Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes. The various eggs and zygotes and other ingredients necessary for the subsequent conception and generation of the non–Anglo-Saxon half of the present author thus continued migrating, rather like the lucky and clever rabbits who left for Watership Down in good time, before the nozzles of poison had been callously shoved into the inlets of the ecology. Lonely and uncertain and angst-burdened as my grandmother’s and mother’s lives were in some ways to be, they took place in refulgent sunshine compared to what they had missed by their forebears having gotten the hell out of Kempno.
I still wasn’t completely done with my investigations of this enthrallingly upsetting region of the past. In the case of another relative—my ancestor-in-law David Szmulevski, a sort of great-uncle—the trail also went as far as Auschwitz but just for once did not end there. Born in the town of Kolo in the Poznan district in 1912, this man had a crepuscular existence on the edge of my family’s awareness. He had, it was said, been a leading anti-Nazi resister. He owns a chapter to himself in the anthology They Fought Back, a book which combats the wretched image of European Jews as fatalistic and passive. He had smuggled photographs out of Auschwitz—the anus mundi or heart of darkness—that showed the transmutation of human beings into refuse and garbage.* He had been some kind of figure in the postwar Polish government (and then there were some whispers of a scandal involving art theft) before being expelled to France in 1968, after the infamous anti-Semitic and “anti-Zionist” purge of the Communist Party.
I had been on his track, in a small and amateur way, for a decade. I had arrived in Paris to try and find him, only to learn that he had recently died. There was no forwarding address. I went to see Daniel Singer, the late disciple of Isaac Deutscher, who from his apartment near the Matignon was himself a single-cell headquarters for anything to do with the Polish-Jewish-Marxist diaspora. He sent me to a man in downtown New York who lent me the only book in Yiddish that I possess—the memoirs of David Szmulevski—and also a very hastily typed English translation. The title of the volume is Resistance in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp. But the back-story was also of considerable interest and the lack of a post-story was perhaps more absorbing still.
Szmulevski had quite early in his life developed a hunger to leave the isolated village of Kolo (which means “wheel”) and had volunteered to become a young Zionist pioneer. Leaving from a Romanian port and landing in Palestine under the British mandate, he had worked on a very tough kibbutz and also on the waterfront in Tel Aviv. From his pages one could count off the swift evolutions of an interwar political consciousness: he observed that Arab workers were paid less and treated more rudely, and he began to run into free-thinking people—one young girl in particular—who gave him horizons much wider and more thrilling than the shtetl or the shul. (You think it’s a stretch to connect Professor Max Born to Olivia Newton-John? Szmulevski’s was almost the same Poland-to-Palestine route that was followed by Simon Pirsky, later Shimon Peres, the president of Israel, whose first cousin is Betty Pirsky or Lauren Bacall.)
I have quite recently found Szmulevski’s Polish Communist-era file, which states unambiguously that in the 1930s he had joined the Communist Party of Palestine. His own memoirs, written post-1968, make no mention of this and give the impression—without exactly making the claim—that he had really preferred the Jewish-Socialist Bund. However that may be, he attended a militant Jewish workers’ meeting one day in 1936 and volunteered to leave Palestine in order to fight the rising menace of Hitlerism—in Spain. He became a member of the Polish battalion of the International Brigade that was named for the great national poet Adam Mickiewicz. He was wounded, and was succored in hospital by the better-off American-emigrated branch of his family—the family of my wonderful late mother-in-law—which also sent a son to that war.*
Escaping to France after the victory of Spanish fascism, Szmulevski soon found that Europe’s pain had hardly begun. He was arrested by the German invaders of Paris and shipped back home, to Auschwitz, where he was employed as a “roofer” in the actual building of the labor-camp section of the place. People a few years older than me who did their National Service in the British Army say that you never, ever forget your “number”: the digits that become “you” for the duration. Szmulevski’s number in Auschwitz, I have learned, was 27849 (a relatively low one). He wore it for the rest of his life. Able to make contact in the newly drafted slave-labor force with veterans of Spain and other hardened comrades, he had at least the chance of keeping up morale and of surviving.
His memoir is strangely artless and appealing, at times almost naïve. Here is his account of helping to organize a clandestine Yom Kippur service, at which the Kol Nidre prayer could be decently sung by the slaves and the condemned, in Auschwitz in the winter of 1943. To his own boyhood shtetl, he recalls:
… unable to form a minyan, Jews from surrounding villages and settlements would come with their families. Even if they had a minyan [the quorum of ten (male) Jews that is needful for a service to be held] they would still have needed a cantor or a prayer-leader with the proper amount of feeling. The melody of that particular prayer is dear to the heart of every Jew, even if he is not observant.
I did not take the way along which my father would have led me. My life journey distanced me from religious tradition and moved me closer to those who fight for justice on this earth, like those who took up arms against fascism—on the battlefields of Spain, in the French partisan groups and also in the death camp known as Auschwitz-Birkenau…
To me, the facilitation in the camps of any action forbidden by the Germans was part of the struggle against the Hitlerite enemy. Ever since then, when I pass a synagogue on Yom Kippur Eve there comes before my eyes the picture of the barracks in Auschwitz where a small number of worshippers was able to experience the atmosphere of the High Holy Days.
These are noble, even exalted, sentiments, which would provide some evidence for those who maintain that religion is at least a supplier of consolation. But they are somehow boringly expressed: they have a tinge of the “Popular Front” to them, with their “facilitations” and other rather wooden expressions. They don’t possess the defiant excitement of Primo Levi, who once wrote so bitingly that if he was god, he would have wanted to spit on anyone who prayed in Auschwitz. In a way Szmulevski survived precisely because he was a good Party man. He lived to help arrange the postwar trials of the Auschwitz criminals, including one historic session that was organized by Germans and not by the Allies. He was able to testify and also to bring important photographic evidence. In 1960 he was garlanded with a high Resistance decoration by Josef Cyrankiewicz, the Socialist-turned-Communist prime minister of Poland who had been a fellow inmate of the same camp.
And this is where my real problem with him begins to take on shape. I sit in Poland, reading again his bureaucratic prose, and find that he claims to have taken up a job “within the national administration” after 1945. What does it mean, this post “within the national administration”? It means, as I eventually discover from the Polish “Ministry of Interior” archives in the Hoover Institution at Stanford, that Szmulevski was a full colonel responsible for Department Seven of the Milicja Obywatelska or “Citizen’s Militia,” headquartered in an old Warsaw palace that had been a seat of secret police authority since tsarist days. He never once alludes to this in his account of being forced out of Poland in 1967, preferring to blame historic anti-Jewish prejudice for the whole business.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that “other” cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper an
d nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still “Operation Reinhardt,” or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, “roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.” We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.
You can’t visit the area, though, without noticing the marks of what became a second erasure. The city of Wrocław/Breslau had been almost schematically rebuilt by the Communists along the lines of its prewar layout and architecture, and right down to its main square and Grass Market it looked like a storybook German town. But in that case, where was everybody? (And where had they gone? You can find one—restored—Jewish cemetery but try finding another one where any of the tombstones are incised in German.) I went to call on the mayor, a sturdy, thoughtful man named Rafal Dutkiewicz, who ruefully said that the problem with citizenship in his rather large bailiwick was that “nobody is really ‘from’ here.” Again I consult the rugged statistics offered by Professor Snyder: almost eight million German civilians were expelled or fled (or fled and returned and were then expelled) from Poland at the end of the Second World War. The eastern German lands from which they had fled or been pushed were then annexed by Poland. To make up the shortfall of population, Poles were moved into these Silesian provinces. And as if to encourage that process, the eastern half of prewar Poland was in turn annexed by the big brother Soviet Union, and a million expelled Poles became settlers in the areas from which Germans had been evicted. A huge zone of silence and complicity was created by this double negation.
There’s no exact moral equivalence between these crimes against humanity. It’s true that perhaps 600,000 Germans were killed in the whole business, which also involved the cleansing of Germans from the Czech lands, but many of these died in the fighting which the Nazis had so insanely prolonged. (Breslau/Wrocław was declared a “Fortress” or “Festung” city by the Third Reich and actually surrendered after the fall of Berlin itself, by which time it had been so much reduced to shards that there was nothing left to fight over.) So you could say, as some people defensively say about the leveling of such cities as Dresden and Würzburg, that the Nazis started it, and the Germans were punished for it.
What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin’s tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy’s children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy’s graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.
And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and “security” departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason.* Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It’s easy to say, with Albert Camus, “neither victims nor executioners.” But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.
He could be as scathing as the Russian Hebrew writers in his denunciations of Jews and Israel—more precisely the Israeli government. He followed Mendele when he compared Jews to hunchbacks (“Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,” 1951) though he also echoed Kafka’s allegory of Jewish deformity, “A Report To An Academy.” Berlin believed that emancipation had turned the Jews into homeless, psychologically deformed strangers trying to gain acceptance in the Gentile world.
—David Aberbach on the centennial of Isaiah Berlin, June 2009
“Die Judenfrage,” it used to be called, even by Jews. “The Jewish Question.” I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish “problem.” Again, the word “solution” can be as neutral as the words “question” or “problem,” but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.
But it could be that any search for any “solution” is in itself potentially lethal or absurd. The Jewish quest for some ultimate answer to the “question” has taken intensely religious and nationalist forms as well as, in more recent times, the identification of huge numbers of Jews with Marxism. My mother’s family was not involved in any of the grandeur or tragedy of this: they sought to get by and to assimilate and to survive, while making a few observant gestures in the direction of their ancient faith and a few protective gestures in defense of the State of Israel.
In my mother’s case I have become convinced that she was willing to give up even the smallest adherence to the synagogue if it would smooth the accession of her two sons into polite English society, and that she only began to feel passionate about the Jewish state in the Middle East as she began to experience her own desperate need for a new start somewhere else: it was either that fresh beginning or an end to every hope. Our very last telephone conversation, when she expressed a desire to immigrate to Israel after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, was bewildering to me at the time and has sent me down many pathways since. And I always keep open the possibility that I could be mistaken and that she might have had her own reasons for being reticent. This is from a letter sent to me recently by one of her oldest friends:
She told me that she went to live with an aunt and uncle in Liverpool in a very Jewish community—perhaps went to school there or secretarial college and her first boyfriends were medical students up there. I have no idea how long she was there but it sounded as though she was happy and from there I presume she went into the WRENS [Women’s Royal Navy Service]. At what time she decided to conceal her Jewishness I have no idea, possibly on going into the WRENS.
This seems probable enough when I think about it: the Royal Navy was a fairly big tent and broad church but even in a wartime battle against Hitler a Jew (or “Jewess”) might have been conspicuous. On HMS Jamaica my father had had a literary shipmate named Warren Tute, who became a minor novelist in the postwar years and wrote one rather successful book, The Cruiser, in which my father appears under the name (no first or “Christian” name) of Lieutenant Hale. At one point in the story the master-at-arms of the vessel, which is called HMS Antigone, is mentally reviewing the shi
p’s crew:
He knew that Stoker First Class Danny Evans would be likely to celebrate his draft by going on the beer for a week in Tonypandy and then spending the next three months in the Second Class for Leave. He knew that Blacksmith First Class Rogers would try and smuggle Service provisions ashore for his mother and that Telegraphist Jacobs was a sea-lawyer who kept a copy of Karl Marx in his kitbag.
Martin Amis often points out that you can tell a lot about a novelist by the trouble he takes over the names of his characters, and Tute clearly didn’t break much of a sweat inventing a Welshman named Evans or a blacksmith named Rogers. By the same token, he didn’t mean us to think that the name “Jacobs” was anything more than a synonym for the vaguely suspect and unsound. I don’t think he was misrepresenting the atmosphere of the Navy by much: Jacobs would not have been persecuted (my father would never have countenanced anything remotely like that), but I don’t exactly see him rising through the ranks, either. “You catch it on the edge of a remark,” as Harold Abrahams observes of discreet English non–philo-Semitism in Chariots of Fire, and that’s how I caught it, deciding to subtitle my first essay on the subject “Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs.” How much more lazy a phrase could there be than “a copy of Karl Marx,” and yet wasn’t there still something in this age-old identification of the Jew with the subversive? If so, good. Remember that it is “free-thinking Jews,” not Jews as such, who are defined as the undesirables by T.S. Eliot in After Strange Gods.