House of Glass

Food became increasingly scarce in Chrzanow as the war went on and the Jews were used as the scapegoats for everyone’s suffering; Polish authorities started confiscating their goods, claiming, falsely, that they were trading on the black market. The local halls in town, where the Jews had often held cultural committee meetings, were suddenly off-limits to them.[9] Both Sender and Jehuda watched all this, and began talking more openly about leaving the town. Jakob laughed at their concerns, and insisted the Jews would be safe in Chrzanow, as they always had been. Little Sala, who had Jehuda’s quietude and Jakob’s gentleness, revered her three older brothers, and agreed with whichever one seemed to be taking charge, which was generally Jehuda. But any talk of leaving Chrzanow could only be talk for now: they weren’t going anywhere until the war ended and their father returned.

However it was becoming almost impossible for them to stay. In late October 1918 there were rumours that a pogrom was being planned, organised by the Polish authorities. On 5 November 1918, six days before the end of the war, the first town in the newly liberated Poland to suffer such an attack was Chrzanow.[10]

They came at night. The townspeople heard them before they saw them, ‘a savage screaming crowd that seemed like a monster. They were attacking animals, wild beasts from the guts of hell. From their distorted snouts came cries of a horrible hatred which I found impossible to understand,’ Sender wrote. Polish men and women tore through the town, ransacking the synagogues, smashing the Jewish shop windows. The Jews ran to their homes, frantically locking the doors behind them. The Glass family hid under a bed, both Sala, who was eight, and Chaya, forty-five, clinging to seventeen-year-old Jehuda in terror. After an hour or so of listening to the frightening noises outside, twelve-year-old Sender scrambled out from under the bed and, ignoring the cries of his family, ran out to join the few Jewish men who were attempting to fight back. In the dark, he tried to make out the faces, but they were so obscured by hate and fury they looked more like wild boars than humans to him – except one. As he watched the group charge up his street he looked at the leader and realised he recognised him: it was Jehuda’s former tutor, the Christian Pole who came over for dinner occasionally. As he looked closer, he recognised some more: people who came in every Sunday to go to church, the man who sometimes gave him a bit of cheese in the market, women who had bought sewing machines from his father. He saw a well-respected judge, Court President Wierszbyicki, he saw scholars, and he saw peasants and thugs – representatives of all sectors of Polish society and here they were, beating up his friends, trying to burn down his house and kill his family.

‘Something in me died in the face of this inhuman explosion of savagery,’ he later wrote. ‘From that day, my childhood was over.’

The pogrom lasted twenty-four hours, and Sender did as much as a young boy could to fight back, tripping the men as they charged in to ransack the empty stores, kicking their horses. At one point he was slashed across the forehead with a knife and, decades later, Sala could still remember her terror when her brother stumbled through their door in the morning, blinded by blood pouring into his eyes from his deep head wound, half-crazed with adrenalin; for the rest of her life she associated Poland with that vision of violence. In one night, almost all the town’s Jews were left destitute, their money and livelihoods taken from them by their own countrymen. When the war ended six days later, few celebrated.

From then on, attacks on Jews became common in Chrzanow and in the surrounding area, especially from the so-called ‘Polish liberation army’, which emerged after Poland’s liberation at the end of the war. Its members were known as ‘the Hallerchiks’ in honour of their leader General Haller, and they would roam through Chrzanow ripping the beards off any Jews they encountered, tearing the skin and laughing at the bloodied faces. If they came across a clean-shaven Jew, they would beat him for his lack of religiosity. They justified these attacks by citing the increasingly popular theory that Jews were not loyal to Poland, but were instead Bolsheviks, plotting to overturn the government. Neither the Hallerchiks nor the Chrzanovians could have known it at the time, and certainly the Glass family didn’t, but they were at the emerging forefront of a relatively new kind of anti-Semitism, one that would shape the twentieth century, and their own lives. And it would linger, like a strange stray black cloud, over the lives of their children and grandchildren.

The theory that Jews are political destabilisers, working against whatever country they live in, is a more modern and politically inflected form of anti-Semitism than the traditional and religiously based one, which held Jews responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion. It emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a reaction against the social and economic changes in Europe, stemming from the French Revolution, when the old monarchical hierarchies were toppled, followed by the spread of industrialisation and urbanisation across the Continent. These two enormous shifts combined to create a new liberal, capitalist social order, one in which citizenship was based on civic participation and equality, as opposed to bloodline and history – forward-looking rationalism over backward-looking nationalism.[11] Thus, Jews could be seen as citizens as opposed to outsiders. Opponents of the Enlightenment, however, argued for national purity, celebrating a country’s heritage as opposed to its modern future, and during the nineteenth century there was a rise in anti-Semitism, as those who failed to benefit from the new economy blamed the Jews. In 1845 the French writer Alphonse Toussenel claimed in Les Juifs, Rois de l’Époque: ‘Protestants and Jews … have controlled public opinion in order to favour trafficking and rigging the market, blocked every defence of royalty and of the people, put the producer and the consumer at their mercy so that in France the Jew reigns and governs.’

These beliefs were validated by the infamous 1903 document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which emerged just as the Glass children were being born. It claimed that a mysterious Jewish cabal was controlling governments and the media, and even though the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was quickly exposed as a hoax, it helped to forge the dominating anti-Semitic narrative of the twentieth century. This really began to take hold after the First World War, when nationalism escalated in response to the economic devastation across the Continent, although specific takes on it differed slightly. In one version of this theory, Jews are greedy money-hoarders who control a country’s government through their connections and wealth, puppet masters pulling the strings. In the other version, the one promoted by the Hallerchiks, Jews are communist revolutionaries looking to overthrow a country’s government. But the message of both versions is the same: Jews are political disruptors working against the people and for themselves, which is just a new take on the old idea that Jews are not really citizens of the country in which they were born, so cannot be trusted. In other words, anti-Semitism becomes another form of xenophobia.

This theory has retained a tenacious hold on the popular imagination, despite everything Jews endured in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century it can be seen in, for example, the right wing’s demonisation of George Soros, the Hungarian-American philanthropist and Holocaust survivor who has been vilified by the American,[12] Hungarian[13] and British far right[14] as a suspicious manipulator plotting to control the global order and bring chaos into the lives of peaceful citizens.[fn1]

[fn2]

The campaign for Brexit – which went on near simultaneously with the vilification of Soros, and crossed left and right party lines – would probably have appealed to the Hallerchiks, with its dreamy-eyed talk about hard borders, heritage and national purity. Nigel Farage, Brexit’s most influential architect, has long talked darkly about ‘the new world order’ and argued that ‘globalists have wanted to have some form of conflict with Russia as an argument for us all to surrender our national sovereignty and give it up to a higher global level.’[15] It takes some effort not to hear the echoes of the Hallerchiks’ insistence that Jews, those citizens of nowhere, were working against Poland for some kind of greater global domination, but Farage determinedly stuck his fingers in his ears and insisted any suggestion of anti-Semitism was ‘wide of the mark’.[fn3] From ‘Bolsheviks’ in the 1920s to ‘globalists’ in the 2010s, the euphemisms for anti-Semitic and nationalist beliefs might shift over time, but the underlying stories remain remarkably constant.

CONTRARY TO EVERYONE’S EXPECTATIONS, his wife’s presumably most of all, Reuben did return from the war, but only barely. He had fought in the Second Battle of the Piave River in June 1918, in which the Italian Army crushed the Austro-Hungarian Army. This battle was the beginning of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which almost 230,000 men were killed, but Reuben survived. He was, however, badly gassed, and his lungs damaged irrevocably. Somehow, he limped through the rest of the war, further depleting whatever strength his lungs had left, and returned home, where he walked in the door and collapsed in the front room.

When Reuben realised how poor his family had become in his absence, with Sender stealing food for the family table and Sala wearing rags, he forced himself to return to work. Reuben didn’t have a pension from the army, and the family desperately needed money, so he went back to hawking Singer sewing machines around the countryside. But there are few worse careers for a man with broken lungs than that of travelling salesman, schlepping through sooty towns on dirty trains in cold nights.

‘My father was very, very ill, and there was no medicine for him. As if we could afford medicine. He had to return to work, to continue his endless travels as a sewing machine salesman for a miserable little salary. Great sadness infected our home,’ Sender wrote.

Reuben did not last long at his job, but the sadness did. One night Reuben came back to the apartment after another trip, went to bed and never got up again. For the next few years he lay there, sick, in horrendous pain, racked with a violent cough that seemed to rip his lungs apart with every hack.

After the war the Glass family were still in their old home but in an utterly unfamiliar land. The deeply anti-Semitic National-Democratic (ND) Party was on the rise in Poland. At the Versailles Conference in January 1919 the Polish delegation, co-led by Roman Dmowski, co-founder of the ND Party, fought unsuccessfully against signing the minorities protections section of the Treaty of Versailles. Dmowski and the Polish politicians complained that it suggested Poland and the Polish people were oppressors as opposed to victims, which was how they saw themselves, and not without some merit. Poland was decimated after the war, after German, Austrian and Russian troops had marched back and forth across it, destroying railways and agriculture, and the ensuing poverty led people to look for targets to blame. Dmowski insisted, in familiar rhetoric, that ‘international Jewry’ was plotting Poland’s destruction, and the Catholic Polish media repeatedly and openly associated Jews with evil.[16] This did little to stem the attacks against Jews in Poland.

The Ornstein cousins had already left Chrzanow for Paris, and after the first pogrom the Glass family knew they had to go too. Like a strikingly high number of Jews in the early 1920s, Jehuda went to Prague to attend university,[17] which the family somehow managed to pay for. So Jakob was the first of the family to go to Paris, in 1920 when he was eighteen years old, followed shortly thereafter by fourteen-year-old Sender. But Chaya and Sala stayed behind with Reuben, as he could not survive the journey, and the three of them alone endured the terror of multiple pogroms and increasing anti-Semitism. Finally, in 1925, after years of pain, Reuben died.

For the rest of their lives, the Glass children referred to Reuben’s death as one of their most formative and traumatic experiences, despite all they later endured. Jakob and Sender were both living in Paris at this point, and the former wept for the only adult he knew who never berated him for his deficiencies, while Sender, who idolised his father, both despite and because he was so different from him, raged with fury against his death. Fifty years later, he dedicated his memoir to his father, ‘the man I loved most in my life’. Sala, still then only fourteen, cried for her father who had made her feel pretty and loved and safe. Chaya leaned on Jehuda more heavily than ever, demanding he come home from university to help her.

Jehuda didn’t cry when his father died. Instead he tucked his grief behind his implacable exterior, like the creased photo of his father that he hid inside his stiff wallet for the rest of his life. Almost thirty years after Jehuda died, I found that wallet, in a storage box in the basement of his daughter Danièle’s building. It had slipped into the lining of an old suitcase and I happened to discover it by accident. I pulled it out and looked through it, hoping to find something that would reveal a little of Jehuda’s later life: receipts, perhaps, or scrawled notes. But the only thing in it was the photo of Reuben, a century old by that point, the only memory Jehuda kept on him at all times, until he, too, was a memory.

Almost as soon as Reuben died, Chaya and Sala went to Paris. The world in which the Glass children had grown up, the eastern European Jewish shtetl, based on community but also dependent on peaceful interactions with outsiders, was dying. Like Reuben, it had no place in this harshly emerging modern era. So both he and it were buried in Chrzanow’s Jewish cemetery, filled with other Jews whose families, if they were lucky, were forging new lives across Europe, leaving behind neglected gravestones and much more.

None of the Glasses ever returned to Chrzanow, except one, once. In the 1970s, Sender – now known as Alex – visited Poland on a trip organised by some of his fellow veterans from the Foreign Legion. He went, very reluctantly, back to a country he associated only with death, pogroms and hunger. But he went because he was interested to see how many Jews were left where he grew up, and how they were living. What he saw devastated him. The town, which he remembered as surrounded by forests and countryside, was, he wrote, now ‘an open, heavily polluted field’. The only things he recognised were ‘the brutish mugs’ of the Polish people he saw in the market place – otherwise, everything from his childhood was gone: his home, the synagogues, the Jews.

Chrzanow fell into German hands almost the day the Second World War was declared, 1 September 1939. This was not a surprise to the Chrzanovians: the month before they’d watched the long caravans of desperate people marching down the long highway between Katowice and Krakow, which ran through Chrzanow, as civilians who lived near the German and Polish borders fled into the countryside for safety. Adolf Hitler had been pushing the myth that communism was a Jewish plot for almost a decade, borrowing the story from anti-Semitic nationalist movements in various countries, including Poland. Meanwhile, the theory that Polish Jews were working for the Soviets, and had even been responsible for the Great Purge of 1936–8 in which up to 1.2 million people were killed in Russia, had become so widespread it was generally assumed to be fact, and Polish nationalists referred to Jews collectively as traitors.[18] Chrzanow was infused with panic, and the wealthier and cannier sent their female relatives, children and valuables out of the city to safety.[19] But many did not. Because so many of the town’s Jews knew and did business with the Germans, they refused to believe that the Germans would actually hurt them, their long-time neighbours, friends and colleagues.[20] For neither the first nor the last time, the Jews were over-optimistic about the benevolence of outsiders. On 4 September 1939 the Nazis entered the city and immediately began to terrorise the Jews. But as much as the actions of their neighbours and former colleagues shocked them, an even bigger surprise to the Chrzanovian Jews was how keen their countrymen, the Poles, were to betray them.

‘They were the ones who pointed out the Jews to the German soldiers, who couldn’t tell the difference between Jews and Poles. They didn’t know any German but with sign language they pointed out “Jude!”’, one resident of the town later recalled.[21] More than 15,000 Jews – almost the entirety of the town’s Jewish population[22] – died in the Holocaust, rounded up and sent just down the road to their sister town, which many of them would have visited before, where they were murdered.[23] Ironically, the pogroms that had so terrified my grandmother and her family had actually saved their lives, because they propelled the family out of Poland before the 1930s. Had they stayed, they almost certainly all would have been killed.

I WENT TO CHRZANOW in the spring of 2018, forty years after Alex visited, almost exactly a hundred years after the Glass family started to leave. My father travelled there with me, as did our relative Anne-Laurence Goldberg, Anna Ornstein’s granddaughter. Chrzanow itself wasn’t quite as grim as when Alex had visited, when it was still under Communist rule: there were typical eastern European tower blocks around the outside, but also pretty streets in the centre, bordered with houses freshly painted in dusky pinks, yellows and greens, as they had been back when the Glasses lived there. Yet it still feels like a town from which something’s been sucked out, and what’s been sucked out are the Jews. In 1920 Jews represented 55.5 per cent of the town’s population. Today, they officially represent less than 1 per cent, although our guide admitted that number was more likely to be closer to zero.

My father, Anne-Laurence and I walked around the town, retracing the stories Alex told in his memoir. The square, where Chaya used to wash the dishes and do the shopping, is still there, but all the Jewish shops that bordered the square have gone. Of the town’s twenty synagogues not a single one remains. The Great Synagogue, where the Glasses prayed, was destroyed in the 1970s to make room for a car park. All that remains of it is a broken concrete wall, heavily graffitied. In fact, the Jewish cemetery where Reuben is buried, which somehow survived the war, is pretty much the only sign that Jews ever lived there at all. He lies in a quiet corner, shaded by the former Galician forest where his children once ran. He is near his daughter Mindel, who died as a child; his father Jakob’s gravestone lies on the other side of the cemetery, next to the great family tomb for the wealthy Halberstam family, like a humble sentryman keeping guard. Reuben was not one for making public statements in life, but in death the deeply carved Hebrew letters on his tombstone act as an uncharacteristically defiant show of Chrzanow’s Jewish legacy.

The week before my father and I booked our tickets to go to Chrzanow in 2018, the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, signed into law an anti-defamation bill, making it illegal to attribute responsibility or complicity for the Holocaust to the Polish state.[24] This law, President Duda said in a national broadcast, ‘protects Polish interests … our dignity, the historical truth … so that we are not slandered as a state and as a nation’. In a century-spanning echo of Dmowski’s complaint in 1919, Duda objected to the idea that Poland was ever an oppressor. Instead, he said, stories about Poland during the Second World War should focus on Poland’s suffering and glory.

This bill was not a surprise to anyone who had followed the Law and Justice Party since they came to power. In 2016 President Duda threatened to take away a national honour from Jan Tomasz Gross, an American citizen born in Poland and one of the world’s experts on the Holocaust.[25] Gross wrote in an essay that the Poles ‘killed more Jews than [the] Germans [did]’, a claim other historians have backed up as correct. Yet Duda insisted this was ‘an attempt to destroy Poland’s good name’, and while in Poland Gross was hauled in for five hours of questioning.[26]

No doubt, Poland endured one of the most brutal occupations of any country invaded by the Germans, and the Poles, who the Nazis considered to be Untermenschen (inferiors), suffered horrifically. Yet it is also true that part of the reason 90 per cent of Poland’s Jews were killed during the war, one of the highest percentages in Europe, is that they were denounced, hunted and killed by the Poles themselves, before, during and even after the war. Just one year after the end of the Second World War, on 4 July 1946, soldiers and civilians led an attack on the Jews in the Polish town of Kielce, killing more than forty Jews. They had survived the Holocaust, returned to what was in many cases their homeland, only to be then killed by their fellow citizens. After what became known as the Kielce pogrom, many of the surviving Polish Jews left the country and few have ever returned. Before the Second World War, more than 3 million Jews lived in Poland, the biggest Jewish population in Europe; today it is estimated to be about ten thousand. By comparison, more than fifteen thousand Jews live in Miami Beach and more than fifty thousand Jews live in the north London borough of Barnet.

Poland had been a deeply anti-Semitic country long before the Nazis turned up, as the Glass family knew well. So while there certainly were brave Polish individuals who tried to help the Jews during the war, they were very much the exception.[27] Even after the war, many in eastern Europe, including Poland, continued to refer to Jews as Bolsheviks, suggesting that what happened to them was in some way their fault, and certainly not Poland’s. That mentality still exists today: by outlawing suggestions of Polish complicity President Duda and his Law and Justice Party are trying to create ‘a narrative of heroic Polish victimhood’, the New York Times said,[28] one that absolved them of any wrongdoing in the Second World War. An official to the President said any Jews who criticised the law, who claimed that Polish anti-Semitism helped to enable the Holocaust happening on Polish land, were merely ‘ashamed [that] many Jews engaged in collaboration during the war’.[29]

Just down the road from Chrzanow is the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial. While my father, Anne-Laurence and I were in Chrzanow, the nationalist and pro-government Polish media was accusing the museum of downplaying the deaths of Poles in the camp and focusing instead on what was described as ‘foreign narratives’ – in other words, the Jewish stories.

‘Foreign, and not Polish narratives reign at Auschwitz. Time for it to stop,’ wrote Barbara Nowack, a former local councillor for the Law and Justice Party. The home of at least one guide at the site was vandalised in March 2018, with someone spray-painting ‘Poland for the Poles’ across the outside alongside a Star of David equated with a swastika.[30]

None of this would have surprised the Glasses. It did, however, surprise me. Because I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau before visiting Chrzanow with my father and Anne-Laurence (whose grandparents, Anna and Samuel Goldberg, had been killed there), what struck me was how much emphasis was placed on the Polish victims. Seventy-five thousand non-Jewish Poles were killed in Auschwitz, which is shocking, but so were the 1.1 million Jews, and looking around at the exhibitions, signs and tours it felt like the memorial was suggesting some kind of equivalence between the Polish and Jewish suffering in the camp. There is even a gift shop – yes, a gift shop – in the car park outside, run by the local municipality, which sells Polish tourist tat. Because nothing makes one more desirous of buying an ‘I Heart Poland’ coffee mug than a trip to Auschwitz. ‘An Auschwitz gift shop’ is surely the ultimate Jewish joke, and its intention is clear: Auschwitz, it is saying, is about Polish victimhood and triumph. The Jews were a side issue.