A Chosen Few (33 page)

But if the 1968 demonstrations reassured Ron Zuriel because a new generation was rejecting their parents, they also showed that all was not well in the new German shopping paradise. In June 1967 demonstrators had greeted Willy Brandt and the Shah of Iran in
Berlin, and while they were in the opera house listening to Mozart, police attacked the student demonstrators outside, killing one. In April 1968 two Frankfurt department stores were burned, and a week later a leader of the student movement was shot by a psychopath, who hanged himself. The incident led to a week of rioting in Berlin and around West Germany in which two were killed and four hundred wounded. The new, nonideological consumer society was turning out to be an angry and violent place after all.

M
OISHE
W
AKS
, five years younger than his brother, had to wait six years before he too could move to Israel. When he finally did, he found himself feeling a bit alone in a strange land. He had Ruwen and Carmela, and a friend of Carmela’s family whom Moishe had met in Germany became his only friend. He played soccer well, and that gave him an activity. It was a beginning.

Ruwen seemed very nervous during the holidays that year. As Yom Kippur approached, he warned Moishe not to go anywhere by car, saying, “They will kill you.” Moishe did not know what to think about that—the presumably Arab “they” was not explained. That evening, from his apartment near the university, he could see an almost infinite line of buses speeding by. But he had no telephone and lived alone, and he had no way of finding out what the buses might mean. The next day, Yom Kippur, he was tired of being alone and decided to visit some friends from Germany who were staying at a nearby hotel.

Moishe drove to the hotel without incident. Surely his brother was overreacting, he thought, and had been needlessly worried. Nobody seemed to be out killing anyone. He spent the day with his friends, and only when his brother, who had been frantically looking for him, finally found him, did Moishe understand that a war, the Yom Kippur War, had begun. There was no soccer, nothing for him to do, and he went to a kibbutz to replace someone who was fighting. His only friend was killed in the war. Moishe began to understand what his grandparents had always told him: Life was very hard in Israel.

T
he late 1960s would have been a good time for Jews in Poland to have had amnesia. But as perverse fate had it, it was at this time that memory started returning. In 1965, Marian Turski accidentally discovered his loss of memory at the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Theresienstadt, where he was talking with a well-known Polish Jewish figure with whom he had been in the camps. The man started reminiscing about the time Turski had saved his life.

“I saved your life?” asked a perplexed Turski.

“On the death march! Remember?”

Turski tried to look into his own memory, but he had no idea what this man was referring to. “Tell me about it,” he said, and he questioned the man for more and more details. Then he realized that he remembered almost nothing of his experiences in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, and the murderous marches to them. He began reading books about the Holocaust. Until then, accidentally scanning the cover of such a book in his peripheral vision had been a disturbing experience. Now he was soaking them up with a hunger that was like the end of hibernation. He also read books about Judaism. He spent his time thinking about his experiences and the collective Jewish experience. The following year, he visited Auschwitz, officially “the place of martyrdom of Polish nations and other nations.” He rummaged through barracks and
visited the subcamp where he had been held. Facing the horror of it was a price he could pay to get back his memory. It was the beginning of what Turski was to call his “comeback.”

This was a time when Poles were also thinking more about Jews, which is generally not a good thing in Poland. For all its impact on Western European Jews, the Six-Day War affected Jewish lives in the Soviet bloc even more profoundly. The Soviet Union had reversed its Middle East policy twelve years earlier, when the British had tried to forcibly prevent Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser from nationalizing the Suez Canal. By the time of the Six-Day War, the Soviet bloc was firmly on the Arab side, supplying and training Arab armies. To the Poles, the spectacle of Soviet-trained armies being routed in less than a week by a bunch of Jews brought glee and pleasure to an increasingly anti-Soviet people. “
Jojne poszedł na wojnę
,” the Poles snickered—“Jojne went to war,” the phrase being cute in Polish because the first and last words rhyme.

Jojne
is Polish slang, the anti-Semitic stereotype of the cowardly Jew who can’t and won’t fight. But finally the
Jojne
had fought, and they won in six days, defeating all those armies so carefully trained and equipped by the Soviets. It was a wonderful joke. Some Poles, even though they never called a Jew a Pole, started taking pride in the Polishness of Israelis. After all, a large part of the Israeli population had been born in Poland. And many of the most warlike Israelis—the organizers of the Haganah, for example—came out of Jewish defense movements in Poland. Was the Six-Day War not in some way a victory of Poles over Soviets? Marian Turski, who was traveling around Poland for his newspaper, constantly encountered such contorted observations.

But party boss Gomułka was not amused. Though he was a Polish nationalist who had fought many political battles with Moscow, the intensity of anti-Soviet feelings in Poland troubled him. He worried about what would happen if war broke out with the West. And, of course, Moscow was even less amused than Gomułka. According to Turski’s sources from the period, Gomułka attended a secret meeting in Moscow in which it was decided that something had to be done about the Polish attitude.

W
HILE IT WAS TRUE
that there were many Polish-born Israelis, Jews were getting to be rare in Poland. After the upheaval of 1956, about half of the remaining Jews had left. Available figures are
imprecise, but at most there were between 25,000 and 35,000 Jews left. Everyone had their own count because divining who was or was not a Jew had become an arcane Polish hobby.

No one would have counted the Gruberskis, for example, who lived in Sochaczew, a town near Warsaw. They were Polish Communist atheists, although on occasion they sent their fourteen-year-old daughter Barbara to mass. She wasn’t baptized; nor was she encouraged to believe. Barbara was stubborn and different and a little difficult, and other children didn’t like her. They would call her that standard Polish curse, “
Żyd
,” Jew. Sometimes they would call her Dreyfus or Beilis, after Mendel Beilis, who had been accused of ritual murder in Kiev early in the century. They would deliberately stretch out and distort vowels to make these names sound especially heinous.

Barbara didn’t know who Beilis or Dreyfus had been, and she didn’t really know what a Jew was. When she asked her parents why the other children called her Jew, they explained that it was because she was adopted. Many people her age were adopted, including a girl in the next house. But nobody called that girl “
Żyd
.” Her mother explained that it was her dark thick hair. Her mother also had dark thick hair, but she was not called a Jew, perhaps because she had light blue Polish eyes. Barbara had dark eyes.

Finally, in 1958, when Barbara was 16, her mother decided to tell her the truth. Barbara had been born in the Warsaw ghetto. Her real parents may have been from the nearby town of Lovice, but that was not certain. Her mother may have been the daughter of a doctor. In any case, they were Jews and had some money, and they had been trapped in the ghetto and desperate. A contract was drawn up in which they paid Polish people to take care of their baby daughter, Barbara. In addition to the monthly payments, a substantial settlement would be made after the war if the parents survived and took back the child. Three months were paid in advance, but after the three months there were no more payments, and the Polish foster parents had lost interest in caring for the child. When the Gruberskis first saw her at the foster parents’ home, she was starving. They offered the seven-month-old baby a piece of bread, and she hungrily ate it. Childless, the Gruberskis happily adopted her and had a new birth certificate drawn up.

Even more shocking for Barbara was the news that the original foster parents were people she knew—the Kwiatkowskis, who
rented an apartment from the Gruberskis in the neighborhood. Kazimiera Kwiatkowska was a first cousin of Barbara’s adopted mother. They often visited and had four children with whom Barbara would play.

At first, Barbara was not certain how she felt about all this. She kept thinking about the fact that the Kwiatkowskis, who she still saw regularly, probably still had the contract, something from her real mother. It would probably have her mother’s signature on it. She decided to confront them, a reckoning, a showdown. Once faced with the embarrassing news that Barbara knew the truth, the Kwiatkowskis were willing to talk to her about it. But they did not want to give her the contract. “It was written by my mother, and I want to have it,” Barbara argued. She had a way of setting her jaw and turning her eyes into cold shining dark stones. Realizing that she would never relent, they gave it to her.

According to the document, Barbara had been turned over for 700 złotys per month, with three months to be paid in advance. In 1942 this had been a substantial payment, far more than care for a baby would cost. But, of course, the foster parents were taking a risk, for which they had to be paid. If they were caught hiding a Jewish baby, the entire family would be shot. The baby was young enough that there was no reason to suspect it wasn’t theirs. As the Kwiatkowskis told Barbara, nobody in the neighborhood would have turned them in, because they were all involved in black market meat for sausages—the Kwiatkowskis stored the meat. One raid on their home, and the whole neighborhood would have been in trouble. For years afterward, Barbara liked to tell people, “If I am alive today, it’s only because of all the kielbasa the Poles eat.”

Barbara took the contract home with her, but could not leave it in a drawer. Whenever she was home, she had to take it out and look at it. The paper was signed
Karolina Leboida
. That signature was the only trace of her real mother—just the signature, not the name itself. It was a Polish name, because her parents had tried to survive outside the ghetto by taking other names, just as Barbara (Irene Hochberg) Góra had done. But the name
Leboida
hadn’t worked like
Góra
, and they were rounded up and put in the ghetto.

Who were they? What was her mother’s real name? What was she like? Barbara Gruberska asked herself these things. Then she started asking, “And who am I? What is my real name?” She went back to the Kwiatkowskis for more information, but they had no more to tell. She took the signature to a handwriting analyst who
compared the signature
Karolina Leboida
and with Barbara’s own. The handwriting expert told her that Karolina Leboida was extremely intelligent, fearless, and well organized. Analyzing Barbara’s signature, he concluded that these two people would not get along well.

Barbara decided that she would be best off, after all, as Barbara Gruberska, Polish Catholic Communist. She tried to be even more Catholic than her upbringing. But even with regular church attendance, she was not completely safe. At a youth camp in Bulgaria a Russian boy said to her, “You have Jewish hair.” she became furious and repeatedly denied that her hair was Jewish. She went to Moscow, and a man on a subway platform asked her where she was from. When she told him she was from Poland, he said, “Ah, a Jew from Poland.” And once in Wrocław, on a tram, a man made his way toward her. She looked at him and knew he was Jewish. “So when are you moving to Israel?” the man said. Once again, Barbara became furious. “What are you talking about? Going to Israel! Me go to Israel? As a matter of fact, I am on my way to mass right now!”

E
VEN
B
ARBARA
G
ÓRA
, with years of practice, could not always pass. When she finished studying agriculture, she moved to a small Silesian village, Stare Olesno, where she worked on a state-run experiment developing a new breed of potato. That was the system: Take a bright young Pole and invest years in training her to be an agronomist—only to bring more potatoes to Poland.

Even though she was a party member, she did not have the usual tensions with the peasants, and she also got along well with the other scientists. She found that the Silesians, for all their German language and culture, were not anti-Semitic. But like other Poles, they had a knack for spotting a Jew when they saw one. Although nobody ever said that she was Jewish, things were often said that made her realize that everyone simply assumed that she was. One of the workers confessed that he had worked with the German Army and then asked, “How did you survive?” The name Góra didn’t seem to be fooling Poles anymore. She would look in the mirror at her same light hair and reasonably broad features and wonder if somehow as you get older, the face changes and becomes more Semitic.