A Chosen Few (15 page)

She had come from a comfortable Jewish household on Urabia Street, in the old center of Warsaw. Her mother had grown up in a devout Orthodox home, where she had hated the rigid religious life with its dietary laws, special clothing, and constant rules about what to do each day and at different times of the day. She married a Jew from a nonreligious home, and they had raised their two daughters like Poles. They spoke Polish at home, reserving Yiddish for times when they wanted to keep secrets from Irene and her sister.

Irene was sent to a new school in the center of Warsaw where many of the students were children of people in powerful positions and where she was the only Jew. Relative to the experiences she would soon have, being the only Jew in this Polish school in the 1930s was a minor trauma. Yet it shaped her as much as any of her later experiences. The school had a compulsory religion class, but her parents told her she did not have to go if she did not want to, so she did not attend. The school, even the religion teacher, were very agreeable about it. They gave her a comfortable place to sit and wait, to study, play, and do whatever she wanted while the other children were in religion class. But because she was absent from the class, the children were merciless in their attacks on “the dirty little Jew.” They battered her with phrases they had learned from their parents. They didn’t know what these things meant, and Irene didn’t know either. But most days she left school crying.

When she was eight years old, the Hochberg family was forced to move to the ghetto, which was not far from their home. Irene’s father, Wiktor, knew a non-Jew who lived in the neighborhood that
was becoming the ghetto. Since the non-Jewish family had to move too, the two families simply swapped apartments. Irene was happy that she did not have to go to school anymore.

Once the Germans began their roundups at the Umschlagplatz, her father used his contacts in the city to smuggle the entire family and himself out one by one. They all got new birth certificates with new names—authentic documents of deceased people who had been born in Warsaw. Only Irene’s mother hid. Even though she was blonde and not particularly Jewish-looking, her Orthodox background had fixed such a strong Jewish identity in her mind that she imagined that anyone at a glance could see she was Jewish. Irene’s sister was placed in the old part of Warsaw, where she lived openly and worked in a factory. Irene, now called Barbara, was moved from family to family. She would stay for a time in one Christian home, and then her father, now calling himself Witold Góra, would suddenly show up and take her to a new Christian home. The Germans were killing more and more people, and it was getting harder and harder to find families with the courage to take her. Finally, he placed her with what was called a
Treuhander
, a collaborator.

The
Treuhander
knew the war was going badly and that when the Germans were gone, he was going to be in trouble with his fellow Poles. Now at least he could say he had saved someone. Besides, it was a perfect cover for his smuggling business to have this little girl riding in a wagon with him as he brought black market goods into Warsaw. She worked very hard at the business while her “uncle”—a lanky man with round little glasses and a hard, bitter face—spent most of his time drinking and smoking cigarettes. Sometimes Barbara would even bring the goods into Warsaw by herself.

Her “uncle’s” family and friends were mostly
Volksdeutsche
, Poles whom the German Reich had officially recognized as being ethnically German and not of the inferior Slavic race. Once the “uncle” took her to visit his cousins. They had a daughter who was Barbara’s age, a little Nazi in a Hitler Youth uniform. The two girls played together. Most people were kind to Barbara. She was a pretty blond girl with smart and cautious eyes in a handsome rounded face. She looked like a cute little Pole, but though her “good look” gave her a certain confidence, she was never sure if people knew about her or not. Sometimes other children would ask her to cross herself, and it seemed that this was a test. She
thought it would look suspicious if she did it—it would look as if she were afraid. So she would just tell them it was stupid to cross yourself when you weren’t even in church. And that seemed to sound good.

When she was selling smuggled goods in Warsaw, there was one man she met who worried her. Whenever she referred to her aunt and uncle, he would say, “They aren’t your family.” She didn’t know what he knew about her. But he was always very kind to her, this poor hard-working little girl.

At home with her false family, she cleaned house obsessively. When she had first moved there, she had seen that the apartment was not particularly clean. Now eleven-year-old Barbara scrubbed everything. She scrubbed places where no one had ever looked. She scrubbed the floor under the beds. She washed the walls behind the furniture. The taunt from her school days—“dirty Jew”—still stung. No one was ever going to call her dirty.

By the time Warsaw was liberated, little remained of the city. According to official history, it was 80 percent destroyed. The Polish Home Army had risen up against the Germans, assuming that the rapidly approaching Red Army would finish the revolt for them. But the Soviets—according to some versions, they were unexpectedly held up by German resistance, and according to others, they wanted the Polish army to be destroyed—did not enter Warsaw until the Germans had annihilated the Polish Home Army and most of the city. Since 1943, the site of the ghetto had been a large blackened lot. Most of the rest of Warsaw was now tall hills of debris. Witold Góra at last reunited his family, but he could not return to Urabia Street, where they had lived when he had been Wiktor Hochberg. Now the street was not even there, except for part of a path through the piles of rubble. Warsaw was nothing but mountains and valleys. On Marszałkowska, one of the longest main streets, only four buildings were left standing.

Barbara Góra had a friend who lived near where the ghetto had been. She lived on the second floor of a building that had no first floor anymore—only the stairway. It scared Barbara even to look at the building, let alone go up to the apartment. But soon she learned that many people lived in buildings like this. She gingerly entered and exited them every day and grew accustomed to the fact that none of them ever fell over.

One of the few remaining buildings in the center of the city was the turn-of-the-century Polonia Hotel, with its ornate white exterior,
its glass art nouveau awnings over the doors, its grand interior with sweeping staircase, and its two-tier rococo dining room. In its new status as one of the few intact structures in town, the hotel building now housed all of the embassies and was teeming with reporters. Poland was one of the big news stories of 1945 because of what had been found in the death camps there. The six main camps of Poland had killed 5,400,000 people. The world had never seen anything like it.

The Polonia Hotel became an exciting place to visit. Barbara Góra, now 13, was drawn to all the colorful flags draped on the building. Inside were Russians, Americans, French, and English. And there were journalists from all over the world—anxious aggressive people speaking dozens of languages, running up and down the stairs. She was particularly interested in the British and the Americans because she was going to school again and was studying English from a Polish teacher. But at the Polonia, there were foreigners speaking real English.

Barbara’s father had been an active member of the Communist underground. The man who had worried Barbara during the war because he always said that her “uncle” wasn’t really her family, also turned out to be a member of the underground, a friend of her father. Because the Communist party wanted to remember people’s wartime records, all the underground activists were asked to keep their wartime names. Barbara was happy to be Barbara Góra, daughter of Witold Góra.
Góra
was a good Polish name that meant the same thing in Polish as the old Jewish name
Hochberg
meant in German—“high mountain.” The entire family was happy to keep their Polish names and continue their wartime identities, never mentioning that they were Jewish. They had all had enough of being Jewish.

Witold Góra was made chief of police in a small town in Lublin province. Barbara was once again the only Jew in school. But now she was a Góra, not a Hochberg, and she went regularly to the Catholic church. The priest knew that her father was a Communist and was very pleased that he was sending his daughter to church. In 1946 the family moved back to Warsaw, and Barbara went to a high school with required religion classes. This time she wasn’t the only Jew in the school, but all of the Jews quietly took the course and never talked even among themselves about being Jewish. Barbara was far happier than she had been years before, when she had been Irene and wouldn’t take the class. When the
teachers in her school asked the class who had gone to mass on Sunday, Barbara always raised her hand.

At first it was easy to sit through the religion classes, but then there was a change in teachers. The new teacher was a fanatical priest who taught that Darwin was evil, that the world was created in seven days, and that anything else was heresy. Barbara was growing tired of religion, and she transferred to a new school that she had learned of, a socialist school that did not teach religion. It was a long way from where she lived, and she had to pack into an overcrowded streetcar to get there. But it was worth the trouble. Communism, her father had told her, was bringing about a new society, free of religion. For a Jew in Poland, at last, here was an answer to the Jewish question: No religion at all, for anyone.

N
OW THAT HIS FATHER
was dead, Marian Turski reflected sadly on how hurt his father had been in the Łódź ghetto when Marian had joined the Communist underground and turned his back on Judaism. But to Marian, Communism was the future. His family had been more Zionist than religious, and many of his cousins had survived by going to Palestine before the war. Now an office in Łódź was helping to arrange for emigration to Palestine, and many of the survivors were leaving.

But Marian thought he had a stake in the new Poland that was emerging. People who had missed school could now get degrees and good positions very quickly. Poland had never before offered such opportunities, and certainly never before to Jews. Barbara Góra helped her father with mathematics, and soon he earned an engineering degree. After she finished her basic education, she herself was able to study in Moscow for an advanced agricultural degree. Jakub Gutenbaum, living in his uncle’s small room, could make up all the schooling he had missed. He had his diploma in two years and then got a scholarship to study electrical engineering in Moscow. Although 3.1 million Polish Jews had been murdered, somehow Jewish life was returning to Poland. Wrocław, which before the war had been Breslau and had had the third largest Jewish community in Germany, now reopened its Yiddish theater, in spite of heavy damage inflicted on the historic center of the city. Later, Warsaw and Łódź did the same. Once again, there were synagogues and Jewish schools. Yiddish newspapers such as
Dos Nahe Lebn
, “The New Life,” started up. In Cracow, where the buildings had not been touched, Jews embraced as they met each other on
the street. Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter with its run-down charm, was now inhabited by non-Jews, but two of the synagogues there were reopened, and Hasids even started their own prayer rooms. On Friday nights, men from each group scouted the streets for the requisite ten men, the minyan, to hold a service.

About 40,000 Polish Jews returned from concentration camps, and another 55,000 turned up from hiding in Poland or other countries. And then 180,000 came back from the Soviet Union. By June 1945, there were already more than 10,000 Jews in Cracow, almost 8,000 in Wrocław, 135,000 in Warsaw, and 41,000 in the Łódź area. These were only small fractions of the prewar population, but they were enough for Jewish communities to function with schools and synagogues.

The Central Committee of Polish Jews established an office in Lublin to disseminate information about who was living and who was dead. Slowly, the incomprehensible figures were compiled and published in press releases. The Committee started to establish orphanages, and by the end of 1945, they already housed seven hundred orphans. By the middle of 1946, they had established forty-four secondary schools for 3,400 children and thirty-six primary schools for another 3,300 children. Miraculously, Polish Jewry was back.

But it was not welcomed. Returning Jews expected to get their property back, and the Poles who had taken over their homes, businesses, and possessions had not counted on this. The Poles grew increasingly hostile to the returning Jews. Polish fascists were still armed and operating in the east and southeast. In Cracow on May 3, 1945, a youthful mob smashed windows in Jewish homes and shouted anti-Semitic slogans until the Red Army moved in to control the disturbance. In August “blood libel” reemerged in Cracow—the old claim, dating back to the Middle Ages, that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in satanic rituals.

An extreme right-wing group called Narodowe Sily Zbrojne, the National Defense Force, pulled Jewish survivors off trains and murdered them. They even attacked Jewish orphanages. The Central Committee of Polish Jews listed four hundred Jews murdered in such attacks between February and September 1945. In 1946 things got even worse. As hostility grew toward the Communists, a new anti-Semitic stereotype gained currency—
żydokomuna
, a Jewish Commie. There had been Jews/the usurers, Jews/the bloodsuckers, and Jews/the baby-snatchers, and now there were Jews/the Communists plotting to undermine the Polish national destiny.
Although Jews represented only a minority of the Communists, it was frequently said that they were the Communist movement. Hadn’t they cheered the entry of the Soviets? Poles hadn’t cheered the Red Army—only the Jews. The fact that the Jews were being saved from total extinction never entered this argument.

Jewish leaders tried in vain to solicit the help of the Catholic Church hierarchy. They were repeatedly refused audiences with cardinals and bishops. In June 1946 the Bishop of Kielce refused to issue a pastoral letter against the spread of anti-Semitic violence. On July 4 a nine-year-old Polish boy, Henryk Blaszçzyk, was reported missing in Kielce. A crowd quickly grew, claiming he had been murdered by Jews who wanted his blood. The crowd marched into the Jewish area and went on a violent rampage. While they were laying siege to the building of the Jewish Committee, the Jewish leaders inside desperately tried to telephone the bishop, but his office refused to put through the call. Forty-two Jews, mostly camp survivors, were killed.