A Homecoming of Sorts: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Polish Roots

Dear Editor,

I was born in 1942, the year the Nazis decided to annihilate European Jewry. This mass murder might have included me and my entire family had not my grandparents come to the United States in an early wave of immigration. My paternal grandparents came from Przemysl, a town in eastern Poland near the Ukrainian border. My father told me the name of this town when he learned that the famous analyst, Helene Deutsch, also came from there. Otherwise, I knew nothing of my grandparents’ life in Poland.

When the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) announced that its annual meeting was to be in Krakow, I jumped at the chance to be the only one in my family to return to Poland in over a hundred years. But I was wary, based upon contemporary Poland’s reputation of being an anti-Semitic country without Jews combined with my negative impressions, while growing up, of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and the Warsaw Pact. My wife and children did not want to go and opted to visit France instead. But Poland was full of surprises and made a deep impression on me. It was a homecoming of sorts.

Between meetings, many on the Shoah (Hebrew for annihilation) and current Polish-Jewish relations, I toured the old Jewish section of Krakow called Kasimierz, the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and my ancestral town of Przemysl. In the places I went and from the people I met, I gained the impression that Poland was waking up from a long sleep, recovering from the German invasion, the Russian occupation, and the uneasy and uneven steps toward democracy and capitalism. Almost everyone I met had been touched in some awful way by World War II — they had relatives killed in Russia, German work camps, or Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many Poles were eager to find out about the Shoah, Judaica, and Israel.

In Kasimierz I saw the efforts to restore something of the Jewish culture of Krakow after almost 60 years. This effort has been underway for about eight years, led by the American Lauder Foundation and perhaps spurred by Spielberg’s movie, Schindler’s List, which was filmed in Kasimierz. Much of the Jewish culture I saw was being kept alive by Gentiles. The owners of the Jewish Book Store and several Jewish restaurants are not Jewish. A young blonde woman I met who teaches Yiddish to Polish students is not Jewish. The guides, knowledgeable about Judaica, are likewise not Jewish. On the other hand, I learned that there are Jews in Poland, some learning only recently that they were Jewish, having been hidden during the war. They are also contributing to a revival of Jewish life in Poland.

After Kasimierz I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was truly staggering to see a gas chamber, a crematorium, and the vast camp where 1.1 million Jews and several hundred thousand Roma (Gypsies), Poles, and others were murdered. Our guide was a 30-year-old blonde school teacher from the nearby town of Oswiciem. She devotes

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her summer to guiding groups through the camps even though she has a new baby. She only learned five years ago about the Birkenau part of the camp and the fact that so many Jews had been killed. Her required trip as a school child had only included Auschwitz where mostly Polish prisoners were housed in better conditions and comparatively few killed. In Auschwitz there are pictures of the Polish victims of the Nazis and a memorial to a nun (Jewish by birth) who was killed by the Nazis, but little outward sign that Auschwitz-Birkenau was primarily a death camp for Jews. The guide, however, pulled no punches and made certain we saw the Birkenau part and understood what it was. The ash from the crematoria, she observed, near tears, still can be found on the riverbanks nearby.

To complete my emotional roller coaster ride, I went the next day to Przemysl, hoping to find some trace of my grandparents’ life — Judaica preserved. The town is a pretty one, on the San River, with mountains visible to the east. There are two large statues of Polish heroes in a lovely town square — but little trace of the fact that the town had been 30% Jewish in 1939. The large New Synagogue is now the public library. Another synagogue is empty but still standing. The large Jewish cemetery, where my relatives may have been buried, was destroyed by the Nazis but has been partially restored. There is a small rose garden and some new headstones provided by families in recent years for those who died in the Shoah. But the rest of the cemetery is overgrown, with smashed headstones still where the Nazis left them. There was a ghetto in Przemysl, decreed by the Nazis in 1941 and “liquidated” in 1942, with most victims going to the Belzec death camp. Before this, 2,000 Jews were murdered in the city prison within the ghetto. This prison still operates. What Judaica there is exists in a Jesuit museum where there is a Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and some other Jewish religious artifacts. The nun who guides the museum tour proudly showed me paintings depicting the history of Przemysl with Jews figuring prominently since the 14th century. Today, however, there is little trace of Jews.

As a psychoanalyst and psychohistorian I have tried to make some kind of sense of these intense experiences. It is going to take me some time and a great deal more working over to do so. But a few things seem clear to me at this moment. World War II has had a continuing profound effect on the people of Europe, perhaps particularly of Poland, an effect which simply does not go away. The Shoah seems to be one of the defining events of our era — its effects are insidious and long-lasting. Poland, situated between Russia and Germany, is in a difficult geo-political situation. As democracy and capitalism come to Poland, so, inevitably, must an examination of its anti-Semitism as it struggles for a viable national identity. Some Polish people have started this painful examination with goodwill and remorse; some have not. Finally, a trip such as mine convinces me in a thoroughly emotional way that political events and historical process are made by people — good, bad, and indifferent — and that these events impact ordinary people in extraordinary ways, for generations to come.

John J. Hartman

University of Michigan

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