Buchenwald, who had escaped being gassed as a Jew only because he was imprisoned as a communist—together with German communist comrades. Pavel believed that the “soft repression” his father suffered during the postwar era of show trials had saved him from committing Stalinist crimes himself. Pavel’s grandfather, the son of a rabbi from the small Moravian town of Třest’, had also been a communist. In his memoirs Pavel’s grandfather said nothing about his Orthodox childhood, though, noting only when and where he was born and how many years this was after the publication of The Communist Manifesto.

  Pavel and I had long talks about Stalinism, about Nazism, about the Holocaust, about Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman and Daniel Goldhagen. As a public intellectual in Prague, Pavel wanted to explain to the Czechs the enthusiastic American reception of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Germans, Goldhagen argued, had been for generations infected with virulent anti-Semitism. They were bad people who enjoyed killing Jews. It was a straightforward explanation, a simple explanation—much simpler, for example, than Zygmunt Bauman’s insistence that, on the contrary, the Holocaust involved the “neutralization”—that is, the subduing or overcoming—of ordinary Germans’ attitudes toward Jews and that the Holocaust had to be understood as an event that exposed the “hidden possibilities of modern society.”