House of Glass Read online

  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 l
eave. 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.

  ‘In all Holocaust sites there is a tendency to emphasise the nation’s suffering and German culpability,’ Martin Winstone from the Holocaust Educational Trust told me in 2018:

  Auschwitz was one of the very few concentration camps where non-Jewish Poles were killed, so it’s not surprising Polish suffering is emphasised there – although, of course, far more Jews were killed there. But so much depends on political and social climates. Even just five years ago people would have said Poland was being really honest about its history. But with this government in power they are trying to limit discussions of Polish culpability, and these efforts aren’t actually aimed at the international community, but at the people in Poland – teachers, academics – who are trying to tell the true story. A huge amount of Polish identity is based on the idea that Poles were victims of the German occupation, but that doesn’t mean some of them didn’t also perpetrate it. Every country wants to have heroic narratives of the war, and what this all shows is how vulnerable historical truth is.

  Back in Chrzanow, we found the building where Anne-Laurence’s grandmother, Anna Ornstein, and the rest of the Ornstein cousins lived on Aleja Henrika. It was large and imposing, with fretted ironwork around the balconies, preventing any children from rolling off. It was painfully different from the crumbling semi-death trap where the Glasses lived, as described in Alex’s memoir. We eventually found the Glass family’s street, after figuring out it had been renamed from Kostalista to Lipstada. Their house had long since been torn down, which wasn’t a surp
rise – I hardly expected a condemned building from a century ago to still be standing. But what I saw around the corner made me stop and stare. There, on the side of a building just behind where the Glasses once lived, was fresh graffiti: ‘Anty Jude’. This was a tag from a fan of the Wisla football team, whose supporters refer to themselves as the ‘Anty Jude Gang’, in opposition to the Widzew team, which is associated with the Jewish community in the way Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is in England. The Anty Jude label is defended by supporters as mere larky banter – only the most po-faced seeker of victim status could confuse it with real anti-Semitism, they say. At a Polish league game in 2013 between Wisla and Widzew, there were chants of ‘Move on, Jews! Your home is at Auschwitz! Send you to the gas chamber!’ A Polish municipal prosecutor decided these were not criminal offences.[31]

  Not even being less than 20 kilometres from Auschwitz made this graffiti artist rethink leaving this tag. If anything, it may have encouraged them. My father winced when he saw it and looked away, but I think the Glasses would have appreciated the aptness of seeing this on their neighbour’s building in 2018. Almost a century after they left everything they had and knew to go to France, their old town – their old country – was still very much vindicating their decision.

  Sala in France, 1929.

  2

  THE GLASS SIBLINGS – Immigration

  Paris, 1920s–early 1930s

  OF COURSE, to the Glasses, their decision to move from Poland to Paris in 1920 felt utterly personal: their home town was suddenly under threat from violent pogroms; the Ornstein cousins were already in Paris so could help them once they arrived; Paris wasn’t unreachably far from Poland. This random set of circumstances, it seemed to them, happened to blow them towards the French capital.