The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  It was understandable, too, that the public had found Daniel Goldhagen so much more appealing than Hannah Arendt, whose ideas were more complex and more disquieting, who pointed to the eradication of subjectivity on the part of both the persecutors and the persecuted, and who wrote of how, in a state of radical evil, all people became superfluous: there was no more death, no memory, no grief. The line between public and private, between truth and falsehood, even between victim and perpetrator blurred: “Totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. In this sense it eliminates the distance between the rulers and the ruled.”

  Hannah Arendt rejected all theories pointing to the inherently murderous “German national character.” Her explanation was a universalist one: the Holocaust was an exploitation of a potential latent in modern society—and in the human condition.

  “For many years now,” Hannah Arendt wrote after the war, “we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human.”

  Now in Vienna, I told Pavel that it was true what he had written: “In as far as Goldhagen is right, we can sleep soundly.” This was the comforting part of Goldhagen’s argument, for it implied that insofar as all the bad Germans were dead—or far away—there was nothing to fear. And after all, I asked Pavel, what was the alternative? That we will never be able to sleep soundly, because now we know what is possible, what humans are capable of.… The problem with the universalist Arendtian interpretation was that it was psychologically unbearable.

  One evening Krzysztof, Jan Patočka’s former student, invited me and Tim to dinner at the magnificent Viennese apartment where, now that his daughters were grown up, he lived alone.

  We ate pierogies and herring in oil. After dinner we sat in the living room, drinking wine, Krzysztof pacing and fingering a beaded necklace as he spoke to us. He was a fascinating man—eccentric and yet irresistible. A Catholic whose philosophical passions were Nietzsche and Heidegger. A friend of the famous philosopher-priest Józef Tischner, and of Karol Wojtyła, who was now Pope John Paul II.

  Krzysztof spoke, too, about his long friendship with Alik Smolar, and I told him about the letter Alik’s father, Grzegorz Smolar, had sent to Władysław Gomułka in 1968, pleading for the release of his imprisoned children. Krzysztof believed I was wrong to have sent Alik the letter.

  “One cannot play God,” he told me.

  WHEN WE MET, Tim was writing of Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansing, of various ghastly episodes, among which Volhynia in 1943 was the bloodiest. It had happened in the midst of the Second World War, precisely in that space east of Warsaw that suffered one totalitarian occupation after another. While caught between Hitler and Stalin, Ukrainian nationalist extremists herded Poles into wooden churches and set them on fire. They murdered with both bullets and sickles. There were hangings and decapitations. Skin was torn from muscles, hearts were gouged from bodies. Poles responded with cruelties of their own.

  This, too, was the context for the 1941 massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbors in Jedwabne: a time and place where throwing babies into fires on pitchforks was no longer unthinkable.

  Tim’s oldest friend in Poland, Andrzej, came from a Polish family that had been ethnically cleansed by Ukrainians. Andrzej told Tim this only after his book was published, for Andrzej was very principled: he did not want to compromise Tim’s historical objectivity. It had happened in Lvov, in 1943: Andrzej’s grandmother had watched as Ukrainian nationalists murdered her husband and her son before her eyes. Then she fled west with her daughter, to the small town of Opoczno in central Poland, at the time still under German occupation.

  In her new home in Opoczno, Andrzej’s now-widowed grandmother hid a Jewish family, whose youngest member was a little girl of perhaps five. She became Andrzej’s mother’s playmate—until one day the little girl could not bear the confinement and ran out onto the street. She was shot.

  During the summer of 2003, just a few days after the ceremony commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Ukrainian ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia, I’d been sitting at Warsaw’s very fashionable Café Szpilka on Plac Trzech Krzyży with my friend Mikołaj, whose own grandfather had been killed in 1939 while defending Warsaw from the Germans. Mikołaj was resentful that the Ukrainian president had not said what the Poles wanted to hear: “We are sorry.”

  “We swallowed Jedwabne, they have to swallow Volhynia,” Mikołaj told me.

  Yet now, just over a year later, the Orange Revolution had come to Ukraine. It was represented by two striking faces: the once-handsome face of presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, now disfigured from dioxin poisoning, his skin full of craters; and the face of his glamorous ally, the businesswoman-turned-politician Yulia Tymoshenko, her long blond hair braided over her head in the style of the Ukrainian peasantry, the forty-something sex symbol of the Orange Revolution.

  November 2004 saw thousands of Viktor Yushchenko’s supporters camping in the center of Kiev, demanding, as they froze, democracy and free elections. And nowhere in Europe was there more support for the Ukrainian revolution than in Poland. The brutal history of mutual violence notwithstanding, it was the Poles who understood why democracy in Ukraine was so important. At that time a young Polish graduate student was spending a semester at the institute in Vienna—together with his young wife, who was several months pregnant. When he heard of the demonstrations, he left his wife in Vienna and caught an overcrowded train headed for Kiev. Sympathetic railway conductors let the Polish students travel for free. In Kiev the young Poles joined the Ukrainian crowd, shouting, “Polska z wami!” (Poland is with you!).

  BY THE TIME Tim and I arrived in Kiev just after our Krakowian wedding, the Orange Revolution was over. No longer was anyone camped out in the square.

  Once again, the women in Ukraine impressed me with their fearlessness, their surety of sexuality’s power. An article in the Russian-language Ukrainian Cosmopolitan was devoted to why Western men were so eager to marry Ukrainian women. There were good reasons: they were beautiful—and free of American-style feminism. They were more giving to their husbands; unlike American women, they embraced their own femininity. The article was both a tribute to Ukrainian women and a satire of Western feminism. “While Western women work out their gender problems,” the author wrote smugly, “Ukrainian women get married.”

  One evening we spent at an outdoor café with two of Tim’s Ukrainian colleagues, talking about the Orange Revolution. It had to happen sooner or later, they believed. One of them explained: some decade and a half earlier, Ukrainian society had gotten the government it deserved. But now society had matured, and the gap between the corrupt elites and the maturing society had widened. Now Ukrainians deserved something better.

  We talked, too, about the passionately contested city that had once been Austrian Lemberg before it became Polish Lwów and still later Soviet Lvov. Now it was Ukrainian Lviv, a poorly run city with a crumbling infrastructure where water and electricity were available irregularly. He would be perfectly willing, Tim’s Ukrainian colleague said, to give Lviv back to Poland, if only the utilities were to work reliably again.

  A few days later Tim and I took the overnight train from Kiev to Lviv, and I understood then what his colleague had meant. Lviv reminded me of Krakow—I could see that it had once been a beautiful provincial capital with winding cobblestone streets. Yet now it was long impoverished and neglected, a world apart even from Kiev. Once-magnificent stone buildings were now decrepit, the hralni avtomaty—dark rooms full of smoke and vodka and slot machines—were ubiquitous. On the streets adults with horrific deformities begged passersby for coins, as they had in Warsaw eight years earlier.

  And now I saw more clearly how much Poland had changed. I saw, too, the sad paradox: a century ago, Warsaw had belonged to Russia, kept under the yoke of the tsarist regime, while Lemberg had been the provincial capital of Austrian Galicia, not so distant
ly connected to Vienna. Now, a hundred years later, the situation was reversed: Warsaw was the capital of a European Union member, while Lviv was an indigent post-Soviet town.

  In Lviv Tim and I stayed at the Hotel George. Once it had been the base of Oleksandr Korneichuk, the Ukrainian communist playwright who became Wanda Wasilewska’s third husband. In autumn 1939, just after the Red Army occupied the city, Korneichuk had received Aleksander Wat and other refugee Polish writers in his room at the Hotel George. And the hotel room was beautiful, with its chandelier and high ceilings, its dark oak furniture and golden cover draped over a large bed.

  As I walked through the town I tried to imagine the city of great fear, the Lvov of autumn of 1939, filled with Red Army soldiers and refugees. The streets Adam Ważyk and Aleksander Wat walked on the way to the editorial offices of the Stalinist newspaper, the restaurant where Aleksander Wat and Władysław Broniewski were arrested that January night in 1940, the villa where Wanda Wasilewska’s husband was shot by the NKVD.

  Unrequited Love

  In Toronto in 2005 Stefan M.’s friend Henry Dasko, who had left Poland after March 1968, was writing his memoirs. It was a race against time, for Henry was dying of brain cancer. He was not well: his writing was awkward and inelegant in a way it had never been. Yet the content remained intact.

  Henry’s father was a Polish patriot who loved to recite Polish poetry to his son. He was also a communist, and Stalinism was the setting for Henry’s childhood:

  The Russian newspaper Pravda was delivered daily to my father. My mother made sure that the paper was unfolded and appeared well read before being put outside with the morning garbage.

  It was one morning when I was still very little, no more than four and barely able to reach the counter when my father entered our kitchen, where our housekeeper and my nanny, a country girl named Mirka, was pounding her feet on the newspapers which covered the floor. What are you doing? asked my Dad.

  We are stomping out Stalin, said Mirka and continued to put her feet down on the large photo of Joseph Stalin, printed in the newspaper, as it often was.

  In a rapid motion my father made for the phone and grabbed the receiver. Don’t—said my mother sharply before he could dial the number. They’ll kill her, you know that.

  Henry’s first books were in Russian; to this day he remembered the cheery, colorful illustrations. All images were aggressively cheerful ones in those years: socialist realism was militantly joyful. This was true even as Henry, born just after the war, grew up in its shadow.

  Although ten years have passed since the end of the war, it never ended for us. It was an everyday subject of my parents’ talk. The war was all we ever played with my friends and it wasn’t just sticks we used to imitate weapons.

  The taupe-colored stucco of our building was pockmarked with bullets. The Warsaw Uprising had played itself out in our area and one day we discovered on the ceiling of the cellars down below an inscription written in the soot of a burning candle. It said that the bodies of four freedom fighters were buried behind the end wall of the cellar. It was as frightening as discovering the bodies themselves would have been. At the age of eight I wrote a letter to Marshal Zhukov suggesting that our building should be plated in armor and machine gun nests placed in its windows, so that we could defend ourselves when the fascists returned.

  In September 2005 I went to Toronto to visit Henry.

  “You won’t recognize him,” Stefan M. told me.

  And it was true: Henry was unrecognizable, his head shaven and his feet swollen. He could concentrate only for a few moments at a time. Yet what he wanted to talk about was Jan Gross and Jedwabne—or rather, about Soviet-occupied eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941.

  When on 17 September 1939, in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression treaty, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, most of them—of us, the Jews—were happy to see the Soviets, Henry insisted.

  “For the Jews September seventeenth was nothing,” he said.

  It was a brief moment of lucidity, then he fell back asleep.

  THAT WEEKEND IN Toronto I also visited Pani Hanka, who a decade earlier had taught me Polish. In the years that had passed she had retired, and her health had deteriorated. A heavy woman with short dark hair, she moved about with difficulty now, aided by a walker. I went to visit her in the small apartment where she lived with an unusually attractive gray cat.

  It was only now, for the first time, that she spoke to me about her family, about Poland, about why she had left. She spoke in Polish, slipping into Russian when she described her time in the Soviet Union. She’d been born in the early 1930s, in the town of Płock. Those were the years of the depression, and Pani Hanka was born into poverty—and into a family of devoted communists. Her father sat in prison, as did her aunt—who shared a prison cell with local criminals. One day, as Pani Hanka’s mother was pushing her two-year-old daughter in a carriage, she was suddenly approached by a known prostitute, who right there on the street embraced her and said, “Greetings from Rachela!”

  Rachela was Pani Hanka’s aunt. In her cell she had become friendly with the prostitute, a fellow prisoner.

  “My mother nearly died,” Pani Hanka said with a smile. She found it amusing now, all these years—and worlds—later.

  When in September 1939 the war came, Pani Hanka’s family fled east to Białystok, an eastern Polish city soon occupied by the Red Army and incorporated into Soviet Belarus. Then, like Bruno Jasieński and so many other Polish communists in the Soviet Union, her parents were falsely accused of anti-Soviet espionage and arrested, and Hanka was taken to an orphanage in Komi, far from Moscow in central Russia. After the German attack on the Soviet Union and the amnesty for Poles imprisoned there, her father made his way to Moscow. There in the capital Wanda Wasilewska arranged permission for him to travel to Komi and search for his daughter. That he found her was rather a miracle. Upon seeing him for the first time since his arrest, the eleven-year-old Hanka asked, “Ty shpion ili net?” She had to know: Was he a spy or not? Had he betrayed the Soviet Union—or not?

  It was a long war. By the time it ended and the family returned to Płock, Hanka no longer spoke Polish well. When he enrolled her in a Polish secondary school, her father said to her teacher, “She has to be humanized.”

  “The worst possible situation,” Pani Hanka said, “the only Jewish girl, Russian-speaking, with poor Polish.”

  She decided then that she would overcome all of this: Polish would be her best subject, and she would be the best student in her class.

  Later she went to study at the university in Moscow.

  “I was in Moscow when Stalin died,” Pani Hanka told me. We were sitting at her kitchen table, drinking tea. And she described those days, just after Stalin’s death, as a time of surreal contrast between hysterical crowds and quiet emptiness. She went to a beauty salon where she was the only customer. When she returned to the dormitory, with her hair done, her nails painted, her eyelashes freshly dyed with henna, the other girls asked her, “How could you?”

  The dormitory, like the salon, was largely empty. And so Pani Hanka lay in bed, reading, enjoying the quiet—while the other students stood in line for two days to see Stalin’s corpse.

  It was only there, as a university student in Moscow, that she became disillusioned with communism. She began work on a thesis about the Polish futurist–turned–Soviet writer Bruno Jasieński, the dandy executed during Stalin’s terror, in whose NKVD file I’d found a dead fly. She never completed the thesis.

  Pani Hanka had lived in Toronto for some thirty-five years, but she had never reconciled herself to the anti-Zionist campaign of March 1968. She had never fully accepted her exile. Yet it had been necessary.

  “How long is unrequited love possible?” she asked me.

  “I took my departure very hard,” she said, “the country where your friends are, where a boy kissed you for the first time, where you went to bed with a boy for the first time …”

&nbs
p; She was smiling, remembering Poland, her Poland.

  Before I left I showed her photographs from my wedding in Krakow that summer, and Pani Hanka began to cry. And I knew that she was crying not for my wedding but for a Poland that could, at moments, be so beautiful.

  IN THE SPRING of 2006 Kostek and Irena Grudzińska, a literary scholar who once had been Jan Gross’s wife and remained his friend, came to Indiana University for a conference on Solidarity. Kostek had been there for all of it—from Solidarity’s beginning to its end.

  Irena—like Jan and Henry Dasko and Pani Hanka—had been part of the “March emigration”: she’d left after March 1968, when as a student—like Jan and Alik Smolar and Adam Michnik—she had been arrested and sent to prison. She and Jan were in New Haven in the 1980s when they organized the Committee for the Defense of Solidarity.

  “It was like theater in a certain way,” Irena said, “suspension of disbelief—you had to believe that impossible things could happen.”

  For Irena, Solidarity was romantic. For Kostek, it was positivist. Nineteenth-century Polish positivism was a philosophy ultimately aimed at national liberation. It had emphasized “work at the foundations,” and in particular the role of journalism and education. And there were parallels. Unlike Václav Havel, who invoked the phenomenon “as if” to describe the greengrocer who lived a lie, pretending to admire the emperor’s new clothes, Adam Michnik had arrived at a very different notion of “as if”: “as if” as normative, as a moral imperative. One should live as if it were a free country, as if words mattered, as if civic education were possible, as if there were such a thing as moral responsibility—even under the communist regime. Kostek’s passion for journalism remained intertwined with this positivist side of Solidarity.