A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [116]
Even Barbara Gora's mother, who had spent her life so afraid of her Jewishness, finally got angry in 1968. When she went to a newsstand to read the latest anti-Semitic slurs, the woman in the stand looked at her and, just as she had always feared, pointed to her and said, “You are a Jew!”
Gora's mother glared back and said, “Yes, and you are a Nazi!” and walked away.
The Jews of the university in Warsaw, the ‘68 generation, left. Joanna Wiszniewicz was one of the few who remained, lonely without her friends from the momentous university days. But they could never come back to Poland for a visit. She arranged to meet friends who had gone to Israel in places in Hungary and Romania in the next few years, but she had in fact lost her friends. Many Jews discovered that their friends were Jewish only when they saw them all leave.
Joanna stayed, because her field of study was Polish culture and she would have nothing to do if she left Poland. “It's not patriotism,” she said. “It's a lack of imagination.”
BARBARA GRUBERSKA became a doctor of internal medicine, just as she had learned her mother's father had been. Though she married a non-Jew, she decided to stop hiding her true identity. Her husband, an electrical engineer, was a third-generation Communist who hated the Catholic Church and had many Jewish friends. Unfortunately, the year she decided to become openly Jewish and even become involved in community affairs in Warsaw was 1968. In that year Jewish life virtually shut down. There were no longer even religious services available, or places to learn about Jewish practices. She decided that she would do what every Jew she knew was doing: she went to the ministry to apply for permission to emigrate to Israel. The government demanded proof of her Jewishness. She had none—neither parents nor ties to the Jewish community. Her application was denied.
Two years later, Kazimiera Kwiatkowska, who had taken 700 zfotys a month to care for her, was dying and asked to see Barbara, who came to her bedside. Barbara pleaded with her, “There must be something more you know about my mother.”
Kazimiera Kwiatkowska, lying in her deathbed, admitted that she had met her mother once. She had come to sign the contract with a bribed German policewoman and another woman whose business was brokering such contracts. She had come holding Barbara on a pillow, saying she had to leave the country and wanted someone to take the baby for a time.
“What did she look like?” Barbara Gruberska wanted to know.
Kazimiera said she was very thin, dirty, and dressed in rags. “She was more like an animal than a human being.” The woman had stayed the night in Kazimiera's home, just sitting on a chair, crying until morning light.
19
Czechoslovakian
Summer
THE EVENTS OF 1968, FOR A FEW EXCITING MONTHS, caused the name of Victory Street in Brno to be changed once again back to Masaryk Street.
The Czechoslovakian economy, which was supposed to be the best in the Soviet bloc, had been failing. Economic reform was halfhearted and unsuccessful, and in search of change the conservative leadership was removed and the party put in the hands of Slovak party chief Alexander Dubcek. In a quip borrowed from Bertolt Brecht after the 1953 GDR uprising, the new party leader said, “We couldn't change the people, so we changed the leaders.” Dubcek was a courageous man whose destiny it was not to be thanked by history. He was a Communist who tried to save Communism in a country where the ideology had once been broadly popular. Taking a slogan from Hungary in 1956, he called for “Communism with a human face.” The mistakes of the Hungarian movement were not repeated. There was no demand for an independent foreign policy, but instead, Dubcek