A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  Funny. Just an odd feeling. On reflection, Barbara Gora realized that for the first time in her life, for just a moment, she had felt proud to be Jewish. Here was this Pole. He was not telling her about the dirty Jew. The Jew who produces nothing. He was admiring the efficient work of these Jews.

  Her father's sister, whom Barbara's father had also saved, was among the Jews who had left Poland in 1956 with her entire family, and Barbara went to visit them in a small town near Tel Aviv, where she stayed for seven weeks. She also visited her mother's sister, who had emigrated to Palestine before the war and had eight children. Then she returned to Poland as she had left, Barbara Gora, Polish agronomist.

  WHEN JAKUB GUTENBAUM RETURNED from Moscow in 1955 — after the “doctors’ plot” and the death of Stalin, he had completed his scholarship—he could find almost nothing that looked familiar. The city of rubble had been replaced by a city of massive blocks, unidentifiable rooftop statues eerily watching, and towers with neoclassical details that looked as if they had been stuck on later with glue.

  It was a good time for Gutenbaum. Nobody seemed to particularly care that he was Jewish. He got a doctorate and a second doctorate and worked on research at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He lived in an elite Polish world. He married a Pole in 1960, and he worked with Polish scientists. No one ever made an issue of his Jewishness.

  In the meantime an entire new postwar generation was growing up, learning of their Jewish background only on a need-to-know basis. The previous generation had tried to save their children this way. The less the child knew, the less danger for everybody. After the war it was as the Lippners had told their sons about Hungary; being Jewish could be dangerous. Since the families were not practicing Judaism, there was no need to discuss the subject unless the child was taunted and needed to know why. Some children were told because they were picking up Polish anti-Semitism. When children who spent their childhood going to church came home repeating anti-Semitic words they heard in school, they were told, “You are a Jew, I am, your father is, our whole family is.” Then the child had to be told what a Jew was.

  Some children were told by dying parents who felt obligated at the last moment to let the children know. But other parents never told their children. In truth, even today it is impossible to say how many people of Jewish origin live in Poland.

  The postwar generation was too young to remember the violence of the late 1940s. They had grown up in the 1950s, when people were arrested for anti-Semitic outbursts. It was a Poland in which the entire subject of Jews was taboo. The Jews didn't want to talk about it, and the anti-Semites did not dare. When Gomulka returned to power, there was a widespread belief that Jewish issues would be laid to rest. He was not considered an anti-Semite. He was even married to a Jew, although Jews later quipped that it was his horrible wife that had turned him anti-Semitic.

  A power struggle bubbled up in the slow-simmering way that happens in countries that do not replace their leaders through elections. General Miczlyslaw Moczar was trying to position himself to overtake Gomulka. In Poland, Jew-hating is always an available card that can be played. In 1966, Moczar established a “Jewish department” to look into the suspicious past of Jews. Moczar thought anti-Semitism would play well with another longstanding Polish sentiment, anti-Germanism. After the Six-Day War, Gomurka came under intense pressure to go along with Moczar. A new version of Polish history was floated in which the Poles had tried to help the Jews during the Holocaust, but the Jews had destroyed themselves by their own cooperation with the Germans. The Jews were foreign sympathizers.

  Moczar began a purge of Jews in the echelons of the party and the army. In June 1967, Gomulka gave a speech about “fifth columnists” to a trade union congress, which was seen as a signal of approval for Moczar's purge. Most of this maneuvering was barely perceptible to the general population until the student movement of 1968. A production of Adam Mickiewicz's popular nineteenth-century drama, Dziady, or Forefather's Eve, was forced to close by the government. This in itself was a strange move, since the play, though nationalist in theme, was an established classic of Polish literature. But the Polish regime was nervously watching a reform movement led by Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia that they did not want to see spread to Poland. There was a student slogan in 1968: “All of Poland is waiting for Dubcek.” In March 1968, Warsaw students demonstrated against the closing of the play. Two student leaders were arrested, and students started demonstrating against the arrests as well as for freedom from censorship.

  Joanna Wiszniewicz was a Warsaw student at the time. She knew that the government would have to react to the demonstration. She didn't know what they would do, but she felt that she had to demonstrate. She couldn't act afraid. What could they do? “I felt safe in this country with its socialist ideals.” The first shock came when she found herself with hundreds of others fleeing from policemen who were mowing through the demonstrators with clubs. A bigger shock came two days later, when she bought a newspaper and read that the entire protest had been carried out by Jews.

  This was astounding. She didn't recall anything ever being said about Jews. She was Jewish, though she only learned that when she was ten years old, and she had never even been to a synagogue. Suddenly, Zionists were supposedly everywhere, and the newspapers were full of warnings. Comic slogans were being used with deadly seriousness. She read phrases such as “Moishe, go to Israel!” and “Zionists, go to Dayan!” Now Jews were being expelled not only from the party but from their jobs and even schools. Well-established careers ended abruptly, with a quick message that their services were no longer needed.

  Konstanty Gebert was 15 when he was expelled from his school as a “political security risk.” His father was an old-time Communist labor organizer in Detroit who had been one of the founders of the Communist Party of America and had returned to Poland after the war. Konstanty had grown up in elite circles and lived much of his childhood abroad while his father served in diplomatic posts. His mother was Jewish. By escaping to the Soviet Union, she became one of four people in her family to survive the war. His parents had met through their common Communist ideology, and that was the family religion. Then suddenly, at the age of 15, Konstanty's long, sixties-style hair was clipped off in front of the school with the pronouncement, “This is not a Jewish school. We don't wear long hair.” A yellow star of David was painted on his desk. It was all so silly, he thought, the way grown-ups acted. He couldn't believe this was all happening.

  Even grown-ups could see this purge was not without its comic aspects. An insignificant factory engineer with a Jewish name was dismissed as a Zionist. He went to the government with his World War II Latvian certificate, which had established to Nazi satisfaction that he was of good “Aryan” stock. The government apologized and reinstated him.

  It was both a thrilling and confusing time for a fifteen-year-old boy. Once Konstanty was thrown out of school, he was free to demonstrate. Coming home from his first demonstration, although he arrived home three hours late, he felt triumphant. This was a Communist household, and he had been on the streets fighting the cops for freedom and equality. Breathlessly, he told his father, the veteran Detroit organizer, about his day. Now he, too, had a story like his father's stories, and his father would be proud. But instead, his father was angry and made him stay in the house for three days. The old veteran was also a father and did not want his son to be beaten up on the street.

  Then something even more confusing happened. Konstanty was walking in his neighborhood, not far from the Polonia Hotel, in an area where enough had survived and been rebuilt to vaguely suggest old Warsaw and conceal the steel and glass giants only a block or two away. Two men grabbed him and slapped him in the face while calling him “dirty kike.” Afterward, he rubbed his sore face and wondered who he was to be so abused, to be called a dirty kike and be hit.

  The older generation was frightened by the Polish regime's purge of the alleged Zionist German conspiracy. Barbara Gora read the
newspapers and felt as if she were back in the Nazi occupation. She started finding out who among her friends were Jewish: They were the ones who were suddenly losing their jobs. The state scientific publishing house where she now worked on an agricultural newsletter dismissed all of its Jewish employees. They were Zionists and could not be trusted. For the moment she was still untouched, but all of the party members where she worked—and she was a party member—were asked to sign a resolution against Zionism. The publisher was told to draw up the resolution. Scared and uncertain of what to do, he wrote a simple statement, “Down with Zionism.” The statement was passed around at a special meeting, awaiting the signatures of all who hoped to keep their jobs. But Barbara Gora's supervisor handed the paper back to the publisher and said, ‘This is not necessary. It's completely irrelevant, because we don't have any Zionists here.” A few days later, the same supervisor ran across an editor he knew who had been fired from the state publishing house. The supervisor hired him for his publication.

  There were many such acts of defiance. They were sometimes less a reflection of sympathy for Jews than of opposition to the government. It was the beginning of an antigovernment coalition that would bring together many diverse groups, including Jews and the Catholic Church. The legal press was state-controlled and dutifully ran the anti-Semitic diatribes handed out by the government. But two weeklies refused to cooperate and instead tried to report on what was really happening. One was a small Catholic weekly called Tygodnik Powszechny, and the other was Polityka, where Marian Turski had made his career.

  Turski was to look back on 1968 as one of the best years of his life. It was a sad year in which many of his friends’ lives were uprooted, but the atmosphere at Polityka inspired him. No one there cared who was Jewish. It was simply a newspaper working against the lies of the state. It was a Communist newspaper practicing adversarial journalism. The other newspapers ran daily attacks on Polityka, calling it the voice of the new money class. But those who worked at Polityka were party members, Jews and non-Jews, comrades taking a stand together. It felt like Communism was supposed to be. The paper was run by Mieczystew Rakowski, who years later would move on to the dubious perch of being the last head of the ruling Polish Communist party. Every day, the Polityka staff would go to work wondering what was going to happen to them. But they always felt good about what they were doing. Marian came home at night and with great excitement told his wife, “Tomorrow or maybe the day after tomorrow, we will all be dismissed. I think I will drive a taxi. I have a car and there are not that many cars in Warsaw, so I think I will be able to do all right as a taxi driver.”

  Jews were being offered one way out: They could forfeit their homes and whatever property they might have and emigrate to Israel. Only Jews were allowed to emigrate, and Israel was the only acceptable destination. Most of the Turskis’ closest friends left. Marian had an offer at the University of Denver. He and his wife had visited and loved the Rocky Mountains. They reasoned that his wife, as a well-established engineer, could find work, and between their two careers it seemed they would live well. To exit for Israel and then change destinations once they were in Vienna was a common tactic. But there was a problem: Turski was working with non-Jews who were risking everything to stand up to this smear campaign. They could have gone along with it, like the other newspapers, and Jews like Turski would have been dismissed, but nothing would have happened to them. Now they had risked everything, and yet if Polityka were closed down, the Jews could leave but the non-Jews would have no escape. They had been loyal to him, and now he would be loyal to them. Once again Turski decided he would stay in Poland.

  Jakub Gutenbaum didn't emigrate either. While he was never a party member, he did believe that Communism stood for some ideals, and this anti-Zionist campaign was a complete contradiction of those ideals. But he could not imagine what he would do in Israel. “‘I would be a foreigner there,” he thought. And his wife and child were not Jewish.

  In 1968 the Kameraz family was through with Poland. Their Jewish building was no longer Jewish. The synagogue in the courtyard had been torn down and was now a playground. The mikveh next to it was no longer used, and the Jewish school was now a movie theater. Ninel's sister and her husband were both dismissed from their jobs, and they left Poland with their three children, as did most of their friends and neighbors. Their mother had died, md their father was ill and depressed. He wanted to emigrate but was too weak and soon he too died. It seemed to Ninel that everyone was leaving. Even her Jewish assistant at work was dismissed and left. In the mysterious ways of Polish Communism, no one ever bothered Ninel. She kept her job as an electrical engineer. But she too wanted to leave.

  Ninel had been married since 1956 to a non-Jew. Since their marriage he had become fascinated with Jewish culture. Abandoning his physics career, he now taught Yiddish and the Kabbalah to Poles. When Ninel approached him about emigrating, he would say, Tm a Pole!” He would talk about their good life and the literature and film projects with which he was involved.

  From NinePs senior class in high school, which had been three-quarters Jewish, only two Jews remained in Poland—Ninel, and a very disturbed schizophrenic who was under treatment.

  HAVING ALREADY BEEN to Israel, Barbara Gora was certain that she did not want to live there, even though one of her closest friends emigrated there and two others moved to the United States. Although she decided to stay in Warsaw, her attitude about the city and Poland generally had changed. After seeing the Holocaust and the subsequent waves of survivors driven out every ten years, she finally reached the conclusion that somebody should stay in Poland and say, I am a Jew and I am still here. “If they don't want me, they have to have me,” she declared. “If they don't want Jews, then 1 should be here.”

  This idea came to her on a spring afternoon as she sat in her living room with three non-Jewish friends reading in the newspaper about how the student demonstrations had been organized by the Zionists. One of her friends, a longtime Communist party member, said that they had managed to arrest a number of students and had singled out the Jews among them. The newspapers did not give their names, but she had contacts and she knew who was arrested. Many, like Barbara Gora, had Polish names. And yet, her iriend had said, they knew. They knew who the Jews were. How did they know?

  And Barbara Gora, without a moment's reflection, said, “Well, I'll tell you something. I am a Jew.”

  Her friends reacted as though she had just said her hair color wasn't natural. It was of no great importance. But Barbara suddenly realized what she had done. She had just said publicly, “I am a Jew”—and nothing had happened. And she didn't think anything was about to happen. For the first time in twenty-six years, ever since she had presented a piece of paper bearing her new name to a German guard and walked out of the Warsaw ghetto, Barbara had volunteered to non-Jewish people, “I am a Jew.”

  She stayed in Poland. She did not change her name. She did not take up the Jewish religion, but every now and then she would tell someone, “I am a Jew.” Next time Poland had one of its bouts of Jew-hating, she resolved, she would still be there, and she would still say it. “Where they beat Jews, you have to be a little Jewish,” she decided. In Paris, students were demonstrating with signs saying, “We are all German Jews.” Why shouldn't she say “I am a Polish Jew”? It was time to say that in Poland. Except that nobody ever says “Polish Jew” in Poland. You are either a Pole or a Jew.

  Even Barbara Gora's mother, who had spent her life so afraid of her Jewishness, finally got angry in 1968. When she went to a newsstand to read the latest anti-Semitic slurs, the woman in the stand looked at her and, just as she had always feared, pointed to her and said, “You are a Jew!”

  Gora's mother glared back and said, “Yes, and you are a Nazi!” and walked away.

  The Jews of the university in Warsaw, the ‘68 generation, left. Joanna Wiszniewicz was one of the few who remained, lonely without her friends from the momentous university days. But they could ne
ver come back to Poland for a visit. She arranged to meet friends who had gone to Israel in places in Hungary and Romania in the next few years, but she had in fact lost her friends. Many Jews discovered that their friends were Jewish only when they saw them all leave.

  Joanna stayed, because her field of study was Polish culture and she would have nothing to do if she left Poland. “It's not patriotism,” she said. “It's a lack of imagination.”

  BARBARA GRUBERSKA became a doctor of internal medicine, just as she had learned her mother's father had been. Though she married a non-Jew, she decided to stop hiding her true identity. Her husband, an electrical engineer, was a third-generation Communist who hated the Catholic Church and had many Jewish friends. Unfortunately, the year she decided to become openly Jewish and even become involved in community affairs in Warsaw was 1968. In that year Jewish life virtually shut down. There were no longer even religious services available, or places to learn about Jewish practices. She decided that she would do what every Jew she knew was doing: she went to the ministry to apply for permission to emigrate to Israel. The government demanded proof of her Jewishness. She had none—neither parents nor ties to the Jewish community. Her application was denied.

  Two years later, Kazimiera Kwiatkowska, who had taken 700 zfotys a month to care for her, was dying and asked to see Barbara, who came to her bedside. Barbara pleaded with her, “There must be something more you know about my mother.”

  Kazimiera Kwiatkowska, lying in her deathbed, admitted that she had met her mother once. She had come to sign the contract with a bribed German policewoman and another woman whose business was brokering such contracts. She had come holding Barbara on a pillow, saying she had to leave the country and wanted someone to take the baby for a time.