A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [151]
With the camera running and lights so bright that his little bakery looked twice its size, Finkelsztajn found himself face to face with the old lines. He was asked if he was a Frenchmen. If so, why did he call himself a Jew? There was no stutter. Finkelsztajn, the high school drop-out, had a smile of wisdom and eyes that seemed to be winking as he explained, “I say I am a Jew because we are in France. When I am abroad, I say I am a Frenchman.”
The interviewer, not content with this, pointed out that he was a Polish Jew. Henri, with the patience of a man who has spent a lifetime answering the same needless question, explained that he had never been to Poland, had had no contact with the country nor the slightest feelings for the place. Then he smiled his pleasant, amused smile—the same smile you get after buying one of his challahs.
P A R T S I X
EUROPE,
NEW
AGAIN
Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht
(When I think of Germany in the night, Fm robbed of
my sleep)
—HEINRICH HEINE
26
In Poland
IN SEPTEMBER 1989, HENRYK HALKOWSKI, THE DIRECTOR of the musty, nearly deserted Jewish social club in Cracow, was eager to show foreign visitors his town. For the first time since immediately after the war, Poland had a non-Communist prime minister. The Polish Communist dictatorship was over, and among the new freedoms was the possibility of showing your town to a Westerner without being watched by the secret police. Halkowski was an enthusiastic man in his late thirties with steel-rimmed glasses and a sardonic smile. On the day that Tadeusz Mazowiecki was installed as the first non-Communist prime minister, a New York University professor was in Cracow and Halkowski wanted to take him to the place where Tadeusz Kosciuszko had first vowed to fight for Polish independence almost two centuries earlier. Halkowski liked the idea that at this historic moment of the new Polish state, he should take someone to this historic spot. He also knew that Kosciuszko was the one Polish patriot whose name was known to New Yorkers—because of the bridge bearing his name on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
Halkowski led the visitor to the large, empty medieval marketplace in the center of town that a few years later would be filled with tourist cafes. As he and his guest stopped at the very spot of the Kosciuszko vow, six young people with shaved heads and laced boots whom he had never seen before pulled him from behind and knocked him down. As they beat him with their fists, they shouted in German, “Jude, Jude, Jude” and then ran off. There was a police station nearby, but the militia that didn't allow youth to roam the streets attacking Jews, let alone curse them in German, had already been disbanded.
THE NEW POLISH STATE, which had for Halkowski so inauspi-ciously begun, was the fruit of two decades of political resistance. The crisis of the Communist state had become so extreme that the military had sought the help of the opposition but in the process gradually negotiated itself out of existence. The opposition had to be legalized, and then parliamentary elections had to be allowed. Power evaporated from Communist hands more rapidly than even Solidarity had been prepared for.
It fell to the former Polityka chief, Marian Turski's longtime editor Mieczyslaw Rakowski, to ease the transition, first as prime minister, then as Jaruzelskfs replacement, becoming the last first secretary of a ruling Polish Communist party. In July, Rakowski appointed the last Communist-led government, but it lacked a following, and in August he had to replace the prime minister with a non-Communist.
The dream had failed. The Communist state for which people like Marian Turski had been working all their lives had collapsed, bankrupt in every sense. Turski and his associates had been fighting this failure for thirty years.