The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  “Democrats have an obligation to know underground printing,” he told the audience, “the way a person has an obligation to know first aid.”

  Today, paradoxically, things were more complicated.

  “I never really expected I would live to see the day …” Kostek said.

  In Kostek’s mind Solidarity’s strength had been its singularity of purpose: “getting the Reds out.” “Contradictions galore,” he added, “—it didn’t matter.”

  Then suddenly—“after we had the misfortune of winning”—the contradictions did matter. People were unhappy.

  “You get steadily fed a diet of miracles,” Kostek said, “you come to expect them, and then eventually when the miracles run out …”

  He put this more bluntly: “If Solidarity is mine, then I’m responsible for your unfulfilled dreams … but if this price was too high, then the bottom line would be—the smart thing to have done was nothing.… In the long run, the guys who refused to take underground literature from me in the seventies were right, I was wrong …”

  But I knew he didn’t really believe this. He would do it all again.

  Later, at a bar in Bloomington, we ordered vodka and Kostek told me a story he’d heard from Adam Michnik. It was a story that had taken place decades earlier, before March 1968 when they had all still lived in Warsaw.

  Adam Michnik was having a party, and a friend of his arrived there looking sad. When Adam asked him why he looked so sad, the friend said he had spent a whole half hour at the Hotel Europejski café with Irena Grudzińska.

  “Well and what? You should be happy!” Irena Grudzińska was the legendary beauty of their generation.

  “No one saw us!”

  Irena, all these years later, remembered that day; she remembered how, during the whole time they spent at that café, the young man never looked at her but rather kept glancing around. She’d been quite irritated.

  “Everyone wanted to impress Irena Grudzińska—that’s why the revolution happened,” Kostek said.

  Irena was embarrassed.

  “It’s annoying,” she said, “how they always tell me: ‘How beautiful you were!’ ”

  In fact she was beautiful still. She still had the same long golden hair with gentle waves she’d had forty years earlier.

  In retaliation Irena told me another story: Kostek’s older sister, Irena’s close friend, had once called her and said, “Kostek is doing it again, hassling our mother, but this time, it’s even worse.”

  “Doing what?” Irena said.

  “Saying he’s Jewish!”

  Irena Grudzińska, Adam Michnik, Kostek Gebert, and his sister all shared largely the same biography—yet only Kostek had embraced Jewishness—and Judaism. Once, Kostek said, he and Adam had drunk endless amounts of vodka, trying to discover what had gone wrong and with whom—and to little avail. For Adam the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a defining moment: for he felt shame at Poland’s participation in that Sovietled invasion, and he believed that he must belong to the nation on whose behalf he could feel shame.

  “My shame for the acts of others,” Kostek said, “came after Sabra and Shatila.”

  Sabra and Shatila were refugee camps in Beirut. It was September 1982, during the Lebanese civil war. Israeli forces were occupying Beirut. They were surrounding Sabra and Shatila when Christian Lebanese Phalangists massacred Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in those camps.

  The following day was Saturday—Shabbat—and Kostek and I talked more in my Bloomington apartment.

  “Someone who has witnessed 1989,” he told me, “does not have the moral right to be a pessimist.”

  And this remained true, despite any disappointments of postcommunist Poland. At one point a former secret police informer came to him to ask for a letter of recommendation. The onetime informer justified his absurd request: after all, Kostek did not recognize him, even though he had once trailed Kostek for quite some time. And insofar as Kostek had never noticed him, he must have been good at his job. Were not such people needed under every government?

  For Kostek what was most haunting about the postcommunist years was Bosnia, the center of the Yugoslav Wars, the site of massacres of whole villages and rapes of tens of thousands of women. Ten years earlier Kostek had stood in the Bosnian trenches, covering the war for Gazeta Wyborcza. When he returned to Warsaw he was the only person on the United Nations cargo jet flying from Sarajevo—which might have carried 350 people to safety. The United Nations, though, did not evacuate civilians. What Kostek had seen in Bosnia still haunted him: the people who died together, their corpses locked in an embrace, the bodies that decomposed, melted into one another.

  It was growing dark when Kostek told me about Bosnia. Afterward we performed the Havdalah ceremony marking the end of Shabbat, with ground cloves and ersatz candles made of paper napkins and lit on the stove.

  It was especially poignant to hear stories about Bosnia from Kostek, whose parents had believed more in the logic of History than in individual choice. On the contrary, Kostek’s father, a Polish immigrant who had been a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States, had been convinced of the justness of History’s iron laws. In 1947, he had returned to Poland from the United States to help build communism there. Those were the years when being the child of communists came with “the very pleasant feeling of being on the right side of History.”

  Kostek went on to devote many years to destroying the very system his parents had devoted their own lives to creating. His father, to his death, remained an unrepentant Stalinist. His parents, Kostek believed, “contributed to building something that became truly evil.” They knew, at the end, that their lives had been wasted.

  “They lived too long,” Kostek said.

  And yet he had loved them very much. He believed, too, that he was similar.

  “Everything good in me I have from my parents,” he told me. “If I spent a dozen or so years of my life trying to pull down the system they pulled up, it was because of values that they had taught me.”

  A Star of the Stage

  When in the summer of 2006 I flew from Paris to Moscow, the contrast, so disquieting, reminded me of my Warsaw–Jerusalem trips of a decade earlier. Paris was so small, so intimate, so intimidatingly beautiful. Moscow was so enormous, everything—the buildings, the streets, the escalators—on a scale larger than life. And terribly ugly. Even the Russian spoken in Moscow was harsher than the Russian in Petersburg. There was formality without civility. Moscow had always felt to me like a city where anything could happen to anyone and no one would be accountable.

  Now, in the Moscow State University dormitory where I lived, mice ran about in the corridor. A pack of stray dogs, too, lived on the vast university campus. I passed them every day when I went jogging. Sometimes they ran with me. It was difficult to love Moscow, one could only reconcile oneself to her.

  IN MOSCOW THAT July of 2006 I saw two of my favorite colleagues from Indiana, Yiddishists who had been traveling through Ukraine, videotaping oral histories of the few remaining native Yiddish speakers. I joined them one afternoon for an interview with one of the last surviving members of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. The theatrical troupe had been founded in 1919, just after the Bolshevik Revolution. A communist project to promote a secular Jewish culture, the theater flourished for three decades—before Stalin’s anti-Semitic, “anticosmopolitan” campaign of 1949 brought about its demise.

  The eighty-eight-year-old woman who greeted us when we arrived at her old Moscow apartment had been a star of the Yiddish stage in her youth. She welcomed us as if she had been waiting expectantly all these years, anticipating that paparazzi would appear at her door at any moment. Now elderly, she greeted us in high heels and earrings, in perfectly applied makeup. She was not only lucid but also energetic—she had the articulation of an actor and the presence of a performer.

  What did she remember?

  She remembered, she insisted, very much. She
had been born in a shtetl, a small town where she had lived only among Jews. And in that Jewish shtetl where she grew up, in Soviet Ukraine, she remembered that the school was beautiful and the theater was built of wood. There was a market, too, all on the street where she lived.

  It had been a very long time since she had lived her life in Yiddish. It was her native language, yet now she continually slipped into Russian, and my colleagues had to bring her back.

  Her father had been a merchant. They had lived well, in a very nice house, a tall house. Then came Stalin, and the forced collectivization of agriculture, and in 1932 and 1933 the famine in Ukraine that saw millions of deaths by starvation. While Stalin forcibly requisitioned their grain and sold it abroad for hard currency to finance Soviet industrialization, desperate peasants resorted to cannibalism. I had seen unbearable photographs of children’s emaciated bodies.

  “Uzhas,” she said, then translated into Yiddish, “a shod.” Uzhas seemed much stronger to me—it was less “shame” and more “horror.” And it had been horror—the horror of the hunger—that made her family flee. Some family members left sooner, some later. They headed to the city, to Moscow, together with so many other young Jews from the shtetl trying to escape the famine. That was when she had to learn Russian. She was young then and liked to sing and dance, and people said of her, “Zi muz zayn a yidishe aktrise” (She must become a Yiddish actress).

  And in Moscow she did become a Yiddish actress. She not only acted, she also sang and danced. She remembered, she claimed, everything—all the plays, all the songs, all the characters.

  “Ikh hob geshpilt gute rolen,” she wanted us to know. She was still proud of that, that she had played such good roles.

  She belonged to an excellent theatrical troupe. In 1935, as Ukraine was recovering from famine and the Stalinist terror was accelerating, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater put on a fantastically successful production of King Lear.

  After all these years, her love for the theater, for music and drama, was indefatigable. She was so expressive, so animated—her articulation, her gestures, her intonation.

  “What was your favorite song?” I asked her.

  And in response she began to perform it: there in her small, tattered living room she sang and danced. She still remembered the melody, the lyrics, even the choreography. It was something remarkable, as if all those years in between, the years without Yiddish theater, had been inessential.

  AT THE MAYAKOVSKY Museum in Moscow, I was struck again by Mayakovsky’s beauty. His paintings with their sharp shapes and dark, vivid colors reminded me of Pani Ryszarda, Szymon Zachariasz’s daughter, who remembered the Stalinist years as a time of the brightest colors.

  Inside the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow was the furnished room where the poet had ended his life.

  I read Vladimir Mayakovsky’s letters to his lover Lilia Brik. He signed them, “Tvoi shchenok” (Your puppy). Mayakovsky loved dogs.

  In the archives of the State Literary Museum I found a telegram sent to Lilia Brik and her husband, Osip, during their trip abroad to Berlin. The date was 14 April 1930, the text a single line: “segodnia utrom wolodia pokontschil soboi” (This morning Volodia took his own life).

  IN MOSCOW I telephoned Wanda Wasilewska’s daughter. We had met only once, four years earlier, but Ewa Wasilewska immediately recognized my voice, or perhaps my accent in Russian, and replied in Polish.

  I went to visit her at her apartment on Leningradskii prospekt. When the elevator reached the eighth floor, Liza, the diminutive dachshund, ran out of the apartment to greet me. I was very happy to see her, the “domestic tyrant,” I’d feared she would be gone.

  “She remembers you,” Ewa Wasilewska said to me.

  I wanted to think it was true. Liza the dachshund was, in any case, very demanding of attention. I spoke to Ewa in Polish, but when I turned to the dog Ewa told me that I would need to switch to Russian, for Liza had never learned Polish.

  Wanda Wasilewska’s daughter was nearing eighty, she yet looked considerably younger. She was easy to talk to, intelligent and thoughtful. She told me about how her mother had played such a large role in raising her son, and about how her daughter had died of leukemia some two decades earlier, at the age of only nineteen.

  Ewa Wasilewska advised me about marriage: there would be many times when my husband and I would disagree—there would be many such occasions, because men and women were different—and I would know that I was right, and I would be right—but even so, it was better to concede. It had taken her years to learn this, she told me.

  Later her husband returned home and joined us, and we began to speak Russian. Like his wife, he looked much younger than his age. They were both unusually warm and sympathetic—in contrast to the city that surrounded us, which was so harsh. We drank a bottle of white Crimean wine—dry and heavy and strong.

  Lustration

  In 2007 I gave a lecture at a small college town in the Midwest where I met a university press editor who had grown up in Poland. Once, she told me, when she was a child, she had met a certain woman who had been a close friend of Wanda Wasilewska and Janina Broniewska and Jakub Berman.

  This woman, the editor told me, was a nice person, a warm person. The editor had pictures of her at her grandfather’s funeral, or perhaps it was her grandmother’s.

  “How did your grandparents know her?” I asked her. “Kuibyshev,” the editor began.

  Kuibyshev, a city in southern Russia, on the banks of the Volga River, had been a gathering place for Polish communists in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Wanda Wasilewska had set up editorial offices there. Janina Broniewska and Adam Ważyk had been there, among others. Since the fall of communism, “Kuibyshev” no longer existed: in 1991 the city had returned to its pre-Soviet name, Samara.

  Unconsciously I raised my eyebrows—or perhaps I did nothing, yet the editor seemed immediately to regret having spoken the name of that Russian city.

  Suddenly she looked at me nervously, “Please don’t tell anyone, I don’t tell people.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said.

  Her father had grown up in interwar Poland. When he was six years old, his mother was taken away from him: like Pani Ryszarda’s father and Alik Smolar’s father, like the parents of many other people I had come to know, she went to prison because she was a communist. The police offered to release her if she would cooperate … but she refused. She would not inform on her comrades, so the editor’s grandmother remained in prison.

  “Nineteen sixty-eight was the end for them,” she said, “so you know what kind of communists they were.”

  WHEN IN 2003 Poland, together with the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Malta, and Cyprus, was invited to join the European Union, most Americans assumed that the Poles would be thrilled and grateful. In fact it was not a foregone conclusion that in Poland the referendum on joining the European Union would pass.

  For many in postcommunist Poland, the European Union meant national self-negation: cosmopolitanism, contraception, abortion, homosexuality—in short, godless decadence.

  In the end, the Poles in favor of joining “Europe” won the referendum—but thereafter, their opponents took their revenge. A national-populist government came to power. Warsaw’s mayor banned a gay rights parade and Poland’s harsh antiabortion laws remained in place.

  Then there was Wildstein’s List. What happened in Czechoslovakia in 1992, during the controversies over lustration, happened in Poland thirteen years later. It was late January 2005, a year after Poland had joined the European Union and three years after the Jedwabne debate. The journalist Bronisław Wildstein copied a list of names from the state’s Institute of National Remembrance, a list of names that included people who had cooperated with the secret police—and people whom the secret police had hoped to induce to cooperate. Bronisław Wildstein posted his list on the internet.

  I had learned about Wildstein’s List in February 2005 fro
m Kostek. He had been in Vienna for a few days; we’d been drinking espresso at the café Alt Wien, Kostek had been smoking a pipe. He was very unhappy: from the opening of other people’s files he was learning things about his friends, about people he had long admired, that he would have preferred not to have known.

  In some way it was a diabolical thing Bronisław Wildstein had done: many of the names on the list were names of former dissidents whom the secret police had hoped to coerce into informing on their friends. The only way to prove one’s innocence, though, was to make public the contents of the file.

  Kostek’s name was on the list. Now he could either suffer his innocence in silence or expose to the media nearly two decades of his private life—and the private lives of many close to him. Was he willing now to find out which of his friends had betrayed him? He preferred not to know, he did not want his life unraveled. And that was not the only reason: Kostek had been married for many years; he and his wife had four grown children. Under communism he’d known his apartment had been bugged. But what could he do—never talk to his family at all? Perhaps more importantly, was he willing to risk humiliating his wife by making public a file that could expose what they said to each other in bed?

  Kostek chose not to open his file. He did not want to see it.

  Others made different choices. That fall of 2005 a visiting Polish scholar at Indiana stopped by my apartment for tea.

  Although her own name was not there, Wildstein’s List had been traumatic for her as well.

  “One of our friends hanged himself,” she said.

  And the rise of the new, populist Right was only beginning.

  The Władysław Broniewski Museum fell under the supervision of a new appointee at the Literary Museum, a nationalistically inclined historian, who now “reminded” Pan Sławek of his past in the Party. And so, after decades of having been the devoted curator of the Broniewski Museum and its archival collections, Pan Sławek was considering early retirement. The assistant curator, who had worked with Pan Sławek for many years, begged him to stay. She liked Pan Sławek very much.