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By Root 372 0

one involved my personal, very intimate feelings. During those years of catastrophe and horror, the conduct that hurt and humiliated me most was that of my fellow Poles: their hatred of Jews, their utter callousness in the face of the unspeakable suffering and extinction of their former friends and neighbors, their contemptible duplicity. It was a breach of fundamental good faith and betrayal that scarred me more than anything I saw done by Germans or Ukrainians. I know perfectly well—and you and my readers should not doubt—that there were Poles who showed extraordinary decency and courage in their dealings with Polish Jews, risking death and torture at the hands of Germans. Alas, they were invisible to me in the vast grey mass of the others. The ultimate injury and betrayal was, of course, the virulence of Polish anti-Semitism in evidence immediately after the Soviet army drove the Germans out of Polish territory, as demonstrated for instance by the pogroms and killings in Kielce and Cracow, events that cause little Maciek, his aunt, and his father to continue the lie of Aryan identity. I found myself overwhelmed, unable to control my voice, when I tried to describe the continued humiliation in words spoken by Maciek, and to show through him the depth of his disillusionment and despair. It occurred to me that this was a job for a grownup. So I let the author or perhaps—the ambiguity is intentional—the same “man with a nice face and sad eyes” who in the first pages of the book remembers his childhood in Poland express Maciek’s anger and scorn. And, of course, announce the “death” of the little boy.

Second, I thought that as a matter of aesthetic choice it would be right to balance the first pages of the book, which give the point of view of a grownup—the man who we are led to think was the child he chooses to call Maciek—with a return on the closing pages to a grownup’s vision and tone of voice.

Finally—I return here to deeply personal feelings—there were moments during the composition of Wartime Lies when I literally needed to pause for breath. The italicized passages drawing on Dante’s Inferno are such stops on my via dolorosa. They represent attempts by “the man with a nice face,” or perhaps by the author, to call to his aid the greatest connoisseur of evil in Western literature, one who was equipped with a remarkable grid of values through which to assess it. They allowed me to have someone other than Maciek speak. That was an urgent necessity. Curiously, I thought of those passages at the time as a window letting in fresh air just as I was close to suffocating. Something of the same nature was at work in the intrusion that closes Chapter IV.

It is a task for the reader’s sympathy and imagination to search for further links between these disclosures and Maciek’s story.

JM: Is your ideal reader one who will forget the adult Maciek—actually, as you point out, an unnamed, sad-eyed adult—most of the time and simply relive the harrowing, suspenseful experiences of the boy? Or do you instead dream of a reader who will, at each step of the journey, think not so much of the boy as of the adult remembering him?

LB: My ideal reader is attentive and blessed by the gifts of sympathy and imagination. You will note that I am going back in this reply to what I said in answer to your first question. Provided the reader has those qualities, all I want to do is to withdraw, to get out of the way and let the reader make of my work what he or she wishes.

That being said, I believe that if I were the reader I would think of myself as Maciek; I would crawl into his skin. I also believe that I would not be able to keep out of my mind the questions raised by the passage in which the adult man remembers what may have been his own childhood: What is such a man like? How does one grow up after a childhood that has been similarly blasted?

It may interest you that my working title for Wartime Lies, which I abandoned with some reluctance, was The Education of a Monster.

JM: That title strikes the ear as a slap strikes the face. I wince