Against the Flow Read online

  For a while after I returned to England, life resumed its old patterns. Leszek and Isa continued to come for a couple of weeks each September to stay at Pamela and Adam’s house in Holland Park – for a few years more anyway. Then Pamela died, aged nearly 90, and Adam slowed down. He wouldn’t go fishing any more, and, having always been more than ready to dwell on the pleasures of extra-marital ‘dooloo dooloo’, as he called it, he now tended to become sentimental about his ‘Pamuszka’ and their shared bliss and mutual devotion. He was consoled at odd times by the arrival from Poland of unaccompanied female students who would stay in his house while studying and perform various duties in return. He lamented to me that, despite every inducement, ‘prick no longer stand up’; adding, with a flicker of the old spirit and the waggling of a finger, that he could still give pleasure. He was then well into his 80s.

  Adam died when he was 85. He left more than a million pounds, of which half went to his daughter by a first marriage and her family, and the other half was divided into six equal parts. My brother Matthew, who was Pamela’s godson and much loved by both her and Adam, received one share. So did I. I do not remember who got the other four, but I know that Leszek was not one of them. Neither he nor Isa attended the funeral – a dreary crematorium affair somewhere north of Edgware – and contact between us lapsed.

  Still, he was the first person I wrote to when I started making arrangements for my return visit. I got no reply. I tried telephoning, but all the numbers in Kraków had been changed. I asked another Polish friend if he could track Leszek down. He emailed me to say that he had spoken to Leszek, who had said that he ‘would not have much time to see you’. Then I had an email from Leszek himself, wishing me well for my trip but saying he would not be able to see me at all. There was no explanation.

  I found a website for Trojanowski Stomatologic, with an address, and when I was in Kraków I called round. The bell was answered by Wojtek, the boy I remembered catching lizards in his bare hands, now a qualified dentist himself. He said his father would be there later. I came back at one o’clock. This time Leszek opened the door. He was in his smock and trousers, with a dentist’s headlamp fastened around his head looking disconcertingly like a third eye.

  Time had treated him pretty well. Always thickset, he was now thicker set, fleshier round the face. But he was 62, and 18 years had passed, after all. He had beads of sweat on his face, and his perfunctory handshake was moist. He explained that he and Wojtek divided the working day, with his shift lasting until 8 p.m. His first patient was due in ten minutes and he had preparations to make. It was clear he did not want me to hang around. I asked after Isa. She was in Katowice for treatment to her back, apparently. He told me he had given up fishing two years before. Finally he suggested that we meet that evening at a café on the Rynek. He made it sound like a neutral venue.

  He brought Wojtek with him, ostensibly to help out with the conversation, on the grounds that his English was much better than Leszek’s. Wojtek, a good-looking, extremely self-assured young man, spoke at some length about his passion for dressing up in US army battle fatigues and crawling around the countryside, pretending to root out units of the Vietcong. He described with great glee appearing one foggy winter’s morning with his fellow enthusiasts outside the church at Półrzeczki and terrifying worshippers on their way in to Mass.

  Leszek talked affectionately about Adam. He said that he had been to London two or three years before and, for old times’ sake, had gone to the house in Holland Park. ‘It was just to remember,’ he said. ‘But is all finished now.’ He talked a little about fishing. A dam had been built on the Dunajec, and the stretches near Półrzeczki where he and I had fished together had been submerged or ruined. These days, he said, he preferred gardening. And travel. For the first time he became animated. He and Isa had been to the Bahamas for three weeks in the winter, then Miami, then New York. ‘We go to Metropolitan Opera. La Bohème. You know how much tickets cost?’ I didn’t. ‘Four hundred and seventy-eight dollars. We go also to Mamma Mia. It is musical. And Neil Simon. I like music very much.’ In November they would be off to Goa, for three weeks, for the third time. ‘Is very nice. Relaxing. The sun, the sea. No waves. Nice girls.’

  Not bad for a Polish dentist, eh? I felt I was being challenged. I said I had never been to Goa, or the Bahamas, or the Met. ‘You make money from writing books?’ Leszek asked. Hardly any, I replied. ‘What book you writing now?’ I tried to explain. ‘Is many changes in Kraków,’ Leszek said.

  We finished our coffee and walked a little way together before parting. I gave him my address at home and urged him to visit, but I knew he wouldn’t. I told him I might be back in Kraków later and would love to see Isa. He said her back was very bad. The implication was that she would have to stay in Katowice indefinitely. I felt that a barrier had been raised between us, though the reason why remained a mystery. He offered no explanation, beyond saying that he had to work very hard to make the money to pay for Goa.

  I did manage to solve one minor mystery, however. The address I had for Leszek from long ago was in Ziaji Street. But when I got to Kraków and tried to find it on a street map, it was not listed. According to his website, the practice was located in Jabłonowski Street, just beyond the Planty and the university quarter. When I got there it seemed familiar.

  ‘Is same street. Same house. But different name,’ Leszek explained.

  It had been Jabłonowski Street in pre-Communist times, named after an illustrious Polish nobleman, soldier and Governor of Kraków, Prince Stanisław Jabłonowski. Under the regime, princes, however illustrious, were out of favour and it was renamed Ziaji Street in honour of Stanisław Ziaji, a hero of the Communist Party killed by the Gestapo in 1944. With the overthrow of Marxist–Leninism, the dice of history rolled again. Prince Jabłonowski, who had fought the Swedes, the Cossacks, the Russians, the Tartars and the Turks, and stood firm for the God-given right of the few to keep the many in their place, was now back; the man who had fought and died for the rights of workers was out.

  Chapter 5

  The Jews

  THERE WERE POSTERS up all over Kraków – 2008: 18th Annual Festival of Jewish Culture. It occurred to me that the first festival must have taken place the year after my stay with Leszek and Isa.

  At that time the hot topic of the moment was the crippling shortage of fuel. Leszek unhesitatingly pointed the finger at ‘the Jews’. They had been buying up supplies and hoarding them, waiting for the price to rise, he said. I asked him who these Jews were. He was vague. I asked if the man with the jerrycans in his garage from whom Leszek obtained his fuel was Jewish. He wasn’t. I said my understanding was that there were very few Jews in Kraków, or indeed anywhere in Poland. Leszek suggested that strings were being pulled by Jewish fingers from outside the country.

  A few days later, without any obvious awareness of incongruity, he urged me to visit the death camp at Auschwitz. No visit to Kraków was complete without seeing it. Did I know, he asked, that many Poles had risked their lives to save Jews from death at the hands of the Nazis?

  The unsettling paradox of Polish anti-semitism is that, historically, no country in Europe has been more welcoming to Jews; and in no country did Jews make a bigger cultural and economic contribution. In the fourteenth century, at a time when Jews were the victims of pogroms all over Europe, the Polish king, Kazimierz the Great, signed an edict giving them protection from persecution. Jewish families flocked into Poland from Spain, Italy and elsewhere. Initially they were concentrated in Kraków, Warsaw and Lublin, but subsequently Jewish communities established themselves in Lithuania, and in most towns and villages in Galicia, which stretched across what is now southern Poland, northern Slovakia and southern Ukraine, as far east as Bukovina.

  For six centuries Poland remained the chief refuge and strong-hold of European Jewry. Their legal status fluctuated, reaching its highpoint in the mid-sixteenth century when they were granted rights that amounted to a kind of religious a
nd cultural autonomy. Subsequently, as Poland was repeatedly ravaged by foreign invaders, the Jews suffered periodic assaults on their liberties as well as attempts to curtail their economic influence. But they stayed and multiplied and, in the period immediately after the First World War, prospered; so that by 1940 there were 3.3 million Jews in Poland.

  Six years later there were 300,000. Of those who survived the Holocaust, the vast majority emigrated soon after the end of the war. Even so, in the late-1950s there were still between 30,000 and 40,000 Jews left. In 1967 the regime led by Władysław Gomułka instituted a purge, accusing them of Zionism and Westernism. By then they were so thoroughly integrated into the general Polish population that some did not even realise they were Jewish. As children they had been passed to Polish families to save them (often with money changing hands) and given Christian names with which they grew up. But the Party, displaying its characteristic thoroughness in such matters, had kept the records. Some 9,000 Jews, spread through the military, the police, the artistic and academic sectors as well as the Party itself, lost their jobs. Between 1968 and 1972, 20,000 Jews left Poland. It is estimated that by 1994 there were no more than 3,500 left in the entire country.

  This was the background to the assertion by my friend Leszek and other educated, prosperous members of the emerging entrepreneurial class that ‘the Jews’ were behind the petrol famine. Small wonder that, to someone from England, the Polish attitude seemed to make no sense at all.

  In Kraków itself a population of almost 60,000 Jews in 1939 was reduced to a handful within five years. Thereafter the ghetto, known as Kazimierz, was left to rot, and in 1990 was still in a condition of complete decay. Later, due at least in part to the world-wide success of Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, the district was brought back to life. Feeding from the curiosity of cineastes and the troubled fascination of the outside world with the fate of the Jews, the city authorities have successfully incorporated Kazimierz into Kraków’s tourist menu. Synagogues and some of the fine old merchants’ houses have been restored, the covered food market has been resuscitated; bakeries, cafés, bars and kosher restaurants have opened and flourish.

  Ten minutes’ walk from Oskar Schindler’s factory is the Galician Museum, which records the nemesis of the liquidated millions in oral testimony and photographs. The presentation is deliberately dispassionate, the effect crushing. Some of the images – the chimneys, the chambers, the watchtowers, the hollow-chested, hollow-eyed, stick-limbed victims – are familiar. Others make their point through their seeming innocuousness. There is a pond at Auschwitz in which the ash of incinerated Jews was dumped; a furniture store in a provincial town which was once the synagogue; a forest scene near Rzeszów concealing a mass grave; a field near Szczawnica covering a Jewish cemetery; hummocks of grass and copses in place of the Zasław camp near Lesko, where thousands died and thousands more were processed on their way to the extermination centre at Bełżec.

  Lesko is a small town in south-east Poland, overlooking the River San. These days its main function is to serve as a gateway to the Bieszczady national park, which extends to the border with Ukraine. In 1939 around 60 per cent of its population was Jewish, and it was a celebrated centre of Chasidism. Jewish politicians served on the town council. There were Jewish schools, Jewish societies, Jewish businesses. The prosperous townsfolk built a fine, handsome synagogue and had inscribed on the façade a quotation from Genesis: ‘And he was afraid and said: “How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the House of God and this is the gate of Heaven.”’

  Within three years, four centuries of Lesko’s Jewish heritage was erased. Most of its Jewish population died at Bełżec, although a few managed to escape across the San to the east and survived. There are no Jews left there now. The synagogue, carefully restored, houses a gallery displaying the work of local artists and an office of the Polish hiking association.

  Down the road from the synagogue is the gate to the cemetery. Two thousand gravestones are spread around a shaded hillside. The oldest of them, dating from 1548, bears an inscription in Hebrew: ‘Here rests the God-fearing Eliezer, son of the Rabbi Meszulem, blessed be the memory of the righteous.’ Some of the stones stand upright, others lean in attitudes of defeat or exhaustion, or lie prone among the nettles and ground elder. Paths wind beneath the branches of oaks, sycamores and silver birches. Fly-catchers dart from trunk to trunk, feet clasping the bark, tiny beaks searching out the insects. But the birdsong hardly dents the silence. There is no one left to tend these graves. Those who would, in the normal course of events, have done so were disposed of.

  Inside the gate there is a monument to those who found no resting place of their own. The inscription, in Polish and English, reads: ‘Here lie remains of the Jews of Galicia and other lands murdered at Bełżec in 1942, reinterred here in 1995’.

  Chapter 6

  Holy river

  I SAID GOODBYE to Józef Jeleński at the bus station in Myślenice. The bus to Zakopane took the new highway south, following the valley of his poor, abused Raba. Sunshine washed the meadows and woods along the river. Ahead cloud hugged the Tatras.

  The look of the landscape seemed reassuringly familiar: the narrow strip fields wandering in whimsical lines up and down hills and dales. But it dawned on me that there had been a change, a big change. Twenty years before, these fields were jealously defended and diligently cultivated. Periodic attempts by the state to impose collectivisation according to the orthodox Marxist–Leninist model had been stubbornly resisted, and thus these holdings had remained enormously precious, both as sources of food and as symbols of independence.

  Now there was almost no ploughed earth, and there were no fields of potatoes, maize or other vegetables. The one crop was grass. Where someone had troubled to cut it, the surface was pale and studded with stooks that, from a distance, looked like green tombstones. But much of it had been left to wave in the wind. I saw one shepherd, in a rough woollen waistcoat and battered felt hat, directing one flock of sheep. Otherwise the countryside was empty.

  The situation of Zakopane, Poland’s favourite mountain town, has proved over time to be too glorious for its own good. It sits almost in the shadow of the High Tatras, at the head of a plateau that extends north to the junction of the two branches of the Dunajec in the town of Nowy Targ. Photographs from a century or so ago show two long, straight streets of wooden houses and barns, the mountains rearing behind, green, well-watered meadows all around: a place of fantastic, haunting beauty.

  Even then, though, Zakopane’s days as an isolated mountain village peopled by simple farmers, wood-carvers and fiddle-players were in the past, and the outsiders were taking over. The occupation was led in the first instance by doctors establishing sanatoriums where their consumptive patients could inhale the healing air of the mountains. They were followed by artists and intellectuals from Kraków, seeking inspiration from the scenery. The incomers swiftly seized upon the architecture, music and quaint customs of the Górale sheep farmers, and proclaimed the discovery of a pure and authentically Polish culture. The word was spread, the road was built, the railway came. Zakopane shed its innocence and soon grew accustomed to a new role.

  Today its resident population numbers about 20,000, much the same as 40 years ago. But its capacity for soaking up visitors has reached 100,000 and is still growing. Zakopane calls itself a town but it has no boundaries, no beginning and no end. Like urban bindweed, it has crept along every approach, propagating itself across its environs. Property prices are the same as in central Kraków and Warsaw. Every patch of land is a building plot.

  The guidebooks call Zakopane ‘bustling’. A stroll along its main thoroughfare, Krupówski Street, reveals the nature of the bustle, and a good deal about what Poles expect when they go on holiday. (It is, overwhelmingly, a Polish resort.) Beer and grilled meat. Amplified pseudo-Górale music. Shops selling folkloric tat, climbing and skiing gear. More grilled meat, more beer, louder music. And everything housed i
n gross parodies of the mountain-style architecture, wooden temples bristling with turrets, pinnacles, spires, festooned with machine-cut swags and curlicues and floral motifs, waxed and varnished to a honey-coloured burnish.

  This school of architecture – flamboyant or grotesque, according to taste – was founded by a painter and art critic from Kraków, Stanisław Witkiewicz. In the 1890s he was commissioned by a wealthy patron to build a house in the mountain style beside what is now Kościeliska Street, which runs south-west from the centre of Zakopane. The Willa Koliba was intended as a model for a new, national style of Polish architecture to be based on the traditions of the highland farmhouses. Of itself, Koliba, with its shingled roofs, recessed eaves, dormer windows and mighty interlocking beams, is a rather wonderful celebration of wood and its possibilities. The wealth of ornamentation and the craftsmanship of the fittings – including door handles, keyholes, furniture and cooking utensils – reveal the phenomenal skill of the carpenters, carvers and metalworkers assembled to create it. But its character is inescapably derivative and backward-looking. Instead of forging a new path, it served to legitimise the so-called ‘Zakopane style’ whose misbegotten offspring continue to disfigure the town.

  One of the rooms in the Willa Koliba contains a collection of the startling portraits churned out in enormous numbers by Witkiewicz’s even more celebrated son. This Witkiewicz was also christened Stanisław, but in his lifelong search for his own voice and artistic identity dubbed himself Witkacy. Painter, dramatist, novelist, philosopher, aesthete, sexual athlete, drinker and furious consumer of hallucinogenic drugs, Witkacy’s self-appointed mission was to shape his life into an absurdist commentary on the horrors and futilities of his age.