by Andrew Potok
When I momentarily abandon anger, I can even admit a possibility of hope regarding that newly erected Museum of Jewish History in Warsaw whose usefulness in the eradication of Polish anti-Semitism I doubted. If all Polish school children are required to visit the museum at least once, that might not be a total solution to the problem of anti-Semitism but, once free of the anti-Semitism of their parents, children might indeed begin to question all hatred.
6.
When I fall into depression and negativity, when I become a joyless, energyless person and Loie no longer wants anything to do with me, I begin all over again to think of myself as the son of Leon—Leon Potok, my father. Loving and being loved by women, being desired, has always separated me from him. At those times when I am not wanted, I become him.
Having listened to clients all day long, Loie comes home from work tired from empathizing, taking on others’ miseries. At the end of my workday, I too am exhausted but, having spent the day alone with my thoughts, I need conversation. She does not relish my eagerness to talk, prompting me once again to suspect that I am living my father’s life. When my mother came home exhausted from shlepping all day, fitting seal and mink and sable onto a Kennedy or the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, she did not like being with my depressed father. I wonder if he wanted to kill her. To steal all her money, hers and Max’s, to set that fucking Maximilian Furs on fire. At the end of the workday when my brain feels like oatmeal, I look forward to a martini and perhaps a glass of wine with dinner. My father did not allow himself any such pleasure.
Since our return from Poland, in relatively harmless Vermont, Loie, together with a few young poets and dancers, has created a program intended to stress individual differences and encourage empathy in classrooms of kids of all ages. “Six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds put their unwanted negative feelings into spider-web boxes,” she tells me, “and they’re able to confront and transform their negative feelings, angers, hatreds, revenge fantasies, into positive useful ones. Kids can still do it with ease,” Loie says. “If only they would do something like this in Poland,” she adds.
In spite of Loie’s activism in the prevention of hatreds toward any “other,” I continue to torture myself by reading about Poles who dug up the fields around Treblinka and other burial pits, looking for gold to extract from the teeth of buried Jewish skulls, then protecting their dug-up treasure from their neighbors who, they knew, would kill for the gold. Anyone in Poland who sheltered Jews during the war faced a German death sentence but, if not discovered by the occupiers, they not only had to protect themselves from their friends and neighbors who hungered for the stolen Jewish gold but had to fear being stigmatized as “Jew lovers.”
I try to rationalize these acts. Poverty? Pure ignorance? Lack of a gene or two that might promote morality? If these were families with children, did their children help? If they confessed to their priests, did a few Hail Marys wipe the slate clean or did the priests join in the search?
A man testifying about the activities of the church during the war wrote that priests often discussed the Jews in church and thanked God that these parasites were gone once and for all. Adam Chetnik, a distinguished Polish ethnographer, noted in his diary in 1941: “In Warsaw one does not see Jews anymore, and some say that it would be hard to get used to them once again. In any case, we do not feel their absence.”
I know I have to stop broadcasting my feelings. No one seems eager to be with me and none of it is helping dissipate the gloom at home.
7.
Some of my friends deny that Polish anti-Semitism is special and think it should not be the cause of obloquy. To them, Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah is unfair in singling out Poland as the prime malefactor. I assume that their objection to Lanzmann comes from their respect and admiration for those Poles who were not Jew haters, those who put their own lives on the line by protecting Jews. And indeed, according to Yad Vashem’s count, there were six thousand Poles, more than from any other nation, among the righteous, those who considered all humans as equals.
Cultural and intellectual life in Poland has always been lively, often extraordinary. Assuming that no trace of post-Enlightenment piety or unswerving devotion to the somewhat discredited Polish church still exists among them, a few recent examples of the many I admire are philosophers such as Leszek Kolakowski, composers such as Krzysztof Panderecki, poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Zbygniew Herbert, and Wyslawa Szymborska.
Since returning from Krakow, I’ve been listening to every book, recorded or scanned into my computer, regarding anti-Semitism, Jewishness, Christianity, Polish history, the many aspects of evil. The hard, cold winter in north central Vermont has not contributed much gaiety to the somber, though enlightening, subject matter.
One morning at breakfast with two good friends, we talk of old times, the Bread and Puppet Circus settling nearby, the quixotic history of Goddard College, the state of our wood piles. Knowing my current obsession with Poland and “the Jewish question,” they mention a book they think I should read, a memoir in the guise of a novel, Fatelessness, by Imre Kertesz, the great Hungarian writer and Nobel Prize winner sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald when he was fourteen years old. Because I am only a year younger than Kertesz, the horrors of his experience strike close to home. In 1944, when he was picked up in the streets of Budapest in the huge Eichmann deportations before the end of the war, I was thirteen, safely tucked away in a New England school. Kertesz’s memories of being pulled out of the cattle car onto the famous selection platform in Auschwitz, and his excitement encountering German troops in their splendid warlike uniforms, was not like anything I had read before. At fourteen, he was intrigued and curious rather than fearful. But then, transported from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, he barely survived the subsequent year of torture. Never, before Fatelessness, could I imagine myself as a child or a teenager experiencing those initial moments as adventure. It seemed possible that, like Kertesz, I might have done so, before experiencing the horror the death camp turned out to be.
In Kertesz’s Nobel acceptance speech he said, “The existential labor that being an Auschwitz-survivor has thrust upon me is a kind of obligation. I realize what a privilege has been bestowed on me. I have seen the true visage of this dreadful century, I have gazed into the eye of the Gorgon, and have been able to keep on living. Yet, I knew I would never be able to free myself from the sight; I knew this visage would always hold me captive . . . I have never succumbed to the temptation of self-pity, nor, it may be, to that of true sublimity and divine perspicacity, but I have known from the beginning that my disgrace was not merely a humiliation; it also concealed redemption, if only my heart could be courageous enough to accept this redemption, this peculiarly cruel form of grace, and even to recognize grace at all in such a cruel form. And if you now ask me what still keeps me here on this earth, what keeps me alive, then, I would answer without any hesitation: love.”
Love? As I first read his words, I have to re-read this passage, but there it is again. Love. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. I don’t know what this really means, how Auschwitz leads to love. My little traumas of the time were not even flesh wounds compared with the unimaginable horrors of Kertesz’s mid-teens, but he emerged with redemption, grace, and love. I emerged with numbness. Of course, as a child, I didn’t make that choice. My body did. Different bodies make different choices and take different roads for the remainder of their lives. I don’t even know how to learn from Kertesz. I can only stand to one side, take a deep breath, and experience an incomprehensible awe.
Now, with the reawakening of my Polish years, numbness is no longer an option. I suppose that, as I numbed out the trauma, I could have become a sociopath, a killer, a warrior, a nasty cop, a seeker of absolute truths, a monk, an ideologue for whom the end justified any means. Post-trauma, people have been known to turn to anti-social rebellion, thuggery and murder and suicide. I could also have learned to forgive, to become a hermit, a leader. There seems to be no pattern in the lives of r
efugees, of the traumatized, the badly parented.
So here I am in progressive Vermont, comfortable, well taken care of and caring, blind but not yet dying of some dread disease, the trees budding I am told, the climate temperate, spring upon us. I am in the throes of unresolved pain, not caused by some virulent act of Jew hatred or by personal affronts, and yet I feel like a knight in armor, Don Quixote, prepared to slash and pierce, ready for the hint of a slur. No real estate is worth the state of mind this pursuit of property recovery has produced, not to mention the expenditure of time and intense emotion. I cannot stop trying to understand the terror that once gripped me, succeeded by the terror that remained in my thinking about the world. I wish I could connect it to my painting, my deep love of music, to the way I deal with blindness, my ability to love and, too often, the ease with which I lapse into anger and hatred. Terror tends to poison all love, generosity, and compassion as inconspicuously as a brown recluse spider crawled into Loie’s suitcase in California and bit her cheek when she unpacked in Vermont. I know that hatred accomplishes nothing except to poison the hater. Unfortunately, forgiveness is not my answer. No philosophy of goodness could entice me to forgive. I am told that forgiving costs nothing. Not true. Whether forgiveness is demanded by some cockamamie religious belief or simply on the advice of a therapist or, better yet, for the sake of rational self-preservation, it’s not easy to surrender a righteous rage if it’s a powerful center of self-identity.
If there had been no war, I imagine that I would have been sent to school in England, and perhaps the Apfelbaum’s Warsaw business and their Bedzin homes and factories would have continued to exist. The recent trip to Krakow has unleashed what I never before faced with such emotional clarity: rage, which has disturbed the complacent part of my existence. I’m afraid that my days will end with hatred in my heart and, wisdom to the contrary, it’s also possible, though unlikely, that the hatred will keep me alive for a long time to come.
The feelings that I am wrestling with are not just about anti-Semitism generally, but about the choices my own family made living within the belly of that beast. They were allowed to live comfortably because of their assimilation, and rewarded with a tacit acceptance by wealthy Poles. The Apfelbaum clan was servile as any good fashion merchant, performing admirably, with humility and generosity, offering Poles and wealthy folks from all over Europe furs beautifully designed by my mother from bundles of pelts bought at Leningrad auctions by Max. But how comfortable could they have been preparing a fashion show at the Hotel Bristol or being led to their table by the maître d’ at one of the great Villanova restaurants? Was my mother smiling? Did Max protrude his chest proudly, pigeon-like? Did the waiters grouse in the kitchen about serving those Jews? Did they even feel like Jews? And then, what if our Citroen van had not made it to the Lithuanian border? In rural Poland, not far from the border crossing, the peasant population would have happily stopped plowing their fields, run for their barns where the knives and clubs hung, and cut us up for fertilizer. Were all peasants who worked the land capable of such brutality? Are they still? If one can slaughter animals for food, does it make the slaughter of fellow humans easier? What if we had turned back to Warsaw? Even with my family’s connections to the rulers of the place, it seems unlikely that any of us would have survived the German hatred of Jews. Most of the family who stayed behind were equally assimilated, which didn’t prevent their murder by German men or the takeover of their apartments and possessions by unquenchable human thirst. And we would have been pushed into the ghetto and from there to Treblinka or Auschwitz. But none of this happened to me or my parents or Anita or Max or Zosia.
A friend sent me electronically an unpublished memoir by a survivor who, because of ingenious stealth and unbelievable luck, made it through the war in Poland. He was my age when the war started but was surely made of sterner stuff. Though also the son of merchants, he and his family lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, whereas my parents and I lived in the thick of a Christian community. Thoughtful, even scholarly, his story of seemingly random decisions, uncanny, unimaginable escapes, though surely true, are too unbelievable for even a bad movie. When he was twelve, he joined other child smugglers outside the ghetto walls, and when the ghetto uprising began, he managed to flee to the countryside where he worked on a farm, then lived in an orphanage run by the Silesian fathers, constantly fearing that his circumcised penis would be detected. After he spent the entire war hiding out from Germans and Poles, all but a very few of the latter eager to turn him in, much to my amazement he wrote that it was unjust to condemn a whole nation on the basis of the behavior of a few. A few? Which Poland was he referring to? Though he could not have been aware then of Jedwabne or Kielce or any of the many other places in the country where “neighbors” slaughtered Jews during and after the war, he must know better by now. A few Poles did have a hand in his survival, but Jew hatred, collaboration, the pleasure he must have seen on their faces as the Jews disappeared, was in the air he breathed. His father, who had bought the birth certificate of a Christian child murdered in a concentration camp, intended to help his son survive as a Pole, but someone discovered that one of the murdered child’s parents was Jewish, putting the memoirist’s life in mortal danger again, especially were his circumcised penis to be detected. Because of his ability to forgive, he is probably living a happier life after the war than he would have if he had carried hatred in his heart, but it is beyond me to imagine the fortitude, the denial or charity, it took to let it go, to accept evil. It surpasses any of my attempts to understand it.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Kertesz said that most efforts to bring the Holocaust to people’s consciousness have been sentimental at best. Referring to Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List, Kertesz said, “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life and the very possibility of the Holocaust.” What he discovered in Auschwitz he describes as “the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived, in the Christian cultural environment, after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.”
10
NATURE AND NURTURE
1.
My psychopharmacologist prescribes a new antidepressant, adding norepinephrine and dopamine to the serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Like idiots the world over, I want a magic bullet to rocket me out of my misery. The new drug cocktail and a martini, plus the passage of time, might help me get on with my life.
I used to talk weekly on the phone with a New York psychoanalyst who was not only a German Jewish refugee, a few years older than I, but blind. I loved the man. But recently, as dear Norbert was emptying the garbage outside the back door of his West End Avenue apartment, he fell down the back stairs and died, a terrible loss. If only he was there now and I could tell him about Poland, about my anger, about all the pain those memories bring. “I probably shouldn’t hate so much,” I might have told him, “but I can’t get over my hatred.”
“Look here,” Norbert would have said, “let us call a shpade a shpade. How can you not hate them? It’s too easy to forgive.” When, at times, I would kvetch about my being a hopeless narcissist, he would say, “Narcissist? Narcissist? Vot is this narcissist? Do not call yourself names.”
At home on Richardson Street, I continue my nighttime talks with Paulina and Solomon, seated in front of my slightly open bedroom windows, the cold night air not a problem as I confess my participation in the search for chemicals and every other damn thing to relieve depression, loss of memory, whatever else ails this aging body. “It couldn’t have been like this in your time,” I say. “None of these nostrums were even invented, crap like Ecstasy, Vicodin, Ritalin, THC, whatever it takes. Some of us scream our hidden kvetches, others repress them. Some eat no sugar or wheat, no animal fat or vegetable oils. Some eat plants grown in sunlight or grown in shade, eat red meat or organic chicken, drink at least
two glasses of red wine to keep the blood flowing.”
“We loved a glass or two of wine with dinner,” my grandmother tells me.
“Nowadays we ask each other, ‘How’s the urinary tract, the prostate, the knees, the high registers?’” I kvetch, “But above all, we dread the loss of memory. We cannot stop complaining about forgetting a name or a phone number. We make ourselves do crossword puzzles or learn Greek. Some say to forget brain exercise. ‘Only physical exercise,’ they say. People of all ages sweat to prolong their lives but, to tell the truth, there aren’t many my age frolicking or dancing, so we do anything to preserve youth and health.”
“And we not?” asks my grandmother. “We ran to the baths, to Carlsbad or Bad Nauheim. We sat in brine and mud. We drank putrid waters that bubbled up through rocks. We closed windows at night to keep bad air away. We wanted to live forever.”
“Ah,” my grandfather Solomon adds. “Special waters, salt springs bubbling from the ground, good for the heart and nerves.”
“The walks in the mountains,” Paulina continues, “the beautiful roses, orange ones and yellow and pink.”
I am smiling, fortified by thoughts of our familial addiction to seeking help. I turn to my side and, almost asleep, I wish there had been some medication, anything, that might have helped my poor father.
2.
There is no sign yet of the Richardson Street woodpecker. However, the robins are chirping away and other woodpeckers are pecking their hearts out in the woods above us, the Richardson Street dead end sign for now undisturbed.
