A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [165]
Most of these children grew up to be achievers. The majority of people in Gutenbaum's group held advanced degrees. Many were doctors. Four were medical professors. But very few had stable family lives. Many were divorced. There was a high rate of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.
For Gutenbaum, the work was therapeutic because it forced him to talk about his own experiences. After a time he could calmly talk about the fire overhead as he hid in the ghetto, about being led through the charred ghetto at gunpoint, about the selection process at Maidanek. These were all things he had never spoken about, not even to his wife or their son. There were other things he still would not speak about—things he would never utter, even though he had learned that the more he talked the better he felt. His nightmares became less frequent. He was looking for activities to throw himself into because soon he would have to retire. He feared the day when he was no longer absorbed in his scientific work and his mind would be free to wander. This was why the hidden children had been achievers.
Barbara Gora had her own reasons for joining the hidden children group. “I decided to join because, you know, I have a lot in common with them. I am alone. I am alone not only because I didn't marry. I want to have my own social group, and this society is not typically Jewish because they are people brought up like me. Some of them are even Catholic because they were brought up like that. I have more in common with them than with typical Jews. I never wanted to be a member of this Jewish cultural society. I have nothing in common with them. I am a hidden child.”
Barbara's sister, who was ten years older, had married a Greek Communist immigrant. They visited Greece every year and raised their daughter to be Greek. When the girl was nine, she read a book about the Warsaw ghetto and asked her aunt Barbara about it. But when Barbara told her that her mother was Jewish, her niece didn't believe her. A cousin of Barbara's father was spending three months in Paris, and while she was there she looked up relatives who lived in a Paris suburb. She discovered, to her amazement, that they were Jewish. She came back and told everyone in her family, “We are Jewish!” To Barbara she said, “Did you know that we are Jewish?”
“Yes,” said Barbara. “I know.”
“Then why don't I know?”
The story makes Barbara laugh. “Now everybody knows. Now it's all open. It was silly. It was stupid. It doesn't matter!” The fact so amazed her that she repeated it several times. “It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter!”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1992, Henryk Halkowski hosted the last meeting at the old Jewish club in Cracow. After forty-six years they were abandoning the musty rooms and auditorium for a small, one-room meeting space. “Smaller, but without the mold,” said Halkowski. Four people showed up, and they made tea and drifted from room to room. They still had the red velour flag with gold embroidery, with the Polish Communist party marked on one side in Polish, their local chapter marked on the other in Yiddish. One of the four said he had heard that an Israeli had recently come to town and told Czeslaw Jakubowicz that they should all move to Israel. They snickered. They weren't going to move to Israel, just to a smaller space.
Although Halkowski's family was originally from Lodz, he became a local historian in Cracow and enjoyed studying the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Jews from Germany and Bohemia had migrated to this city where they could live in peace. The Cracow Jews were so secure in their