A Chosen Few (39 page)

At 19, Zoltán nervously made his way through the dark old Jewish section of central Pest, to the ornate cathedrallike Dohány synagogue, said to be the largest synagogue in Europe. He observed strange things going on in this imposing building, in a strange language with strange music. Zoltán may have been drawn to other Jews, but he did not feel that his place was in the Dohány.

When he was 21 he met Kati Kelemen. As a small child, Kati had come home from school mouthing anti-Semitic slurs, meaningless curses she had learned from other children. Her parents, Communists who believed in working toward the egalitarian society, told her then that they were Jewish, but they never told her much more about it.

Zoltán and Kati married and continued to ambiguously pursue Judaism. Budapest was the capital of officially sanctioned Judaism in Central Europe. It had the largest community and the only rabbinical seminary. Everything Jewish was either officially sanctioned or unofficial and banned. There were official social functions. The seminary offered a
Kiddush
, a social gathering centered around a wine blessing to sanctify the Sabbath, and the turnout for this was generally large. Zoltán and Kati sought out other Jewish gatherings, and they began to stumble across the unofficial ones, including one in the home of a couple who had secretly invited people there for a Passover seder. The same couple would also
invite five or six young people over for Friday nights. The couple were regularly warned by the police against these activities, but they continued to invite people to their home. The police would call them in for questioning and would warn them that they would lose their jobs and have their passports revoked.

Zoltán and Kati also met a young dissident rabbi, Tomas Raj, a graduate of the Budapest seminary in a class of four. Raj had already aroused the displeasure of the authorities for attempting a Saturday afternoon study group in the town of Szeged, where he had been rabbi. When he produced a play about Moses at the synagogue, the Jewish Community leaders had removed him and sent him to work at a home for the elderly in western Hungary. He continued his activities, and in 1970 he was expelled from the rabbinate.

The officials of the seminary and the Budapest Jewish Community leadership, MIOK (the Hungarian acronym for National Representation of Hungarian Israelites)—which was directed by Géza Seifert and, after his death in 1976, by his wife Ilona—worried about maintaining their own positions and about keeping what they had operating and on good terms with the state. Because of this, the state could often rely on the central board to stop unapproved activities. This was the system for state management of Judaism throughout Central Europe. An older generation remembered that it had also been Eichmann’s system. To a younger generation, including Zoltán and Kati, it meant that they could expect no help in learning about Judaism from the official Jewish Community. There were no courses or books or any guidance for Jews wanting to learn the basics. Their only chance was to meet other Jews, and for this reason they started going regularly to the synagogue.

“You couldn’t catch a word,” said Zoltán. “I can’t catch a word because I don’t know Hebrew, and even if you know Hebrew you can’t possibly understand what is going on if you are not told where you are.”

They joined a group of young professionals who studied with Rabbi Raj. Studying rendered them ever more confused: What did it mean to be Jewish? Was it a nationality, like being Hungarian? Or a religion that they did not know how to practice? If it was a nationality, then did they belong in Israel? In 1983, through an Israeli contact in Budapest, Zoltán and Kati were able to arrange an illegal trip to Israel. They told the government they wanted to
visit neighboring Austria and were given passports and visas. In Vienna they were met by a Jewish organization with visas and plane tickets to Israel. In Israel they were taken around the country to meet Hungarian Jews who had immigrated. Everyone told them of the good Jewish life in Israel and showed them only the best and most beautiful sights.

But they could not make the decision to move there. Their lives, all their friends and relatives, everything they knew was in Hungary, and they hadn’t even had a chance to say good-bye. They hadn’t dared to tell anyone what they were really doing. After four weeks they returned to Hungary even more confused, and for years afterward they would periodically think about Israel.

G
omułka was finally destroyed, not over any of the student issues, not over democracy or free speech or anti-Semitism, but rather because of the price of meat. A 36 percent hike during Christmas 1970 led to strikes, and he was replaced by Edward Gierek. The change was welcome news for Marian Turski and the staff of the besieged
Polityka
. The independent Communist newspaper had been advocating a shift toward Western financing, opening opportunities for a private sector, and making infrastructural improvements such as a highway system.

This was exactly Gierek’s approach. Gomułka had wanted nothing to do with the West. “In a way, there was something in common between him and De Gaulle,” Turski later said of Gomułka, “ … a very selfish man with a very large, unlimited ego.” Gierek was a pragmatist who had been educated in the West. Promising economic growth, he obtained Western loans and started a Polish automobile industry and built roads, including the main highway from Katowice in the south to Warsaw. Poland showed impressive growth rates and was soon ranked the tenth strongest industrial nation in the world, only slightly behind East Germany. At the time these were probably the two most overrated economies in the world. By 1976, supposedly thriving Poland was forced to reveal that it was literally bankrupt and could not even service its debts.
Just as Gomułka could not be forgiven his sins once his great virtue of holding down prices was proved hollow, Gierek without economic growth did not have much appeal.

It was a period of change when the old faiths weren’t working, a time when Poles were asking many questions. Ever since a thug had called him a Jew and punctuated it with a smack in the face, Konstanty Gebert had been asking himself, “What was I supposed to do about things? How come I’m a Jew? What does it mean?” He was not going to start going to a synagogue. Synagogues and churches were “relics of the past,” not something for an enlightened modern Communist. Gebert was not even sure where to find a synagogue. He suspected that some of his friends were also Jewish. But you could not go to your friend and say, “Are you Jewish?” He compared it to saying to someone, “Are you an ape?” In Poland to ask someone if he or she is a Jew is to make an accusation.

The alternative was reading. He tried reading the Bible, but it did not speak to him. So he turned to the great nineteenth-century Yiddish literature. Writers such as Russian-born Sholem Aleichem and Polish-born Isaac Leib Peretz had been recognized by the regime as part of official culture and therefore were translated into Polish and made available to the public very inexpensively. Culture for the masses was a Communist ideal, and these writers had been included. What amazed Gebert when he read these stories of Jewish life in Poland and Russia—the world that had been exterminated shortly before he was born—was that it did not seem alien. Though he had never seen a shtetl or met religious Jews, they seemed very familiar and understandable, as though somehow certain values and ways of thinking had been passed on to him without the hat, beard, language, or rituals. Was Jewishness, then, a way of thinking?

In 1971, Gebert decided to visit the United States and look up some of his father’s old Jewish Communist friends. He discovered a great-uncle in Sacramento, California, whose family included a grandson his age. They were not deeply religious, but they did observe the Sabbath, and Gebert, for the first time, went to a synagogue and to a family Sabbath meal. Although he was intrigued, he could not imagine living like that. In 1976 he met the family again in London. He even tried hosting his own Sabbath meal with Warsaw friends. But it didn’t really work.

By then, Gebert, a psychologist by training, was reading more
intellectual Jewish writers such as Martin Buber. When Carl Rogers, the American humanist psychologist, came to Poland to meet with Polish psychologists, Gebert and most of his friends went to see him. After a general talk, Rogers suggested that they break up into groups of special interest. There could be a group on divorce, one on parents of small children—

“How about a Jewish group?” someone said. Everyone laughed. Jews were always a good joke. But the person who had said it wasn’t joking. He ignored the laughter and stubbornly added, “Well, anybody who is interested, meet me in my room at eight o’clock.”

Gebert went, pressed his way into the packed room, looked around, and discovered that most of his friends were Jewish. After that, he started talking to his friends about being Jewish. He found that most of them had in some way been abused in 1968 and that for them, too, the experience had led to reflection, but they hadn’t known what to do. Gomułka’s 1968 campaign had driven most Jews out of Poland but it had rekindled a Jewish consciousness in the few who remained. An unofficial Jewish group formed to meet twice a month in the hope that their common questions would lead to some common answers.

T
HE
G
IEREK YEARS
—from 1970 to 1980—were a good time for this kind of activity. Under Gierek, Western fashions and culture started to appear, and there was a minor boom in the publication of what were perceived as “Western-type” books, which included a wide variety of titles on Jewish subjects including Holocaust history, World War II memoirs, studies of Jewish art, and reprints of prewar Jewish books.

The history of Eastern European Communism has been colored by the irony that opposition most flourished during periods of relative freedom. Gierek couldn’t go after Western loans while he was busting up meetings and arresting intellectuals. When he eased the repression, it gave an opportunity for groups to organize. An accidental by-product of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 was that for a rare moment in Polish history, Jews and the Catholic Church were thrown into the same camp. Then the Catholics and the Jews began working with trade unions. By 1980, a wide range of opposition groups had formed an unlikely but solid coalition called Solidarity. The coalition between Catholics and Jews lasted throughout
the early 1980s. Gebert, as a Jewish dissident, was sometimes invited to speak at Catholic churches, which, like synagogues, he had never expected to enter. The congregations always seemed very excited and a little embarrassed to have a Jew among them. One priest introduced him as “Mr. Gebert of the Mosaic persuasion.” Just as the influence of the Catholic Church was increasing in Poland, Karol Wojtyła from Katowice became Pope in 1978, giving the Polish church even more confidence.

This prosperous time for Konstanty Gebert, Marian Turski, and many other people in Poland ended harshly in 1981. The meat price went up again, and Lech Wałesa, the Solidarity leader with his base as an electrician in the Gdańsk shipyards, organized nationwide strikes. The Gierek regime suddenly realized something astounding: Most Polish workers were now Solidarity members. Ten million Poles belonged to Solidarity. To settle the strike, Gierek agreed to sweeping reforms and then resigned. Most of the reforms were not carried out, but the Communist party was now in such disarray that Poland by default became the freest society in the Soviet bloc. But on December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski led a coup d’état and established martial law. The small measure of Polish freedom was over.

The little Polish Jewish revival also ended with the coup. Gebert’s group was discontinued, because any gathering of more than eight people had to register with the police. Since almost all of the sixty group members were active in the underground political opposition, they could not afford to do this. But the group still unofficially met on Jewish holidays and observed its own annual commemoration of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, shunning the official one. Fifty Jews would quietly walk through the few monuments in the 1950s housing project where the ghetto had been. The police didn’t object until 1983, when Solidarity decided to join in and invited the people of Warsaw to participate. Not coincidentally, this was the year when the government, trying to improve its badly degenerated international image, invited Jewish leaders from abroad to come to an official commemoration of the fortieth anniversary. Marek Edelman, the last surviving veteran of the ghetto uprising, was now involved in the underground opposition; he urged world Jewish leaders not to come because they were being used to give the regime the appearance of international approval.

Gebert’s little group could barely be found among the thousands of Solidarity supporters and sympathizers who joined in the
unofficial ceremony. They were surrounded by police with clubs and machine guns as they made their way through the trim, straight streets to the Umschlagplatz. The plan was that survivors and relatives of survivors would lay wreaths in front of the plaque that marked the site where the ghetto Jews had been herded for deportation. But as these elderly mourners approached, the armed police blocked them from coming near the plaque. The crowd grew as angry Poles from the neighborhood joined the mourners. It was not that Poles were supporting Jews but that they were all opposing the regime together.