by Halina Rubin
The boycott had a disastrous effect: it destroyed many enterprises without improving the economy. With it came violence. Gangs of patriotic youth, armed with sticks, knuckle dusters and razor blades roamed the streets, attacking anyone who looked Semitic. In response, Władek acquired two more skills: boxing and jujitsu. No one was going to trifle with him or his companions.
The military claimed him for the first time soon after his return from Palestine. On this occasion he was sent to Radom, a pleasant town not far from Warsaw. His CV does not tell me how he felt about this transfer; it certainly doesn’t mention if he suffered the usual, notoriously brutal, treatment of recruits. CVs are silent on emotions. In prewar Poland, completing military service was considered a patriotic duty and the military was held in high esteem.
Even in the army, Władek continued his political activities, organising a cell of the Communist Youth Movement and becoming its secretary. Perhaps in anticipation of the revolution to come, or merely because he wanted to be good at it, he was keen to learn how to ride a horse and shoot a gun. Thus, during a time of unemployment in Poland, the army provided him with skills, and even shelter. But once freed from military service, he was back to square one: perpetually short of money. By then Władek and Ola lived together in Smocza Street. Ola worked in two clinics, and Władek, during long periods of unemployment, helped Henoch in his business.
Whether that was because working as a tailor contradicted my father’s image of himself as a fighter, or because this work wasn’t particularly significant to him, he barely mentioned it. But I do remember how effortless it was for him to issue the finest spray of water from his mouth before ironing his shirts. And, when I was still at school, he used our dilapidated Singer sewing machine to make me a fully-lined, double-breasted jacket.
Like his search for work, Władek’s political activities never ceased. He alternated between hiding from the police and doing time in prison. Due to lack of evidence, or because his activities were not considered subversive enough, or simply since he was lucky, he never faced court and his spells in prison lasted weeks rather than years.
Poland had been a police state for more than a hundred years, hence any kind of subversion or opposition to tyrannical rule was a source of pride. To be a political prisoner was a time-honoured tradition. Indeed, some of the most interesting people were behind bars. It offered my father an opportunity to learn, and for time to go faster.
7
Bereza
Dearest little daughter,
Sometimes, when I think of the times of revolutionary struggle, it comes to my mind that one day, you too will carry the tradition of progressive and humanist ideals and use your knowledge to serve the nation.
Your dad
I remember opening the book my father gave me and reading this dedication. Its overused sentiment made me cringe. I gave the book a once-over and put it away, next to the other books on revolutionary struggles. I was nineteen and nothing was more daunting than the idea of carrying the torch my father wanted to pass onto me. The book was about Bereza Kartuska where my father spent thirteen months as prisoner number 634.
In 1934 the government,13 impatient with opposition, found a way to remove ‘undesirable elements’ to a place of extreme isolation without having to trouble the judiciary. The idea came from government circles much taken with German and Italian fascism following Hermann Göring’s visit to Poland. The Polish hosts shared Göring’s enthusiasm for a recently opened concentration camp in Dachau. The very name Dachau – infamous long before becoming a death camp, a place of extreme brutality – should have prepared me for the harrowing details of my father’s stay in Bereza.
The little town of Bereza Kartuska, surrounded by expanses of forests and marshes, is typical of the eastern borderlands of Poland, a place where, on a rainy day, one might hang oneself out of despair, or so I imagine. Accessible by train and road, it was an ideal location for a penal centre. The camp’s red-brick buildings initially served as a garrison, and were later converted to a tsarist prison. The place was secretive. Even escorting policemen were not allowed to enter the camp and passing locals were ordered to look the other way, under risk of punishment. The isolation would have been complete if not for the defiance of those involved, and constant movement in and out of the camp. Ex-prisoners would, against proscriptions, tell others about their experiences, while new inmates shared the latest news from outside.
As a result of widely spread strikes, the number of arrests sharply increased all over Poland. Władek was arrested at the beginning of May 1936, only a few days after a successful May Day rally which he helped organise. Handcuffed, he was taken by train to Bereza, accompanied by a policeman who was not allowed to talk to him, but was kind enough to let him not only buy food but removed his handcuffs so he could eat.
The inmates came from all over the country. And who was not there? It seems that every social and ethnic group was represented: students, workers, peasants, journalists and poets, criminals, Ukrainians and Belorussians, Jews and Poles of every political inclination, from every corner of the country. Not surprisingly, Władek saw many familiar faces.
Władek’s arrival coincided with a period of increased brutality. The first days of initiation were the worst, not least because of the confusion and disbelief of the newcomers who, despite being forewarned, had been taken unawares. Beatings began straight away; the guards aimed their rubber batons at heads, necks, kidneys, knees. Stripped naked, Władek and his companions were herded into a large draughty room, its concrete floor doused with water. Windows, boarded with planks of wood, let the wind in.
The men – there were no women in Bereza – were ordered to stand, motionless, for hours, the slightest movement provoking more blows and roars of abuse. And when, eventually, they were allowed to lie down on the concrete floor, they were still forbidden to move. This brought no relief, only more pain. They were to be beaten into submission.
In Bereza, humans replaced animals and machines. Those too exhausted to continue were viciously, sometimes fatally, beaten.14 No one can say with certainty how many Bereza inmates died; in many cases they died after they were set free. Blows were dispensed freely, methodically, in cold blood or white rage, even as ritualistic punishment. On such an occasion, the inmates were ordered to bend down. This changed when Ajsen – a tall, thin worker from Galicia – was severely beaten and then ordered to bend down in submission. He refused, and from then on so did the others.
Władek, like everyone else, would have chosen even the hardest of tasks rather than endure a day-long exercise drill. Police guards and the criminals who assisted them, armed with long wooden sticks, would supervise these drills by hitting at the first sign of an inmate slowing down the pace of a squatted walk, hands stretched up; or a regimen of crawling, running and jumping for hours. Władek was thirty and fit but it did not take long before his exhausted body refused to obey.
It was torture by another name.
Władek thought of conventional prison almost with fondness. In jail, he could talk or read; his sentence set, he could look forward to his day of release. In Bereza, however, no one knew if their time would be measured in months or years, no court would sit in judgement, deciding how much longer they would have to remain in such a hell.
Reading the testimonies of Bereza’s inmates, I realise that I had known many of them. They were family friends, frequent visitors to our home in Warsaw. Quite a few fathers or relatives of my school friends had shared the same fate as Władek. As far as I know, they did not speak much of Bereza. Maybe events of greater magnitude obscured their earlier experiences. The war eventually scattered them all over Europe, landing them in resistance groups, battlefields, ghettos, German concentration camps and Soviet gulags. Each place was its own kind of hell. Those who’d participated in the Spanish Civil War or joined the French resistance fighters could not have predicted that one day their own Communist Party would accuse them of espionage and punish them accordingly.
Some never made it to peace time. Salek Jolles, the uncle of my school friend, an amiable man with red hair, loved by everyone in Bereza because of his good nature and humour, was killed in the battle for Warsaw in 1944.
They tried to forge their own destiny. Yet history jostled them every which way.
Only now, long after their deaths, am I astonished by their lives.
If there was one thing that made Bereza tolerable, it was their unity. The communists formed a tight group, protecting each other, especially the weakest. The risk of punishment was great. Talking was prohibited at any time. They had to speak softly, their mouths scarcely opened, quickly, when the guards were turned away. Their defiance could only be expressed in small, almost invisible, ways: giving a piece of bread to someone badly beaten, propping up someone who could not walk. A surreptitious smile, a wink, a barely heard murmur: ‘Just hang on a little bit longer’ – these communications, of little consequence in other situations, here transmitted strength from one to another.
News from outside also broke the isolation. Every scrap of information was precious, and shared in hurried whispers at night. The issue foremost on their minds was the Spanish Civil War. Their moods fluctuated with the outcome of battles and the movement of the front lines. Their happiness and hope hinged on the outcome of that war.
The most dreaded punishment – as if staying in Bereza were not penalty enough – was to be sent to solitary confinement: karcer. In his thirteen months in Bereza, Władek spent more than one hundred days in there – almost one third of his stay.
Four small dungeons made of bluestone, once used for storing gun powder, now served as a place of extreme isolation. The concrete floor was permanently wet, there was nothing inside other than the parasza, a pail for excrement. To keep warm – coats were taken away during the day – the inmates walked around the tiny space and exercised, all in darkness. Eventually, despite the cold, out of sheer exhaustion and against their will, the need for sleep took over. They would lie down in the watery mud and doze off. Of all the privations – lack of food, warmth, basic comforts – my father said loneliness was the worst. Those who had another person for company were lucky.
Like others before and after him, Władek passed the time by telling himself stories, recounting his favourite books and films while he walked and exercised to keep warm. Sometimes he’d look through the small gap between the stonework to see prisoners passing to or from work. On clear nights he’d watch the sky, waiting for a star to come into view before it disappeared, taking away its wonder. Every two hours, the guard banged at the door, waking him from sleep, forcing him to answer. Nothing could distract him from the hunger. The camp administration boasted that the cost of feeding one inmate was on a par with the price of a daily paper. Those in karcer were cheaper to feed. Every second day he was given half the normal food ration and on other days only water and a piece of bread, which had to last till the following day. Common sense demanded that one resist the impulse to devour all 350 grams at once and save at least some of it for later.
After seven days – the usual length of the punishment – the prisoner re-emerged semi-blind, feverish, even hallucinating, often too weak to walk unaided. None of this, of course, freed him from work or beatings.
One of the many torments of Bereza was the latrine. With only four holes for squatting, and timing in the hands of the supervising guard, the process was as fast as it was distressing. Whoever was at the head of the running group – the inmates were not permitted to walk, everything had to be done on the trot – was at an advantage.
In Władek’s dormitory there was a fellow, M., who always managed to get there first and, once there, did not move for the entire time, mocking the unfortunates who had to relieve themselves wherever they could. From the point of view of the supervising guards standing some distance away, it was a comic spectacle. Especially because the toilets, covered by then with faeces, had to be cleaned with one minuscule rag.
Władek’s patience ran out. At dusk, once everything had quietened down, he walked calmly across the room to M. and, with all his might, slapped his face. In the large and silent dormitory the sound was loud, like one wooden board hitting another. M. started wailing, which immediately brought the guard’s attention.
‘What’s the hell is going on?’ the guard demanded.
‘I admit hitting M.,’ Władek reported, standing to attention as regulations required.
‘You have no right hitting another human being!’ roared the guard. ‘You have no rights at all, you son of a bitch!’
A bit rich coming from the guard, thought Władek, but kept this to himself. ‘I report that I did not hit a human being but M. He is a scoundrel.’
Everybody seemed gratified. It was a long time coming to M. who was also known for stealing bread from the others. Even the guards were impressed. Nevertheless, Władek was given the usual treatment of seven days in karcer. He thought it was worth it. Especially given that from then on, he was hardly ever hit.
My recalcitrant father was involved in another well-known incident, minus the comic element. It happened in February when, as part of a working gang, he was ordered to load chunks of icy snow onto a large platform to be pulled away. The platform was exceedingly heavy and the gang could not move it. The guard was beside himself with fury. After much swearing and screaming, he decided to show them who was in control. He ordered everyone to crawl along the wet snow. The men moved gingerly as the slush had a way of getting inside the sleeves of their coats. This only made the guard more furious.
Several hundred meters away there was a ditch covered with thin ice. Despite a brief hesitation, the men kept moving. By the time Władek, the last of the group, got to the ditch, the ice was already broken. He got up and jumped to the other side.
‘Back!’ ordered the guard. ‘Keep on moving! Crawl you bastard!’
Władek jumped to the other side again.
‘Crawl! you bastard.’
‘Mister commandant, sir, which order do I have to obey? To crawl or to swim?’ Władek asked, standing to attention.
‘You son of a bitch, I am going to show you, you lousy scoundrel!’ The guard was aware of many eyes watching his authority being shattered. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Bąk number 634.’
‘Well, number 634,’ the guard said, slowly removing his automatic revolver from its holster and placing it against Władek’s temple. ‘I am counting to three. If you do not crawl through the fucking ditch, I’ll shoot you like a dog.’ Then he began to count slowly: ‘One, two …’
Władek wanted to make a point but that was going too far. He dropped to the ground and, hands first, submerged himself in the water. By the time he reached the other side, his clothes were thoroughly soaked.
‘Mister commandant, sir, I demand to see the chief commissioner,’ Władek said, standing to attention once more. ‘I’d like to lodge a complaint about mister commandant, for acting against regulations. Swimming across the watercourse is neither work nor exercise. It’s against the law.’
Needless to say, Władek did not have the upper hand. Before he could utter a word of complaint, the chief commissioner ordered: ‘Detainee Bąk, seven days in karcer, right now!’
As long as he was moving, indignant, planning his next move, the cold did not bother Władek too much. But once inside the cell, his shivering became uncontrollable and he began to worry. It dawned on him that to stay there in sub-zero temperatures, in wet clothes, could spell his death sentence. He needed to do something drastic, something not done in Bereza before – a hunger strike.
As the hours passed, he dreamt of developing a raging fever, of pneumonia or some other dreadful sickness; he fantasised about being transferred to a warm hospital bed, or at least of returning to his usual dormitory. Meanwhile his clothes, which at first formed a frosted armour around his body, began to steam.
The following day, the cook escorted by the guard brought him food which he again ref
used. Neither did he eat on the following day.
Three days passed without food, or pneumonia. On the fourth, the chief commissioner himself – cleanly shaven and bristling with insignia – paid him a visit. To listen to his complaint.
‘The guard behaved correctly and the arrested is to spend seven days in karcer,’ was the clipped answer. Yet on the next day Władek was released and taken to a cell inside the barrack. There he remained for the term of his punishment. It was just a cell but it was warm and the inmates working in the kitchen ensured that he got the choicest bits of food.
For all that, the immediate way out of Bereza was always at hand. All one had to do was sign a declaration not to engage in political activity of any kind; better still, to leave the country. Yet despite threats and intimidation, for many inmates this was out of the question. It was a matter of principle not to be complicit in one’s own moral downfall. Władek signed nothing.
If the aim of the camp was to break down the resolve of the detained, to set ethnic groups against each other, it failed. In the century in which, all too often, the main line of defence was: ‘I was only obeying orders,’ none of them followed the call to torment another person. They left the camp in a sorry condition – famished, their health ruined – but unrepentant.
Some were taken directly to another prison, and a few really unlucky ones were sent back to Bereza again. Salek Jolles, the red-haired giant, remained in the camp for nine hundred days, mostly in the karcer. Michał, another of my father’s close friends, required complete rest and treatment for tuberculosis. Władek was fortunate: he could go home. At the beginning of June 1937, he returned – his head closely shaven, his ribs sticking out, unbowed.
I do not remember when I first read the book he gave me so many years ago. Much too late, I notice the tenderness of his voice, feel his suffering, admire his resolve.
He would have been pleased to know how much all this matters to me now.