by Andrew Potok
They say that only Catholic Poles are true owners of Polish land. Jews, as the lady in Warsaw told me years ago, are visitors, and visitors exist at the whim of the owner. Every country lives with its own mythology, based on chosen morsels of history, true or imagined. But the North American nineteenth-century expansion west did not make Americans frontiers people; that tendency is not an inherited trait. Gun ownership among pioneers doesn’t translate into the joy of shooting folks with guns today. Poland has had a much longer history, yet only some inhabitants feel they have the right to claim to be “ethnic Poles.” This unhappy territory has been inhabited by Scythian, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic tribes. Not a Jew among them until a thousand years ago. Still visitors? You bet. A thousand years? The blink of an eye. It depends on who is counting. Though at times over the centuries secular authorities have tried to moderate violence toward Jews in order to sustain the economy, the Roman Catholic Church pushed hard for their exclusion, considering them a despised sect, a danger to the church. Morality never entered the picture.
5
13 STRADOMSKA STREET
1.
After breakfast on our second morning in Krakow, Loie and I set out to see the apartment house on Stradomska Street, the reason we are here. We negotiate the narrow, winding, icy Kazimierz streets and, in spite of the horrible weather, Loie points out some of the small tourist attractions. “There’s one called Theta Café,” she says, and snaps a photo for her New Age West Coast friend for whom theta waves lead to health and happiness. I’m freezing but it’s never too cold for the sudden appearance of Loie’s iPhone. “Oh my God, Andy,” she says a few minutes later as I stomp the pavement in my city shoes, “it’s a restaurant with a large picture of Che Guevara in the window”—an image soon to be mailed to my idealistic grandson Nickie. We pass groups of Israeli high school students gathered at the entrances of restored synagogues, the kids equipped with yarmulkes and backpacks, singing folk tunes and clapping.
We emerge on a wide busy street, Stradomska Street, humming with electric trams, speeding traffic, people huddled in their winter coats jumping over snowbanks and, like us, skidding on the treacherous ice. But something grips me, something beyond the daily comedy of slipping and jumping, beyond traffic or the conversations in the street or inside the shops or trolley cars. It is the feeling of a hovering blanket of danger, of alien nationhood, toxic and impenetrable to people like me.
“There’s a Number Thirteen here but it’s just an entrance to a shabby courtyard,” Loie reports. “This can’t be it,” she says, but nevertheless we step into a long, narrow forlorn looking area. “Andy,” she says, “I don’t know how to tell you this but it doesn’t look inhabited.”
“Not inhabited?”
“Electric wires are hanging from the windows, paint is peeling, shutters are falling apart.”
My stomach begins to ache. “We came for this?”
“At the far end, I see an Italian restaurant,” Loie says. “Giuseppi’s or Botticelli’s or some damn name. It’s an old sign and I can’t make it out.”
“Are there people?”
She says nothing for a moment.
“Waiters?”
“No, but I do see tables and chairs, some bottles in the window. Cars parked near the entrance, but no people.”
“It’s supposed to be an apartment house,” I murmur. “My grandmother couldn’t have lived here.” Loie puts her arm through mine. What is with me? Instead of feeling solace, I’d like to take the next plane out of here, to forget we ever came.
“What can I tell you?” Loie says.
“Maybe before the war . . .” I begin.
“Maybe if there were pots of flowers on the balconies,” she says.
“Balconies? There are balconies?”
“And shutters,” she says, “but they’re broken, off their hinges. If it were an Italian slum, they’d have spruced it up. There would be something gay about it.”
“Not that we ever imagined a little pied-à-terre in Krakow,” I muse in spite of a growing awareness of the emptiness of this quixotic journey. “What a thought! How could this piece of shit be worth the kind of money Artur predicted?”
Totally dejected, we find a little café not far from Number Thirteen. “Many of the buildings on Stradomska Street have huge nets tightly cinched around their facades,” Loie reports.
“It’s to keep the crumbling stone from crushing passers-by.”
“Why are they crumbling?”
“The giant Lenin Steel Works, Nowa Huta, spewed particulates into the atmosphere, destroying many beautiful Medieval and Renaissance buildings and churches. The last time I was here, people walked around pressing handkerchiefs to their mouths and noses.”
“You know, Andy,” Loie says, “maybe the condition of the property doesn’t matter. The location has to count for something. The street itself is central and wide,” she says, “plenty of shops and a lot of traffic.” We sip our coffees in silence for a while, our thinking now beginning to concentrate on location. After all, the property, though a tenement, is only a stone’s throw from Wawel Castle, the gem of this city, the place where kings and queens of Poland lived. We ponder the implications of being owners of a Dickensian hovel and begin to walk up the long hill to the castle itself, a stupendous fortified complex of buildings begun by Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century on a site that has been populated since the Paleolithic Age. In one of its rooms hangs a Leonardo da Vinci oil on wood from 1489 called Lady with an Ermine. I hang on to Loie’s elbow as we walk through the galleries. She’s impressed but neither of us have the stamina to stay inside for long.
In October 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, Hans Frank was named governor-general of all Poland and took up residence inside the castle. It has been said that he loved the Leonardo lady, as he did all of Beethoven. In one of the royal staterooms, on December 16, 1941, Hans Frank announced to his senior officials the approaching annihilation of the Jews. “What should we do with the Jews?” he asked. “We were told in Berlin, ‘Why all this bother? We can do nothing with them either in Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat. So liquidate them.’ Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible.”
And so it went. Any European, especially a German, could have uttered those words, words not as shocking or distasteful as they might have been, if not for their religious and civic legitimization and long historical precedent.
From a bench on Wawal Hill overlooking the great Vistula River, I sit gloomily imagining Jews bound for Auschwitz being pushed into boats and trains, whipped, struck with rifle butts. “I wish you could see the view from here,” Loie says. “It’s majestic.”
We walk down from Wawel Hill on this historic blood-soaked land, a ground zero of human evil, which some say can be a product of thoughtlessness; it can be banal, a concept pushed by Hannah Arendt in her coverage of the 1962 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She formulated the dangerous and wrong-headed idea that Adolf Eichmann’s role in the murder of millions of Jews was the work of a clown rather than a monster, stating that, aside from his desire to improve his career, he simply followed orders and showed no anti-Semitism and was thus wrongly tried and hung. Somehow, she missed a large body of evidence that Eichmann boasted of his evil convictions. Evil can be banal, but just because so many humans are capable of its perpetration does not excuse its usage. Hannah Arendt’s tendentious thinking regarding Jewish prominence as bourgeois capitalists allowed her to believe that Jews were partly responsible for their annihilation.
No matter the excuse, evil is an available human choice. For the poet W. H. Auden, evil is potential in everyone. In his poem “Herman Melville,” Auden wrote: “Evil is unspectacular and always human / And shares our bed and eats at our own table.” The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (a convert from Judaism to Christianity), wrote, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is g
loomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”
When, the next day, I tell Artur about our dismay at the condition of Thirteen Stradomska, he seems surprised by my concern. “Once it is recovered, don’t you have to sell it?” I ask him.
“Yes, of course,” he says.
“Why would anyone want to buy such a place?”
“There is always someone,” he tells me. I presume that a buyer would tear the dump down and build a handsome apartment building, but even though I loved living in cities such as New York and Paris, a handsome little apartment house on Stradomska Street, with trams, cars, and trucks whizzing by, neighboring buildings falling apart, the shops dingy and unpleasant, would never be my choice of location. “But Andrew,” says Artur Bobrowski, “you must f-f-forget your taste and think of this as money in the b-b-bank. Remember that all of this is about a nephew of your grandmother’s,” he says. “This Edward Prokocimer in 1946 told the court that all the other inheritors of this property, your father and your uncle Stanislaw, were dead.”
“This is so hard to believe,” I say quietly.
“Not only that,” says Artur, “but he stated that his own brother, B-B-Bruno, who survived the war in Paris, was also dead.
The substance and reality of betrayal has haunted me all my life, and the news of another family betrayal brings old ones back to center stage. I sip my vodka and wonder about memory itself, often cast in stone, impregnable, encased in a thick-walled culvert protecting it from change. “When Edward died,” Artur goes on, “he deeded the property to his son, Miron, who lives in Israel. We will recover it from Miron,” he says.
“Why would Miron listen to a Polish judge’s orders?” I ask. “Can’t he simply dismiss the whole thing?” I entertain an image of a Polish posse riding through the Zin Valey in the Negev. “I am going to sue a relative,” I say quietly to Loie.
“For money that is legally yours,” Loie says sweetly.
Artur thinks for a minute. “No one wants to give away half of his fortune, so he might fight the court, which would only prolong the process. Then, not only will he lose the property but he will be forced to pay all the court fees.” Artur has made his fortune doing precisely this kind of work for survivors now scattered all over the world. “In law school,” he tells us, “I concentrated my studies on Polish law of 1946 and so I am equipped to challenge wrongful inheritance that the Polish court of the time permitted.” He then reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a pack of papers for me to study, much of it the same genealogy of the family since 1830 that he described to me in Vermont; but before we go to court, he tells me, I need to be completely familiar with the names and, when known, the means and place of their wartime murders.
He reads aloud and it is as if I am hearing it for the first time. A stranger in my life and half my age, Artur reminds me that my father had a brother and sister whose existence had been totally unknown to me. My father’s brother, my uncle Szymon, was transported by the Russians to a labor camp in Gorky where he died from tuberculosis that he contracted in the camp. And then there was my aunt, Aunt Maryla, who, probably together with her son (likely my age at the time) and perhaps her mother, my grandmother Paulina, were dragged from a comfortable assimilated life and forced into the Bedzin Ghetto, then transported to Auschwitz to be murdered by ordinary German men, probably with the help of a Ukrainian or two, who were probably identified as Jews by Polish neighbors eager to occupy their houses. Artur’s papers documented only broad details. But how could it have happened except like this? My aunt and cousin and my beloved grandmother were taken to the “showers,” gassed with hundreds of other Jews, then reduced to ashes in a crematorium manufactured by a German corporation. I wonder if Paulina, at her age, had the strength to climb on other bodies, if the eleven-year-old cousin screamed at the bottom of the pile, or if Maryla held them both in her arms. My grandmother Paulina must have been brutalized by filthy alien hands on her body, selecting her, grabbing her, yanking, battering, pushing her into pits or showers or filthy bunks teeming with suffering humanity. I wonder if my grandmother’s white hair was used to stuff some Berliner’s mattress, if the gold fillings in her teeth were yanked out, if she prayed or if her God was already dead to her. I took it for granted that everyone in my family was murdered by Germans or Russians, Ukrainians or Poles, but the difference between knowing the general and knowing the particular is immense.
2.
Until I owned a house and land in Vermont, I had never felt at home, never felt I belonged anywhere. With that house came a joyous feeling of home until, one day, I remembered that, like my parents in Poland, I was merely a visitor in someone else’s land. I wondered how my few surviving relatives felt about their displacement, then acculturation to a new country, surrounded by a new language, new landscapes.
My cousin Anna has lived in Gothenburg, a large city on the west coast of Sweden, since 1969. Also descended from that Potok patriarch born in the 1830s, Joachim David, she traces her lineage to his second marriage while I trace mine to his first. Not only were there eight surviving children from each of the two marriages, but there is some evidence that the inexhaustible Joachim married one more time, though no recorded births from that union have yet been found. Anna and I are both refugees but our experiences have been vastly different. She and her parents were forced to leave Warsaw because of the mass expulsion of Jews, accused by the government of being a Fifth Column, saboteurs and conspirators. The Gomulka government fabricated a narrative for the war years, claiming that, once again, those crafty Jews were spreading ugly rumors about Polish Jew hatred. Thus the ruling party rewrote World War II history, censoring all references to Poles who sent Jews to the death camps or helped with deportations or were simply silent bystanders. The new formulation declared that everyone was sent to extermination camps, especially Poles. Having established this revisionist history, Gomulka forced Jews out of government, academy, and business.
I was thirty-seven at the time, recently married to Charlotte, my political self engaged with American cities burning, the King and Kennedy assassinations, and the violence unleashed by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley at the 1968 Democratic Convention. I was totally ignorant about the expulsions of Jews from Poland.
“Of course it was different for me to be expatriated when I was twenty-three than for you at the age of eight,” Anna tells me. In Sweden, where she has now lived for forty-five years, Anna still feels that she does not belong, not there in Gothenburg, not back in Warsaw, not anywhere. Anna’s father was a physician, her mother a school nurse and, like many others, they fled east at the outbreak of the war, ending up in a Soviet camp, where they were put to work in a military hospital. Like my London cousin Anita, when the war was over Anna and her parents went back to Poland. Though she had not experienced the war, she grew up in the midst of Warsaw rubble, the city destroyed by Germans and Russians. “Poland was my home. I had many friends and a language,” Anna tells me, and I imagine her as a child buying a loaf of bread from the neighborhood bakery, helped by the shopkeeper who asks about her parents and puts the change into her little fists. Anna skips home, maybe munching an end of the loaf, stops at the curb, then crosses the street. A few years later, she sits at a café with a few girlfriends, telling each other stories of how their mothers came out of the bedroom rosy pink and smiling, and how their fathers grumbled as they read the day’s newspaper. Then Warsaw University, a crush on a boy on the nearby bench, her first cigarette, the swallow of vodka. “In Sweden I started a new part in my life. What to do? Learn a new language. My father started to work as an anesthetist in a little town not far from Gothenburg. I studied Slavic languages at the university in Uppsala but, instead of teaching, I took a job with Volvo. Because of my language skills, I did a lot of work in Poland and all over the Soviet Union.”
No matter the circumstances, childhoods are simply childhoods, one lived in war, another in peace. “It’s like children who are born blind,” I tell her, “and consider themselves whole, en
tire, until they learn that others have a sense that they lack.”
“Though I’ve been married to a Swede for many years,” Anna says, “I have never felt at home in Sweden. I feel more and more like a stranger. To go back to Poland? Maybe, I don’t know. Even though the reason why I had to leave Poland was that I am Jewish, at the time I did not think about it much. We never celebrated any Jewish holidays. I know nothing about Judaism.” Anna speaks Swedish, English, and Russian, but she thinks and dreams in Polish. “I lost contact with most of my school friends. It was very strange to see Warsaw after so many years. When I walked all over the city, I realized that it was no longer my city. I panicked when I realized that I didn’t belong there, and if not there, then nowhere.”
My London Anita also feels that she does not belong anywhere. “Certainly not as a Jew,” she says, “but I’m afraid not really as an English woman either.” I’m surprised because she seems so very English, her language the Queen’s English, her ease and comfort among the natives akin to mine in America.
The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “A loss of harmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world, so oppressive to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an artist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existential situation of modern man, one must live in exile of some sort.”
6
PATRIMONY
1.
Memories of getting out of Poland remain skeletal, abridged by intervening time, necessarily incomplete. None of the adult participants are alive, though even when they were, talk of the past was strictly limited. But now that I’m here again walking the streets of this unwelcoming land, the frustration of unrecovered memory drives me crazy. Not only are records destroyed, but entire parts of the country, including large thriving cities, once in Poland, are now no longer so. Vilnius, Wilno in Polish, is now in Lithuania, while others, like Lwow, are part of Ukraine.
