On the Berlin-Warsaw inter-city train, I feel very positive about a first visit to Poland. The birch woods along the track seem to be haunted with ghosts of characters from novels, but the aging Polish women who are sharing the compartment seem familiar in their features and dress, and the music of the language sounds somewhat like home. It occurs to me that I am going back to roots and origins, the land of my fore-fathers and mothers, grand- and great-grandparents. I am going to meet Ala, to fulfill a plan we made twenty five years when we first became friends at Yale, to visit Poland to celebrate life. I have no inclination to go to Auschwitz; a visit to Sachsenhausen a few years ago sufficed, and perhaps I am also under the influence of Heinz who spoke of the need to forgive. Instead, we shall go to the last days of the Jewish culture festival in Krakow. The long weekend is so full of experiences, that it is hard to capture in just a few paragraphs the mish mash of impressions and pages of scribbled notes in my diary.
There is the relative poverty of Warsaw, dilapidated buildings with bricks exposed under peeling plaster, drab shops and grimy windowless kiosks, street vendors with make shift stalls of folding tables displaying shoelaces and underwear, farmers selling cherries and potatoes out of crates, shabby trams and buses, prefab blocks of flats, all intermingling with the advances of Western commerce, office towers spotting the skyline, stores sporting chain labels of luxury, and advertisements of youth in erotic poses alongside reliefs of proletarians gazing into a future of hope at entrances to the imposing relics of Soviet architecture. Yet, on my last night, staying in the lap of comfort in a guest room at the Institute for Mathematics just off pl. Konstytucji, kindly arranged by Ala’s 89 year old mother, Halina, there is a street performance of classic theater on Ulica Marszalkowska, complete with stage, sound system and rows of chairs for the audience.
Ala grew up in a cul-de-sac close by a boulevard of mansions that now house embassies of great nations, an enclave of Communist high officials named appropriately Aleja Przyjaciol (avenue of friends), since the children of these elite families, many of whom gained intellectual prominence in their own right, still remain in touch on an informal basis of ringing the bell to visit impromptu. We stay with Hanja and Jerzy, she the daughter of an early post-war president, who still live in the family home, a sprawling apartment furnished in faded upholstery and worn wood tables, with functional spare rooms and beds for the children and grandchildren, and the dining room lined with book cases and glass cabinets cluttered with bric-a-brac gifts from heads of state and souvenirs of travels. I feel as if I have traveled in a time warp backwards to the ‘60s, the memory awakened by things I recognize from when we came to Israel – sheets that fall short of covering the length of the bed, books in their original covers wrapped in glossy newspaper neatly folded under the corners (in the toilet where the niagara clanks when you flush), empty jars for re-use on shelves in the kitchen. And above all, the free for all open home and endless spirited chatter over tea and schnapps (such a contrast to Goettingen where I have yet to see the interior of a home besides the flat where Silke rents a room), albeit with the smothering concern of our hosts who insist on taking care of everything themselves, refusing our offers of help.
Halinka has also taken care of our train tickets and accommodation for Krakow, where we stay in a hostel that is affiliated with a government ministry on Meisel street in Kazimierz, just minutes walk from where the festival events take place in a run down area with a fringe culture of boutiques and bars, mixed with tourist shops selling stereotype plaster figures of Jewish men holding musical instruments, and dimly lighted cafes and restaurants with lace table mats, as well as a weekend flea market, where swastikas can be found among collections of old medals and one man was selling old post cards of Hitler (when I suggested he shouldn’t, he retorted, “it’s a democracy”). Here I get a crash education on the Jews in 20th century Poland.
A walking tour brings to life the densely populated and impoverished pre-war ultra-orthodox community, from which those with personal means and vision of a freer world moved out towards the affluence of Krakow. A documentary film about the great purge of assimilated Jewish intellectuals in 1968, based on interviews at a reunion in Israel (in which we saw Mika, Ala’s sister), recreates the isolation, bewilderment and panic that accompanied the anti-semitic wave while lived memories of the Holocaust were still fresh. An interview with an anthropologist about her book on the “legend of ritual murder” reveals the role of the church in keeping alive the common fear of Jews killing Christian children for their blood to make matza; and her research also uncovers horror stories, never yet spoken, from witnesses of pogroms like Jedwabne in 1941, which traumatize the students who conduct the interviews. There is also an amicable, humorous and optimistic talk by Shevach Weiss (who is admired, loved and adored by the audience, and gets a standing ovation when someone presents him with a sunflower for his birthday) about the great cultural loss to Poland of what could have been, the many Poles commemorated as the righteous of the nations, and the need for humanism, tolerance and reconciliation; and a rather amateur film on the Holocaust by a survivor from Krakow, there in person, who made a life in Hawaii and spends each summer guiding tourists at Auschwitz.
I am deeply affected from the immersion in Jewish-Polish culture and the intense conversations with Ala and the friends she meets, but most of all I am saddened by the emptiness of the Jewish revival that the festival symbolizes. I had expected to see here many Jewish people, but I am the only one wearing headphones for translation from the Polish in the packed audiences at the talks in the Kupa synagogue; the Friday night service at the Rema synagogue turns out to be a small group of bearded men in black looking for two Jewish men to complete a minyan; and while Szeroka square is teeming for the final open air concert on Saturday night and some of the performers are clearly American Jews, the appearance, attire and language of the people in the crowd speaks of curious onlookers, even if some of them look as if they are the offspring of generations of interbreeding. Official statistics say there are 1,100 Jews in Poland today, one or two hundred in Krakow. And I heard more than once that there are four kinds of Jews: those that know they are Jewish and practice, those that know and do not practice, those that know and keep it a secret, and those who do not know but might discover it from a grandparent on his or her deathbed.
Back in Warsaw, we spend most of the morning sitting with Halinka in her kitchen, listening to her own story of the war as a young woman in Lodz. In the early afternoon, before Ala leaves for Copenhagen, a friend of hers who has become active in the progressive community in Warsaw, Piotr, drives us to the ghetto, and we walk from the memorial to Mila 18 and the Umschlagplatz, where 330,000 people were transported to Treblinka. The area is now residential with large green spaces, and the streets are almost totally deserted, except for one or two couples and a group of youngsters from the US. At the Nathan Rapaport memorial of the uprising, there is a wreath of daisies sprayed in blue paint in the shape of a star of David, left by an IDF delegation together with a row of memorial lamps specially marked for the occasion and all blown out. I relight one, and then another and another, all in all six. I stand in silence with eyes closed, and am overcome with grief. I bring my attention to the rise and fall of the chest with the breathing and expand the opening of the heart, repeating in my mind a loving kindness meditation. I whisper a kadish, and once again the sorrow rises, so I repeat the meditation. This is my tribute.
In the evening I go out to eat with Wlodek Tulcijew, whom we met in Krakow and is also staying where I am. Over dinner, he continues the story he started in Krakow, pointing to the logs that are part of the restaurant décor, and telling me that as a child he lived in hut made of these in a stetl with 6,000 inhabitants, a third of which were a hassidic community. Their main contact was buying meat and poultry discarded as not kosher by the shokhet. He has many stories of the cruelties of the German occupation, of collective punishment and massacres of entire villages, both Jews and Poles. When he was 14 years old, he was deported with his parents and brother to work in forced labor in a small ammunition factory in Vienna. They lived in a room on the premises, which was destroyed one night in the bombing. After the war, under the Communist regime, Wlodek got an education and became a physicist, a student of a well-known scientist who was a student of Einstein, and who sponsored visits abroad of many of his protégées, including Wlodek, who all came back so that their friends could continue to go.
Wlodek left Poland in 1968. He has two explanations for this. One is that the people in power were persecuting all high ranking academics, so as to make room for their favorites, and he was interrogated and then followed because one of his friends was suspected of having connections with US military research, which was entirely untrue. The other is that he personally knew one of those in power from the war time, then a partisan leader renowned for his brutality. Besides murdering an entire Jewish community to get his hands on a communal cache of jewels and then killing his second in command after seeing his girlfriend wearing a pair of earrings from this treasure, he also murdered someone Wlodek knew personally. This was a teacher who taught him in secret, since the Germans only allowed Polish children to learn reading and writing and basic arithmetic. She and her boyfriend were killed because of a disagreement about a certain partisan strategy. So Wlodek went to teach in Canada and from there to Italy where he now lives in retirement, and he continues to mentor and collaborate with his former student at Warsaw University.
To end on a positive note, I should say that the food was a general delight: knaidlach soup, chicken liver with onion and apple, stuffed cabbage in tomato sauce, kugel, potatoes, beets and coleslaw, pierogi with cheese and mushrooms, and thick slabs of rye bread served with cream cheese. Besides that, in the taxi on the way to the airport to catch a flight to Geneva, I notice the billboards and wonder how on earth does one pronounce ‘wkr’, ‘sprz’ and ’wyzsz’?
