by Andrew Potok
Following a border incident in March 1938, Poland presented an ultimatum to Lithuania demanding the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries; and thus the border, the one we were allowed to cross, had only recently been re-opened. Who knew? Had this not been the case, where would we have ended up? And what if Zosia had not met a man on a train months before? I had never given any thought to the appearance and availability of an airplane, which seemed to be waiting for us at an airport in Riga. Like everything else that happened after the first bombs fell, it simply happened. If it had not, we would have ended our days in a Riga ghetto, or been transported back to a death camp nearer to home. Our way out—as was the case with everyone who managed it—was fraught with the most unlikely coincidences, called miracles by some, called life’s improbable events by me. The fragility of a choice or decision—a few days or hours before, a few days after, choosing to enter one door rather than another, making a flight or catching the one that doesn’t crash—the decision or accident, either our own or someone else’s, determines entire lives. A friend whose family had also gotten out said, “They had twenty unbelievable breaks. Had there been only nineteen, they would have died.”
3.
I held my father’s hand as we stepped off the ferry from Ellis Island. Our feet touched America at the same moment. My mother, Max, and Anita were behind us. An airplane flew above us and I hid my face in my father’s overcoat. Two people whom Max had met at the World’s Fair a year before met us and brought us in two taxis to their apartment on the Upper West Side. Again an airplane buzzed overhead and I flew under a dining room table, the woman—later to become the PR lady for Maximilian Furs—laughed, pulled me out, and held me against her. I only wanted to be away from the shaking earth, the sky dense with danger, the Citroen van, betrayals; away from blood-soaked Europe, away from that language, my language, away from my parents.
Now there is a new America, no longer the America of “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore . . .” Now much of the country seems hell bent on keeping people out or sending them back to the agonizing fate awaiting them at home. It’s naïve to think that America’s reluctance to share wealth, or what it defines as freedom, is a rarity. Rather, it’s the nature of the beast, any beast, certainly not only the American one. But owning an American passport and a long American past, I feel as guilty as the bystanders in Germany and Poland way back then, sitting comfortably at the top of quiet peace-loving Richardson Street in Vermont, angry and embarrassed but impotent.
I imagine that there was as little to be done then as there is now. There are a few brave, moral people who risk life and livelihood to tell the truth of American dominance over any group standing in its way, comparable to the few who tried to save fellow human beings in spite of the threat of death. America was a haven then, but mostly to the likes of my well-to-do merchant family; it denied access to the equally embattled throngs on their way to annihilation.
I must consider how lucky and therefore grateful I should be that I was granted entrance in February 1940, a time when Roosevelt turned away the SS St. Louis, a ship of Jewish refugees, and sent it back to sure death in Jew-hating Europe. In mid-summer 1939, two-thirds of respondents to an American Gallup poll said they did not want thousands of Jewish children allowed into the US no matter how threatened their lives were in the Germany of that time. Most Western countries regarded the plight of Jewish refugees with skepticism or unveiled bigotry; for just as the oppressed easily transform themselves into oppressors once their oppression is alleviated, so do the comfortable become hardened to the plight of the victims of war, greed, and violence, still so heartbreakingly evident in most of Europe, as Syrian, African, Afghani, and Iraqi refugees endure the horror of present wars or die either in flight or in the struggle for acceptance and safety. Can evil infiltrate humanity as easily as that or can we learn to care for “the other,” whoever that other is? German policy of the 1930s stated simply that it is the duty of the strong to rid the world of the weak.
What an immense number of selves make up a lifetime, and how hard it is to accept all of them. I have tried for years to reconfigure, to recreate, the father that was and the son that might have been. As tempting as it is to come up with different scenarios—no war, no displacement, no borders to cross, no frantic search for another kind of life—the course of life lived is unchanging; only the handling of memories, unstable and insufficient as they are, is open to imagination. With no betrayal at the border, would my father have found other occasions to express an inner need to betray, or was it (as I have always tried to believe) a split-second blackout, a biological leap for survival, brain neurons rather than the mind responding to airplanes, bombs, and bullets? Would my father and mother have stayed together if they had remained in their familiar culture? Would he have killed her or she him? But of all the moments in my life I want most to relive and change, it is the one at my father’s deathbed. I wish I could have permitted my head to rest on his chest, my hands to touch his cheeks, my eyes to fill with tears. Whatever pain he had caused me, I could have recognized the immensity of his own pain and despair.
In New York, my self-hating father gloated when, during the Eisenhower administration, a man named Goldfine was caught bribing Sherman Adams, an assistant to the president, with the gift of a vicuña coat. My father loved the fact that a Jew was acting in the precise way that anti-Semites had stereotyped Jews. My father had become strictly majoritarian, no matter how dumb the position, driving me then and now to mistrust majorities, especially self-defined moral majorities.
And then, how many people in America pay tribute to the public-intellectual Jews I admire, the Noam Chomskys, the Howard Zinns, the real heroes who are vilified for their clear-headed humanity, their progressive view of the world, their morality and activism? In our corporate media, we hear mainly from a little right of center to very right of center. Even after all my years on earth, I remain astounded by the extent of ignorance——astounded by people who are enamored of violence, hatred of the other, and wealth at any price; people who vote against their own interest. How to live an informed life when mired in the communications fog, amid the lies of government, public relations, advertising and corporate media, all lawful, even embraced by capitalism? How to live in a country that finances death by drone, or “shock and awe,” that allows the police to murder people of color? How to live with millionaires and billionaires buying elections, with there being no difference between politicians and lobbyists?
Deracinated, my father’s life passed as in a nightmare, in an atmosphere of gloom, frozen by memories, without joy. One of the most guilt-ridden moments in my life was when I held my father’s hand twenty-five years after our arrival in the US, as he, skeletal and racked with cancer, lay in his bed, speechless and in great pain. He was hardly recognizable, his sallow skin stretched as tight as it could be without tearing apart, his eyes bulging, his hand not a human hand but a vulture’s claw. He moaned softly. All his life, my father moaned. He moaned as he sat at his radio listening to the news, moaned as a greeting, a warning to anyone entering the apartment. Neurasthenia, said the doctor, but it was abysmal depression and self-hatred. His mental illness was not helped by the disdain and hatred of his wife and brother-in-law, neither of whom he could escape. Uncle Max’s subterfuge, bluster, and bombast allowed him, always with a push from my mother, to assume the position of the warrior king of furs. I both looked up to Max and hated him for the damage he inflicted on my father, and yet who else was there as a model of manhood, especially since my mother constantly reminded me that my father was spineless, impotent, a nothing. Above all, she would say, your father is contagious. I still struggle not to be like him. I do fear the contagion, but internalizing one’s parents is a biological given on the cellular level in spite of the most fervent wishes not to allow it.
Depression seems to have run deep in the Potok famil
y. My London cousin Anita and I have joked about it many times in the past, noting our own tendencies in that direction, always attributing it to our Potok genes. Her mother, Pola, my father’s first cousin, had separated from her husband, a Saper by name, before the war, but the three of them left Sosnowiec together in 1950 to begin their English lives. Pola had always been severely depressed, and in the 1950s she was offered a frontal lobotomy. “Father and I visited her a few hours after the operation,” Anita tells me. “She was bandaged up, sitting and reading a newspaper. I think she was about sixty-five at the time. For about six months she was happy, delightful, and the sort of mother I always wanted, but she gradually reverted to being a depressed unhappy person, back to being a Potok.”
My uncle Stash, my father’s brother, was a very depressed man. I only vaguely remember Stash in my Warsaw childhood but spent a lot of time with him during several of my visits to London where he told me the story of the one true love of his life. Before the war, he was in love with Marysia. When the Russians deported him, he knew he would never see Marysia again. After his liberation from the Soviet labor camp and during his year-long trek through Russia and vast expanses of the Near East, he could not stop dreaming about Marysia. Two years after settling in London, he was on his way down the long escalator to the Victoria Underground Station. On the other escalator, going up, he thought he saw Marysia. “I cannot believe what I see,” he told me, “but I yell her name.” He takes a deep breath. “And it is she. We both think the other is dead, but we are not dead. She is there and I am there. We are never so happy. We marry immediately.” Stash stops and takes out his handkerchief. “It is two years later, two years,” he says, still unable to believe it, “Marysia has breast cancer and she dies.”
Sitting at my father’s bedside as he lay dying, I wanted to be anywhere but there. My narcissistic mind had no room for grief, especially grief for this father-betrayer. “What about me?” I thought as I sat on the edge of his bed, “I am beginning to go blind. Not only that,” I thought, “but I’m not like you. I can be happy.” In Vermont for just a couple of years, I had everything I wanted. I lived in a house I loved with my two children, surrounded by new friends. As I sat at my father’s deathbed, I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and my guilt will never leave me.
From my visual past, I remember seeing only one photograph of my father. He is in a white tuxedo jacket and tie, sitting at a dining table during a transatlantic crossing on his way to Bad Nauheim, where he went a couple of times during his last years. Though I did not like his going to Germany for a holiday, I hoped he had a mistress there or somewhere. I would now love to stare deeply into his eyes, to discover something there, perhaps pleasure that, in my filial anger, I would not have known existed. Sitting there in the photograph, he is alien to me. I never knew a father who wore a tuxedo, who sat in front of splendid dishes, who looked proud doing so. I suppose he contributed to conversations at the table. The captain’s table? Did anyone nod in agreement or consider him charming? Did he seek them out on deck? What did he think of when he looked into the ocean? Surely he carried a photo of me in his wallet that he showed proudly to the others. He told me that he heard both Lenin and Trotsky speak in Switzerland, the thought of which I value. His first vote in America was for the Socialist Norman Thomas. After that, it must have been depression that pushed him from social democracy to McCarthyism, a sinkhole for self-hating miserable Jews, making me wonder if he felt like a Jew. In the many generations of Potoks, there must have been observant ones. In Yad Vashem’s long list of Potoks murdered during the Holocaust, there are many Jentas, Avrahams, Fajgas, Yaakovs, Goldas, Zalmans, and Khaims. The language spoken at my parents’ home was Polish. I am amazed to learn that eighty-eight percent of Polish Jews considered Yiddish or Hebrew as their native, primary language.
Once, in New York, I followed him on the streets, hoping he had a mistress, a friend, anything, but he ended up in a small walk-in Merrill Lynch office where he, with other aging men, all of them except my father dressed in good suits and polished shoes, watched the ticker tape from the New York Stock Exchange. He must have had a different life in Poland than in America. He might have had fantasies that haunted or amused or aroused him, a piece of music or a book that made him smile or cry or interested him enough to pursue them to places he had never been. It’s hard to imagine my father enjoying anything, though in New York, he walked over to St. Nick’s Arena to watch men perform the sick choreography of staged wrestling. His blood must have boiled with excitement; he must have shouted, hoping for gore in that hot sweaty place as men threw one another to the ground, pulled hair, pummeled mercilessly with their fists. It might have relieved some of his frustration, depression, his hatred for his brother-in-law Max, perhaps for his wife as well. My father’s mental state, depression called neurasthenia by his European doctors—might have become chemically treatable had he lived longer. On the other hand, the effects of war and displacement contributed immensely to the mental pain he suffered. How I wish he had talked, reminisced, or shared his terrible pain.
Though a lot of my life has been devoted to not being, or resembling, my father, there were times when I felt like him, was him. As I inched toward blindness, the slowness that it imposed felt like his shuffle as he walked from room to room in his old, worn slippers. My awkwardness, the little physical calamities, the dependence, the not knowing what to do, where to turn, how to express needs without losing integrity, how not to be a burden, these were our shared concerns. When I left my house and marriage, when my community of friends disappeared, I came ever closer to feeling like he must have felt as he sat and moaned by his radio, smelling of old age. Surely his isolation was worse than mine. How could I not have knelt in front of him to offer companionship and solace? If I coughed or sneezed when I was a child, it was my father who took charge. I can still feel his wet lips on my forehead, checking for fever, then the sound of the glass cups inside the doctor’s black bag clinking as he walked toward Number Four Moniuszki Street to lay a dozen of the little cups on my back. In his way, my father cared.
4.
My father was born in a town named Bedzin, less than forty miles west of Krakow. The Potoks had lived there for generations, owned factories and homes. Living a fairly prosperous life, and with pre-war bourgeois expectations and no history of mobility, they undoubtedly expected to remain there for generations to come.
Bedzin was founded in the ninth century on a tributary of the Vistula in the Silesian highlands. For much of the nineteenth century, there were more Jews than Catholics in both town and county. Before September 1939, more than twenty-four thousand Jews lived precariously with thirty thousand others in this thriving industrial community. Of course, Jew hatred was as virulent in Bedzin as everywhere else in Poland. Still, every summer of my childhood, I was sent there to visit my grandparents and uncles and never heard the Polish word for Jew. Even if I heard it, I wouldn’t have known what it meant, or that I was one, while most Jewish kids my age were already deep into religious studies. In a recent book, A Small Town Near Auschwitz, the Jews from the area who survived tell of childhoods scarred by curses and beatings by Polish children taught by priests, parents, and teachers that “the Christ-killers deserve to be hated, tormented, and wiped from the earth.”
In September 1939, the German Army, followed by the SS death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, burned the Bedzin synagogue and murdered whoever among the Jews appeared in their field of vision. They created the Bedzin Ghetto in 1942 and, by the summer of 1943, most of the Jews in Bedzin were deported to the nearby German concentration camp at Auschwitz. Since Bedzin was one of the last Polish communities to be liquidated, there were a relatively large number of survivors, my grandparents not among them.
Now, Artur hires a car to take us to Bedzin, about an hour’s drive from Krakow. It is not quite as polluted and dismal as it was when the Lenin steel plant was active and spewing particulates for a hundred-mile radius, but it’s still grim and dirt
y from the remaining heavy industry in the region. The few pedestrians in the Bedzin streets still wheeze and cough as they cover their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. It’s hard to picture this ugly town in its pre-war industrial splendor. Our driver takes us to the half-destroyed, long-abandoned Potok factory, whose oil presses produced a vegetable oil marketed as Potokola and the margarine named Potokana. I had been here during my 1979 visit but now again I try to stifle tears, always ready to flow, even for the present unseen reminders of what symbolized normal times.
An old drunk leans on the loading dock of the factory, where nuts, seeds, fruits, and fiber used to be unloaded for processing. I ask him if he knows anything about this factory or the Potok family who owned it. It takes him a few moments to gather his wits.
“Knew them?” he finally slurs, “My father worked for them.” He stretches his arms to touch my shoulders. “Good little Jews they were,” he hiccups, proud of his tolerance, surely unaware of the term’s pejorative, infantilizing connotations. “Very good to us they were,” he reminisces, “decent, generous people.”
A few blocks away stands the large old house, a mansion, where my grandparents lived, now converted into municipal offices, work stations, the undecorated, lifeless cubicles separated by shoulder-high partitions, nearly hiding the gorgeous parquet floors that bombard me with memories of my happy summer visits.
My uncle Stash remembered an incident from one of my summer vacations in Bedzin. “When you were five, maybe six,” Stash told me years ago in his Chalk Farm London flat. “Who was there aside from your father? I think Henio and his Basia, Marek and Freda, maybe Marylka and Idek. You played with your lead soldiers under the dining room table while we drank our schnapps, and somebody said, ‘Pass the pickles,’ and suddenly you piped up from under the table: ‘Did someone say pickles?’ We laughed so hard we nearly wet our pants and your governess—who was it? Inka I think—grabbed you from under us and passed you around from hand to hand, as we tossed and hugged you, and you shrieked with pleasure.”
