After Such Knowledge

In the beginning was the war. That was my childhood theory of origins, akin perhaps to certain childhood theories of sexuality. For me, the world as I knew it and the people in it emerged not from the womb, but from war. The theory was perhaps understandable, for I was born in Poland, in 1945, that is, on the site of the Second World War's greatest ravages; and so soon after the cataclysm as to conflate it with the causes of my own birth.

Even in Cracow, where I grew up and which had escaped physical destruction, traces of war were everywhere visible: in the injured bodies of war veterans; in the orphaned children I met on our street, and whose condition seemed to me the most pitiable; in the pervasive presence and consciousness of death. Everyone I knew had lost relatives, intimates, friends. My parents lost their entire families: their own parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, and aunts. On the Jewish high holidays, when our small family went to one of Cracow's old synagogues, we met a community in mourning. The facts of death were so ubiquitous that they seemed both to precede and to supersede the facts of life.

When I was about five, my father took me to Warsaw, a city still lying largely in ruins. We walked along stretches of smooth pavement, but all around us there was stony rubble and skeletal scaffoldings. Metal columns stuck through jagged remains of walls. Window frames gaped, revealing rooms cut in half and filled with debris. Sometimes, the pavement along which we walked gave out as well, and my father and I stumbled as we picked our way across rubble-covered streets. The greyness, the mounds and crumbling hillocks of stone, had an almost lyrical picturesqueness; but the scene was also profoundly, piercingly sad.

Along with the Renaissance architecture of Cracow and the flowering meadows and forests of the Polish countryside, the ruined cities were part of my primal landscape—as, through films and photographs, they became part of my generation's primal iconography. Some of us grew up in or near ruined cities, some of us knew them only through tale and imagery. But all of us born in those first years came into a torn, ravaged world. It is no wonder that so many postwar artists have found fascination in abandoned sites, decayed structures, rust, rubble, peeling paint; the signs and traces of destruction. And it is no wonder that so many have been tempted to see in such subjects a kind of melancholy beauty.

War penetrated the very fabric of my childhood. It interwove itself into other, more sunny sensations with a somber poetry of its own. But it was also the heavy ground of being, the natural condition to which the world tended, and could at any moment revert. Everything else was a precarious aftermath, or maybe an interregnum. In retrospect, I can see that I spent much of my childhood waiting for the war. Waiting for it to manifest itself again, to emerge from where it lurked with its violent, ravaging claws. Waiting for danger and destruction, which were the fundamental human condition, to trample the fragile coverlet of peace. I kept anticipating, with a fearful anxiety I took as normal, the death of my parents. After all, every one of the adults who had once formed our family group, and to whom my parents so often referred, was dead. Life itself, for children born into families like mine, could seem a tenuous condition, a buffeted island in the infinite ocean of death. The Holocaust was not yet distinguished from "war" in anyone's mind; but the intimations of mortality that followed from it were part of my earliest perceptions of the world as I transformed the felt traces of a historical event into a kind of story about the basic elements and shape of the world, a childish mythos or fable.

My parents endured the terrible years in the small town of Załośce, situated about two hundred miles east of Lvóv (now Lviv), in what was before the war the Polish part of the Ukraine. That was where they had both grown up, in their still Orthodox, premodern shtetl families; and that was where they remained, through the war and the annihilation of their families and community. They survived with the help of local Ukrainian and Polish people, and by eluding the hostility of others. During much of the war, they were hidden in the attic of a primitive cottage belonging to Ukrainian peasants who were risking their own lives in order to shelter my parents. Their survival was wrested from the most improbable odds. The statistics of extermination in their region of Europe were among the worst. When the war ended and Załośce, with all of Polish-Ukrainian territory, was declared to be part of the Soviet Union, my parents made the wise decision to head for the nearest Polish city, which happened to be Cracow. They had just gone through an inferno of hiding and hunger, of fear and hairsbreadth escapes, of hearing regular, devastating news about the murders of their closest and most loved relatives. I was born several months later.

It is no exaggeration to say that I have spent much of my life struggling with this compressed cluster of facts. They were transmitted to me as my first knowledge, a sort of supercondensed pellet of primal information—the kind from which everything else grows, or explodes, or follows, and which it takes a lifetime to unpack and decode. The facts seemed to be such an inescapable part of my inner world as to belong to me, to my own experience. But of course, they didn't; and in that elision, that caesura, much of the postgeneration's problematic can be found.

The Holocaust, in my first, childish reception, was a deeply internalized but strangely unknown past. It has become routine to speak of the "memory" of the Holocaust, and to adduce to this faculty a moral, even a spiritual value. But it is important to be precise: We who came after do not have memories of the Holocaust. Even from my most intimate proximity I could not form "memories" of the Shoah or take my parents' memories as my own. Rather, I took in that first information as a sort of fairy tale deriving not so much from another world as from the center of the cosmos: an enigmatic but real fable.

Nor was it exactly memories that were expressed at first by the survivors themselves. Rather, it was something both more potent and less lucid; something closer to enactment of experience, to emanations or sometimes nearly embodiments of psychic matter—of material too awful to be processed and assimilated into the stream of consciousness, or memory, or intelligible feeling.

Not that my parents or others within the war-ravaged community wanted to dwell on the recent past. The war—it was not yet the Holocaust—was not my parents' or their friends' main theme or conscious focus. Their energies, their efforts, were pointed towards the present. That mix of carpe diem energy and carpe diem cynicism that was the characteristic postwar mood was reflected in particular personalities, and I think that many of us second-generation children were awed by our elders' vitality in those postwar years. After emerging from their hidden hells, after making their epic treks and their escapes, the survivors wanted to snatch experience somehow and anyhow, to live and create new lives. People who lost families started new ones. Those who lost homes found new places of habitation. From my childhood, I remember the merriment of conversation when my parents got together with their Jewish friends, the zest with which they talked of books and clothes (so scarce and valued in Poland of that time), and the films they had seen. To those who had lived through the war, the difference between life and death must have seemed extremely well marked just then—even as it seemed very liminal to those of us who had just come into the world.

In the world at large, one could also sense a dynamism—perhaps the sheer surge of a collective life-instinct coming through after so much death—that coexisted with the sadness so closely as to be braided into it. In Poland, as in all of Eastern Europe, there was also a kind of official optimism, a sense of hardship overcome, and of triumphant, Soviet-sponsored victory. On the fifteen-minute newsreels shown before the movies we went to on Sunday mornings, the ruined skeletons of buildings were replaced by images of buildings going up, filmed against sunny skies, with teams of purposeful and thick-muscled workers placing brick upon brick with euphoric, Stakhanovite speed, and sometimes straightening up to look far into the horizon, masculine hand put up against the brow to shield the eyes from the promise of the sun. Rebuilding, reconstruction: the mood, or idea, that governed much of the postwar world, though not everywhere as tendentiously, as cynically in fact, as in Eastern Europe. Much of the globe, after all, had just emerged from an orgy of killing and was ready to start again with a strange, almost euphoric vitality.

But there were also—the postwar mood was potently complex—images of brute mute tanks on the newsreels, making their slow progress between enfilades of cheering people; and there was footage of soldiers on parade, marching to the accompaniment of the peculiarly energetic tones of that period's news commentary, voices whose theatrical decisiveness suggested that the times called for vigilance and iron resolve. Armies were still very much with us, and the fear of war, it seemed to me, was always in the air, although the adults often tried to reassure us children that nobody would go to war so soon after the cataclysm had ended; that people had suffered too much from its evils; that perhaps, after what had happened, no one would go to war ever again.

A charged, mixed atmosphere, then, a determined turn to life despite and against all other evidence. But for those who had actually endured the Shoah, the ghastly evidence could not be fully suppressed, the affirmation (or was it a denial?) could be sustained only so far. The overwhelming experiences, still raw, still palpably present, kept breaking through into the ordinary day. It is increasingly clear that the myth of survivors' muteness, of a blank, blanket silence, was largely a misconception. A few survivors were determined never to talk about what they had lived through; but others wanted to give expression to the horror, or perhaps couldn't help doing so. Whether the world wanted to listen was another question. Much of it didn't; and so, survivors, or at least those among them who were willing to touch on their experiences in words, tended to talk among those from whom they could hope for some understanding—fellow survivors, or others whom they could trust.