On the one hand, I felt eerily at home. On the other hand, the government had just passed a law making it illegal to blame Poland for any crimes committed in the Holocaust, and that doing so could result in incarceration. After decades of Soviet repression and Nazi conquest before that, the Poles were in a new nationalist phase. Their own victim status in World War II was important. The Polish underground was hugely popular, its anchor symbol graffitied across Warsaw buildings. People wore T-shirts with sleeve decorations that mimicked the resistance armband. A Home Army family legacy held great cache. In Kraków, a longtime exhibit about Jewish resisters in the ghetto was replaced by a broader non-Jewish war story. The Poles wanted to feel their heroism against the grand enemies.
And here I was, writing about this very issue. I felt connection and a new level of alienation and fear. Once again, a Poland of two extremes, just like many of the women described in their memoirs.
It is deeply troubling to make laws about what historical narratives are allowed to be told—it shows a rulership interested in propaganda, not truth. But I also understood that the Poles felt misunderstood. Warsaw had been decimated. The Nazi regime enslaved, terrorized, bombed, and killed many Christian Poles—Renia, after all, was jailed and tortured as a Pole, not a Jew. To be held responsible for the Holocaust did seem unfair, especially when the Polish government did not collaborate with Nazis and attempted to run a resistance faction—albeit one that was only mildly Jew friendly. Certainly, this claim is unjust to those who risked their lives to help Jews—a number that could be greater than we know. Those Poles had been silent about it under Soviet rule, but historian Gunnar S. Paulsson has argued that in Warsaw alone, seventy to ninety thousand Poles helped conceal Jews; this is a ratio of 3 to 4 Poles per hidden Jew. Some scholars have noted that Jews felt particularly hurt and betrayed by their Polish neighbors, and so their reports of Pole’s anti-Jewish behavior are emphasized in their testimonies. Then again, there were many Poles who did nothing, and, worse, many who turned on and turned in Jews, selling them to the Gestapo for pennies or a bit of sugar, blackmailing, profiteering, happily stealing property; many were antisemites and themselves perpetrators. I have tried to understand the Polish sentiment of victimhood without whitewashing the antisemitism, without playing a game of “who suffered more.”
Inspired by these women fighters’ memoirs, I began to see the importance of laying out stories that were multifaceted, telling tales that were not black and white, that ached in their ambivalence. History needs to account for complexities; we must all confront our pasts honestly, face the ways we are both victims and aggressors. Otherwise, no one will believe the storyteller, and we will write ourselves out of any real conversation. Understanding does not have to mean forgiving, but it is a necessary step for self-possession and growth.
*
“Carefulski!” I said to the driver, trying not to appear rude—not to mention, my Polish was slightly lacking—but it looked like the truck was headed straight for us. Fast.
In doing research for this book, I found myself on a tour de monde, in myriad unusual situations, as authors often do. Eating burekas with the daughters of ghetto fighters who were cross-examining me in the kitchen of their kibbutz workplace in the Galilee; New York City commemorative gatherings of Bundists who stood to sing “The Partisan Song” as if their anthem; poring over photos of forest ziemlankas at a French café in Montreal, making sure not to stain them with croissant-buttery hands; carrying my sleepy three-year-old down flights of stairs in a Kraków hotel during a five-in-the-morning fire alarm to the background of blaring Polish directives.
And now this: one of my last days, a pilgrimage to find Renia’s birthplace. I was carsick in the backseat of a cigarette-smoke-filled, decades-old Skoda with no power windows, power steering, or AC, soaked from the morning traipse through a thunderstorming tour of the Kamionka ghetto, where I hiked into drenched weeds to stand right on the site of Frumka’s fighter bunker. Afterward, we’d had a snack at a B?dzin “Jewish café” filled with Judaica and serving what was allegedly the Jewish dessert of sweet cheese, orange rind, syrup, and raisins—one I’d never heard of. （The restaurant had a reputation as a good local date spot.） We also stopped to see a refurbished prewar private prayer house, with glistening golden walls adorned with frescoes of Jewish tribes, uncovered a few years ago, by accident, by playing children—for decades, the room had been used for coal storage. Now the driver stopped smack in the middle of the road. In the middle of nowhere. Hour five of driving that day, with many more to go as I traced the sites of Renia’s story. My chauffeur was screaming in Polish into her phone; my guide, originally from Lithuania, was in the passenger seat, lighting the next cigarette for her before the last was done.