The war turned out to last only a matter of days, but Ruwen was sent to work on a kibbutz run by the German Zionist movement near the Lebanese border. After two months he returned to Dusseldorf, a hero in the Jewish Community, no longer confined to stairwells, giving talks about his experiences in the city's major halls and meeting places to Jews and non-Jews. After several months, he returned to Israel, and soon he was running into many of his friends from Germany who had also decided to emigrate. But time passes swiftly in Israel, and to Israelis the war was already long over by then. The Germans lost their sense of purpose and, a few at a time, went back to Germany. Only Ruwen stayed to make his life as an Israeli. He married Carmela, an Iraqi Jew who had lived in Israel since she was a small child.
Aaron and Lea may have had their hearts in Israel, but their pants store was in Dusseldorf. Every year, while they preached Zionism, their lives became more deeply entrenched in West Germany and the German economic miracle. The store was prospering, and they had a large apartment on a wide rebuilt boulevard near the center of the city, not far from the birthplace of Heinrich Heine, the Jewish poet who a century earlier had written passionate verses of his love for Germany.
And others, like Lea's parents, were returning from Israel. One German Jewish family that had lived in Israel since Hitler came to power moved to Dusseldorf over the sad protests of their two Israeli-born children. In Tel Aviv this family of four had lived in one room of a four-room, four-family house with a common kitchen and bathroom. Educated people, the father worked small teaching jobs and his wife was a maid. In 1953 they were evicted from the house and were about to move to a distant housing project in a slum. Instead, to their children's great chagrin, they moved to Dusseldorf, where he worked as an editor on the Jewish newspaper and lived in an apartment in the center of town. He had a love of the language and culture, and in truth it was the country where he was most at home. Still, no one in this family loved Germany the way Heine had. They loved German literature and no doubt knew Heine's famous verse, “O Deutschland, meine feme Liebe” but to them, for the past twenty years in exile, Germany had been not a far-off love but a horror they had escaped. Now it was simply a place where they could have a good job and a decent apartment. Israel had not offered that.
DUSSELDORF, like all West German cities, was being rebuilt with a modern opulence it had never before seen. Within walking distance from the Wakses’ was the Konigsallee, where trees were planted and rococo bridges built over a little dark canal. Both sides were lined with cafes and shops, where enormous quantities of money could be spent on anything with a label on it. Nothing creative or original was being offered, only status name brands, so that West Germans could spend their money and display their wealth.
West Germans embraced materialism with the same set-jawed determination with which they had done everything else. The people who, when blockaded from munitions in World War I, had made their own by learning how to extract nitrogen from the air, were now focusing their ingenuity on becoming rich. Economic growth became the all-important measure between the two Ger-manies. West Germany had it, and East Germany didn't. West German growth was so rapid that in the early 1960s there was a labor shortage—a need for foreign laborers, guest workers to live in Germany without citizenship and do the work that Germany needed done. These growth figures were a point of national pride for the West. Every sign of prosperity was an important benchmark. Germany had been mired for too long in ideologies. The East Germans were still stuck in one. But West Germany would be the successful new Germany, a land of material wealth. As the ruined cities were rebuilt, each one had a boulevard like the Konigsallee, the most important being the Ku'damm, because it was in West Berlin, the ultimate display case of the Federal Republic deep inside the GDR.
Protz is a German word for showiness, too many gold rings, flaunted wealth. The Israeli-born daughter of the man who took the newspaper job in Dusseldorf concluded after years of reflection that it was this flirtation with gaudiness, the Protz, that seduced. It was a dramatic contrast to the harsh life in Israel. It kept bringing German Jews back, and it held them there. Aaron and Lea Waks would go to Israel someday, but for now they had the trouser business, just as for Ron Zuriel his law practice was keeping him in Berlin.
But the Wakses and the Zuriels had distanced themselves from the fact that they were in Germany by not associating with non-Jews, by preserving their stern and critical distance from “the Germans.” When student demonstrations began erupting in Berlin in 1968, Ron Zuriel found it an encouraging sign. Here was a truly new generation of Germans rejecting their parents’ world. “They actually revolted against the attitude of their parents… they were rejecting everything institutional,” he said. This was a German movement of which he could approve. They were saying the same things about Germany that he had been saying. He even began to hope that new Germans were being made who could construct a new Germany.
But if the 1968 demonstrations reassured Ron Zuriel because a new generation was rejecting their parents, they also showed that all was not well in the new German shopping paradise. In June 1967 demonstrators had greeted Willy Brandt and the Shah of Iran in Berlin, and while they were in the opera house listening to Mozart, police attacked the student demonstrators outside, killing one. In April 1968 two Frankfurt department stores were burned, and a week later a leader of the student movement was shot by a psychopath, who hanged himself. The incident led to a week of rioting in Berlin and around West Germany in which two were killed and four hundred wounded. The new, nonideological consumer society was turning out to be an angry and violent place after all.
MOISHE WAKS, five years younger than his brother, had to wait six years before he too could move to Israel. When he finally did, he found himself feeling a bit alone in a strange land. He had Ruwen and Carmela, and a friend of Carmela's family whom Moishe had met in Germany became his only friend. He played soccer well, and that gave him an activity. It was a beginning.
Ruwen seemed very nervous during the holidays that year. As Yom Kippur approached, he warned Moishe not to go anywhere by car, saying, “They will kill you.” Moishe did not know what to think about that—the presumably Arab “they” was not explained. That evening, from his apartment near the university, he could see an almost infinite line of buses speeding by. But he had no telephone and lived alone, and he had no way of finding out what the buses might mean. The next day, Yom Kippur, he was tired of being alone and decided to visit some friends from Germany who were staying at a nearby hotel.
Moishe drove to the hotel without incident. Surely his brother was overreacting, he thought, and had been needlessly worried. Nobody seemed to be out killing anyone. He spent the day with his friends, and only when his brother, who had been frantically looking for him, finally found him, did Moishe understand that a war, the Yom Kippur War, had begun. There was no soccer, nothing for him to do, and he went to a kibbutz to replace someone who was righting. His only friend was killed in the war. Moishe began to understand what his grandparents had always told him: Life was very hard in Israel.
18
Passing
in Warsaw
THE LATE 1960S WOULD HAVE BEEN A GOOD TIME FOR Jews in Poland to have had amnesia. But as perverse fate had it, it was at this time that memory started returning. In 1965, Marian Turski accidentally discovered his loss of memory at the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Theresienstadt, where he was talking with a well-known Polish Jewish figure with whom he had been in the camps. The man started reminiscing about the time Turski had saved his life.
“I saved your life?” asked a perplexed Turski.
“On the death march! Remember?”
Turski tried to look into his own memory, but he had no idea what this man was referring to. “Tell me about it,” he said, and he questioned the man for more and more details. Then he realized that he remembered almost nothing of his experiences in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, and the murderous marches to them. He began r
eading books about the Holocaust. Until then, accidentally scanning the cover of such a book in his peripheral vision had been a disturbing experience. Now he was soaking them up with a hunger that was like the end of hibernation. He also read books about Judaism. He spent his time thinking about his experiences and the collective Jewish experience. The following year, he visited Auschwitz, officially “the place of martyrdom of Polish nations and other nations.” He rummaged through barracks and visited the subcamp where he had been held. Facing the horror of it was a price he could pay to get back his memory. It was the beginning of what Turski was to call his “comeback.”
This was a time when Poles were also thinking more about Jews, which is generally not a good thing in Poland. For all its impact on Western European Jews, the Six-Day War affected Jewish lives in the Soviet bloc even more profoundly. The Soviet Union had reversed its Middle East policy twelve years earlier, when the British had tried to forcibly prevent Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser from nationalizing the Suez Canal. By the time of the Six-Day War, the Soviet bloc was firmly on the Arab side, supplying and training Arab armies. To the Poles, the spectacle of Soviet-trained armies being routed in less than a week by a bunch of Jews brought glee and pleasure to an increasingly anti-Soviet people. “Jojne poszedl na wojne” the Poles snickered —“Jojne went to war,” the phrase being cute in Polish because the first and last words rhyme.
Jojne is Polish slang, the anti-Semitic stereotype of the cowardly Jew who can't and won't fight. But finally the Jojne had fought, and they won in six days, defeating all those armies so carefully trained and equipped by the Soviets. It was a wonderful joke. Some Poles, even though they never called a Jew a Pole, started taking pride in the Polishness of Israelis. After all, a large part of the Israeli population had been born in Poland. And many of the most warlike Israelis—the organizers of the Haganah, for example—came out of Jewish defense movements in Poland. Was the Six-Day War not in some way a victory of Poles over Soviets? Marian Turski, who was traveling around Poland for his newspaper, constantly encountered such contorted observations.
But party boss GomuJka was not amused. Though he was a Polish nationalist who had fought many political battles with Moscow, the intensity of anti-Soviet feelings in Poland troubled him. He worried about what would happen if war broke out with the West. And, of course, Moscow was even less amused than Gomulka. According to Turski's sources from the period, Gomulka attended a secret meeting in Moscow in which it was decided that something had to be done about the Polish attitude.
WHILE IT WAS TRUE that there were many Polish-born Israelis, Jews were getting to be rare in Poland. After the upheaval of 1956, about half of the remaining Jews had left. Available figures are imprecise, but at most there were between 25,000 and 35,000 Jews left. Everyone had their own count because divining who was or was not a Jew had become an arcane Polish hobby.
No one would have counted the Gruberskis, for example, who lived in Sochaczew, a town near Warsaw. They were Polish Communist atheists, although on occasion they sent their fourteen-year-old daughter Barbara to mass. She wasn't baptized; nor was she encouraged to believe. Barbara was stubborn and different and a little difficult, and other children didn't like her. They would call her that standard Polish curse, “Zyd,” Jew. Sometimes they would call her Dreyfus or Beilis, after Mendel Beilis, who had been accused of ritual murder in Kiev early in the century. They would deliberately stretch out and distort vowels to make these names sound especially heinous.
Barbara didn't know who Beilis or Dreyfus had been, and she didn't really know what a Jew was. When she asked her parents why the other children called her Jew, they explained that it was because she was adopted. Many people her age were adopted, including a girl in the next house. But nobody called that girl “Zycf.” Her mother explained that it was her dark thick hair. Her mother also had dark thick hair, but she was not called a Jew, perhaps because she had light blue Polish eyes. Barbara had dark eyes.
Finally, in 1958, when Barbara was 16, her mother decided to tell her the truth. Barbara had been born in the Warsaw ghetto. Her real parents may have been from the nearby town of Lovice, but that was not certain. Her mother may have been the daughter of a doctor. In any case, they were Jews and had some money, and they had been trapped in the ghetto and desperate. A contract was drawn up in which they paid Polish people to take care of their baby daughter, Barbara. In addition to the monthly payments, a substantial settlement would be made after the war if the parents survived and took back the child. Three months were paid in advance, but after the three months there were no more payments, and the Polish foster parents had lost interest in caring for the child. When the Gruberskis first saw her at the foster parents’ home, she was starving. They offered the seven-month-old baby a piece of bread, and she hungrily ate it. Childless, the Gruberskis happily adopted her and had a new birth certificate drawn up.
Even more shocking for Barbara was the news that the original foster parents were people she knew—the Kwiatkowskis, who rented an apartment from the Gruberskis in the neighborhood. Kazimiera Kwiatkowska was a first cousin of Barbara's adopted mother. They often visited and had four children with whom Barbara would play.
At first, Barbara was not certain how she felt about all this. She kept thinking about the fact that the Kwiatkowskis, who she still saw regularly, probably still had the contract, something from her real mother. It would probably have her mother's signature on it. She decided to confront them, a reckoning, a showdown. Once faced with the embarrassing news that Barbara knew the truth, the Kwiatkowskis were willing to talk to her about it. But they did not want to give her the contract. “It was written by my mother, and I want to have it,” Barbara argued. She had a way of setting her jaw and turning her eyes into cold shining dark stones. Realizing that she would never relent, they gave it to her.
According to the document, Barbara had been turned over for 700 zfotys per month, with three months to be paid in advance. In 1942 this had been a substantial payment, far more than care for a baby would cost. But, of course, the foster parents were taking a risk, for which they had to be paid. If they were caught hiding a Jewish baby, the entire family would be shot. The baby was young enough that there was no reason to suspect it wasn't theirs. As the Kwiatkowskis told Barbara, nobody in the neighborhood would have turned them in, because they were all involved in black market meat for sausages—the Kwiatkowskis stored the meat. One raid on their home, and the whole neighborhood would have been in trouble. For years afterward, Barbara liked to tell people, “If I am alive today, it's only because of all the kielbasa the Poles eat.”
Barbara took the contract home with her, but could not leave it in a drawer. Whenever she was home, she had to take it out and look at it. The paper was signed Karolina Leboida. That signature was the only trace of her real mother—just the signature, not the name itself. It was a Polish name, because her parents had tried to survive outside the ghetto by taking other names, just as Barbara (Irene Hochberg) Gora had done. But the name Leboida hadn't worked like Gora, and they were rounded up and put in the ghetto.
Who were they? What was her mother's real name? What was she like? Barbara Gruberska asked herself these things. Then she started asking, “And who am I? What is my real name?” She went back to the Kwiatkowskis for more information, but they had no more to tell. She took the signature to a handwriting analyst who compared the signature Karolina Leboida and with Barbara's own. The handwriting expert told her that Karolina Leboida was extremely intelligent, fearless, and well organized. Analyzing Barbara's signature, he concluded that these two people would not get along well.
Barbara decided that she would be best off, after all, as Barbara Gruberska, Polish Catholic Communist. She tried to be even more Catholic than her upbringing. But even with regular church attendance, she was not completely safe. At a youth camp in Bulgaria a Russian boy said to her, “You have Jewish hair.” she became furious and repeatedly denied that her hair was Jewish. She went to Mo
scow, and a man on a subway platform asked her where she was from. When she told him she was from Poland, he said, “Ah, a Jew from Poland.” And once in Wroclaw, on a tram, a man made his way toward her. She looked at him and knew he was Jewish. “So when are you moving to Israel?” the man said. Once again, Barbara became furious. “What are you talking about? Going to Israel! Me go to Israel? As a matter of fact, I am on my way to mass right now!”
EVEN BARBARA GORA, with years of practice, could not always pass. When she finished studying agriculture, she moved to a small Silesian village, Stare Olesno, where she worked on a state-run experiment developing a new breed of potato. That was the system: Take a bright young Pole and invest years in training her to be an agronomist—only to bring more potatoes to Poland.
Even though she was a party member, she did not have the usual tensions with the peasants, and she also got along well with the other scientists. She found that the Silesians, for all their German language and culture, were not anti-Semitic. But like other Poles, they had a knack for spotting a Jew when they saw one. Although nobody ever said that she was Jewish, things were often said that made her realize that everyone simply assumed that she was. One of the workers confessed that he had worked with the German Army and then asked, “How did you survive?” The name Gora didn't seem to be fooling Poles anymore. She would look in the mirror at her same light hair and reasonably broad features and wonder if somehow as you get older, the face changes and becomes more Semitic.
In 1965, Barbara Gora went to Israel. She had relatives to see and the opportunity to travel. To get the travel permission she had to say that she wanted to go to Israel to visit family, which was a great deal more than she customarily said about her background. And she was saying it on official documents. Traveling by Polish freighter, she first arrived at the port of Tel Aviv. As the freighter glided into this modern harbor, a Polish crewman explained to her the harbor's layout, how well organized and modern and efficient it was.
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