Page:The Minority of One 1961-10.pdf/6

I WANTED WAR

The world situation in the late thirties, as viewed by a young Jewish lad in Poland, seemed utterly unbearable. The newspaper headlines kept reporting the ever more aggressive demands and advances of Nazi Germany. In daily encounters, one’s nerves were put to a severe test when listening to the macabre firsthand accounts of the thousands of Jewish expelees from Hitler’s Reich. Among those refugees there were some close relatives of mine; and their tales of how they had been abused, dispossessed, tortured, and expelled were hair-raising. Yet, there seemed to be no end and no limit to the spread of the Nazi disease. Hitler seemed all-powerful; his expansionist successes followed one after the other. His will prevailed in all diplomatic disputes. He was stopped neither from occupying the Ruhr territory, nor from annexing Austria, nor from conquering first a part and then the entirety of Czechoslovakia. Now his eyes were focused on Danzig and the “corridor” through Poland. Who could doubt that once more his ambition would prevail? And then, what next? How many more villages and towns would fall under his rule, in terror and devastation? How many new victims would each new stage in diplomacy create? How many lives destroyed, how many people dispossessed and denied the protection of the law? The Nazi refugees were a living testimony to the application of the Nuremberg Laws. Their businesses were taken from them overnight. Some lost their jobs; some were evicted from their homes and apartments, often driven into the streets and beaten or forced to humiliating labor. The venom of anti-Semitism, promoted by the Nazis throughout the world, proved quite . contagious even among those peoples who obviously were Hitler’s next intended victims. To be sure, Poland has always been an anti-Semitic country. Nazi propaganda, however, added ever more strength to the home-grown bigotry. The Polish Sejm busied itself with passing ever bolder and more candidly anti-Semitic legislation. The economic boycott of the Jewish citizens received the official sanction and blessing of the Polish Premier (a general who died during World War II in Tel-Aviv, of all places). Jewish traders and industrialists were being put out of business en masse by taxes arbitrarily raised by the local authorities. Para-military anti-Semitic organizations sprang up all over the country. Their uniformed and often armed members were becoming an unofficial part of the state administration. Mass pogroms erupted in city after city, and wherever they occurred the police either participated or did nothing to prevent them. The main street in my city, Lodz, was Ulica Piotrkowska. It was a busy, broad avenue with big. beautiful stores along both sides of it. Ulica Piotrkowska was the city’s promenade. People strolled up and down the avenue, a favorite pastime. A walk along Ulica Piotrkowska had become an intimate social institution of our city dwellers. There was an atmosphere of cordiality among the passers-by. No one ever hesitated to start a pleasant conversation with a stranger. Young folks picked up their dates on Piotrkowska; older strangers would spontaneously exchange their impressions about the beautiful window displays. In the late thirties, however, the street was losing its traditional relaxed character. Ever more it was becoming out of bounds for the city’s Jews. Jewish storekeepers, under frequent physical attack and harassed by pickets proclaiming that only “the enemies of Poland buy from Jews,” were either closing down or moving to peripheral parts of the city. Even walking along Piotrkowska became a hazard for anyone whose facial characteristics betrayed his Jewishness. If you could not avoid passing the street, you would pull the brim of your hat or student cap low over your forehead and eyes and pull up the collar of your coat to hide your Jewish face. Often this gave you away and the inevitable happened: suddently you felt the fists and feet of your fellow passers-by all over your Jewish body. Before you escaped the hateful mob, a policeman’s club would land on your head, for “creating” a public disturbance... If you were in your teens and a student, you would envy your seniors who sometimes succeeded in gaining admission to the university in spite of the restricting numerus clausus. You, however, were totally barred by the ever more widespread replacement of the numerus clausus with the numerus nullus. Even the way to and from school was a dangerous trap. It had become one of the most popular “sports” of Polish students to march to the segregated Jewish schools and to beat up the emerging Jewish “fellows.” The few Jewish university students were hardly in an enviable situation. They were assigned “ghetto”-seats, in a seperate seating section on the left side of the lecture hall. Most professors hardly concealed their racial animosity, and a test of a Jewish student became an antagonistic battle of wits between him and the examiner. Pogroms on the campus had become a permanent feature. Some Jewish students were killed on the campus in broad daylight, without as much as causing a police investigation. We sensed that the worst was yet to happen. We knew that either Hitler’s armies would before long stretch their evil arm over Poland, or that the local anti-Semites would do the job for them. The political parties, including the one in power, OZON, were outbidding each other in embracing anti-Semitic extremities. The situation was black and hopeless. Everybody thought of emigrating, emigrating anywhere. But this escape was open only to the few. Few countries were seeking immigrants, and those who did would not accept penniless people. Poland would let her Jews go, provided they left all they possessed behind. I was at the time in my teens, making my first encounters with the world beyond the second-hand depictions of it I had received from my parents and teachers. They followed the maxim that goodness is planted in the human heart by good example and had brought me up in a world of ideals. They had quite deliberately concealed from me the existence of intentional, planned evil in human beings. Two decades and a war later I am not yet free of the faith they planted in me, and each encounter of ill-will is still an entriely new experience to me and has the shocking impact of a “first.” I clearly remember ascribing all injustices to simple mistakes on the part of those who inflicted them. As a young boy I remember thinking that if only I could get to Hitler, I could explain to him that he was wrong, and that then he would undoubtedly change his course and become a benefactor of humanity. Meanwhile I was confronting a cruel reality, for which mentally I was utterly unprepared. My ivory-tower upbringing had not admitted the existence of the kind of world I was facing and suffering from. My frustration was great, so great that it outlasted my adolescence, accompanying me throughout the war years in the ghetto and concentration camp; it still interferes with my mental processes jp this new nuclear era. Little wonder that against this pre-World War II reality one could hardly retain sufficient personal detachment to judge international events with due proportion and an objective historical perception. My impatience and anxiety were so great and the prevailing situation seemed so utterly intolerable, that the only reaction could be an attitude of “Let's get it over with.” I viewed mankind as a patient whose only hope lay in dangerous surgery. “Let’s get it over with,” I kept saying to myself and believed that the only way to reverse the unbearable situation was war. So I wished for war. I wanted war. And I got it.

• * *

Six days had passed since war started. Those were difficult days. My father, who until then was very worried about the effects of the anti-Jewish economic boycott on his industrial enterprise, had suddenly traded big concerns for small ones. No longer worried about the intricacies of administering an industrial enterprise, he now found himself standing in line day and night to get a loaf of bread for his family. Even the incessant air-raids could not make him seek cover and thereby lose his “place.” When, after hours of battling to reach the bakery, he would bring home a loaf of bread, the pride and satisfaction of achievement that lit up his face shone brighter than when in days past he would provide his family with the most extravagant luxury. Life had suddenly necessitated new concepts, a new perception and a new sense of proportion. Things which had seemed of shattering importance became petty, while bagatelles assumed overriding significance. My refusal to train in engineering so as eventually to succeed my father in his profession, a concern which once shook my family, suddenly diminished to less than comic status. Instead, getting a few pieces of fire-wood or a few cigarettes filled our mental firmament. There were many casualties in our midst during those first few days of war. German bombers flew over the city, incessantly unloading their murderous cargo. Houses and streetblocks collapsed, burying their residents. In these few days of war we learned enough to discover the fallacies of civil defense. During the first day or two everyone took cover in the shelters each time the sirens warned of approaching enemy planes. Then bombs started falling before the sirens were heard. Too many people were killed in their “shelters” to keep us believing in their protective value. A day or two of war had turned us into experts. We learned about the many people who survived because they had not gone to the shelter; for others, it became their mass grave. Soon we had learned to go about our business, air raid or no air raid. We realized that intelligence could not plan survival. We watched fate in its capricious blindness. On the eve of the sixth day of war we went to bed ready to stay there until morning, whether or not the wailing sirens woke ws from sleep. But it was not sirens that woke us that night. Instead it was a violent knock on the door. When my father opened it, a neighbor came in with a rucksack hanging over his back. In a loud and agitated voice he said: “C’mon fellows, get dressed, hurry up, all men are volunteering for the army, the Germans are coming! C’mon, hurry up, there is no time to waste.” Within minutes my father and I were dressed, while my mother and sister busied themselves packing some clothing and food for us.