Of course I passed Metek your invitation to come and stay, but he said, “Never, Gra
His attitude to Poland is complicated. Culturally he is a Pole. He knows Polish poetry by heart and he worships Chopin, but he cannot forgive the Poles for the pogrom in Kielce. He says the 6 million Jews who died during the war were a cosmic catastrophe, something caused by a misalignment of the planets, but those 42 Jews who were killed after the war, in July 1946 in Kielce, are a stain on the conscience of the Poles. Did you hear about the murders or did it not reach you in Russia?
They say the pogrom was organized by the KGB, Polish or Soviet makes no difference. The police and the army were implicated. What difference does it make? The murders were committed by Poles, all just as in the Middle Ages. Once again a rumor was spread that a Christian child had been abducted—blood, matzah, the “Jewish Easter.”
It happened after nearly all the Jews of Kielce had died in the death camps and only a couple of hundred who had survived returned after the war. They were rehoused on Planty Street. There, in a large apartment block, the upper floors were occupied by Jewish Communists, Chekists, and everybody who welcomed the new authorities. Downstairs were ordinary people and it was on them that the pogrom was unleashed. Metek was not in the town. He was in Warsaw for two days for an audition. I think he had been invited to join an orchestra.
The pogrom began with people breaking into the lower stories of the house. First they looked for the abducted child, and then for gold. What gold? Everybody was penniless. They found nothing and started murdering.
Metek’s entire family died in the camps, only his younger sister Riwka survived. When he returned from Warsaw she too was dead. The victims lay in a shed near the station and he was called to identify her.
She was buried and Metek said to me, “Gra
For five years Metek tried to get permission to emigrate. We could not understand why everybody was being allowed out except him, but then Metek guessed it was because he was from Kielce and had been in that shed. The authorities were trying to conceal the truth about the postwar pogroms and Metek was a witness. There were pogroms in Kraków and Rzeszów, too, and Metek later met Kraków Jews who had not been allowed out either. In 1951 permission was finally granted and we emigrated.
I can’t say I find life easy in Israel, but in Poland my heart was shredded by sympathy for my husband. The only thing that justifies the move is that the children are very happy here.
Metek has a difficult personality and has been through so much that his constant depression is readily understandable. I can say to you, dear Wiktoria, that we are a good married couple and bring meaning to each other’s lives. We love our children very much, of course. Metek is particularly attached to our daughter and I, I suppose, am closer to our son, but the two of us are like a single entity. It is only thanks to our love that we have managed to survive, both in the war and now. Life here is very, very difficult.
Sweet Wiktoria, send me your photograph. I am sending you ours so that we will recognize each other if God grants that we should meet. One day, perhaps?
I’m so glad you have reappeared in my life. I hope that this time we will not lose each other again.
Love,
Your Gra
March 1965, Kfar Tavor
L
ETTER FROM
G
RA
YNA TO
W
IKTORIA
Hi, Wiktoria!
I’ve been back home for two weeks now and just can’t collect my wits. Before the trip I still thought I might be able to change my life and go back to Poland, but I see now that’s impossible.
After Metek’s death, when I realized that now I could leave Israel, all that held me back was Hanna. Metek adored her. He was never so close to Andrzej. Andrzej was alienated, and now we will never know why he was so chilly toward his father. Andrzej was my favorite, while Hanna was and remains to this day her Daddy’s girl. She has been miserable the whole year since he died. She is at a difficult age and is such a mixture of brashness and vulnerability. How could I leave her alone?
Now that Andrzej has been killed they won’t take her into the army. There is a rule that if only one child is left it is not called up. She dreams every night of joining the army, and goads me by saying she will join the paratroops. She is musical like Metek, has a good figure like I had when I was young, and she is pretty. I don’t know where she gets that from. Metek and I were never very good looking. After Andrzej was killed and Metek died I would have gone straight back to Poland, but Hanna adores Israel. All the young people here adore their country. She will never emigrate. Anyway, what is Poland to her? And what sort of a Catholic is she? I so wanted to keep her in our faith. All through her childhood I took her to church, and she came willingly. Later, though, she dropped it like a brick. She told me she wanted Giur, that is, to become a Jew. As the daughter of a Christian woman she was not considered a Jew under the laws here. She had to convert to Judaism.
“I have no interest in God at all. I just want to be like everybody else.” That is what she tells me. She is a Jewish girl, an Israeli, and her dream is to get into the army as soon as possible and get a rifle in her hands. She used to come with me to see a Catholic priest here. He is from Poland, too. From the very outset he said a person should make a conscious choice, especially here in Israel. The fact that you baptized her means nothing until she has grown up. He told me to take her to church while she was little, but warned that in our difficult situation you have to have the patience to let someone make their own mind up. I can see now he was right. She doesn’t go to church anymore. She has clearly left all that behind. She would never come back to Poland with me and now I have nobody other than her. She is 17. I used to think that when she grew up and married I would go back and live out my last years in my homeland, but when I saw Poland again after so many years, I realized that life would not be good for me there either.
Why have things turned out like this? There seems to be no place on earth where I can feel at home. I am very unhappy in Israel, but I was unhappy in Poland, too. Here so much gets me down: the noise, the over-expansiveness of everybody. The neighbors yell, people on the bus yell, my employer yells in the workshop. I hear Arab music incessantly and just want to turn off the sound. The sun is too bright here and I would like to turn it down a bit, too. I find the heat exhausting, and our house is unbearable in the summer. The heat makes me feel like my blood has congealed. Looking out the window I can see Mount Tabor, the place where the Transfiguration of Jesus occurred, but I would prefer to live in one of the new apartments in Kielce. The trouble is that now, having just come back from our dreary Kielce, I have to accept that I couldn’t live there either. All I have left is two graves in the Holy Land.
I am very grateful to you, Wiktoria, for being so hospitable. You proved kinder than a sister to me, but that is not a basis on which to return to Poland. Everything there is so gray and colorless, and the people are just too dour.
It was a year yesterday since Metek died, two days before his 50th birthday. Andzrej was killed two days before he would have been 20. Yesterday our neighbors and Metek’s colleagues from the College of Music came and brought food and vodka. They said such good things about him. To start with, Hanna laughed to the point of indecency, and then sobbed. She has really quite a hysterical personality. Andrzej was just the opposite. So calm and serene. I realized yesterday what a happy family we were four years ago. I can’t bear it. I can’t pray. I have a stone where my heart should be. Hanna at least cries, but I have no tears.