A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  The well-landscaped Warsaw neighborhood where he and his wife lived for three decades, in a comfortable but not palatial apartment, indicated the limited measure of privilege he had enjoyed as a party member, albeit a troublesome one. His study was decorated with his collection of antique wooden carvings of Catholic saints. But there was no escaping who he was and what he had seen. In 1993, Turski appeared on a British television panel with three neo-Nazis from France, Austria, and Germany. One of them would not even shake Turski's hand because he was a Jew. The oldest of them was 32 and the youngest 21, and they sat across from him and, quoting from Faurisson, claimed that the Holocaust that Turski had survived had never really happened. Turski's wife had pleaded with him not to do it, fearing he would get so upset that he would have a heart attack. But he believed that these people had to be faced. “I was so quiet, so absolutely fully organized,” said Turski. “She was amazed.”

  EVEN THOUGH MORE PEOPLE in Poland declared themselves Jewish every day, the community remained small. In the fight to at last receive German reparations after the fall of the Soviet bloc, applications in Poland were only in the hundreds. There was a loneliness to Polish Jews living in a non-Jewish world with non-Jewish friends. Even if it was known that they were Jewish, their colleagues, being broad-minded, would include them in Christian holidays and give them flowers and cakes on the saint's day of their name, forcing them in misguided friendship to act out a charade that to the non-Jews was simply being Polish. Only among other Jews did the few Jews of Poland feel safe being candidly what they were. Many would admit their Jewishness only to other Jews. No matter how many non-Jewish friends you had, it was only with a Jew that you were always sure, no matter what happened, that you could still say, “I am a Jew.” It was only with Jewish friends that you didn't have to pretend to care about your saint's day or Christmas, lest they be offended. Your Jewish friends were never going to slip and say one of those things that are just part of Polish culture. But the Jews saw their valuable Jewish friends vanish, emigrate, and die. Survivors clung to distant cousins as though they were siblings, because it was all they had. An impoverished elderly woman who ate at the lunch program by the synagogue would gather scraps of food and give them to a middle-class Jewish woman in her thirties because the young woman's father had given her food during the war, and this was the only connection she had left.

  Konstanty Gebert married a non-Jew, which meant that according to Jewish law their four children were not Jewish. With the help of Lauder programs, he was bringing them up with Jewish instruction in the hope that they would convert. “I don't want to make their decisions for them. I do desperately hope that they will make the decision to formally convert,” he said.

  He recognized that even he was a kind of artificially constructed Jew. In the anti-Communist underground days when he was working with Marek Edelman, Edelman would question Gebert's Jew-ishness, saying, “You invented it, you made it up.” The Gebert household observed the Sabbath and most of the holidays. Gebert was not kosher because it would be too arduous a discipline in Poland. But he did not eat meat, a practice that was not necessarily Jewish except that it precluded the risk of mixing meat with dairy. “Why can't we be free like Dad and not eat meat?” his children asked.

  Gebert wore a yarmulke indoors. Sometimes he forgot to take it off when he left the house, but nothing happened. Still, he was uneasy about his role in Poland. “The problem is there are so damn few of us. I don't want to be turned into a professional representative.” He recognized that there were limits to how Jewish he could be in Poland. He too had made his choice. “I would prefer to live in circumstances that would make more observance possible, but if that means leaving Poland, I'm not about to do it.”

  Jakub Gutenbaum, who lost faith in Communism in 1968 but did not want to be a foreigner in Israel, became a full professor in 1977. He had never been a party member and was not political. Science was his religion. But he said that after the fall of Communism, “I thought maybe I could do something about problems outside of my field.” In 1991 the Lauder Foundation was trying to organize an association for Jews who had survived the war because they had been hidden as children, and Gutenbaum became involved, eventually becoming the head of a group of 140 people. There were twenty older ones, like himself and Barbara Gora, who had survived the ghetto and concentration camps. The rest had been hidden as babies. All but fifteen of the 140 members were women. It had been too dangerous to hide a boy with the telltale circumcision. The people in Gutenbaum's organization had experienced a broad range of childhood traumas. One woman spent her infancy in the bed of a prostitute who serviced German soldiers. One child had been living with Christian peasants, and after the war a Jewish committee came to claim him. At night he escaped through a window and ran back to the peasant family, crying, “No, I'm not Jewish!”

  Most of these children grew up to be achievers. The majority of people in Gutenbaum's group held advanced degrees. Many were doctors. Four were medical professors. But very few had stable family lives. Many were divorced. There was a high rate of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

  For Gutenbaum, the work was therapeutic because it forced him to talk about his own experiences. After a time he could calmly talk about the fire overhead as he hid in the ghetto, about being led through the charred ghetto at gunpoint, about the selection process at Maidanek. These were all things he had never spoken about, not even to his wife or their son. There were other things he still would not speak about—things he would never utter, even though he had learned that the more he talked the better he felt. His nightmares became less frequent. He was looking for activities to throw himself into because soon he would have to retire. He feared the day when he was no longer absorbed in his scientific work and his mind would be free to wander. This was why the hidden children had been achievers.

  Barbara Gora had her own reasons for joining the hidden children group. “I decided to join because, you know, I have a lot in common with them. I am alone. I am alone not only because I didn't marry. I want to have my own social group, and this society is not typically Jewish because they are people brought up like me. Some of them are even Catholic because they were brought up like that. I have more in common with them than with typical Jews. I never wanted to be a member of this Jewish cultural society. I have nothing in common with them. I am a hidden child.”

  Barbara's sister, who was ten years older, had married a Greek Communist immigrant. They visited Greece every year and raised their daughter to be Greek. When the girl was nine, she read a book about the Warsaw ghetto and asked her aunt Barbara about it. But when Barbara told her that her mother was Jewish, her niece didn't believe her. A cousin of Barbara's father was spending three months in Paris, and while she was there she looked up relatives who lived in a Paris suburb. She discovered, to her amazement, that they were Jewish. She came back and told everyone in her family, “We are Jewish!” To Barbara she said, “Did you know that we are Jewish?”

  “Yes,” said Barbara. “I know.”

  “Then why don't I know?”

  The story makes Barbara laugh. “Now everybody knows. Now it's all open. It was silly. It was stupid. It doesn't matter!” The fact so amazed her that she repeated it several times. “It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter!”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1992, Henryk Halkowski hosted the last meeting at the old Jewish club in Cracow. After forty-six years they were abandoning the musty rooms and auditorium for a small, one-room meeting space. “Smaller, but without the mold,” said Halkowski. Four people showed up, and they made tea and drifted from room to room. They still had the red velour flag with gold embroidery, with the Polish Communist party marked on one side in Polish, their local chapter marked on the other in Yiddish. One of the four said he had heard that an Israeli had recently come to town and told Czeslaw Jakubowicz that they should all move to Israel. They snickered. They weren't going to move to Israel, just to a smaller space.

  Although Halkowski's
family was originally from Lodz, he became a local historian in Cracow and enjoyed studying the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Jews from Germany and Bohemia had migrated to this city where they could live in peace. The Cracow Jews were so secure in their home that many believed the name Poland was of Hebrew origin. Their popular theory was that it came from the Hebrew words po and lin, which together mean “stay here.”

  27

  In Budapest

  IN 1984 AN ADVERTISEMENT FROM A HUNGARIAN TRAVEL agency led documentary filmmaker Gyula Gazdag to realize at last his childhood dream of making a film about the Holocaust. The advertisement was for a package tour of Auschwitz. Thinking that this was a peculiar idea, Gazdag investigated and discovered that the package was being put together at the request of the official Hungarian Jewish Community for the fortieth anniversary of the liberation. All of the tourists who took the package were Auschwitz survivors. Package Tour is Gazdag's documentary about the trip. He finds watching it almost unbearable and could hardly si and looking at it long enough even to edit it. The film crew moves from barrack to barrack across the shady Auschwitz grounds as the survivors point to the spot where someone was shot, where they were forced to line up for Mengele's experiments. A cheerful, enthusiastic Polish guide insists on telling them at every turn information he has been trained to recite. The survivors get increasingly annoyed with this uncaring Pole and finally take him aside to inform him that the people he is talking to are survivors and don't need to hear all this. But then we find out that the Polish guide, one of the early political prisoners, was also an Auschwitz survivor. He had worked hard at being cheerful because that was his job.

  Most Gyula Gazdag films were still being censored by the regime. Although Gazdag never became active in the democratic movement, he and other Hungarian filmmakers provided one of the few vehicles for the expression of discontent. In the 1980s the Democratic Charter movement that Gyorgy Konrad had helped create and other opposition movements were emboldened by the seeming weakening will of the Communists. Groups were forming around underground publications. Gyorgy Gado's apartment was searched eight times by police looking for illegal publications, which they generally found.

  As Gyorgy Konrad got more deeply involved in the opposition movement, he became convinced that Central Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—would in time break from the Soviet Union. He even developed a pet theory that it would happen in 1992. This was not a deep political insight but instead was based on the observation that every twelve years something happened. There was 1944, then ‘56, then Prague in ‘68, and Warsaw in 1980, and so surely something big would happen in 1992. But he also saw the entire superpower structure of global politics as destined to break up, and he wrote about it in a prophetic book called Anti-politics.

  In 1988, Janos Kadar was replaced as head of the government by Karoly Grosz, who tried to offer economic reform as a substitute for political reform. But as in Poland, events outran even the opposition. By late 1989, the Communist party had voted to dissolve into a different kind of socialist party and to give up its power monopoly. New political parties were formed to fill the vacuum. The two leading ones, the Democratic Forum and the Free Democrats, offered similar programs, although the Free Democrats wanted to move a little faster. The major difference was that the Democratic Forum appealed to nationalism and the Free Democrats avoided it. Nationalism was about to turn neighboring Yugoslavia into a brutal battleground. Hungarian nationalism could get pulled in. Yugoslavia had ethnic Hungarians, as did Romania and the Slovak side of Czechoslovakia. Even before the 1990 election a vocal right wing of the Democratic Forum talked about who was and was not a “true Hungarian.” It was being implied that Hungarians of Romanian, gypsy, or Jewish origin were not “true Hungarians.” This was a code that everyone in Central Europe understood. The same thing was happening in Romania, except there, it was Hungarians, gypsies, and Jews who were being singled out. Hungarian nationalists were saying that Hungarian Jews were not “true Hungarians,” but they also claimed that Hungarian-speaking Slovaks were. But many Slovak Jews are Hungarian-speaking—would they be “true Hungarians”?

  The Democratic Forum was saying that the Free Democrats were not “true Hungarians,” which was their way of reminding voters that some of the Free Democrats, including parliamentary candidate Gyorgy Gado, were Jews.

  This was free speech. No one had been allowed to talk like this for forty years. It all may have been predictable, but that did not stop it from being a shock. The activists of both parties had worked together against the Communist regime. An angry Gyorgy Gado said, “I hoped, like many other people in my field, that a liberal democratic change had come. We knew, of course, that there were other forces in the society that did not hope for such a liberal change but for a Christian change or a change that had another ideology. But for many months we thought that our first enemy was the former system, the former government, the Communist party, the Communist movement. In this historic change our first enemy is not the former regime. It is people with whom we previously sat together and participated in the so-called opposition round table.”

  The nationalist line of the Democratic Forum paid off, when shortly before the 1990 election ethnic Hungarians were attacked by Romanian nationalists in Romania, killing four Hungarians and further infusing the political atmosphere in Hungary with paranoid nationalism. After the Democratic Forum came to power, the tone worsened. The man of the moment became Istvan Csurka, a popular comic playwright who had risen to be vice president of the ruling Democratic Forum. Csurka talked a lot about “legitimacy.” In repeated statements he expressed the idea that only “true Hungarians” should have a voice in Hungarian affairs. To expound on this message, in September 1992 Csurka staged a rally that was attended by a reported seventy thousand people. Shortly thereafter, thugs murdered a gypsy in a rural town. Konrad and his Democratic Charter organized a counterdemonstration of equal size, filling the large square by the many-spired parliament building with candle-bearing protesters. He was not surprised that it was difficult at first to line up speakers. “I am accustomed to this fact that people generally are afraid in this country. I wouldn't say that this government is aggressive or violent, but there are aggressive forces. A teacher is now afraid of what he has to say in history lessons to the students. Journalists are afraid, and writers are afraid.”

  Hungarians, especially Hungarian Jews, had to deal with things that had not been seen in a generation. There was an extreme right-wing group called Jobboldali Blokk, and neo-Nazi literature was appearing on the streets. In September 1993 an elaborate ceremony marked the transfer of Hitler's ally Admiral Miklos Horthy's body from where he died in Portuguese exile to his hometown in Hungary. It was an unofficial ceremony sponsored by navy elements who called him “a great seaman”—dim praise in a country with no coastline and no fleet. The government said they had had nothing to do with the transfer, but several ministers attended the ceremony and a commemorative coin was issued. Prime Minister Jozef Antall, who usually distanced himself from the more nationalist elements, referred to Horthy as “a great patriot” because he had gained back lost Hungarian territory. The fact that he had done this by allying Hungary with the Third Reich was not discussed. Nor were the deportations under his rule mentioned.

  Jews were becoming uneasy but also angry. Konrad had a ninety-two-year-old uncle, a veteran of the Hungarian independence struggle, who was furious. “I fought with Kossuth, I survived Auschwitz. Why do I want to be told now Pm not Hungarian?” his uncle would shout. It had become a common scene in Jewish households in post-Communist Hungary. A Jewish businessman who had emigrated to Switzerland and then returned after the change was discussing events with his family over a Rosh Hashanah dinner. He still had his house in Geneva and his Swiss papers. “If things go badly, I can move the whole family there,” he said. But his family had not gone abroad with him before, and they were not interested in moving now. They had survived a lot in Hungary, and the
y were determined to survive Csurka. A cousin, a meticulously dressed older woman across the table, began talking with a rage that grew like a swell at sea. “This Csurka, he talks about who is a Hungarian and who is not a Hungarian. The Romanians aren't Hungarians, the gypsies aren't Hungarians. The Jews. Nobody can tell me I'm not a Hungarian. I have paid to be here,” she said, at which point she shoved up her sweater sleeve and showed the bluish Auschwitz numbers tattooed on the pale inside of her forearm.

  AFTER THE WAR the Budapest Jewish Community leadership, the MIOK, had estimated that there were 240,000 Jews left in Hungary. About 150,000 fled following the 1956 uprising. For years the estimate of the Jewish population ran between 80,000 and 100,000. But this had always been a guess. Only about 10,000 Jews were registered members of the Jewish Community. After the change in regimes, in spite of nationalists and neo-Nazis, the number of acknowledged Jews steadily increased. By 1993, the common figure was 120,000 Jews. Budapest had three Jewish schools, and the Community was growing more active and more diverse.

  One of the first things to be done was to remove the old leader-ship. Ilona Seifert was asked to leave the MIOK. Some Jews, especially younger ones, were bitter about her stewardship of the Community, and this judgment angered her. In her mind she and her husband had done what had to be done to keep the Community operating. “It was written what we had to do, and we were allowed all the elements of Jewish life. It's not true that you couldn't do what you wanted. Unless it was Zionist. That was very strict, and sometimes they thought things were Zionist and they weren't. But that didn't come from Hungary, it was from Russia. Because they didn't know what a Zionist movement was. Young people would try to do something and they would think it was Zionist.”