by Fiona Harari
These days, Warsaw’s chequered past emerges through its eclectic cityscape — from the long-abandoned buildings whose owners never returned to reclaim them to the towering Palace of Culture and Science, Stalin’s mid-century socialist-realist skyscraper and the most visible legacy of the city’s communist era.
Not all parts of Warsaw’s history, however, are as obvious. The hop-on, hop-off bus tour comes with a free map, pointing out many local features: the royal castle, the old town. It also lists a kosher restaurant — a jarring acknowledgement of life for those who assume that Poland’s long Jewish history ended in 1945.
Thirty per cent of Warsaw’s pre-war residents were Jewish. They had shops and families, 400 synagogues, and nine daily newspapers, and they lived with varying degrees of religious observance in the cultural capital of the Jewish diaspora. But their collective voice was largely muted when so few survived World War II, and even further with the onset of communism.
On the drive through Warsaw’s rebuilt streets today, past its verdant public parks and comfortable cafes, the two-hour-long bus commentary includes many references to the city’s Jewish connections — its multiple synagogues and schools, the Jewish organisations based here — but they are invariably expressed in the past tense.
Death is a recurring theme for many searching for Poland’s Jewish roots, even as the acclaimed POLIN Museum, a shiny new edifice documenting a millennium of Polish Jewry, celebrates that same community’s life. The country’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, an American who moved here in 1990, spends as many of his working hours tending to life as he does to death; advising one day on the appropriate handling of bones that have just been unearthed near the Sobibór extermination camp, and on multiple occasions every day confronting the same seemingly impossible equation: how to maintain 1,400-odd Jewish cemeteries, built for a once vast community, when there are so few people remaining to tend to them.
Before the war, Poland was home to 3.3 million Jews. At its end, nine in ten were dead, and after liberation significant numbers of those still living fled elsewhere. For those who remained, many hid their religion because of its uncertain welcome in a communist world, or because they were worried about what a Jewish future might entail given what its recent past had provided. From 1945 to 1989, when communist rule ended, Poland’s long Jewish culture, heritage, and history were rarely discussed in public.
There are still Jews in Poland — around 7,000, some say, and possibly thousands more, Schudrich believes, with many only just learning of their Jewish heritage. There are again synagogues with rabbis and congregants, philanthropic organisations, kosher restaurants, and openly observed festivals. In Warsaw, where there is a Jewish school and day-care centre, tourists clamour to see not just the beautifully resurrected old town, but the Nożyk Synagogue, the only pre-war Jewish prayer house still standing, and to seek out the few remaining sections of the once menacing wall that contained close to 500,000 people inside Europe’s largest ghetto.
History has been erased in parts and preserved in others, but it still lingers. On the same week that twenty-nine Australian students march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, a man in a smart business suit walks down Warsaw’s busy Nowy Świat Street, a restored stretch of old buildings and new cafes. He bears a proud demeanour, a confident gait, and what appears to be a yellow star on his lapel.
From a distance, it might be a paper flower. But up close, his yellow embellishment bears a striking similarity to the insignias that wartime Jews were forced to wear on these same streets, before being barred from them, and then removed from them entirely, as they were through much of Europe.
His dress is startling. Then a second person walks past wearing the same insignia, and then a third. A few metres beyond stand two women handing out paper daffodils to passers-by.
It is the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and, across town, staff from the POLIN Museum are distributing free paper daffodils — a symbol of memory, hope, and respect. Inspired by one of the leaders of the uprising, who was himself anonymously sent a bunch of daffodils each year, the paper flowers, when opened, resemble a six-pointed star.
Not everyone who is proffered a yellow flower on this sunny day accepts it. But many do, and many of them are young people. That night, across multiple television stations, every newsreader dons the same yellow shape. So does the Polish president.
There is Jewish life in Poland, as in Europe. But it is different. In a city whose Jewish houses of worship were all but lost to genocide, there are again regular services at the Nożyk Synagogue, but the sermons are delivered in English or Hebrew or Polish, and not in Yiddish, the old language of eastern Jewry that for so long filtered through these streets.
A taste of that old world can still be found at the POLIN Museum, where audio guides are available in many languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish, and in the in-house restaurant that purposefully serves dishes now rarely seen outside of private Ashkenazi Jewish homes: cholent and kreplach and tsimmes.
It is an intentional reminder of a world that has all but gone, a backwards glimmer that can be seen, too, in Kraków’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, a once thriving Jewish neighbourhood where the future cosmetics giant Helena Rubinstein was born to a local family, just beyond the spot where a newish restaurant called Babelstein stands today. Only 4,000 of Kraków’s 69,000 Jewish residents survived the war. And in the decades that followed, the Kazimierz area, once a centre of life, was neglected and mostly avoided. With so many of its former inhabitants gone, it became an empty, unsavoury place, only revived after Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film Schindler’s List was released in the early 1990s, and curious visitors began trooping through the area to inspect its locations.
Now Kazimierz has been revived as an old Jewish neighbourhood. Its central square is still lined with several synagogues, one of which has been converted into a museum, and with restaurants called Ariel and Rubinstein, where spruiking staff members stand out the front, menus in hand, to entice visitors inside. They offer chicken soup and ‘Jewish caviar’ (chopped chicken livers), and host bands playing the joyful klezmer music so beloved of this district a generation or two ago. Mostly, though, these restaurants are neither Jewish-owned nor kosher.
‘The musicians are Polish,’ says our cheery walking tour guide, Ania, an effusive and knowledgeable local who spent five years immersed in Jewish studies, as she leads us around the busy square. ‘That’s why we sometimes call this place Polish Disneyland.’
An hour away from Auschwitz, Jewish life is being reborn in Kraków, but not as it was when Kuba Enoch lived here. The city now hosts a popular annual Jewish culture festival, and every night the songs that once filled Jewish theatres are played to a new kind of audience: mostly inquiring strangers keen to dip into the city and its culture for a few days before flying off somewhere else.
They wander through the restored narrow streets, take in the charming atmosphere and the rich history, and then sometimes stop for a meal at an inviting cafe whose detailed interior has been carefully furnished to resemble the inside of an old Jewish tailor’s shop. On the menu there are luscious cakes, warming soups are graciously served from individual jugs, and, instead of bread, guests are presented with plates of matzah, the unleavened bread that Jews have been devouring at Passover each year for centuries — but which here, in homage to a community all but lost, is served year-round.
Outside, a light rain begins to fall. In the grey of a Kraków spring day, suddenly the air is melancholy and bittersweet. In a country to which it had seemed lost, Jewish life is being recreated. But it is another Jewish life. And the other world that once flourished here has all but gone — even as its last survivors still breathe.
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed in countless ways to this book. I thank all those who suggested survivors, those who assisted with research in Australia and Poland — especially
Avril Alba, Sue Hampel, Konrad Kwiet, and Renee Symonds — and the families and friends of interviewees.
My endless gratitude goes to this book’s eighteen survivors for so generously recalling such a terrible period of their lives and its ramifications. Spending time with you has been one of the highlights of a long and rewarding career. You have made me laugh and cry, and above all think. Thank you for all those conversations. You have forever enriched my life.
I am grateful, too, for the few but unforgettable encounters I had with the late Magda Singer. A survivor with an untold story, she was the inspiration for this book.