A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [114]
The older generation was frightened by the Polish regime's purge of the alleged Zionist German conspiracy. Barbara Gora read the newspapers and felt as if she were back in the Nazi occupation. She started finding out who among her friends were Jewish: They were the ones who were suddenly losing their jobs. The state scientific publishing house where she now worked on an agricultural newsletter dismissed all of its Jewish employees. They were Zionists and could not be trusted. For the moment she was still untouched, but all of the party members where she worked—and she was a party member—were asked to sign a resolution against Zionism. The publisher was told to draw up the resolution. Scared and uncertain of what to do, he wrote a simple statement, “Down with Zionism.” The statement was passed around at a special meeting, awaiting the signatures of all who hoped to keep their jobs. But Barbara Gora's supervisor handed the paper back to the publisher and said, ‘This is not necessary. It's completely irrelevant, because we don't have any Zionists here.” A few days later, the same supervisor ran across an editor he knew who had been fired from the state publishing house. The supervisor hired him for his publication.
There were many such acts of defiance. They were sometimes less a reflection of sympathy for Jews than of opposition to the government. It was the beginning of an antigovernment coalition that would bring together many diverse groups, including Jews and the Catholic Church. The legal press was state-controlled and dutifully ran the anti-Semitic diatribes handed out by the government. But two weeklies refused to cooperate and instead tried to report on what was really happening. One was a small Catholic weekly called Tygodnik Powszechny, and the other was Polityka, where Marian Turski had made his career.
Turski was to look back on 1968 as one of the best years of his life. It was a sad year in which many of his friends’ lives were uprooted, but the atmosphere at Polityka inspired him. No one there cared who was Jewish. It was simply a newspaper working against the lies of the state. It was a Communist newspaper practicing adversarial journalism. The other newspapers ran daily attacks on Polityka, calling it the voice of the new money class. But those who worked at Polityka were party members, Jews and non-Jews, comrades taking a stand together. It felt like Communism was supposed to be. The paper was run by Mieczystew Rakowski, who years later would move on to the dubious perch of being the last head of the ruling Polish Communist party. Every day, the Polityka staff would go to work wondering what was going to happen to them. But they always felt good about what they were doing. Marian came home at night and with great excitement told his wife, “Tomorrow or maybe the day after tomorrow, we will all be dismissed. I think I will drive a taxi. I have a car and there are not that many cars in Warsaw, so I think I will be able to do all right as a taxi driver.”
Jews were being offered one way out: They could forfeit their homes and whatever property they might have and emigrate to Israel. Only Jews were allowed to emigrate, and Israel was the only acceptable destination. Most of the Turskis’ closest friends left. Marian had an offer at the University of Denver. He and his wife had visited and loved the Rocky Mountains. They reasoned that his wife, as a well-established engineer, could find work, and between their two careers it seemed they would live well. To exit for Israel and then change destinations once they were in Vienna was a common tactic. But there was a problem: Turski was working with non-Jews who were risking everything to stand up to this smear campaign. They could have gone along with