A Chosen Few (49 page)

Outside the death camp is a parking lot filled with tour buses. There is a bookshop and a snack bar and a pretty green area with rows of two-story brick barracks and a small gateway in the shade of a slinky willow with the words “
Arbeit Macht Frei
” in decorative ironwork overhead. In the summer, the wildflowers are in bloom, and the seedlings that the doomed prisoners were forced to plant are now rows of tall straight shady trees, thick with leaves. Different tour guides are available in different languages and with different agendas. Some talk about martyred priests, others about the heroic antifascists. There are also survivors walking as though in a trance, leading their families.

Auschwitz shows things that are beyond commentary—the human hair, the eyeglass frames, the piles of toothbrushes, and an unremarkable-looking oven, like a bread oven. And there are gallows where prisoners were hanged and walls where they were shot and laboratories where they were worked on.

Somehow people drifted through all this. A little French girl, perhaps eight, sat down outside one of the display barracks and refused to go in. “Come on,” pleaded her parents, pointing to the sign identifying the display. “This is about the life of the prisoners.”

“I don’t want to see that,” said the little girl, hunkering into the wooden stoop.

Many of the visitors were weeping, others looked stunned, some looked like bored tourists shuffling from exhibit to exhibit, taking snapshots to mark each spot.

Birkenau, the sister camp down the road, was far more devastating. There were no exhibits, little documentation. Just the barbed wire, sentry towers, and a few barracks, though most had been stripped for their wood so that only the chimneys remained. Through Birkenau ran more than a mile of train tracks, with platforms for selections and at the end the caved-in crematoriums that the Germans tried to blow up at the last minute. It was a factory, designed for efficient mass production.

But at Auschwitz, many of the intact barracks had been turned
into national pavilions, each displaying the suffering of its country, some with cold documentary style, others almost artsy. Auschwitz had become a kind of world’s fair of genocide. The new Catholic visitors’ center outside the camp, the result of the fight over the Carmelite convent, was just one more attempt to claim the moral high ground here on the killing site. Who would be the voice in this place? That was to be a seemingly endless struggle, first with the Communist state, which called the site “A Monument to the Martyrdom of the Polish and Other Nations.” Their information was mainly about antifascism, with little mention of Jews. The plaque was later changed. Exhibits were changed. Literature was rewritten. Then there was the fight over the Carmelites and the resulting visitors’ center offering the Catholic Church’s interpretation.

Every institution with any pretense of moral authority wants the last word on Auschwitz. The problem is that there is very little that a truly moral voice can say. It remains incomprehensible. But if there is nothing that can be said, then the moral voice falls to the greatest victims, which were the Jews. To cede the moral voice to the Jews was an intolerable notion to some Polish Catholics. As Konstanty Gebert said, “The world owes us the right to exist because we have suffered. However, on the pinnacle of suffering, there is room for just one.”

The spectacle of Jews wrestling for the mantle of martyrdom could be seen, theologically, as a Catholic victory after all. Martyrdom is a Catholic thing. It is the Catholics who chose as their symbol of faith an implement of torture, the cross of martyrdom. Judaism, however, has always been a religion with relatively little to say about death, other than that it should be kept clearly separate from life. Synagogues and cemeteries are not to be on the same site. For the Jews of Łódź to go to the cemetery on Saturday morning instead of to the synagogue is very contrary to Jewish law. Kohenim are not supposed to go to cemeteries at all. Priests should not gaze on death.

But Jews are forced to contemplate Auschwitz, because otherwise someone else will speak for them to hundreds of thousands of visitors and to history. Auschwitz survivors like Marian Turski do their duty and sit on the International Auschwitz Committee and are thereby regularly forced not only to think about but to visit the site of their nightmares. The International Auschwitz Committee tried to reach a consensus on what to do about Auschwitz. Turski,
who for twenty years would not even allow his mind to remember what he had seen there, became an active member. Now he had to go with some regularity for speeches, conferences, and meetings. In time he no longer found it difficult. “Of course, when I am there, there are two or three places which have special bonds to my memory. There is something there in myself, in my heart. I would say it’s a sore spot. I go there. I sift through the archives,” Turski said, and then added with self-amazement, “I am really an expert!”

The well-landscaped Warsaw neighborhood where he and his wife lived for three decades, in a comfortable but not palatial apartment, indicated the limited measure of privilege he had enjoyed as a party member, albeit a troublesome one. His study was decorated with his collection of antique wooden carvings of Catholic saints. But there was no escaping who he was and what he had seen. In 1993, Turski appeared on a British television panel with three neo-Nazis from France, Austria, and Germany. One of them would not even shake Turski’s hand because he was a Jew. The oldest of them was 32 and the youngest 21, and they sat across from him and, quoting from Faurisson, claimed that the Holocaust that Turski had survived had never really happened. Turski’s wife had pleaded with him not to do it, fearing he would get so upset that he would have a heart attack. But he believed that these people had to be faced. “I was so quiet, so absolutely fully organized,” said Turski. “She was amazed.”

E
VEN THOUGH MORE PEOPLE
in Poland declared themselves Jewish every day, the community remained small. In the fight to at last receive German reparations after the fall of the Soviet bloc, applications in Poland were only in the hundreds. There was a loneliness to Polish Jews living in a non-Jewish world with non-Jewish friends. Even if it was known that they were Jewish, their colleagues, being broad-minded, would include them in Christian holidays and give them flowers and cakes on the saint’s day of their name, forcing them in misguided friendship to act out a charade that to the non-Jews was simply being Polish. Only among other Jews did the few Jews of Poland feel safe being candidly what they were. Many would admit their Jewishness only to other Jews. No matter how many non-Jewish friends you had, it was only with a Jew that you were always sure, no matter what happened, that you could still say, “I am a Jew.” It was only with Jewish friends that you
didn’t have to pretend to care about your saint’s day or Christmas, lest they be offended. Your Jewish friends were never going to slip and say one of those things that are just part of Polish culture. But the Jews saw their valuable Jewish friends vanish, emigrate, and die. Survivors clung to distant cousins as though they were siblings, because it was all they had. An impoverished elderly woman who ate at the lunch program by the synagogue would gather scraps of food and give them to a middle-class Jewish woman in her thirties because the young woman’s father had given her food during the war, and this was the only connection she had left.

Konstanty Gebert married a non-Jew, which meant that according to Jewish law their four children were not Jewish. With the help of Lauder programs, he was bringing them up with Jewish instruction in the hope that they would convert. “I don’t want to make their decisions for them. I do desperately hope that they will make the decision to formally convert,” he said.

He recognized that even he was a kind of artificially constructed Jew. In the anti-Communist underground days when he was working with Marek Edelman, Edelman would question Gebert’s Jewishness, saying, “You invented it, you made it up.” The Gebert household observed the Sabbath and most of the holidays. Gebert was not kosher because it would be too arduous a discipline in Poland. But he did not eat meat, a practice that was not necessarily Jewish except that it precluded the risk of mixing meat with dairy. “Why can’t we be free like Dad and not eat meat?” his children asked.

Gebert wore a yarmulke indoors. Sometimes he forgot to take it off when he left the house, but nothing happened. Still, he was uneasy about his role in Poland. “The problem is there are so damn few of us. I don’t want to be turned into a professional representative.” He recognized that there were limits to how Jewish he could be in Poland. He too had made his choice. “I would prefer to live in circumstances that would make more observance possible, but if that means leaving Poland, I’m not about to do it.”

Jakub Gutenbaum, who lost faith in Communism in 1968 but did not want to be a foreigner in Israel, became a full professor in 1977. He had never been a party member and was not political. Science was his religion. But he said that after the fall of Communism, “I thought maybe I could do something about problems outside of my field.” In 1991 the Lauder Foundation was trying to organize an association for Jews who had survived the war because
they had been hidden as children, and Gutenbaum became involved, eventually becoming the head of a group of 140 people. There were twenty older ones, like himself and Barbara Góra, who had survived the ghetto and concentration camps. The rest had been hidden as babies. All but fifteen of the 140 members were women. It had been too dangerous to hide a boy with the telltale circumcision. The people in Gutenbaum’s organization had experienced a broad range of childhood traumas. One woman spent her infancy in the bed of a prostitute who serviced German soldiers. One child had been living with Christian peasants, and after the war a Jewish committee came to claim him. At night he escaped through a window and ran back to the peasant family, crying, “No, I’m not Jewish!”

Most of these children grew up to be achievers. The majority of people in Gutenbaum’s group held advanced degrees. Many were doctors. Four were medical professors. But very few had stable family lives. Many were divorced. There was a high rate of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

For Gutenbaum, the work was therapeutic because it forced him to talk about his own experiences. After a time he could calmly talk about the fire overhead as he hid in the ghetto, about being led through the charred ghetto at gunpoint, about the selection process at Maidanek. These were all things he had never spoken about, not even to his wife or their son. There were other things he still would not speak about—things he would never utter, even though he had learned that the more he talked the better he felt. His nightmares became less frequent. He was looking for activities to throw himself into because soon he would have to retire. He feared the day when he was no longer absorbed in his scientific work and his mind would be free to wander. This was why the hidden children had been achievers.

Barbara Góra had her own reasons for joining the hidden children group. “I decided to join because, you know, I have a lot in common with them. I am alone. I am alone not only because I didn’t marry. I want to have my own social group, and this society is not typically Jewish because they are people brought up like me. Some of them are even Catholic because they were brought up like that. I have more in common with them than with typical Jews. I never wanted to be a member of this Jewish cultural society. I have nothing in common with them. I am a hidden child.”

Barbara’s sister, who was ten years older, had married a Greek Communist immigrant. They visited Greece every year and raised
their daughter to be Greek. When the girl was nine, she read a book about the Warsaw ghetto and asked her aunt Barbara about it. But when Barbara told her that her mother was Jewish, her niece didn’t believe her. A cousin of Barbara’s father was spending three months in Paris, and while she was there she looked up relatives who lived in a Paris suburb. She discovered, to her amazement, that they were Jewish. She came back and told everyone in her family, “We are Jewish!” To Barbara she said, “Did you know that we are Jewish?”

“Yes,” said Barbara. “I know.”

“Then why don’t I know?”

The story makes Barbara laugh. “Now everybody knows. Now it’s all open. It was silly. It was stupid. It doesn’t matter!” The fact so amazed her that she repeated it several times. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter!”

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1992, Henryk Halkowski hosted the last meeting at the old Jewish club in Cracow. After forty-six years they were abandoning the musty rooms and auditorium for a small, one-room meeting space. “Smaller, but without the mold,” said Halkowski. Four people showed up, and they made tea and drifted from room to room. They still had the red velour flag with gold embroidery, with the Polish Communist party marked on one side in Polish, their local chapter marked on the other in Yiddish. One of the four said he had heard that an Israeli had recently come to town and told Czeslaw Jakubowicz that they should all move to Israel. They snickered. They weren’t going to move to Israel, just to a smaller space.

Although Halkowski’s family was originally from Łódź, he became a local historian in Cracow and enjoyed studying the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Jews from Germany and Bohemia had migrated to this city where they could live in peace. The Cracow Jews were so secure in their home that many believed the name
Poland
was of Hebrew origin. Their popular theory was that it came from the Hebrew words
po
and
lin
, which together mean “stay here.”