A Grain of Truth (34 page)

“Wiesenthal yes, Morel no.”

“Apparently during the war, here, in what was already Soviet Lublin, Simon Wiesenthal, our number one Nazi-hunter, and his comrades founded a secret organization called Nekama, meaning Revenge. I abhor revanchism, but I am capable of imagining a situation where a few survivors of the Holocaust are burning with desire for revenge to such an extent that they convoke a special organization. Perhaps it soon turned out they could operate openly, and something which came into being in Poland as Nekama later became the Historical Documentation Centre that Wiesenthal founded in Austria. Right?”

“Right,” replied Szacki laconically.

“So on the one hand we have Wiesenthal,” said Maciejewski, making an appropriate gesture, “and his revenge, involving hunting down Nazis. A clean solution. Then on the other hand, we are burdened by Salomon Morel. He was lucky enough to be saved from the Holocaust by a good Pole, thanks to which he could join the People’s Guard, the Communist resistance, and when Wiesenthal was founding Nekama, Morel was organizing a militia for the Reds in this same city, Lublin. Later he became the commandant of the Zgoda labour camp in Upper Silesia, where the Communists detained mainly Germans and Silesians, but also Poles who were inconvenient for the regime. At this camp, established moreover at the site of a former concentration camp, almost two thousand people died, apparently as a result of Morel’s deliberate neglect.”

“And?” Szacki thought all this was very interesting, but it was of no help to him at all.

“And you have two faces of Jewish revenge in that era. On the one hand, Israeli officials tracking down SS-men in their Argentinean villas, and on the other, the compulsive satisfying of a base instinct for revenge. Base, but somehow understandable. Imagine you come home to your village, and there’s someone living in your house who blackmailed Jews hiding during the war, and because of whose denunciation your entire family died in a camp. Your wife and children. Would you be able to restrain yourself? Forgive him? Love him as yourself?”

Szacki said nothing. He couldn’t reply to that question – no one who had never been faced with such a choice could answer it.

“Do you have a family?” asked the rabbi.

“Yes, I do, I did have. Until recently.”

Maciejewski looked at him closely, but didn’t pass comment.

“In that case I’m sure you can imagine those emotions better than I can. For me it’s an abstract, academic consideration. We only know ourselves to the extent that we have been tested.”

“The Talmud?”

“No, the poet, Wisława Szymborska. It’s good to get wisdom from various sources. In fact it’s a quote from a poem about a woman, an
ordinary teacher, who died saving four children from a fire. I like that poem and that quote, and I like the conviction that’s behind those words: we never know how much good we have in us. I saw a documentary about an American Jew who went to Poland to look for his roots, and among the smashed gravestones and synagogues converted into workshops he found the peasant family who had saved his father. Then in Israel he asked the father why they’d never sent those Poles as much as a greetings card. And he got the answer: how? How do you say thank you for something like that? And the final question: in the reverse situation, would you have done the same? And the old man replied quietly: no, never.”

“You’re talking like an anti-Semite.”

“No, I’m talking like someone who knows that history on the grand scale is a collection of little histories, each of which is different. Because in the reverse situation that old Jew might, as he says, have done nothing, but he might just as well have carried kasha to the barn to feed a fugitive, knowing his entire family could be shot at any moment. We only know ourselves to the extent that we have been tested.”

Maciejewski poured himself more wine.

“I know hundreds of little stories like that,” he said, sitting down again in an armchair opposite Szacki. “You know how it looks from the Polish side, all those shit-bag skinheads. But do you know how it looks from our side?”

Szacki shook his head, faintly curious to know what was coming next, but only faintly. He felt he was running out of time. That he should find something out and get back to work as soon as possible.

“It’s like this – when a tour group comes here from Israel to visit the camp at Majdanek, they take their own bodyguards with them to the disco. And before they get on the coach to Warsaw airport, they have to listen to a talk on how to behave in case of an anti-Semitic attack. I was brought up in Israel, and I went on one of those tours, which mainly consisted of shocking us with the Shoah.” Maciejewski pronounced this word in a guttural, sing-song way, and now Szacki realized that the strange, plucked tones he had heard from the start
in his fluent Polish must be traces of Hebrew. “But not just that. It consisted to the same extent of bullshitting about omnipresent anti-Semitism, stirring up suspicions, xenophobia and the desire to retaliate. In fact, when it comes to building an identity on dead bodies we’ve done better than the Poles.”

Despite the solemnity of the subject, Szacki burst out laughing and raised his glass.

“I’ll drink to that, because if it’s true” – here he paused – “you’ve achieved the impossible.”

They clinked glasses.

“Does the abbreviation KWP mean anything to you?” asked the prosecutor, shunting the conversation onto the topics that interested him. He wanted to bring it to an end.

“No, why?”

“What about
Konspiracyjne Wojsko Polskie
– the Polish Underground Army?”

“I don’t know, it rings a bell, but only a faint one. Is it something like Freedom and Independence, or the National Armed Forces?”

“Yes, exactly, they were one of the partisan groups known as the ‘cursed soldiers’.”

The rabbi sighed and gazed at the dark window, as if posing for a photo session in which sportsmen pretend to be thinkers.

“Why do you ask?”

“Various clues imply that present events might be connected with it. Does it mean anything to you?”

“Yet another painful topic. The cursed soldiers fought against the Communist regime, some of them right into the 1950s. I’ve read about them, the whole issue has lots of overtones, over the decades all sorts of legends have grown up around it, and as is usually the case in Poland, there’s no truth in them.” The rabbi smiled unexpectedly. “By the way, I love your Polish characteristic of sticking to emotional extremities, either euphoria or black depression, great love or blind rage. With the Poles, nothing’s ever normal. Sometimes it drives me mad, but even so, I like it – I’ve learnt to treat my addiction to the Polish character as a harmless vice. Anyway, that’s not the point, the
point is that your anti-Communist partisans are spoken about in extreme terms, too. For some people they were flawless heroes; for others they were harmful troublemakers who sought an excuse to fight and brawl; and for yet others they were bloodthirsty Jew-baiters who organized pogroms.”

“Were there incidents of that kind?”

“Frankly, I don’t have that much knowledge. Don’t forget, these were generally right-wing units – the left wing more or less believed in the new regime. And this was the pre-war, National-Democratic right wing, streaked with anti-Semitism, especially in the case of the National Armed Forces. But remember too that since the Holocaust every act aimed against a Jew has been presented as an expression of anti-Semitism, which doesn’t have to be true. The cursed soldiers fought against the state apparatus, against its functionaries, and Jews were killed in the fighting because there were a lot of them in the Communist secret police.”

“I thought that was an anti-Semitic lie.”

“The way facts are interpreted can be anti-Semitic, but not the facts as such. With regret, because it is not a very clear page in my nation’s history, I admit that until the mid-1950s more than one third of the operatives at the Ministry of Public Security were Jews. That is a fact, and there’s nothing anti-Semitic about it. Of course, presenting it as a Jewish conspiracy aimed at Poland is quite another story. Especially since most of them were common or garden Communists – they just had Jewish origins.”

Szacki organized the new information in his head. He was pleased – the theory he had come here with was starting to gain flesh.

“Why quite so many?”

Maciejewski made a gesture of helplessness.

“Because any regime other than the German one seemed good to them? Because before the war, Communist ideology was already attractive to the Jewish poor? Because the regime by its nature preferred cosmopolitan Jews to patriotic Poles who disliked the Russians? Because there’s just as much truth in the rumours of anti-Semitism among the Poles as there is in the ones about Jewish antipathy towards
the Poles?” Suddenly the rabbi paused, and crooned sadly: “I wanted to be someone, because I was a Jew, a Jew who wasn’t someone, was a no one through and through.” Szacki recognized Jacek Kaczmarski’s famous song about the Communist-Polish-Jew.

“Because for some people it was a means of getting revenge on their neighbours?” added Szacki.

“Right. Looking for the guilty parties is the simplest way of coping with trauma. If you point at someone who caused you harm, at once it’s easier. There weren’t any Germans, but the Poles were to hand. And the Reds, whispering in their ears that those National-Democrat gangs were organizing pogroms. It’s no accident that the department for combating what the official terminology called ‘banditry’ was run by Communists of Jewish descent – the technique of inflaming and antagonizing always works well.”

Szacki listened in amazement.

“I wasn’t expecting to hear anything like that.”

“Of course you weren’t, you’re oversensitive, like every educated Pole. You’re afraid you only have to squeak and at once they’ll fetch out the pogroms at Kielce and Jedwabne for you. That’s why, unfortunately, like the rest of the world, you’re incapable of making a reliable judgement. I myself am a Jewish believer and a patriot, but I regard Israel’s politics as harmful. Instead of being the leader in the region, we’re like a fortress inhabited by paranoiacs with a siege mentality, antagonizing nations that already hate us anyway. Presented, of course, as terrorists and Hitler’s henchmen. Besides, I don’t know if you’ve been listening to the radio today, but it’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, and our deputy prime minister is at Auschwitz, exploiting it to compare Iran to Nazi Germany. It is so disheartening – some of our politicians, if they didn’t drag out Hitler at every opportunity, would lose their
raison d’être
.”

Szacki smiled to himself, because there was something very Polish about Maciejewski’s commentator’s ardour and ritual beefing about the authorities. It smacked of vodka, vegetable salad and smoked sausage laid out on a silver platter. Time to wind it up.

“Of course, you know why I’m asking about all this?”

“Because you’re considering the option that it might be the work of a Jew, and you want to know if it’s possible. If we were talking about someone normal, I’d say no, but anyone who has two people’s blood on his hands is a madman. And with madmen anything is possible. And there’s something else, too…”

“Yes?” Szacki leant forwards in his chair.

“Everything you talked about – Sandomierz, the painting, the quotes, the knife for
shechita
, the corpse in the barrel…” Maciejewski made his thoughtful boxer’s gesture. “It’s impossible to acquire all that knowledge in a weekend. In theory you’d simply have to be a Jew, and then one who’s perfectly au fait with his culture. Or someone who studies it.”

“Why in theory?” Szacki had switched on all his radars – there was something in the rabbi’s tone that told him to be on high alert.

Maciejewski turned the photograph of the Hebrew inscription on the painting in the cathedral towards him and pointed at the middle letter in the middle word.

“That’s
het
, the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It’s written wrongly, but not so wrongly that you could explain it by dyslexia, for instance. It’s the mirror image of a correctly written letter – the curve should be on the right, not the left. No Jew would write it that way, just as you’d have to be drunk or on drugs to write a B with the loops to the left. I think someone’s just cunning, trying to resurrect enough demons to be able to hide among them. The question, my dear prosecutor, is whether in the crowd of phantoms and apparitions you’ll be able to make out the face of the killer.”

VI

The words about phantoms resonated in Szacki’s head as he drove back to Sandomierz that night. As he passed the villages and towns of the Lublin region, he wondered how many of them had been Jewish shtetls before the war. How many Jews had there been in Kraśnik? In Annopol? And where had they ended up? In Majdanek,
in Bełżec? Maybe some of them had lived until the death marches? An ignominious end, with no burial, no funeral rites, no one to see their souls off to the other side. If the folk beliefs were true, all those souls should be roaming the world, trapped for seventy years between dimensions. On days like this one, Yom HaShoah, could they tell they were being remembered? Did they then return to Kraśnik or Annopol, looking for familiar places, and did the Polish inhabitants glance over their shoulders, feel a chill more often than usual, and close their windows earlier?

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki felt anxious. The road was strangely empty, the dark Lublin villages looked abandoned, and from Kraśnik onwards there was fog trailing along the highway, sometimes hardly noticeable, like dirt on the windscreen, sometimes as thick as cotton wool, visibly parting before the bonnet of the Citroën. The prosecutor recognized his own apprehension by the fact that he was more focused than usual on the old car’s moans and groans – a faint knocking on the left side of the suspension, a hissing from the hydraulic fluid pump and a grumble from the air-conditioning compressor. It was completely irrational, but he was eager not to have to stop right now in the fog and darkness.

He cursed and turned the steering wheel abruptly when a black figure loomed out of the fog; he only just managed to miss the hitchhiker, who was standing almost in the middle of the road. He glanced in the rear-view mirror, but all he could see was blood-stained darkness and fog aglow with red lights. He was reminded of Wilczur’s recording from outside the archive, and remembered the Jew dissolving in the thick fog above the Vistula.