A Chosen Few (7 page)

T
he thud of an orange startled Moishe Waks. After hearing stories about Poland all his life from his parents, he was not surprised that the Poles were throwing things at him. What was surprising was that they would waste an orange. Oranges were expensive in post-Communist Poland. Then he picked it up, and the Waks family laughed. It was only the peel, so there really wasn’t anything to be amazed about.

The Waks family always did a lot of laughing when they got together, which was not that often. Moishe lived in Berlin, a plump and successful Berlin businessman, and he was the one leader in the West Berlin Jewish Community who took an interest in Irene Runge and the
Ossis
at the Kulturverein. His older brother Ruwen, taller and less plump but otherwise looking very much like his brother, lived in Israel. Their mother, Lea, a strong-willed woman with a crisp, ironic sense of humor and a proud, straight posture, still stubbornly lived in Düsseldorf, all the while preaching Zionism.

By the time Poland opened up for visitors and the Wakses could go back to look around, Moishe’s father, Aaron Waks, a dogmatic but loving man, had died in Düsseldorf. Moishe and his brother had gotten the idea of having their mother show them Łódź, where she and Aaron had grown up. But the trip was making her visibly ill. She was showing her sons things she had never even been able
to talk about. Still, like many Jews with Polish roots, in recent years her sons felt that they had to see Poland.

Families from Łódź were part of almost every Jewish community in the world, but in Łódź itself there was only one usable synagogue left. The Wakses knew better than to look for Jews there. They went directly to the cemetery. The few Jews left in Łódź knew that the best chance of meeting foreign Jewish visitors was to wait around the cemetery. When Jews came to Łódź now, they were looking for the dead. On Saturday mornings, Shabbat, Jews went to the cemetery and waited for weekend visitors like the Waks family.

Piotrkowska Street was being cleaned up and transformed into a commercial pedestrian mall to greet the new capitalism. But most of Łódź was chipped and peeling, its bygone affluence revealed in the richly decorative architecture. The wood-paneled mansions with long sweeping stairways that used to belong to the mill owners were now museums. Some of the old mills were still operating, like the colossal red brick gothic cottonworks of Poltex, and a few two-story wooden houses with outdoor staircases, where mill workers’ families crowded together, were still standing.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its trade bloc, Łódź was again without a local economy. It had lost its Russian market. Between 1990 and 1993, forty thousand Łódź textile workers were laid off. Almost half of the 285 factories had closed.

The same thing had happened at the beginning of the century. In 1918, when Poland received its independence, Łódź had also lost its Russian market. The Poles started getting their wish, that often-proposed answer to “the Jewish question”: The Jews, on the bottom of the crumbling economy, were leaving Poland, not by the hundreds but by the hundreds of thousands. In the seventeenth century, three-quarters of the world’s Jews had lived in Poland, after fleeing anti-Semitism in Western Europe but stopped from going further by anti-Semitism in Russia. But over the next four centuries Poland became an increasingly unfavorable place for Jews to live. By the 1920s, only one out of every five Jews in the world still lived there. Even so, it had the second-largest Jewish population in the world. Only the United States had more, and that was because so many Polish Jews had moved there.

I
CCHOK
F
INKELSZTAJN’S CERTAINTY
about his decision to move from Łódź to Paris was a little shaken when he finally arrived at the
Gare du Nord. After days of bumping across Europe, as he made his way from the high-roofed ironwork railroad station and out into his first Parisian day, his first thought was, “
This
is what they call the city of light?”

There had been more light back in Łódź, with its wide streets and ornate buildings. Even in the smaller ghetto streets there had been more light. It was 1931, and the buildings of Paris had not been cleaned for centuries. Everywhere he walked he looked up at blackened buildings.

Still, Finkelsztajn had not had many choices. He was a cabinetmaker, but there was no more work in Łódź. No one had money anymore. Paris was alive, even if it was coated with the color of mourning. The markets were full of food—fruit and vegetables and meat. In Paris, when a man wanted to smoke a cigarette, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack and took one out. When the pack was empty, he would go to any corner store and buy another. In Poland, if a man wanted a cigarette and he had the money for one, he would go to the store and buy a single cigarette to smoke. Sometimes he might buy two or three cigarettes.

As Poland got poorer, moves were made to exclude Jews from universities and to force shops to stay open on Saturdays, which meant that practicing Jews could no longer be shopkeepers. Finkelsztajn had had no intention of going to a university: nor did he observe the Sabbath—or for that matter, any other religious practice. He did not really believe in religion. He believed that the future was socialism, a kind of social justice that would do more to improve the lives of working Jewish people than religion ever had. But he had also heard about an increasing number of Jews who for no apparent reason could not get a license to operate a shop. The old nightmare of Russian times returned—pogroms, those sudden unexplainable violent attacks against whole Jewish communities. Shortly before he left Poland, Kielce, the town of his girlfriend, Dwojra Zylbersztajn, had a pogrom.

Icchok was a small sturdy man, with black hair that was combed back from his square forehead and handsome Semitic features that made him look almost debonair, despite his thick worker’s build. Dwojra had a soft fleshy look, a kind of generous maternal bearing, and a warm melon-shaped face and thick hair that strained in waves and frizzes against the pulled-back style of the period. They decided that before they got married, they would leave Poland, The Hasidim were offering vocational training in preparation for
aliyah
—the return to Israel—and many were moving to Palestine. David Ben-Gurion had visited Poland—under heavy armed guard—in 1933. But Palestine was not for Icchok and Dwojra. They had come from a leftist tradition that considered France the home of liberty. True, France had also been the home of Dreyfus; all Jews knew that. But they also knew that in the end Dreyfus had won, had been returned from Devil’s Island and reinstated in the French army.

The plan was for Icchok to go to France first and for Dwojra to follow once he had secured an income. Icchok’s sister, Leah, had already moved to Paris and was married to a baker, Korcarz, who was also from Poland. In 1932 the Korcarzes had opened their own bakery. But Icchok rejoiced in hard physical work, fresh air—and light. He did not want to be cooped up in a bakery.

He decided to leave Paris, this dark “city of light,” and went south to the Alps region of France, where there was work even during the Depression. He got a job in an aluminum foundry, applied for his work papers, and thrived on hard labor in the mountain air. He liked the French workers, not only for their way of smoking and their lunch breaks of sour red wine and crusty bread, but also for their camaraderie. If you were a worker, you were one of them and you could talk and joke with them and feel that you belonged. It was the kind of working-class life he believed in.

But after three months, the foundry management told him he could not work there anymore because the French government had rejected his application for working papers. Reluctantly, he returned to Paris and learned to be a baker in Korcarz’s shop, mixing huge vats of dough and kneading and braiding the challah for Friday night. What he most hated was having to be in a basement. Bakers stripped nearly naked to bear the heat, working with coal- or wood-burning ovens in closed basements. After a few hours’ work, the entire room would feel like an oven—with no light, no scenery, no jovial French comrades.

The bakery was located in the Pletzl, a Yiddish word meaning “settlement” that was also the local name for most of Paris’s fourth arrondissement, in the center of the city. The buildings there looked even worse than the sooty nineteenth-century facades that had so depressed Icchok at the Gare du Nord. They were smaller and several centuries old, cracked, sometimes even tilting, and the apartments inside were small and getting smaller as they were subdivided to make room for more and more immigrants. The
neighborhood had been dominated by Alsatian Jews, who had moved to Paris in the 1870s after the Germans took Alsace. The Alsatians of the Pletzl were working-class Jews in sturdy crude clothing, but they were noticeably better off than the new arrivals—strange, bearded, scruffy-looking Yiddish-speakers without education or even hygiene. Finkelsztajn was one of thousands of Polish Jews who had turned up in the Pletzl in the past ten years. Entire families had arrived, carrying their belongings, looking for a room. Many were leftists like Finkelsztajn. The ones who were religious would have nothing to do with the Grand Rabbi of Paris; they set up their own little one-room synagogues—what are called
shtibls
in Yiddish—where they could murmur their ancient five-tone Hebrew chants. In 1934 the president of the Consistoire, the official Jewish establishment, complained that the influx of all these immigrants would slow down the process of assimilation.

While there had been little possibility for Jews to assimilate in Poland, in France it was expected of Jews. When the French Revolution addressed “the Jewish question,” it was said that “there cannot be a nation within a nation.” Therefore, it was decreed, Jews were free Frenchmen and would henceforth have the same rights as all other Frenchmen. But in exchange, Jews had agreed to act like all other Frenchmen. In order to make Jews more like Catholics and therefore easier to understand and regulate, Napoleon had the Jews reorganize their community into a hierarchy like that of the Catholic Church, with a central authority, the Consistoire Israélite, and a central synagogue with a head rabbi known as the Grand Rabbi of France.

One hundred years after the French Revolution, there were 85,000 Jews in France. Of these, some 500 were thought to be traditional, but the rest were not very different from Catholics. Rabbis wore priestlike robes. Jewish children had little celebrations at the appropriate age that corresponded to baptism and first communion. The adults offered flowers to the dead instead of the traditional stones, and they played organ music in synagogues instead of the traditional five-tone Hebrew chants. There were even discussions about shifting the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.

T
HE
K
ORCARZ BAKERY
was on a corner in a narrow, dark, and particularly dirty street named Rue des Rosiers, “Rosebush Street,” not out of irony but because in the early thirteenth century it had
led to a royal rose garden. The corner was sunny, though, and the Korcarzes decorated the building’s facade with cheerful bits of blue-glazed tile in a bright modern mosaic. In 1933, back in Poland, Dwojra said good-bye to her parents, her sister Bella, and her baby brother Sacha in their little village outside Kielce, and moved to Paris to join Icchok. They found a little apartment at 14 rue des Ecouffes, just around the corner from the bakery.

In 1937 their son, Henri, was born. When he was three years old, the Wehrmacht took Paris. One of Henri’s earliest memories was a train trip with his mother, for which they carried big packages. They were going to see his father. He can’t remember much more. It was 1941. That year, concentration camps were built in Poland. In September all Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars. But even before that, on May 14, when the nationality of French Jews was still more or less respected, there had been a roundup of four thousand foreign Jews. Icchok Finkelsztajn had been caught on the street. Even if he had had the right papers, he had the wrong accent. He was sent to a prison—or, as it was officially labeled, a “lodging camp,” in Pithiviers, just a little south of Paris.

Soon after Dwojra and Henri went to visit him, Icchok escaped. The family hid in the town of Tarbes, in the Pyrenees. The Korcarzes fled to a neighboring town. Since they had been forced to flee in 1941, the Finkelsztajns and the Korcarzes were not among the Jews who were rounded up the following year on Rue des Rosiers and Rue des Ecouffes and shipped off to gas chambers in Poland.

Icchok found work in the Pyrenees. A group of Republicanos—Spanish leftists who had fought Franco and had taken refuge across the border in 1939—hired him, knowing he was Jewish and knowing he needed work. His job was chopping firewood in the mountains, sometimes for weeks at a time. Dwojra and Henri tried to stay indoors as much as possible. Only Icchok would venture out on his bicycle to shop for food or go off to work in the mountains.

Many of Henri Finkelsztajn’s memories of Tarbes are glimpses from behind curtains. Henri would go to the window and lift up the bottom of the curtain about two inches, just enough for his eyes, and watch the Gestapo search the building across the street. Dark uniforms would move through the building. Suddenly one would appear on a balcony and then disappear, and then the same man would pop up a few minutes later at another window or on
another balcony. It was fun to try to guess who would pop up where next. But he could sense his parents’ fear.

In 1943, Dwojra gave birth to another son, Willy. Icchok, the leftist atheist, surrounded by Gestapo, was adamant that his son must be circumcised. In 1943 nobody wanted to be circumcised, let alone have a circumcision performed on someone they loved. The greater part of that generation of European Jewry simply skipped this biblical demand. But somehow Icchok found a
mohel
, a ritual circumciser, some twenty miles from Tarbes in the Catholic shrine town of Lourdes. He brought this terrified elderly Jew to the apartment. The infant Willy was placed with the mohel in the living room, and a curtain was stretched across the corner for privacy. Little Henri of course peeked under curtains, but what he saw this time was in a way more terrifying than the Gestapo. The
mohel
had a knife in his hand and was leaning over Willy. Henri couldn’t tell if it was his old age or just simple fear, but the hand with the knife never stopped shaking, causing the knife to wave in little abrupt spasms.