A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  Malka also went to school in New Jersey. For her, one of the deciding factors had been the mounting power of the Catholic Church in Poland. It was able to get mandatory Catholic religious classes into the school system in 1990. Malka was allowed to skip the classes, but that fact was noted by her teachers and might be reflected in her grades. She also felt set apart. She, in fact, was put back into the same dilemma in which young Barbara Gora had found herself in the 1930s. There were other signs that the Catholic Church was again going to be controlling life in Poland. Priests were denouncing the concept of a separation of church and state as Communist. The Church succeeded in getting a law passed reversing the liberal abortion policies and making Poland one of the most difficult countries in Europe in which to obtain an abortion.

  In America, Malka felt free to be Jewish without being set apart. But she missed her parents and came back after the first year. It only took a few weeks back in Poland to decide: “I know I don't want this,” she said resolving to return to New Jersey.

  Barbara Gruberska felt she had to square things away with her mother, who she couldn't even remember. When she saw her children become Jews, she felt she had done that. The price, however, was losing them, shipping them away to a distant country whose language she could not even speak. She could no more imagine living in America than in Israel. “I'm too old to go to America,” she said, though she was only in her fifties. “Too old to move.… Well, maybe to raise my grandchildren.”

  WHEN THE WAKS FAMILY made their trip to Lodz, they went directly to the cemetery to find what was left of Jewish life in this city whose population had once been one-third Jewish—home to the Wakses, the Turskis, the Yoskowitzes and the Moreinos, the Finkelsztajns, the Silbermans. Jewish families from Lodz were part of every Western Jewish community. Where else to find Jews on a Saturday morning in Poland but at the cemetery? Lea chatted with what was left of the Lodz community, none of whom remembered any Wakses or Lessers. Then Lea and her family went to the area that had been the ghetto, in search of the houses in which she and Aaron had grown up. The closer they got to Lea's house, the more distraught she became. She had not wanted to take this trip. She found her old building and struck up a conversation with a woman in the back, where the housekeeper had lived. When the woman explained that she was the housekeeper's daughter, Lea introduced herself and recalled that they had played together as children. The woman did not seem to remember her.

  The building, the entire neighborhood, was exactly the way Lea Waks remembered it, except for the deterioration from almost fifty years of neglect. The Jewish owner of the house had fled to Canada before the war. By coincidence, Ruwen Waks knew a relative of his in Tel Aviv. But the tenants only knew that the owner had left a long time ago, and they were still hoping that one day he would return and repair his property. The sukkah—the little hut for celebrating the Jewish harvest-time holiday, Sukkot—was still on the balcony where he had built it. It had not been used since 1940, and when Lea pointed it out to residents, none of them seemed to have any idea what it was for. Apparently, no one had ever asked why there was a hut on the balcony.

  The people in Lodz did not see Jews very often anymore. In Communist times the few Lodz Jews had had a second-floor cockroach-infested canteen in the once-Jewish neighborhood that claimed to offer kosher meals. Their only noticeable dietary concession, however, was that they did not serve pork. The staff was non-Jewish and wanted Sundays off, so the canteen stayed open on the Sabbath. With the change of regimes, the canteen lost its state funding and got even dirtier and more infested. Finally, the Warsaw Jewish Community insisted that it be closed.

  Lodz had one restored synagogue. The fact that it was concealed from street view in an alleyway behind a building was not significant. Many buildings in Lodz have a tunnellike entryway, with two iron gates leading to an alley full of shops. The real life of the city is in these alleys. The synagogue, a rose-colored building of distinctly Jewish architecture, was behind the buildings on Rewolocja Street, one of the last streets to retain its Communist name. Een on a Saturday morning the synagogue was usually locked up, because there was rarely a minion. A man working on his car in the same alley on a rainy Saturday morning said that the synagogue was sometimes open but certainly wouldn't be on this morning. He looked up between the buildings at the gray sky and said, “It's raining. Besides, it's Saturday. Maybe on Monday.” Though there was not always a minion, there was a cantor. In the nineteenth century, the student of a famous Bobover rabbi had a son who assimilated and survived the war as a Pole in a small town. After the war the son's daughter also grew up as a Pole. She married a Polish engineer and had a round-faced blond son named Krzysztof. Krzysztof Skrovronski played the flute and had a lyric singing voice that in time matured into a rich baritone. When he was 16 years old, his grandfather—the man who had survived the war by concealing his Jewish identity—was dying. He looked up at Krzysztof from his bed and said, “Do you know who you are?”

  “Who I am? What kind of question is that?”

  “There is something you need to know. Me, your grandmother, your mother—we are all Jewish.”

  The news did not have the anticipated impact. It didn't change his life, his flute playing, his friends. But more than ten years later, in 1985, when the Communist regime was losing its grip on society, Krzysztof started studying Hebrew with the last knowledgeable Jew in Lodz—a ninety-year-old man. Krzysztof's parents warned him that it would not be good for him to be Jewish. But he continued his schooling and eventually went off to Israel to study and become a cantor and a religious Jew. When he returned to post-Communist Lodz, his parents began to feel proud of him. Being a cantor in a community with at most twenty practicing Jews did not seem like much, but people noticed his voice and soon he was riding the commercial crest of philo-Semitism. A Warsaw producer contracted him to record Jewish songs, which were becoming a big seller in the Polish record industry. He had television singing appearances. He became a celebrity. Jews had been as essential to Polish culture as Blacks are to American culture, and Poles missed Jewish culture. But still, Krzysztof would not wear a yarmulke on the streets of Lodz, because, he said, “I want to live.”

  He did not see any Jewish future for Lodz. His wife was Jewish, and they decided that when they started having children, they would move to Israel.

  IN THE POLISH SUMMER the rolling hills of the south near the Slovak border are plowed in quilted patterns of yellow and chartreuse. Distant ridges appear blue on the horizon. Wild raspberries grow along the curving roads that lead to little villages of wooden houses with statues of saints carved into the gate posts. Bulbous church towers stick out from thick green foliage of fruit trees, and the fields are studded with flame-colored poppies and violet and yellow wildflowers. In this setting, in an abandoned hilltop estate, the Lauder Foundation set up a summer camp for Jewish teenagers to learn about Jewishness.

  Most of the teenagers had only recently discovered they were Jewish and were trying to learn something about it. Most had been raised as socialists; a few even as Catholics. Even those not from Catholic homes knew much more about Catholicism than Judaism just by living in Poland, and the bells of summer masses echoing off the blue hills, and the shrines and churches that punctuated this rural countryside seemed far more normal to them than the exotic rituals and practices they were learning about at the camp. For most of them, Judaism was a new idea. One girl first heard of it when her mother told her their family was moving to Israel.

  “But they won't let you unless you are Jewish,” pointed out the daughter.

  “We are Jewish,” said the mother.

  Some of the children had discovered photographs of a grandfather in a long black coat with a beard. Sometimes they did not even know what that odd clothing meant. A few of the teenagers were not Jewish but were simply curious. They, too, were welcomed, because it was hard to say who was Jewish. One non-Jewish girl who had come out of curiosity afterward told her mother how much she had enjoyed
the camp. The mother only then confessed that she was Jewish.

  A teenage boy who had only learned that his mother was Jewish when he was 12 said, “The funny thing is, the Poles knew first. They always know before the Jews. I don't know how they do it. Kids used to call me Jew, and I didn't know why. How do they always know?”

  After a month the teenagers would go home. Some took up praying. Some tried to keep kosher. But they found that out in Poland, they could not continue to live the life they had learned about at the camp. At least at the camp these young Poles had experienced what Jewish life would be like. The food was uncompromisingly kosher. The men wore yarmulkes even outdoors, though it wasn't required. They sat around with their yarmulkes on, talking about how they could never do this in their home town. Two boys from Warsaw estimated that in the Praga section, a notoriously tough part of Warsaw on the other side of the Vistula, “someone with a yarmulke on would live for about two minutes.” Another boy told a story of a family he knew in Praga that drew blackout curtains every Friday night so they could light Sabbath candles.

  These teenagers had had socialist educations in which equality of the sexes was a strong belief. As they learned about Judaism, they had hard questions. They wanted to know why women didn't wrap tefillin, why they were not called up to read the Torah, why they were separated from men. They would consider abandoning atheism but they would not give up equality of the sexes.

  The camp forged amazingly good relations with the locals in the aiea. There was a farmer who let them milk his cow so that they could be assured it was kosher milk. Michael Schudrich, the American rabbi who ran the camp, talked a baker into setting aside a separate room with separate mixing bowls and pans, where he would bake for the camp, under rabbinical supervision, an excellent round, crusty Polish peasant bread. The camp ordered dozens of loaves, and the baker was pleased to have the business.

  One day in the summer of 1992, two men from a nearby village rode their ten-speed racing bikes to the door of the main estate building at the Lauder camp. One had the broad, rough, beat-up hands of a farmer. The other, who looked a little more refined, started speaking in Polish to an American who asked the nearest bilingual teenager to translate—a good-natured fifteen-year-old with shaggy long blond hair and a borrowed Lauder yarmulke. The two bicyclists looked around admiringly at the wood-paneled manor house. They talked about how it used to be in a complete shambles. Then it had been rebuilt with glass and aluminum. Now it looked like the old manor. Very nice, they both agreed.

  After a few minutes they said, “Well, thank you,” and shook the long-haired boy's hand, got on their ten-speed bikes, and pedaled off to continue their trip.

  “What strange men,” said the boy.

  Why?

  “They don't hate Jews. He even shook my hand!”

  NOT FAR AWAY from those flowered summer hills is Cracow, whose untouched medieval center makes it Poland's best bid for a tourist destination. Cracow also has location going for it. When tourists get off the train from Warsaw, they are greeted at the platform by eager taxi drivers offering, “Taxi? Hotel? Auschwitz?”

  The splendidly preserved walls of this rare city are papered on seemingly every available eye-level space with posters that say “AUSCHWITZ” in large block letters. “Go to Birkenau and be back in Cracow at 4 P.M.” one of them advertises.

  A thirty-minute taxi ride away is the most famous death camp of all. It may also have become Poland's biggest tourist attraction, with some half-million visitors a year and growing. While Poles think fondly of their country's variety of cultural and historical attractions, in the West Poland is largely thought of as the killing ground. Foreigners come to see what is left of the ghetto, the Jewish cemeteries, and the death camps—Sobibor, Maidanek, Belzec, Treblinka, Chelmno, Stutthof, Auschwitz-Birkenau—Poland was the site of the Holocaust. In Warsaw there is a heroic monument to the resisters of the Warsaw ghetto. Tourists come by the busload, sometimes even posing for group pictures on the steps. Nearby, a man sells assorted souvenirs, mostly books. The vendor is ready with an ink-pad and stamp to mark the endpaper with his souvenir “Warsaw Ghetto” stamp.

  Some of the Jewish tourists, the groups who go to see death in Poland and then life in Israel, were understandably irritating to the Jews in Poland who prefer not to think of their home as the absence of life. But for the other Poles in the new Poland trying to embrace capitalism, it was good business. When a Cracow taxi driver got an Auschwitz fare, he would merrily inform the others at the stand, “I'm off to Auschwitz. Bye!” It was far better money than going back and forth to Kazimierz, the Jewish section on the other side of town.

  The landscape between Cracow and Oswi^cim has probably not changed much since the camp was operating—rolling farmland, yellow strips of harvested hayfields, orchards with branches drooping from the weight of summer apples, towns with traditional log houses, and even some horse-drawn carts. Coming into Oswi^cim a wide railyard is passed, a junction of so many tracks it appears to be set on the outskirts of a major city. That is why the Germans chose this spot for a death camp. For all those tracks only twelve thousand people had been living there. The majority had been Jewish. There was still one Jew left in Oswi^cim, and he, not surprisingly, was a recluse.

  Outside the death camp is a parking lot filled with tour buses. There is a bookshop and a snack bar and a pretty green area with rows of two-story brick barracks and a small gateway in the shade of a slinky willow with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” in decorative ironwork overhead. In the summer, the wildflowers are in bloom, and the seedlings that the doomed prisoners were forced to plant are now rows of tall straight shady trees, thick with leaves. Different tour guides are available in different languages and with different agendas. Some talk about martyred priests, others about the heroic antifascists. There are also survivors walking as though in a trance, leading their families.

  Auschwitz shows things that are beyond commentary—the human hair, the eyeglass frames, the piles of toothbrushes, and an unremarkable-looking oven, like a bread oven. And there are gallows where prisoners were hanged and walls where they were shot and laboratories where they were worked on.

  Somehow people drifted through all this. A little French girl, perhaps eight, sat down outside one of the display barracks and refused to go in. “Come on,” pleaded her parents, pointing to the sign identifying the display. “This is about the life of the prisoners.”

  “I don't want to see that,” said the little girl, hunkering into the wooden stoop.

  Many of the visitors were weeping, others looked stunned, some looked like bored tourists shuffling from exhibit to exhibit, taking snapshots to mark each spot.

  Birkenau, the sister camp down the road, was far more devastating. There were no exhibits, little documentation. Just the barbed wire, sentry towers, and a few barracks, though most had been stripped for their wood so that only the chimneys remained. Through Birkenau ran more than a mile of train tracks, with platforms for selections and at the end the caved-in crematoriums that the Germans tried to blow up at the last minute. It was a factory, designed for efficient mass production.

  But at Auschwitz, many of the intact barracks had been turned into national pavilions, each displaying the suffering of its country, some with cold documentary style, others almost artsy. Auschwitz had become a kind of world's fair of genocide. The new Catholic visitors’ center outside the camp, the result of the fight over the Carmelite convent, was just one more attempt to claim the moral high ground here on the killing site. Who would be the voice in this place? That was to be a seemingly endless struggle, first with the Communist state, which called the site “A Monument to the Martyrdom of the Polish and Other Nations.” Their information was mainly about antifascism, with little mention of Jews. The plaque was later changed. Exhibits were changed. Literature was rewritten. Then there was the fight over the Carmelites and the resulting visitors’ center offering the Catholic Church's interpretation.

  Every insti
tution with any pretense of moral authority wants the last word on Auschwitz. The problem is that there is very little that a truly moral voice can say. It remains incomprehensible. But if there is nothing that can be said, then the moral voice falls to the greatest victims, which were the Jews. To cede the moral voice to the Jews was an intolerable notion to some Polish Catholics. As Konstanty Gebert said, “The world owes us the right to exist because we have suffered. However, on the pinnacle of suffering, there is room for just one.”

  The spectacle of Jews wrestling for the mantle of martyrdom could be seen, theologically, as a Catholic victory after all. Martyrdom is a Catholic thing. It is the Catholics who chose as their symbol of faith an implement of torture, the cross of martyrdom. Judaism, however, has always been a religion with relatively little to say about death, other than that it should be kept clearly separate from life. Synagogues and cemeteries are not to be on the same site. For the Jews of Lodz to go to the cemetery on Saturday morning instead of to the synagogue is very contrary to Jewish law. Kohenim are not supposed to go to cemeteries at all. Priests should not gaze on death.

  But Jews are forced to contemplate Auschwitz, because otherwise someone else will speak for them to hundreds of thousands of visitors and to history. Auschwitz survivors like Marian Turski do their duty and sit on the International Auschwitz Committee and are thereby regularly forced not only to think about but to visit the site of their nightmares. The International Auschwitz Committee tried to reach a consensus on what to do about Auschwitz. Turski, who for twenty years would not even allow his mind to remember what he had seen there, became an active member. Now he had to go with some regularity for speeches, conferences, and meetings. In time he no longer found it difficult. “Of course, when I am there, there are two or three places which have special bonds to my memory. There is something there in myself, in my heart. I would say it's a sore spot. I go there. I sift through the archives,” Turski said, and then added with self-amazement, “I am really an expert!”