Gebert, Living in the Land of Ashes.pdf

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Konstanty Gebert
the Land of Ashes
Living in
Austeria Publishing House
Krakow • Budapest 2008
AcK now LedGements
The author thanks the taube Foundation for Jewish Life and culture
for its generous support in writing his book.
Some earlier versions of parts of the book had been published as chap-
ters of other works. The author wishes to thank the publishers: Social
Research Quarterly, New York (Vol.58, No.4, Winter 1991); Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, London (Jonathan Weber (Ed.): Jew-
ish Identities in the New Europe; 1994); The Jewish Museum, New
York (James E. Young (Ed.): Holocaust Memorials in History; 1995);
Orchard Academic Press, Cambridge (E. Kessler, J. Pawlikowski, J.
Banki (Eds): Jews and Christians in Conversation; 2002), for having
graciously consented to the publication of the amended versions of
these chapters in the present volume.
cH A P teR 1
IntRodUct Ion
In 1983 I had the opportunity to meet with one of the first Israeli
groups to visit Poland after the break of diplomatic relations in 1967.
Some thirty young kibbutzniks came to Warsaw to attend the com-
memoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Up-
rising and invited me to their hotel. They were deferential at first,
treating me as if I were some sort of museum piece, but soon, as they
relaxed, their attitude changed. They wanted to know why I was still
in Poland. How dare I live in a graveyard!
I looked at them and told them that they stood out on a warsaw
street the way a group of Africans would stand out in downtown Tel
Aviv. Not because they looked “Jewish” – they did not. Indeed, most
of them had what is called in Poland “the good look” – during the
war they could have passed for Aryan and would have had a chance of
surviving. But on the drab gray streets of Warsaw they looked flashy,
sexy – very Western rather than “Jewish.”
These young people, however, were accompanied by three elderly
educators from the kibbutz, and they had the Jewish faces that I re-
membered from childhood and that I see in the synagogue now. “Don’t
kid yourself into thinking this will last,” I told the young people. “As
you grow old, you too will grow Jewish faces, and you will then need
somebody here to tell you where they come from.”
It is so much easier to identify the dead. Abandoned buildings,
names that no longer mean anything, and still vivid memories of hor-
ror abound in Poland’s physical and mental landscape. Fewer than
300,000 Polish Jews (just ten percent of the country’s pre-war Jew-
ish population) survived the Shoah, most of them having fled to the
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Living in the Land of Ashes
Soviet Union and returned after the war. Current population figures
are not available; the numbers change depending on who is asked.
The National Census of 2002 returned a ridiculous figure of 1,055
self-declared Jews in a nation of almost 40 million. This says more
about the still-prevalent fear of revealing one’s ethnic background
than about current Jewish demography, but still, the combined na-
tional membership of the two main Jewish organizations – the re-
ligious one and the secular Socio-Cultural Association – does not
exceed 6,000. At a parliamentary hearing in 1989, the then Minis-
ter of the Interior, General Czesław Kiszczak, said that there were
15,000 Jews in Poland. As a Warsaw Jew, I tend to trust him on that
point – he had the files.
Just two years later, while standing in the cavernous hall of Warsaw’s
Jewish Historical Institute on the eve of Hanukkah 1991, I wondered if
the General’s files were up to date. At least five hundred people were
milling about, twice as many as had come to the city’s only remain-
ing synagogue for the High Holy Days. And they did not seem to
be the same crowd. Most of the worshippers in the Nożyk Shul had
been elderly, but here, at the Institute, many middle-aged and young
people, and even children, were happily running about. Suddenly, a
group of youngsters in athletic clothes rushed in, carrying a lighted
torch to inaugurate what was a Maccabi Warsaw sports event. An
elderly Jewish gentleman standing next to me in the crowd watched
the young athletes and shook his head. “These kids were born in the
1970s or later,” he told me. “They don’t know a thing about this coun-
try. They don’t know about the war, the post-war pogroms, the ever-
present anti – Semitism, about the 1968 purges. They think that just
because they’re Jewish and like sports, they can have a Jewish sports
club in Poland. In Poland!” He shook his head again and laughed.
Years later, Grażyna Pawlak, who founded and served as president
of the Maccabi club, recalled how many people thought she was crazy
for setting it up and, in effect, gambling on a Jewish future. “This
was supposed to be a dying community, right? No children, no young
people, no future; this is what everybody knew,” she said. “But what
I knew was that I have a daughter and she has friends. My friends
also have children. It didn’t seem to me that we were going to die out
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Introduction
right away.” Pawlak is a sociologist of sports. In 1989, at the dawn of
Poland’s new democracy, she traveled to Israel for the Maccabiad. The
stories she told upon her return home impressed her children and their
friends. They clamored for a Maccabiad of their own, so she helped
them comply; and as she herself used to be a fencer, fencing became
the first section of Maccabi Warsaw.
The Maccabi club has since ceased functioning, and Pawlak now
runs Warsaw’s Moses Schorr Educational Center, a well equipped
Jewish study and learning center for adults. But the club was one of
the first in a series of Jewish initiatives that appeared in Poland over
the past fifteen years or so, and it formed an early part of what is semi
jokingly referred to as the “Jewish renaissance.” The joke seems to be
obvious: there cannot be much of a renaissance in a community that
is estimated at only ten to fifteen thousand, even if you double this
number as the optimists do. Nonetheless, compared what we had in
the post-World War Two era, the re-birth of Jewish intellectual, re-
ligious and organizational life we have seen in Poland since 1989 is
somewhat impressive.
Of the fewer than 300,000 Jews who survived the war, about half
fled the anti-Semitism and destruction of the early post-war years.
Pogroms and massive emigration destroyed the dream of rebuilding
the Polish Jewish community. The Stalinist period of 1948-56 put an
end both to emigration and to organized Jewish life; both resumed
after 1956, with emigration the stronger factor. By the late 1950s no
more than 40,000 Jews remained in Poland. Most of them had made a
conscious decision to remain in Poland and embrace a Polish identity;
even so, they became the target of an anti-Semitic campaign launched
in 1968 by Communist authorities under the banner of “anti-Zionism.”
Thousands of people were purged from the Communist Party, fired
from their jobs and expelled from their government-owned apart-
ments. Eventually some 15,000‒20,000 Polish Jews fled the country.
In that period, a Jewish-sounding name was enough to get one into
trouble. The case of an obscure Warsaw engineer called Judenberg was
typical. He was fired from his menial job only to be reinstated after
producing a wartime Nazi document that confirmed his Aryan par-
entage. Public opinion was indifferent; the campaign was organized
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