A Chosen Few (46 page)

Barbara Góra, another longtime Communist, did not mourn the regime’s passing, either. She had never married and had always been absorbed in her work. She had found a position compiling a weekly newsletter on foreign agriculture. The three-page publication was intended to be a serious journal for professionals who
wanted to keep up with interesting ideas around the world. She tried to make it her contribution to improving Polish agronomy. But it was difficult to fit all the information into only three pages, and she worked under a man who desperately wanted to embellish his standing in the party by having his own articles published. His studies were usually arcane and irrelevant and sometimes ridiculous. She particularly remembered his pointless study of Swedish bears. When they were that silly, she would simply take the article home with her and never mention it. But she was often obliged to run his pieces. Dissatisfied, she left when the first opportunity to retire came up in 1987. “We all waited for the changes. We were so disappointed with our lives. This was not socialism. It was state capitalism. There was a privileged class, the owners of Poland.”

But the new Polish state would also have its disappointments. Konstanty Gebert understood that in spite of its coalition of Jews, Catholics, unionists, and intellectuals, Solidarity had always had an anti-Semitic element, especially within the Warsaw chapter of the trade union. During the 1990 presidential campaign, a poll indicated that 30 percent of Poles believed “Jews have too much influence in Poland.” Among those who said they intended to vote for Wałesa, 50 percent agreed with that statement.

In the local elections that year several small parties expressed anti-Semitism. A small conservative Catholic party with the backing of Polish Primate Józef Cardinal Glemp produced a poster that showed a happy worker tossing out a barrel-load of people bearing the sinister rapacious faces that have become the standard anti-Semitic stereotype for Jews. The caption said, “Enough of socialism, comrades.”

In the 1990 presidential race, Mazowiecki, having been the first post-Communist leader, appeared to be mounting a major challenge to Wałesa’s candidacy. Although Mazowiecki was a devout Catholic, his campaign was dogged by persistent rumors that he was secretly a Jew. No public figure ever uttered this, but it appears to have been widely believed. Konstanty Gebert, who by that time had become a well-known journalist, would question people on why they believed this. One person explained to him, “He is sad, and he prays too much,” while another told him, “Well, he did get to be prime minister, didn’t he?”

While Wałesa had always been outspoken in condemning anti-Semitism, he did nothing to deflate the anti-Semitic tone of the campaign, no doubt since it had turned against his principal
opponent. He started playing with Polish anti-Semitism, vaguely alluding to hidden Jewish activities and asserting that he was “a hundred percent Pole” and that he had documents going back “for generations untold” proving his Polishness.

In a speech to a Solidarity group Wałesa referred to rumors that “a new clique is at the trough again.” He went on to say that he had heard they were Jews. A group angrily walked out of that meeting and established its own party, the Civic Movement for Democratic Action. Wałesa complained that he could not attack the new movement without being accused of anti-Semitism. When Gebert asked him at a press conference if he considered the Movement to be “a Jewish party,” he said no but then added, “Why do they conceal their origins?” As he went on the campaign trail, he was regularly confronted with questions about when he would throw the Jews out of government. Some would shout, “Gas the Jews.”

Wałesa did not confront these comments at his rallies and when he later talked about such incidents, latent Polish anti-Semitism kept slipping into his rhetoric. In the meantime anti-Semitic graffiti, which had appeared occasionally even in Communist times, was becoming increasingly common, especially “Gas the Jews” written in Polish and “
Juden Raus
,” Jews Out, written in German. Anti-Semitic literature was once again being sold openly on the streets. In Kielce the performance of a Jewish folk group was interrupted by firecrackers and the shouting of anti-Semitic epithets. A month before the election, a group of reportedly more than a dozen youths stormed the Jewish Historical Institute in central Warsaw, smashing windows but failing to break down the door. They tried again one week later. Although the Institute is located near police headquarters, the siege continued for more than an hour without the police ever intervening.

Wałesa won the presidency by a landslide. Mazowiecki did not even come in second, trailing behind an unknown return émigré from Canada who promised to improve the life of Poles within one month. Gebert described Wałesa as “a consummate opportunist. He used anti-Semitism because it was expedient.” The longer Wałesa stayed in office, the more Poles would see this electrician who spoke rough and uneducated Polish as a self-serving egotist focused on power politics with few programs. In 1993 even the Solidarity trade union broke with him. The old opposition had been certain to break up once it came to power, but one of the first rifts in the victorious anti-Communist coalition was when Jewish
intellectuals split with Wałesa over the 1990 campaign. Shortly before the election, Adam Michnik, who first came to prominence in the 1968 student protests, wrote to Wałesa in his paper,
Gazeta Wyborcza
, “I have never accused you of anti-Semitism, but I do want to say that what you had said—that people of Jewish origin should reveal themselves—and I am a Pole of Jewish origin—was for me as if I had been spat in the face. I will not forgive you this.”

At the same time, the short-lived amity between Jews and the Catholic Church ended over the existence of a Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz. It was foreign Jews and not those in Poland who strongly objected to this Catholic shrine, which had stood just outside Auschwitz since the 1970s. In 1987 the Catholic Church came to an agreement with Western European Jewish leaders to close the convent by February 1989. But no steps were taken to close it down, and as the deadline approached, Cardinal Glemp began vaguely denouncing the accord. Avi Weiss, a Riverdale, New York, rabbi, went to Poland with his group to protest. Barred from the convent, they climbed over the walls to stage a sit-in. Workmen attacked them with urine, water, and paint and had started to beat them when the Polish police reluctantly intervened. Glemp delivered a homily in traditional anti-Semitic language, accusing the Jews of thinking themselves “a nation above all others” and asking them not to use their “power in the mass media.”

The upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks around Poland at the time of this homily was probably not coincidental. Glemp had never been popular because he had been seen as too soft on the old Communist regime (even in his anti-Semitism, he would slip into official rhetoric, such as referring to Jews as Trotskyites). But after this homily he suddenly gained a following. The international controversy over the convent went on for several more years, and in the end the Jews were the great losers. Instead of the convent the Catholics built a far larger visitor complex two hundred yards outside the camp. As the relationship between the Church and the Jews regained its more traditional tensions, the era of Solidarity ended.

As Wałesa was losing his mass following, a sign of the confused state of post-Communist Polish anti-Semitism was a graffiti message on a Cracow wall which said “Send Wałesa to Madagascar.”

N
INEL
K
AMERAZ
had simply wanted to overthrow Communism. She was not disappointed nor did she continue her political activities.
Though her building was no longer Jewish, her apartment was unmistakably the home of a Jew, even if the mezuzah was on the inside rather than outside of the doorway. It was a warm dark place in earthen colors, with antique books and a sense of organized chaos. She had taken up painting, and the walls were covered with her slightly macabre tempera paintings. She had an old Victrola with a horn through which she played prewar recordings of Yiddish songs. The one small room—almost filled by a large wooden table with an electric samovar whose on-off switch was built into the table—was her conversation room. She would flip on the hot water for tea and reflect on the changes in her adopted country. “The Poles see themselves altogether differently from what they are. They see themselves as having always struggled for the freedom of all nations, that they waited for centuries, that all around them are animals—the Germans, the Czechs, the Russian, the Lithuanians—who are always stupid or evil or mean, all kinds of things, and about the Jews we know already. But they, the Poles, are pure and wonderful and good. When this was a closed state under Communism, they couldn’t go anywhere. They looked in on themselves, they had to analyze themselves. And when the borders opened and they began to travel again, it turned out that people didn’t say such nice things about Poles after all. They said they were thieves, that they didn’t know how to work. And the Poles said, ‘What? How can that be? We fought for liberty and freedom of all nations. How can you say such terrible things about us?’ It’s good that these lessons were learned. They were hard lessons, but they were necessary. And now they are finding out that they are normal people. They are good. They are bad. All kinds.”

H
OW MANY
J
EWS
are in Poland remains unknown. It is often said that there are five thousand, and some think there are perhaps seven thousand. There is one operating synagogue in Warsaw, a small Jewish community in Wrocław, another in Łódź, and two synagogues in Cracow, though only one is used at a time. Łódź and Wrocław on occasion get ten men. In Warsaw the half-dozen aging Yiddish speakers scour the area near the synagogue three times a day looking for the two or three more Jews they need for minyans, and the Cracow synagogues make their minyans on tourists. It would be difficult to show that there are one hundred Jews in Poland who practice the Jewish religion with regularity. But
there are many hundreds more in search of some relationship with Judaism.

After the fall of Communism the three most likely places to find foreign visitors in Warsaw were the old town, the hotel strip by the central train station, and Grzybowski Square. The historic old town, so carefully restored after the war before anything else was, became one of Poland’s first experiments in capitalism, with cafés, restaurants, and bookstores all of limited appeal to foreigners, even though they were a new phenomenon for Poland. The hotels by the train station were also an experiment in capitalism. Even before the fall of Communism, they had become a center for prostitution. Most of the hotels were new glass high-rises catering to the few bold foreign businessmen looking for investments in Poland. The Polonia Hotel, that once-elegant survivor where Barbara Góra had followed diplomats up stairways, was no longer draped in flags, but it was still international. Women in the Polonia who were dressed in peculiar and revealing outfits could say, “Let’s have a drink,” in Russian, Polish, German, English, or French.

The third tourism center in Warsaw, Grzybowski Square, was the closest there was to a Jewish tourism area. Since a large portion of the world’s Jews had roots in Poland, Jewish tourism ironically became the greatest part of the new Polish tourist industry. So many tourists were Jewish that the Poles had to change their little souvenir Hasid dolls. These wooden carvings that were sold in Poland’s main tourism centers—such as Warsaw’s old town and the center of Cracow—portrayed Hasidim much as in Goebbels’s hate films, with sunken avaricious eyes and jagged menacing noses. It was an authentic Polish souvenir but in time the Poles noticed that the tourists, being mostly Jewish, didn’t seem to like these dolls, and so they softened their appearance.

With the growth of Jewish tourism, Grzybowski Square, the green triangle on the opposite side of the Culture Palace from the Polonia, became an attraction. The Culture Palace itself—a tower ornamented in the basic medieval/Moorish/art deco/neoclassical architecture that had become a symbol of Stalinism—though hard to ignore, was not an attraction. But a guidebook for Jewish tourists could describe the Grzybowski Square area as offering a synagogue, a Yiddish theater, and a kosher restaurant.

The kosher restaurant, decorated in white and blue, was one of the more expensive restaurants in Warsaw and struggled to survive with a small, mostly foreign clientele. The synagogue also often
needed a tourist or two to have a minyan. The Yiddish Theater was of some distinction until 1968, when its director, Ida Kaminska, and most of its actors emigrated. Now it was run by a dramatic white-haired man, Shimon Szurmiej, who was one of the least-liked figures in the Warsaw Jewish community. During Communist times, as head of the Social and Cultural Association, Szurmiej was a token “Jewish leader” and was ready to give credibility to any position that the regime took, from rejecting criticism from world Jewry to establishing martial law.

The Yiddish Theater would not be much of a draw for Polish Jews in any event, since only Moishe Shapiro and a handful of others understood the language. Next to the synagogue was a free lunch program—a very basic lunch weighted with a lot of potatoes—where these few could socialize with each other and speak Yiddish. These people had very little money and went neither to the kosher restaurant nor to the Yiddish Theater. The rarely-more-than-half-filled theater was made up of a few Poles curious about Yiddish theater and schoolchildren who had no choice. Headphones were provided with a monotonous, droning translation into Polish, but many of the schoolchildren did not even put the headphones on. Aside from Szurmiej, his wife, and his son, most of the actors were not Jewish. They had been coached in Yiddish but were not conversant. And since they knew nothing of Hasidim or shtetl life, their attempts to imitate it ended up as buffoonish anti-Semitic stereotypes. It was the performance equivalent of the carved wooden dolls.

Pinhas Menachem Yoskowitz, a Gerer Hasid from Łódź who had survived the ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was brought from Israel to Warsaw by American Hasidim to be the rabbi for the Nozyk Synagogue. He came from an important Hasidic family, and a marriage had been arranged between one of his seven children and Chaim Rottenberg’s son, Mordechai, who took over from his father on Rue Pavée. Yoskowitz, in his sixties, was a tall, thin, meticulously dressed figure in the long dark garb of Gerer Hasidim with an expensive-looking black broad-brimmed fur hat. His eyes seemed to sparkle with a sense of mischief, and his long white beard caught the breeze and rippled across his chest.