Such Good Girls (27 page)

“I have heard that you have a very good memory,” she asked the small, bespectacled boy. “Is it so?” And when he had proved it, she asked him how he did it.

“I don’t know, Sister,” he replied. “The words just come to me on their own.”

She made him promise not to mention his gift to anyone. Inspired by this special attention, Shlomo began volunteering for little jobs, making himself useful. One afternoon, Sister C. asked him to wash, change his shirt, and prepare to visit the house of the prelate, the town’s highest religious authority, who lived near the church orphanage. Ironically, the prelate lived across the street from the house Shlomo’s family had lived in, and which was now occupied by strangers.

The imposing prelate first asked if he was the son of Joseph Breznitz, the Jew who had lived across the street and who had been taken, along with Shlomo’s mother, by the Germans. The prelate then asked him to demonstrate his mastery of the Catholic prayers, which he effortlessly did, after which the prelate retired to an adjacent room with the Mother Superior and Sister C., leaving Shlomo to wonder about the significance of his performance and what destiny awaited him.

He wouldn’t learn what the prelate had in mind until months after the war, when he was miraculously reunited with his mother, who had, unlike his father, survived Auschwitz. Shlomo’s mother found her son’s survival equally miraculous. At Auschwitz she had seen the children from the first orphanage where she had tried to deposit her son, and could only speculate that the Jewish children from Saint Vincent had met with a similar fate. That very morning, Shlomo’s mother informed him that she had met with the Mother Superior, who told her what had happened behind those closed doors.

The prelate had seen Shlomo’s gift for memorizing prayers as a sign that Shlomo might be the Jewish orphan who would one day become pope, foretold in a fable he knew, and familiar to the Saint Vincent sisters as well. The prelate had urged the sisters to protect Shlomo from the Germans at all costs in the hope that Shlomo indeed might rise to become the leader of the planet’s Roman Catholics! After the prelate’s brutal murder near the end of the war, the Mother Superior remained so convinced that Shlomo was papal material that it was only his mother’s reappearance that convinced her to let him go.

Instead of becoming pope, Shlomo and his mother made aliyah to Israel in 1949, where he grew up to be a renowned psychologist and expert on stress, member briefly of the Knesset, and a leader in the use of technology to improve and maintain brain function.

In the case of Jean-Marie Lustiger, perhaps the most famous of all Jewish-born priests, the crucial factor seems to have been a temperamental affinity for Catholicism so strong that, unlike Breznitz, he likely would not have renounced his adopted Christian faith even if his mother had survived the war. Lustiger was born in 1926 in Paris to two Polish Jews, but when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 Lustiger and his sister were sent to live with a Catholic woman in Orleans. Immediately taken with Catholicism, the teenage Jean-Marie decided to convert that same year, against his parents’ wishes. Not even his mother’s murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 deterred him from entering a Carmelite seminary in 1946 and being ordained in 1954, while his Jewish father, a survivor, watched from a seat in the back of the church. He went on to become the pastor of Paris’s Sixteenth Arrondissement.

After a spiritual crisis in the late 1970s, when he considered moving to Israel, the stylish but conservative Lustiger was appointed archbishop of Paris by the pope in 1981, a nomination about which his enigmatic comment was, “For me, this nomination was as if, all of a sudden, the crucifix began to wear a yellow star… . I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.” Two years later he was named a cardinal and gained a broad reputation for his authoritarian manner. A strong supporter of Israel, he was instrumental in pressing Pope John Paul II to order the removal of the controversial Carmelite convent that had been constructed next to Auschwitz in 1984.

When the Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel accused Cardinal Lustiger of betraying his people and his faith during the Jews’ darkest period, the Holocaust, he replied, “I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”

“I believe he saw himself as a Jewish Christian, like the first disciples,” one of his close friends said.

After he stepped down as archbishop in 2005, the year that pope John Paul II died, he was mentioned as a possible successor, but he refused to discuss the possibility publicly. To a friend who asked him if he might become pope, he reportedly said in French-accented Yiddish, “From your mouth to God’s ear.” However, to another who asked him the same thing, he reportedly replied, “Oy vey—you think I’m meshugge?”

Jakob Hirsch Greiner was also able to juggle, or reconcile, his double religious identity. In 1942 Jakob, already eleven years old, ran away moments before the Germans shot the rest of his family. He spent most of the rest of the war wandering alone from Polish village to Polish village under the name Jakob Popofsky. After the war, he found a home at a Catholic orphanage, where he didn’t reveal his Jewish name for fear of standing out, but he missed having a faith. The children’s agency didn’t know what to do with him until a nun from the orphanage said, “Well, if he’s so religious, I’ll take him with me.” Popofsky entered the seminary in 1952 and became a priest in 1958. “But all the time one thought kept bothering me,” he said. “I was a Jew and I was still hiding. Why was that? It began to torture me.” In 1966 he announced in a magazine article about his life that he was a Jew, after which he was better able to reconcile the religious tension in his life.

Things were not so simple for Father Popofsky’s brother, who had survived the war and was now living in Israel as an Orthodox Jew. He discovered his long-lost brother through the magazine article and tracked Jakob down. When the priest decided to visit Israel in 1970, his brother warned him that if he insisted on coming as a priest, “You better stay in Poland.”

Disregarding this advice, Father Popofsky arrived in Israel wearing a cassock. His brother, who met him at the airport, was upset. “This is how you greet us?” he said. “I can’t take you home like this.” So Popofsky changed out of his cassock in the airport men’s room and went home with his brother to meet his long-lost relatives, who took him to their synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, where the Lubavitcher rabbi said, “Let God bless him.” Back home, his brother exclaimed, “Do you realize what an honor that was!?”

“Big deal,” Popofsky replied. “I could’ve blessed him!”

Somehow Popofsky survived his “dual personality” with a sense of humor. “I’d go to synagogue with a yarmulke on my head, and the next day I’d go to church with the yarmulke in my pocket,” he said. “I had to be careful not to cross myself in the synagogue or put my yarmulke on in church.”

In the mirror, Popofsky doesn’t see a 2,000-year-old rift between two major religions predicated in some large measure on the allegation that the Jews killed Christ. Instead he sees the essential decency and kindness that followers of all religions profess to aspire to. “When I’m alone,” he says, “I can talk to myself in the mirror: ‘Oh, there you are—a decent guy I can talk to.’”

It’s easy to see the priest’s renunciation of his Jewish faith, as Popofsky’s own brother does, as a betrayal of Judaism and a kind of posthumous victory for Hitler. Yet the relatively peaceful coexistence of both religions within Popofsky might also be seen as a profound spiritual rebuke to the very anti-Semitism that motivated the Final Solution. If the Jew is no longer the Other, no longer the viciously maligned foil for Christianity, but rather Christianity’s long-lost brother, a vital member of the spiritual family, then how can you murder him? He too is in you. As Popofsky says, “If Christ’s a Jew and I serve him, that means I’m also a Jew.”

For Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, however, the question of whether he was Catholic or Jewish became a source of great suffering. Unlike Breznitz, Lustiger, and Popofsky, Weksler-Waszkinel never had a chance in childhood to choose his faith. Born in 1943, he was given up as a newborn to a Catholic couple, the Waszkinels, the only parents he would ever know—or know of, until middle age. Still, he harbored faint doubts about his origins; it was as if others knew something about him that he didn’t. When he was a boy, two drunks once yelled “Jewish orphan!” at him. He was the target of other taunts about his appearance, so unlike his parents’. At the age of ten or eleven, the dark-haired Weksler-Waszkinel looked in the mirror and asked his mother if he looked like his fair-haired father. On a trip with his father when he was thirteen, an elderly Polish man pointed to him and said to the father, “Where did you conjure up this little Jew?” At fifteen, he was reading to his illiterate mother about some Jews when he saw tears in her eyes. “Why are you crying?” he asked. “Am I a Jew?” To which she replied, “Don’t I love you enough?”

At seventeen he decided to enter a seminary, which angered his father. “Am I doing something wrong?” Weksler-Waszkinel asked him. “No,” his father replied, “but your life will be very difficult.” Shortly after, his father died of a heart attack. In 1966, Weksler-Waszkinel was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-three.

In 1975, now a Polish Catholic priest and professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, Weksler-Waszkinel moved his mother in with him in an apartment in Lublin, where he was again encountering rumors of his possible Jewishness. “The question ‘perhaps I really am Jewish’ nudged its way into my consciousness more and more intensely,” he wrote of that period. “I nurtured this question in my heart and the possibility of it having a positive reply no longer terrified me.” In 1978, when he was thirty-five, his beloved, now elderly mother, Emilia, finally brought herself to tell him the truth—that in 1943 his Jewish mother, trapped in the Lublin ghetto, contacted Emilia and begged her to take her week-old baby, saying, “You are a devout Catholic. You believe in Jesus, who was a Jew. So try to save this Jewish baby for the Jew in whom you believe. And one day he will grow up to be a priest.” And so it had actually come to pass.

Weksler-Waszkinel now considered himself an emissary between Jews and Christians, who themselves had lost three million to the Holocaust. But the belated proof of his earlier suspicions that he had been born Jewish unsettled him, even as, for the next thirty years, Weksler-Waszkinel attended to his university students at an Ursuline convent in Lublin. When he was in his sixties, the knowledge that he was born Jewish gave birth to a determination to settle in Israel and become a Jew. For one thing, he had learned that his biological parents had been Zionists who wanted to immigrate there. For another, with the help of a nun who herself had saved many Jews during the war, he had been put in touch with an uncle and survivors from his Jewish parents’ small town who now lived in Israel. He at last learned his father’s family name and appended it to his Polish Catholic surname. Maybe most of all, he could no longer abide the anti-Semitism in Poland. The country, he said, reminded him of people smoking under a sign that says NO SMOKING. Anti-Semitism was prohibited, but no one complied. “The sermons are filled with it,” he complained. A Christian radio station with millions of listeners peddled anti-Semitism to the masses. “I can’t bear it,” he said. “It’s too intense for me.”

On a preliminary visit to Israel, Weksler-Waszkinel wore both his priest’s collar and a yarmulke at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. His plan was to learn Hebrew and Judaism at a religious kibbutz but practice as a Catholic priest on Sunday. However, no monastery in Israel would accept him, most likely because he was Jewish, and no kibbutz would accept him as a Jew if he insisted on conducting a Mass one day a week. Eventually he accepted a place at a kibbutz on the condition that he give up his once-a-week Mass—“Is he a Jew? A Christian? Who are you, Yaakov?” a member of the kibbutz’s Ulpan Admissions Committee had asked during his interview. He insisted on having two faiths, but the kibbutzim wanted him to choose Judaism. “I’m going through something very intense,” he confided in a friend, a woman who was also a hidden child, but one who returned to Judaism decades earlier after seven years as a Catholic. Under the strain of reconciling his two faiths, he became very depressed and wanted to leave the kibbutz.

Because of a decades-old Israeli law that prohibits a Jew who practices another religion from having the right to return to Israel as a Jew, the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority granted him temporary residence status, not as a Jew, but as a monk, with a home at Abu Gosh, a Benedictine monastery, once run, ironically, by a monk of Jewish origin.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Israel had already granted Weksler-Waszkinel’s Catholic parents the status of Righteous Among the Nations for saving a Jewish boy—himself.

Why has Romuald Jakub agonized so over his religious conflict while Jakob Popofsky embraced both religions, and Shlomo Breznitz and Jean-Marie Lustiger made their choices and stuck with them? Where do you go looking for the answer? In the fact that Weksler-Waszkinel was born during the war and traumatized as an infant, so that the roots of his conflict were preverbal and more disturbing on a subconscious level and unresolvable? That he happened to lack Popofsky’s sense of humor, as well as his feel for a spirituality that transcends all religions? Or is the answer just hidden in the unknowable thickets of personality and personal preference?

The discovery that hidden child survivors were born Jewish continues to this day, but perhaps nowhere is the revelation more perilous than in Poland, the home of an increasing number of people who have learned only as adults that they were born Jewish. As their Catholic hiding parents enter old age, they, like Weksler-Waszkinel’s mother, have finally come clean. The number of Jews in Poland—three million before the war, more than any country in the world—had dropped by the 1990s to roughly 4,000, but has climbed in recent years to 20,000 or more. Since 1988, an annual Jewish Cultural Festival in Kraków provides an opportunity for curious Poles to learn about the country’s vanished Jewish culture and cuisine, but almost every newly discovered Jew in Poland who embraces his or her Judaism still does so at some risk—to their social status, family harmony, friendships, careers, even their marriages.