A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [81]
The Kamerazes felt safe in their Jewish building, even though from time to time, during periods when anti-Semitism was particularly active, someone would rub excrement on their door. Ninel's parents didn't know how to live a Jewish life—it was the Poles cursing “Zyd” on the street and shoving people out of trams that forced them into the safety of Jewish company. Ninel's mother and many of the other people in the building spoke Yiddish, but Ninel concentrated on learning Polish. Yiddish was only used to talk of terrible things, of camps and who was saved and how, and who wasn't and why. Ninel did not want to hear all this. It frightened her.
There was something temporary about life in their cozy apartment of little rooms and hallways, and stacks of dusty books, and the table they sat around with the electric samovar always heating water for tea. All around them Jews were leaving. Ninel's family didn't leave but only said good-bye to friends. Other Jews from Moscow would arrive. But then they wouldn't stay. So the Kamer-azes made their life between things—between hellos and goodbyes, between Russia and the West, between the Judaism they had abandoned and the Communism that had abandoned them.
In Warsaw, as in other Polish cities, new Jewish institutions started up after the war—schools, cooperatives, theaters, newspapers in both Polish and Yiddish, the Union of Jewish Writers, and even a publishing house. As long as there was still a sizable survivor population in Poland, foreign funds were available for such things. But with each pogrom and train murder the Jewish population shrank and the remaining Jewish community began turning its institutions over to the state because it could no longer operate them. The Jewish school that Ninel attended in the neighborhood became a state school, even though it still had a largely Jewish student body.
As in Czechoslovakia and everywhere else where Stalin's influence was felt, the Polish regime hardened in tone and substance after 1948. Wkdysfew Gomulka, with his Polish-nationalist brand of Communism, was removed from power, even imprisoned, and a government that followed every hand-gesture in the Kremlin was installed. But once again as things worsened for Poles, Jews saw an improvement in their lives. As the police state cracked down on the population, fascist and anti-Semitic activities were no longer tolerated. A Pole caught throwing Jews off trains or scribbling anti-Semitic graffiti—or, for that matter, any kind of graffiti—was quickly arrested. Also, Jews profited from the anti-Semitic stereotype of the zydokomuna (Jewish Communist). Polish anti-Semites became afraid of Jews because their own hate propaganda had convinced them that all Jews had connections to top-ranking state security people.
In 1949, when Marian Turski moved to Warsaw, the reconstruction process was only beginning. The old center of town was being rebuilt, stone by stone, reproducing the pastel historic buildings. The heaps of refuse where the ghetto had been were starting to be cleared away and replaced with modern apartment buildings with huge gates and massive entranceways, as well as a relatively restrained touch of the neoclassic ornamentation that seemed to obsess architects in the last years of Stalin. Soon the area that had previously been a downtown district, then a Jewish death camp, then an ash heap, had become a desirable new housing project. Turski moved into one of these new buildings in 1951, in an apartment with a view of the new Old Town, and began his career as a journalist.
Most of the young men in Turski's circle of friends were pursuing the same young woman. He too thought her extremely beautiful, and he was amazed that she seemed to prefer him, then finally chose him. Turski, a small, dark-haired, awkward man with a slight speech defect, often pondered why she had chosen him. Even months after they started living together, he still shook his head in astonishment. One day after they had been living together for six months, he was