A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [164]
EVEN THOUGH MORE PEOPLE in Poland declared themselves Jewish every day, the community remained small. In the fight to at last receive German reparations after the fall of the Soviet bloc, applications in Poland were only in the hundreds. There was a loneliness to Polish Jews living in a non-Jewish world with non-Jewish friends. Even if it was known that they were Jewish, their colleagues, being broad-minded, would include them in Christian holidays and give them flowers and cakes on the saint's day of their name, forcing them in misguided friendship to act out a charade that to the non-Jews was simply being Polish. Only among other Jews did the few Jews of Poland feel safe being candidly what they were. Many would admit their Jewishness only to other Jews. No matter how many non-Jewish friends you had, it was only with a Jew that you were always sure, no matter what happened, that you could still say, “I am a Jew.” It was only with Jewish friends that you didn't have to pretend to care about your saint's day or Christmas, lest they be offended. Your Jewish friends were never going to slip and say one of those things that are just part of Polish culture. But the Jews saw their valuable Jewish friends vanish, emigrate, and die. Survivors clung to distant cousins as though they were siblings, because it was all they had. An impoverished elderly woman who ate at the lunch program by the synagogue would gather scraps of food and give them to a middle-class Jewish woman in her thirties because the young woman's father had given her food during the war, and this was the only connection she had left.
Konstanty Gebert married a non-Jew, which meant that according to Jewish law their four children were not Jewish. With the help of Lauder programs, he was bringing them up with Jewish instruction in the hope that they would convert. “I don't want to make their decisions for them. I do desperately hope that they will make the decision to formally convert,” he said.
He recognized that even he was a kind of artificially constructed Jew. In the anti-Communist underground days when he was working with Marek Edelman, Edelman would question Gebert's Jew-ishness, saying, “You invented it, you made it up.” The Gebert household observed the Sabbath and most of the holidays. Gebert was not kosher because it would be too arduous a discipline in Poland. But he did not eat meat, a practice that was not necessarily Jewish except that it precluded the risk of mixing meat with dairy. “Why can't we be free like Dad and not eat meat?” his children asked.
Gebert wore a yarmulke indoors. Sometimes he forgot to take it off when he left the house, but nothing happened. Still, he was uneasy about his role in Poland. “The problem is there are so damn few of us. I don't want to be turned into a professional representative.” He recognized that there were limits to how Jewish he could be in Poland. He too had made his choice. “I would prefer to live in circumstances that would make more observance possible, but if that means leaving Poland, I'm not about to do it.”
Jakub Gutenbaum, who lost faith in Communism in 1968 but did not want to be a foreigner in Israel, became a full professor in 1977. He had never been a party member and was not political. Science was his religion. But he said that after the fall of Communism, “I thought maybe I could do something about problems outside of my field.” In 1991 the Lauder Foundation was trying to organize an association for Jews who had survived the war because they had been hidden as children, and Gutenbaum became involved, eventually becoming the head of a group of 140 people. There were twenty older ones, like himself and Barbara Gora, who had survived the ghetto and concentration camps. The rest had been hidden as babies. All but fifteen of the