by Jan Morris
Alas, by the 1990s a more muted image of those woodland furies was the general image of Europe’s Gypsies. The endearing sales talk of the old door-to-door clothes-peg seller or iron merchant had become, in most people’s minds, the threatening whine of the street mendicant. Technology had deprived the Gypsies of their ancient crafts: poverty had made them turn more and more to petty crime. By now they haunted the railway stations of half the continent. They swarmed the streets of Bucharest. They were the street-thieves of Prague and Sofia. They touched one’s shoulder, feather-light, as they begged in the streets of Tirana. They camped in the undeveloped bomb-sites of Berlin. I found them once squatting in the very heart of the European Community, among the tower blocks of the Brussels bureaucracy. If you wanted to hear how Europeans had talked about Jews before the Second World War, you had only to hear them talking about Gypsies sixty years on. My own archetypal Gypsy figures of the 1990s were the groups of children who prowled the streets of Rome, seizing upon likely tourists to mouth their stylized litanies of hard luck, catching hold of skirts and coat-tails, scurrying and dancing from one side to the other, scampering off like shadows when they were thwarted in their pickpocketing. Poor little souls, they held cardboard boxes in front of them, the better to hide their thieving fingers.
58 The chosen
Last in this parade of the exceptions, paradoxes and anomalies that have so complicated and enlivened my vision of Europe – last to appear but, as in the old music-halls, top of the bill – must come the Jews. They entered Europe long, long ago, and they were like the comets of this continent, repeatedly streaking through its history in brilliance and in tragedy. They were its allegorical familiars, a ‘headstrong, moody, murmuring race’, as the English poet John Dryden said of them in the seventeenth century. Their great men and women reached the summits of Europe – socially, economically, intellectually, artistically. Their poor were among the poorest of all, and from the shtetls of Poland to the tenements of London’s East End the image of the Jew was the image of deprivation. It was also the image of the stranger: however profoundly assimilated, however successful and admired, the Jew remained the outsider. His religion if he had one, his appearance, his temperament, the impression he gave of wider and older loyalties, the mystery that so often seemed to surround him, the envy he inspired, the Christian superstitions that branded him an enemy of the faith, the conspiratorial legends that had been built up around his people down the centuries – they all combined to make him the ultimate loner of Europe.
And I write in the past tense because in the end they all combined, too, to destroy him. The emblematic tragedy of twentieth-century Europe, changing the very nature of the continent, was the deliberate extermination of Jewry at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers, which has meant that during my fifty years the Jews of Europe have been mostly ghosts. Wherever I go I find them, in vanished ghettos and in concentration camps, and I hear their sad melodies from hotel balconies, and wander among city streets somehow missing their salt.
59 The Jew’s House
I walked one day along the coastal path that leads to the famously picturesque Cornish village of Polperro, now one of the great tourist sites of southern England, not so long ago a remote fishing-port speaking its own Celtic language. Hardly had I entered the little town, past its picture-postcard fishing-harbour, where a large cat sat licking itself on the mud of a low tide, than I saw on the wall of an ancient building a noble proclamation: ‘The Jew’s House’. The words thrilled and fascinated me. Who was that Jew? How did he ever come to live in this distant corner of a western island? Did he move around that waterfront in black hat and ringlets? Were bar mitzvahs once celebrated in his cream-tea cottage? Might I have once seen through his narrow windows the seven-branched candelabrum of Israel? What became of him in the end? Was he burnt, or banished, or did his seed gradually mingle down the generations with the alien corn, until his very Jewishness was lost, and he was remembered only by those enigmatic words on the house by the harbour?
I was later assured that the words were really a corrupt translation of old Cornish – Tŷ Io, ‘Thursday House’ – and nothing to do with Jews at all. This did nothing to change the emotions I felt that day. For me there had been a Jew of Polperro, if not historically at least figuratively, and he can stand for me as an epitome of his people. Even in my time, when so many of the Jews had been murdered or dispersed, I could find their traces and sometimes their lingering presence in the remotest parts of the continent, where they had often arrived long before in threes and fours, a couple of families here, a solitary entrepreneur there. Into my own corner of Wales, in the peninsula called Llŷn that protrudes into the Irish Sea, the family of Pollecoffs (probably once Polyakoffs of Poland or Russia) long ago found their mysterious way, to become leading citizens of a district that could hardly have been more foreign to them: in the 1990s, though the last of the family had gone, still the name of their draper’s shop – Pollecoffs of Pwllheli – resounded through the columns of our telephone directory.
60 Dust in the temple
Even in Wales, a country not generally xenophobic, the Jews have had their troubles. In Pwllheli the Pollecoffs provided mayors for the town, but at the industrial end of Wales, during the Depression of the 1930s, the handful of Jewish shopkeepers sometimes found themselves scorned and persecuted. Still, it was nothing compared to the unimaginable swell of hatred which fell upon the Jews of Germany at the same time, and upon all the Jews of continental Europe soon after. I had little idea, when I first sat upon that bollard in Trieste, about the scale of the tragedy that had befallen this people – and certainly no premonition that for the rest of my life their fate would dog my footsteps around the continent. My first immediate intimation of the Shoah, the Holocaust, came when, wandering all uninformed around Trieste, I came to the immense and magnificent synagogue of the city. It was built to a cathedral scale – Mr Bultoen of Antwerp would have been proud of it. Its structure breathed cultivated wealth and confidence, because the Jews of Trieste had long been financiers and commerçants of international influence. By the 1900s, when that great building went up, they controlled much of the trade passing through the chief port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and into their hands and networks Vienna itself entrusted its interests. Brilliant Jews from Freud to Svevo had lived and worked in the city: even Mr Bloom of Ulysses might be said to be half Triestino, since James Joyce created much of the character when he was living here.
However, when I crept tentatively into the synagogue that day (for I had never been in a synagogue before), I found it in a state of misery. All its sheen was gone. Its fabric was decaying, and even its holiness seemed somehow half-hearted. Dust lay everywhere. I was not altogether surprised to find it in this state – most things in Europe were in a state of neglect or abeyance anyway, waiting to be revived – but I remember still the black shock I experienced when the reason for its condition dawned upon me: that almost all the Jews of Trieste, almost every one, had been taken away and murdered.
61 The void
I suppose the shades of murdered Jewry will haunt Europe for centuries. If nothing else, the remains of the Nazi concentration camps will see to that. Some are just desolate and abandoned sites, some are museums. Some are in forlorn brown landscapes of Poland, some close to exquisitely civilized cities of Germany itself. Coachloads of visitors go to visit them, in mourning or in voyeurism, and Jews from the four corners make their pilgrimages to the places of sacrifice – for as a sacrifice I long ago taught myself to think of it, a terrible and inexplicable atonement for us all. When I was young I considered the Shoah a totally meaningless expression of evil, but I came to see it as an allegorical burnt-offering. I was once walking towards the entrance gate of Buchenwald when a big group of tourists had just arrived. They were milling this way and that, trying to get the hang of the place, some making for the bookshop, some for the film-show, talking in many languages, but through their agitated forms I saw sitting on a
bench a solitary impassive figure, absolutely still and silent. He was patently a Jew. He sat there immobile, like a statue: and it was only when the crowd had dispersed, and he was left all alone there on his bench, that I saw him remove the spectacles from his eyes, to wipe the tears away.
For years after the war I used to notice, on the wrists of academics or of fellow travellers in buses, the tattoo marks of the concentration camps. They reminded me of Masons with their secret handshakes. By the 1970s I hardly ever saw those fateful brands. Most of the survivors had gone to join the murdered, and all over Europe they had left a sad void behind them. Jewishness had all but abandoned the continent – if not as absolutely as the Nazis wanted it, at least on a scale to make some of the oldest and most historic places judenfrei. Only a handful of Jews was left in the famous Jewish Town of Prague, where the tombs of a thousand years were tumbled together in the heart of the old ghetto, littered still with mourning-stones. At Vilnius in Lithuania, ‘the Jerusalem of eastern Europe’, virtually the whole Jewish community had been murdered in the extermination camp of Paneriai, only a few miles outside the city: the celebrated Great Synagogue and its library had been destroyed, together with some ninety-five smaller temples, and a Jewish quarter once famous for its culture and learning had been utterly expunged, only its street names remaining. If the city of Amsterdam somehow seemed short of pith or irony, it was because its Jews were gone. In Berlin an entire wealthy, cultivated and patriotic community, once vital to the nature of the capital, had vanished for ever. In the innumerable shtetls of Poland scarcely a Jew remained. One could easily travel from one end of the continent to another, through half a dozen ancient capitals, without seeing evidence of a living Jewish presence.
What must it have been like, then, to be a Jew of a certain age revisiting Europe after the Second World War and remembering all the life and variety of Jewishness that was lost? I have imagined sometimes how it would be to come home to my own country and find my people gone. Gone the little group of veterans on their bench outside the lifeboat station – dead the pubs where the Welshmen go – abandoned Siop Newydd the grocer, and Medical Hall the chemist’s shop on the corner of Stryd Fawr – Twm Morys and his poetry only a memory – nobody left to sing the old songs. No longer would cheerful Dewi the Post come bustling up Trefan lane, or the old ladies sit in their gossiping rows at the health clinic. The Welsh language would be for ever silent, the chapels defaced, and all my dear friends and neighbours would be mere shadows in the streets of our shtetl.
62 What did I expect?
As the twentieth century approached its end, I found everywhere signs of resurgence, among the remaining European Jews. Lucky Britain, of course, had never lost its Jews, and only in the 1990s, as month by month the London obituaries recorded the passing of yet another eminent Jewish citizen, did I really realize what a prodigious influx of refugees had enriched the national life since the 1930s. But elsewhere in Europe too, although there were still attacks on synagogues and desecrations of Jewish graves, in general it seemed to me that the Jews had regained their confidence. The virile example of Israel, like it or not, had helped to expunge the old images of Jews in their millions going passive to the slaughter: as was said even by Guy de Rothschild, the banker, Israel had liberated ‘part of our inner ego’. The immense power of American Jewry was like money in the bank for the remaining European Jews, and the very idea of Jewishness, for so long a slur or an accusation, had acquired glamour and prestige. The ghetto at Venice – the original ghetto, which I remembered as a dingy and half-abandoned semi-slum – had become a sight of the city, its synagogues restored and active, its treasures proudly displayed. The diamond district of Antwerp, one of the most important in the world, hummed once more with the activity of its Jewish cutters, polishers, sawyers and choppers – a proper Jewish quarter come to life again. Eighty thousand Jews lived in Budapest, making it once again among the great Jewish cities of Europe, and their towered Great Synagogue had been magnificently restored. In Gibraltar Jews were prosperous and influential. In Prague the tiny remnant of that Jewish Town, almost as stifled under the Communists as it had been under the Nazis, had been miraculously regenerated as a community, and thousands of respectful tourists passed through its cemeteries and synagogues. In Vilnius a few thousand Jews had returned, a solitary synagogue was active again, a National Jewish Museum had been started, and there was a kosher restaurant – ‘call in advance for group bookings’. In Kazimierz, the old ghetto of Kraków, tourists flocked to eat kosher luncheons in the reconstructed square, to visit the new Jewish Cultural Centre, to follow the trail of Steven Spielberg’s holocaust film Schindler’s List, to place their reverent stones upon the grave of the holy Rabbi Remu’h, or to go on tours to Auschwitz. In Bratislava, where most of the Jews were murdered or deported by the Nazis, where the Jewish district beneath the castle had been destroyed by the Communists, and where there was still a rumorous suggestion of anti-Semitism, there arose on the very site of the old quarter a spanking modern pension, Chez David, strictly kosher, gleamingly comfortable, and much in demand among tourists Jewish and Gentile. At Tomar in Portugal they told me that the little synagogue had recently celebrated its first Yom Kippur since 1497, when Jews had either to leave the country or convert to Christianity: families forcibly converted then were reverting to Judaism, and ‘secret Jews’ who had semi-clandestinely kept the faith through all those centuries were coming into the open again. Lights were hopefully shining in the synagogue at Sarajevo, when I passed by one dismal evening in 1996. In post-Franco Spain I found a cantor from North Africa giving a singing lesson next door to his synagogue high in a modern office block. In post-Fascist Turin I learnt for the first time that the shining pinnacled Mole Antonelliana, which towers above the city as its universally recognized emblem, had begun life as a spectacular project for a synagogue. Even in Germany, though pathetically few and sometimes abused by louts, the Jews presently recovered their assurance. Years ago, from my bedroom window at the Kempinski Hotel, on Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin, I used to look directly down upon the Jewish Community Centre. It incorporated the doorway of a synagogue that had stood on the site until it was burnt by the Nazis in 1938, and was then almost the only Jewish institution still active in the city. Even then I was amazed at the evident wealth and certainty of the Jews who used to arrive to enter its gates, elegantly on foot or swishily in their expensive cars. But what did I expect? Striped suits of the concentration camps? Ghetto rags?
63 The frisson
Up a dingy flight of stairs in Vienna I went to visit Dr Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter. He seemed to me in every way a figure from the past. For one thing he was unmistakably a Jew from the pre-war Europe, a Polish Jew, a survivor of the camps. Short, balding, in his seventies, he was surrounded in his cluttered room by certificates of merit and scrolls of gratitude, for he was an award-winning Nazi-hunter. Then again, he was implacable in a way that younger European Jews I had met no longer were: they were unforgetting, of course, but did not harbour revenge. Wiesenthal undoubtedly did. He would call it retribution, and he had devoted his life to tracking down the last of the Nazi murderers and seeing that they were punished – year after year, decade after decade, while those once-swaggering S S men grew frail and forgetful, and Wiesenthal himself entered old age fired still by his tireless and merciless search for justice. If he had anything to do with it, he said, no single Nazi murderer, however old and grey, would ever be allowed to die in peace. I thought his office, up above Salztorstrasse, unforgettably baleful. The files that filled its walls were dreadful files of death and torture. Wiesenthal talked disturbingly about wicked men still alive and flourishing in Europe. Just along the road was the old Jewish quarter of Vienna, and its concomitant the Gestapo headquarters.
Many people, and not only Jews, greatly admired Dr Wiesenthal. Many more, and not only Gentiles, disliked him, and feared what he stood for. Not least the Viennese, whose communal conscience about the Jews was less than cl
ear, very much wished he would go somewhere else. There had been an attempt on his life a few weeks before my visit, and a police guard had reluctantly been given him. That day’s sentry looked up at me as I left Wiesenthal’s office. He was a blond long-haired youth with a gun on his lap, lounging there on a bench with his feet on a chair, chewing something: and as he insolently stared at me, and at the old gentleman saying goodbye to me at the door, I felt an uneasy frisson.
3
NATIONS, STATES AND BLOODY POWERS
*
As I say, in Trieste, or Trst as the Slovenes prefer, or Triest as the Austrians have it, you are not quite sure what nation you are among. If a nation can be defined as an amalgam of ethnicity, language, history and landscape, or as James Joyce’’s Mr Bloom more succinctly thought ‘the same people living in the same place’, then the nationality of Trieste is far from absolute, and when the city soccer team plays elsewhere in Italy its players are sometimes sneered at as Slavs or Germans. As the Mayor exclaimed to me, one day in the 1970s, ‘We are the furthest limit of Latinity, the southern extremity of Germanness’ – he could have said a western protrusion of Slavness too, but that might have been politically incorrect. When I first came here Trieste’s Statehood was just as debatable. The Yugoslavs had some claim to it by force majeure (they had played a powerful part in forcing the Germans and Italian Fascists out), by history (they had been fellow citizens, with the Triestini, of the lost Habsburg Empire) and by blood (outside the city centre most of Trieste’s people were Slovene). The Italians could claim it because it had been in more ancient times an Italian seaport, and because they had been awarded it as spoils of victory after the First World War. History had thrown it about between sovereignties, and was still tossing it then–in 1947 it was declared a free territory under United Nations protection, almost a State itself, and only in 1954 did the city become once more part of Italy.