A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [48]
Barbara's father had been an active member of the Communist underground. The man who had worried Barbara during the war because he always said that her “uncle” wasn't really her family, also turned out to be a member of the underground, a friend of her father. Because the Communist party wanted to remember people's wartime records, all the underground activists were asked to keep their wartime names. Barbara was happy to be Barbara Gora, daughter of Witold Gora. Gora was a good Polish name that meant the same thing in Polish as the old Jewish name Hochberg meant in German—“high mountain.” The entire family was happy to keep their Polish names and continue their wartime identities, never mentioning that they were Jewish. They had all had enough of being Jewish.
Witold Gora was made chief of police in a small town in Lublin province. Barbara was once again the only Jew in school. But now she was a Gora, not a Hochberg, and she went regularly to the Catholic church. The priest knew that her father was a Communist and was very pleased that he was sending his daughter to church. In 1946 the family moved back to Warsaw, and Barbara went to a high school with required religion classes. This time she wasn't the only Jew in the school, but all of the Jews quietly took the course and never talked even among themselves about being Jewish. Barbara was far happier than she had been years before, when she had been Irene and wouldn't take the class. When the teachers in her school asked the class who had gone to mass on Sunday, Barbara always raised her hand.
At first it was easy to sit through the religion classes, but then there was a change in teachers. The new teacher was a fanatical priest who taught that Darwin was evil, that the world was created in seven days, and that anything else was heresy. Barbara was growing tired of religion, and she transferred to a new school that she had learned of, a socialist school that did not teach religion. It was a long way from where she lived, and she had to pack into an overcrowded streetcar to get there. But it was worth the trouble. Communism, her father had told her, was bringing about a new society, free of religion. For a Jew in Poland, at last, here was an answer to the Jewish question: No religion at all, for anyone.
NOW THAT HIS FATHER was dead, Marian Turski reflected sadly on how hurt his father had been in the Lodz ghetto when Marian had joined the Communist underground and turned his back on Judaism. But to Marian, Communism was the future. His family had been more Zionist than religious, and many of his cousins had survived by going to Palestine before the war. Now an office in Lodz was helping to arrange for emigration to Palestine, and many of the survivors were leaving.
But Marian thought he had a stake in the new Poland that was emerging. People who had missed school could now get degrees and good positions very quickly. Poland had never before offered such opportunities, and certainly never before to Jews. Barbara Gora helped her father with mathematics, and soon he earned an engineering degree. After she finished her basic education, she herself was able to study in Moscow for an advanced agricultural degree. Jakub Gutenbaum, living in his uncle's small room, could make up all the schooling he had missed. He had his diploma in two years and then got a scholarship to study electrical engineering in Moscow. Although 3.1 million Polish Jews had been murdered, somehow Jewish life was returning to Poland. Wroclaw, which before the war had been Breslau and had had the third largest Jewish community in Germany, now reopened its Yiddish theater, in spite of heavy damage inflicted on the historic center of the city. Later, Warsaw and Lodz did the same. Once again, there were synagogues and Jewish schools. Yiddish newspapers such as Dos Nahe Lebn “The New Life/’ started up. In Cracow, where the buildings had not been touched, Jews embraced as they met each other on the street. Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter