A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [109]
18
Passing
in Warsaw
THE LATE 1960S WOULD HAVE BEEN A GOOD TIME FOR Jews in Poland to have had amnesia. But as perverse fate had it, it was at this time that memory started returning. In 1965, Marian Turski accidentally discovered his loss of memory at the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Theresienstadt, where he was talking with a well-known Polish Jewish figure with whom he had been in the camps. The man started reminiscing about the time Turski had saved his life.
“I saved your life?” asked a perplexed Turski.
“On the death march! Remember?”
Turski tried to look into his own memory, but he had no idea what this man was referring to. “Tell me about it,” he said, and he questioned the man for more and more details. Then he realized that he remembered almost nothing of his experiences in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, and the murderous marches to them. He began reading books about the Holocaust. Until then, accidentally scanning the cover of such a book in his peripheral vision had been a disturbing experience. Now he was soaking them up with a hunger that was like the end of hibernation. He also read books about Judaism. He spent his time thinking about his experiences and the collective Jewish experience. The following year, he visited Auschwitz, officially “the place of martyrdom of Polish nations and other nations.” He rummaged through barracks and visited the subcamp where he had been held. Facing the horror of it was a price he could pay to get back his memory. It was the beginning of what Turski was to call his “comeback.”
This was a time when Poles were also thinking more about Jews, which is generally not a good thing in Poland. For all its impact on Western European Jews, the Six-Day War affected Jewish lives in the Soviet bloc even more profoundly. The Soviet Union had reversed its Middle East policy twelve years earlier, when the British had tried to forcibly prevent Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser from nationalizing the Suez Canal. By the time of the Six-Day War, the Soviet bloc was firmly on the Arab side, supplying and training Arab armies. To the Poles, the spectacle of Soviet-trained armies being routed in less than a week by a bunch of Jews brought glee and pleasure to an increasingly anti-Soviet people. “Jojne poszedl na wojne” the Poles snickered —“Jojne went to war,” the phrase being cute in Polish because the first and last words rhyme.
Jojne is Polish slang, the anti-Semitic stereotype of the cowardly Jew who can't and won't fight. But finally the Jojne had fought, and they won in six days, defeating all those armies so carefully trained and equipped by the Soviets. It was a wonderful joke. Some Poles, even though they never called a Jew a Pole, started taking pride in the Polishness of Israelis. After all, a large part of the Israeli population had been born in Poland. And many of the most warlike Israelis—the organizers of the Haganah, for example—came out of Jewish defense movements in Poland. Was the Six-Day War not in some way a victory of Poles over Soviets? Marian Turski, who was traveling around Poland for his newspaper, constantly encountered such contorted observations.
But party boss GomuJka was not amused. Though he was a Polish nationalist who had fought many political battles with Moscow, the intensity of anti-Soviet feelings in Poland troubled him. He worried about what would happen if war broke out with the West. And, of course, Moscow was even less amused than Gomulka. According to Turski's sources from the period, Gomulka attended a secret meeting