A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [112]
Her father's sister, whom Barbara's father had also saved, was among the Jews who had left Poland in 1956 with her entire family, and Barbara went to visit them in a small town near Tel Aviv, where she stayed for seven weeks. She also visited her mother's sister, who had emigrated to Palestine before the war and had eight children. Then she returned to Poland as she had left, Barbara Gora, Polish agronomist.
WHEN JAKUB GUTENBAUM RETURNED from Moscow in 1955 — after the “doctors’ plot” and the death of Stalin, he had completed his scholarship—he could find almost nothing that looked familiar. The city of rubble had been replaced by a city of massive blocks, unidentifiable rooftop statues eerily watching, and towers with neoclassical details that looked as if they had been stuck on later with glue.
It was a good time for Gutenbaum. Nobody seemed to particularly care that he was Jewish. He got a doctorate and a second doctorate and worked on research at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He lived in an elite Polish world. He married a Pole in 1960, and he worked with Polish scientists. No one ever made an issue of his Jewishness.
In the meantime an entire new postwar generation was growing up, learning of their Jewish background only on a need-to-know basis. The previous generation had tried to save their children this way. The less the child knew, the less danger for everybody. After the war it was as the Lippners had told their sons about Hungary; being Jewish could be dangerous. Since the families were not practicing Judaism, there was no need to discuss the subject unless the child was taunted and needed to know why. Some children were told because they were picking up Polish anti-Semitism. When children who spent their childhood going to church came home repeating anti-Semitic words they heard in school, they were told, “You are a Jew, I am, your father is, our whole family is.” Then the child had to be told what a Jew was.
Some children were told by dying parents who felt obligated at the last moment to let the children know. But other parents never told their children. In truth, even today it is impossible to say how many people of Jewish origin live in Poland.
The postwar generation was too young to remember the violence of the late 1940s. They had grown up in the 1950s, when people were arrested for anti-Semitic outbursts. It was a Poland in which the entire subject of Jews was taboo. The Jews didn't want to talk about it, and the anti-Semites did not dare. When Gomulka returned to power, there was a widespread belief that Jewish issues would be laid to rest. He was not considered an anti-Semite. He was even married to a Jew, although Jews later quipped that it was his horrible wife that had turned him anti-Semitic.
A power struggle bubbled up in the slow-simmering way that happens in countries that do not replace their leaders through elections. General Miczlyslaw Moczar was trying to position himself to overtake Gomulka. In Poland, Jew-hating is always an available card that can be played. In 1966, Moczar established a “Jewish department” to look into the suspicious past of Jews. Moczar thought anti-Semitism would play well with another longstanding Polish sentiment, anti-Germanism. After the Six-Day War, Gomurka came under intense pressure to go along with Moczar. A new version of Polish history was floated in which the Poles had tried to help the Jews during the Holocaust, but the Jews had destroyed themselves by their own cooperation with the Germans. The Jews were foreign sympathizers.
Moczar began a purge of Jews in the echelons of the party and the army. In June 1967, Gomulka gave a speech about “fifth columnists” to a trade union congress, which was seen as a signal of approval for Moczar's purge. Most of this maneuvering