Enduring Tragedy
HUSARSKA, ANNA
Enduring Tragedy Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland By Malgorzata Niezabitowska Photos by Tomasz Tomaszewski Friendly Press. 272 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Anna Husarska Contributor, "Le Monde,"...
...Perhaps the signal contribution of Remnants to illuminating the condition of Polish Jews is its bringing home to the reader that 5,000 is a surprisingly large, not asurprisingly small, number...
...Certainly in the "underground society," the vast network of parallel, often secret institutions involving education, journalism, book publishing, science, the arts, etc., Jewish matters are treated openly...
...The single ray of hope is a group of less than tw o dozen young people, in their 30s, whose Jewish consciousness was aroused by the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign...
...From the bits and pieces of personal stories here, one cannot help concluding that virtually all had more reasons to leave Poland than to stay...
...Easier credit is the main objective, and the authorities have been multiplying friendly gestures: official celebrations were held to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising...
...Another 25,000 departed in the wake of a fierce anti-Semitic campaign in 1968, when student demonstrations were used as a pretext for firing Jews from their jobs and expelling them from universities...
...at the end of last September Cracow University was allowed to organize a conference on Jewish concerns...
...A distracted censor...
...At almost the same time the Polish Minister of Interior, General Czeslaw Kiszczak, gave a display of sincere anti-Semitism...
...A genuine interest in a disappearing culture...
...Pockets of it subsist, but there are signs that increasingly it is considered afaux pas in the country's very rigid social decalogue...
...It is too soon to claim "popular" anti-Semitism has disappeared in Poland...
...and recently there has even been talk of re-establishing diplomatic relations between Poland and Israel...
...The pictures by Tomasz Tomaszew-ski capture the bleakness of a decaying Jewish existence, along with precious elements of everyday life in contemporary Poland: cardboard cartons used for storage, plastic fruit displayed on a patchwork of colored postcards, living quarters ranging from sparsely appointed single chambers to apartments overcrowded with furniture and memorabilia...
...There are few Jews left in Poland, but on the government side the Jewish problem is far from resolved...
...People who attended its clandestine seminars, held in private apartments, were searching for links with the past, for values they could grasp that Communism in no way offered them...
...In Kazimierz, before the War a thriving Jewish quarter of Cracow, kosher food is provided thanks to the Joint Distribution Committee...
...An interest in the Jewish question began to emerge in 1976, when the democratic opposition movement gained strength in Poland...
...Following the most infamous incident, a pogrom in Kielce that took 42 lives (executed with at least the tacit approval of the Communist authorities), 100,000 Jews emigrated from Poland...
...General Wojciech Jaruzel-ski's defamation campaign was rejected en bloc and had an opposite effect: It generated sympathy for those who were again meant to be the scapegoats...
...The overwhelming majority are assimilated, or in any case fearful of calling attention to their roots...
...If the Jews in today's Poland are the "last" ones there, the "remnants" of what before World War II constituted the second largest Diaspora, that is not only the result of Nazism...
...Nor istheremuch chance that Jew ish culture will survive after these veteran actors die...
...the censors have permitted a Catholic review to run a double-issue focusing on Jewish problems...
...True, 90 per cent of the 3.5 million-member community was exterminated in the Holocaust...
...translator of George Orwell's essays into Polish First the title...
...Printed on glossy paper (rara avis in the country), it contained texts in both Polish and Hebrew (rarissimo...
...Indeed, during the first year after the War a total of 353 Jews were killed...
...All the taboo subjects were taken up, including minority problems...
...One of several independent activities organized at that time was the "Jewish Flying University...
...Yet they, too, are pessimistic...
...Malgorzata Niezabitowska, a relatively young but experienced journalist, conveys what they have to say about their present circumstances and their manner of saying it...
...Somewhat ironically, the imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981, ending Poland's nonviolent revolution, helped stamp anti-Semitism with a negative label...
...The predicament of the artists who make up the Jewish Theater is equally depressing: Although they perform in Yiddish, barely anyone in the audience can understand them w ithout headphones for translation...
...The government's approach to the Jewish question is a different story...
...Reviewed by Anna Husarska Contributor, "Le Monde," the "Spectator," New York "Times Book Review...
...Speaking of a jailed underground opposition leader, Czeslaw Bielecki, who is a Jew, he said: "His only links with Poland consist in the fact that he was born here...
...Some of the interiors have obviously been carefully arranged, but their intentional neatness only adds to the pathos...
...In 1985, too, permission was granted to exhibit the photographs from Remnants in several towns in Poland...
...In Lublin, once a Jewish intellectual center, there is hardly a minyan and mourners are not always able to say the Kaddish...
...In the 16 months of the legal existence of Solidarity, the first authentic postwar social movement, a general catharsis occurred...
...Whatever it was, the spell didn't last long...
...Definitely...
...Jewish survival has mostly been a taboo subject in postwar Poland, in great part (though not only) because too few Poles can be proud of their attitude toward the persecution of Jews during the Nazi occupation...
...General Jaruzelski's regime has obviously come to realize the advantages of toning down its anti-Semitic propaganda and trying to gain the sympathy of Jews abroad (especially in the U.S...
...Badly damaged cemeteries throughout the country are not taken care of, and synagogues have failed into ruin...
...The Kielce pogrom, however, was marked as the "so-called Kielce events," a euphemism that is hard to swallow...
...But under the Communist regime 95 per cent of those who escaped Hitler's Final Solution have had to flee different forms of persecution...
...An attempt to gain some sympathy...
...Asked about the future of Polish Jewry, Kostek Ge-bert, a psychologist and prominent member of the group, answers: "I believe that we are the last ones...
...A year ago, a Jewish calendar was officially produced in Poland...
...But getting rid of old habits is not easy...
...Remnants' heroes, however, are in the main elderly, ill, lonely individuals with tragic, indelible pasts...
...Srul War-szawer, Warsaw's sole remaining kosher butcher, lives in a decrepit house and carries out the Biblically prescribed ritual slaughtering with a shochet who comes every fortnight from Budapest...
...It needs some explanation...
...The author and her photographer husband encountered them in the course of traveling, over a five-year period, to the places where Jews had formerly thrived...
...Now fewer than 5,000 Jews live in Poland...
...By 1950, 50,000 more had left...
Vol. 69 • November 1986 • No. 16
