Poland stumbles over its Jewishpast

Benjamin Paloff

8 On November 19, 1942, the great Polish author Bruno Schulz left his home in the Jewish ghetto of Drohobycz—according to the generally accepted version of the story, he had gone to fetch a ration of bread—and was shot to death by a German SS officer. The author of two critically acclaimed short-story collections and a graphic artist of growing renown, Schulz had survived the Nazi occupation as long as he did under the protection of Felix Landau, a vicious Gestapo officer who fancied himself a patron of the arts. Landau was fond of Schulz’s drawings, which frequently depict dreamlike scenes of sexual humiliation, and he had ordered Schulz to decorate his son’s playroom with images from fairy tales. During the last year of his life, Schulz received special permission to leave the ghetto to paint Landau’s frescoes. It has been said that, shortly before his death, Schulz was planning to leave Drohobycz, a provincial Polish town now located in western Ukraine, once and for all—so-called Aryan papers had already been prepared for him. But on this day in November, which would become known locally as Black Thursday, the SS shot more than 250 Jews at random in the street, Schulz among them. Some accounts specify that Schulz’s murderer was Karl Günther, Felix Landau’s rival in the local Gestapo, who wanted to get back at Landau for killing his Jewish dentist. “You killed my Jew,” Günther is reported to have told Landau later. “Now I’ve killed yours.”

For thisreason, Schulz has lately been leaving a bitter taste in the mouthsof some of his Polish admirers, who are now being forced to questionwhether he was theirs in the first place. In February 2001, a youngGerman documentary filmmaker named Benjamin Geissler traveled toDrohobycz with his father, Christian, to document the latter’slongtime preoccupation with Bruno Schulz and the mystery of themurals Schulz painted for Felix Landau in 1942. For almost 60 years,no one had been able to locate Schulz’s last artworks, and theywere presumed lost for good. But to the astonishment of scholars andSchulz enthusiasts around the world, Geissler and his small crewended up finding the frescoes, which emerged as shadows from behindlayers of whitewash in the pantry of what is still a privateresidence. The discovery made international headlines, andspecialists arrived from Poland to examine the find—polychromesdepicting colorful, fanciful figures, some with faces bearing astriking resemblance to Felix Landau and his mistress.

Then, almostas quickly as the images had appeared, they were gone. In May 2001,representatives from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ andHeroes’ Remembrance Authority, in Jerusalem, arrived in Drohobyczand hastily removed those portions of Schulz’s murals that hadalready been uncovered by the Polish art conservationists. Yad Vashemleft behind what had yet to be uncovered, destroying the integrity ofthe composition. Within just a few weeks, the frescoes had twice madeinternational headlines. They are likely to do so again in March2005, when the portions of Schulz’s frescoes that disappeared willfinally receive their first public showing in Yad Vashem’s newmuseum complex in Jerusalem.

The circumstances of Yad Vashem’soperation remain in dispute. The organization has repeatedly assertedthat itacted openly and in cooperation with the Drohobyczauthorities, and that its first interest was the preservation andsafe conduct of Schulz’s work. However, no one involved in themurals’ discovery and initial restoration, including the Polish artconservationists and Benjamin Geissler, who first informed Yad Vashemof the murals’ existence, had been told of Yad Vashem’s plansbefore the Schulz fragments left the country. In the aftermath, theUkrainian government threw together a crude criminal investigationinto corruption among the local Drohobycz authorities, culminatingthis summer in a peculiar epilogue: according to Polish news reports,the government of Ukraine has formally announced that the Schulzfrescoes already in Israel are a goodwill “gift” to Yad Vashem.In return, Yad Vashem is reportedly helping to finance the officialestablishment of a Schulz museum in Drohobycz.

Since the partitionof Bruno Schulz’s murals, public opinion in both Poland and Ukrainehas raged against what is generally perceived as the theft ofnational treasures. But for Poles in particular, Yad Vashem’sactions carry a weighty significance. They suggest that dying becauseone is a Jew negates the relevance of having lived largely as aPole—and, harsher still, that Jewishness and Polishness have beendeemed fundamentally irreconcilable. In response to mountinginternational outrage, Yad Vashem posted a public statement on itsWeb site—one of very few official comments on theincident—asserting a “moral right” to Schulz’s work. Theconfrontational final sentence addresses Poland directly: “Yad Vashem is of the opinion that if Poland feels that they have aninterest in assets that they see as their own, a discussion can beinitiated regarding assets—cultural and other—which are part ofthe Jewish legacy in general and the Holocaust-era in particular, andare spread throughout Poland.”

This closing resonates lesswith “moral right” than with an unsettling attitude ofyou-took-ours, we-take-yours, and no one in Poland really knows whatto make of it. Among the Polish intelligentsia, there is clearskepticism of Ukraine’s announcement that Schulz’s murals are agift-after-the-fact, and there is open resentment of theimplication—not very well masked by Yad Vashem’s position onSchulz—that Poles were complicit in the deaths of their Jewishneighbors and have forfeited their right to the Jewish aspect oftheir national heritage.

In Poland, they love Bruno Schulz.They want him back. 

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From the beginning, the debate over theownership of the Schulz frescoes—and the Schulz legacy—has beenplagued by politically motivated oversimplifications that haveprevented many of its participants from appreciating the complexityof Schulz’s identity. Although his Jewish roots certainly had apowerful impact on his literary and artistic imagination, Schulz wasnot an observant member of any religious community. He is reported tohave loved ritual; leading his classroom in Catholic prayer, he wasknown to cross himself reverently, though he was not a Catholic. Hewrote in Polish and German; he did not speak Yiddish. From 1935 to1937 he was engaged to Józefina Szeliº-ska, an enchanting Catholicschoolteacher, and went so far as to withdraw from the JewishCommunity of Drohobycz to facilitate their wedding, though Schulzultimately—and in great despair—broke the engagement because hefound a creative life beyond Drohobycz unimaginable. The town itselfwas a fluid, indefinable zone on the border between rural andindustrial, old world and new. Throughout his life, Schulz wasinextricable from his hometown, where he made a meager living beforethe war as an art teacher at a local high school. To a large extent,Drohobycz was the source of his identity crisis: born a subject ofthe Austro-Hungarian empire and later a citizen of independentPoland, Schulz found himself living briefly under Soviet occupationat the beginning of the war and was murdered because he was a Jew intheThird Reich. His body now rests in an unmarked grave in Ukraine, justa few miles from the eastern edge of the European Union. Remarkably,this is the story of a man who spent most of his life in oneplace.

The unexpected removal of portions of the Schulzfrescoes to Israel both compounds an already irresolvable identityand fits resonantly into a biography whose underlying theme is loss.Schulz’s richly lyrical stories obsess over the slow demise of theauthor’s father and the mysterious world of old Jewish merchants herepresents. Beyond the two books Schulz managed to publish during hislifetime, he is believed to have completed a novel, The Messiah, anda long story in German, “Die Heimkehr” (The Homecoming). Thenovel’s manuscript, if it existed, would have been among variousdrawings and personal papers, including portions of his voluminouscorrespondence, that Schulz entrusted to friends when he was forcedinto Drohobycz’s ghetto in 1941; like the identity of itsprotector, the novel has been lost. In 1937, Schulz sent a copy of“Die Heimkehr” to Thomas Mann in the hope that the famousnovelist could help secure him an audience in the German-speakingworld. Mann never received the manuscript, and no copy remains.Schulz’s own body is lost: after his murder, a friend risked hislife to sneak out into the night, collect Schulz’s corpse from theplace where he was shot, and bury him in an unmarked grave. Sincethen, even the cemetery where Schulz was buried has beendestroyed.

It is no wonder, then, that Schulz’s identity hasproved so malleable. Full of aporias and ambiguities, Schulz’sbiography has become a compelling example of how the gaps in realhistory become occasions for invention, speculation, andappropriation. Consider Philip Roth’s 1985 novella The Prague Orgy;the Israeli novelist David Grossman’s See Under: Love; CynthiaOzick’s 1987 novel The Messiah of Stockholm; and the title story ofthe Polish writer Henryk Grynberg’s recent collection Drohobycz,Drohobycz (billed precariously in English as “True Tales from theHolocaust and Life After”). All these works—and this list ishardly exhaustive—feature some fictionalized version of Schulz,alive, dead, or in between. Such recastings of the real author as acharacter in someone else’s fiction have suited Schulz quite wellas a literary afterlife. Intriguing, perplexing, moving, and elusive,Schulz could belong to everyone by belonging to no one. UntilBenjamin Geissler discovered Schulz’s pictorial fairy tale, thenotion of “owning” Schulz had been a matter of defining one’sown relationship to his life and work, and the extraordinary varietyof ways in which Schulz has been reimagined by writers and artistsaround the world remains a testimony to this powerful mythos.

Themurals break this spell. They are objects to be claimed andpossessed, and interest in the frescoes exceeds any potential theymay have to commemorate the life of their maker. In 1992, to mark the100th anniversary of Bruno Schulz’s birth and the 50th anniversaryof his death, a community of Drohobycz survivors living in Israelcommissioned two busts of Bruno Schulz, one to be placed inDrohobycz, the other at Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem refused the offer,saying they had no space for such a monument. (Similarly, there havebeen no serious challenges to Poland’s possession of Schulz’sextant letters and drawings, virtually all of which are held in theAdam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature and the Museum of the JewishHistorical Institute, both in Warsaw.) But the Schulz murals haveinvited claims from many interested parties: they are a link toUkraine’s tangled past, products of Nazi brutality and slave labor,and the last surviving work of a major European writer andartist.

Among the more interesting journalistic forums to emergefrom the discussion of Schulz’s identity and the proper place forthe preservation of his newly discovered frescoes was a three-partdiscussion printed in June 2001 in Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’sleading daily newspaper. In one column, Uri Huppert, a Polish-Jewishcolumnist living in Israel, argues the case for Yad Vashem. In anadjacent editorial, Piotr Pacewicz, a Polish journalist, arguesagainst the murals’ removal. The third section presents a briefinterview with Marek Podstolski, Bruno Schulz’s great-nephew andthe last surviving member of his family, who notes simply that Schulzwas—and considered himself to be—a Polish writer with noinclination toward Zionism. The piece was appropriately entitled“Whose is Schulz?,” and it pointed to a number of the issues atstake in delineating Schulz’s legacy: To what extent did Schulzself-identify as a Pole or as a Jew? Was Drohobycz the source of hiscreative energies—and therefore inextricable from his art? Does theHolocaust and its memory belong to any one group, or is it somethingthat can—and must—be shared?

These are old, fundamentalquestions that one encounters time and again in the vastness ofSchulz scholarship, the overwhelming majority of which has been donein Poland. It is only with the discovery of Schulz’s lost muralsthat the same questions create a painful intersection betweenliterature and politics. For Huppert, as for many who have weighed inon the Schulz question, Schulz is defined by the manner of his death.Huppert writes: “Let’s imagine that during the occupation BrunoSchulz found himself in Warsaw, got out of the ghetto, and perishedin the Warsaw Uprising like a lot of Poles, including those of Jewishbackground: that would have been a Polish death.” But in hisrebuttal, Pacewicz suggests that while Schulz’s having died as aJew is indisputable, using this fact to support Yad Vashem’sactions is deeply problematic: “The problem of the Holocaust—forJews and for us—is the matter of admitting others to one’s ownpain. It is a question of the ownership of suffering: is it possibleto consider Jewish and non-Jewish grief over the Holocaust as havingequal value?”

The faults with both arguments are extremelytelling. On the one hand, Huppert’s remarks render the life of theartist, including his own self-concept as revealed in a considerablebody of work, irrelevant to the question of his identity. On theother hand, Pacewicz trips over a persistent stumbling block in thePolish treatment of interethnic relations. Living in an almostcompletely homogenous society, Polish intellectuals talk about racerelations without any real appreciation of the constant strivingtoward mutual understanding that life in a multicultural societyentails. “Admitting others to one’s own pain” remains a purelytheoretical exercise when there are no others around.

Inspite of this naiveté, the attitude expressed by Pacewicz isundeniably the more idealistic and, ultimately, the more meritoriousbecause it is indicative of a greater sense, palpable in many Polishurban centers, that Poles are more than ready to come to terms withtheir Jewish heritage. Whether or not it is possible for Poles toembrace their Jewish past in a way that would be acceptable to Jewsin Israel and the diaspora, and whether they should even be allowedto try, is at the heart of the question “Whose is Schulz?” And onthis particular issue the administrators of Yad Vashem have clearlymade up their minds.

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The controversy surrounding the Schulzfrescoes stems from Yad Vashem’s unilateralism and the sense amongSchulz experts—almost all of whom are Polish or specialists inPolish literature—that the frescoes’ removal was both an affrontto the artist’s memory and a major setback in efforts to reconcileCentral Europe with its Jewish history. Benjamin Geissler’sdocumentary account of the frescoes’ discovery, Finding Pictures,has only fueled the debate. It is a remarkable, if controversial,film, beginning as the story of a quixotic personal quest, invitingthe audience to watch as the film crew unexpectedly uncovers theSchulz polychromes, and then mourning the frescoes’ seconddisappearance.

For his part, Geissler makes no secret of hisdispleasure with Yad Vashem’s actions. Since the film’scompletion, Geissler—now at work on a sequel, entitled LostPictures—has actively campaigned for the repatriation of Schulz’smurals and the establishment in Drohobycz of an international BrunoSchulz center. Signatories to Geissler’s open letter include theGerman Nobel laureate Günter Grass and the Polish poet JerzyFicowski, Schulz’s biographer and most ardent promoter.

Since1942—the year he first read Schulz, and the year Schulz waskilled—Jerzy Ficowski has dedicated his life to retracing BrunoSchulz’s. When Regions of the Great Heresy, his authoritativebiography of Schulz, finally appeared in English in 2003, Ficowskiappended a special chapter addressing Yad Vashem’s actions inDrohobycz, stating that when he heard what they had done, he took thereports for “empty gossip, most likely invented to shake the moralrenown of Yad Vashem.” Ficowski, like many of those most intimatelyinvolved in the interpretation and promotion of Schulz’s oeuvre,has decried the removal of Schulz’s frescoes.

Yet public outcryover Yad Vashem’s actions has been far from unanimous, and from thevery beginning the issue has reached beyond the confines of Schulzscholarship. Polemical essays and open letters have abounded,presenting strident arguments that often veer away from Schulz’slife and art to questions of Jewish identity in Europe, thepossibility of reconciliation between the victims and perpetrators ofgenocide, and who has the “moral right” to the products of Jewishslave labor under the Nazis.

The frescoes at the center of thiscontroversy are slight and unassuming. Seen for the first time inBenjamin Geissler’s film, they are faintly visible on the wall,peeking out from behind old jars and cans in an apartment whosecurrent residents, an aging couple with poor eyesight, never noticedthe faint shadows of Schulz’s handiwork. Alfred Schreyer, one of Schulz’s last surviving students and a dedicated participant in efforts to preserve his memory in Drohobycz, is so overjoyed that he appears he might disintegrate in one of the paroxysms Schulz describes so fondly in his stories.

But the manner in which the film presents the Schulz frescoes, as well as their peculiar fate, is unambiguously political. A special Polish-Ukrainian commission led by Wojciech Chmurzyº-ski, a noted expert in Schulz’s visual art, immediately arrives and begins the painstaking work of removing layers of household paint to reveal the images underneath. What appears at first to be a miserable task—the tiny space in which Schulz had been forced to paint his murals is in terrible disrepair—becomes exhilarating as a horse and a coachman emerge from behind decades of grime. “My faith is restored,” Chmurzyº-ski remarks. The figures that appear bear telltale marks of their maker: the coachman’s face resembles the artist himself—Schulz’s last self-portrait. Schulz frequently populated his drawings with the likenesses of Drohobycz townspeople, which understandably got him into hot water: no one wanted to see his wife or daughter naked, holding a whip, in a drawing by the local art teacher. In Geissler’s film, an unsettling montage demonstrates the clear resemblance between the polychrome of an aloof queen and Trudi, Felix Landau’s mistress and cohabitant in the house where the murals were found.

The film’s final 25 minutes consist mostly of reactions by older Jewish survivors of Drohobycz to Yad Vashem’s actions. Alfred Schreyer , the congenial man who was so overjoyed by the murals’ discovery, is now speechless with grief. Perhaps most affecting of all is Dora Kacnelson, an elderly woman from Drohobycz’s reform Jewish congregation who looks as though she has physically absorbed her community’s hardships. She glares into Geissler’s camera and accuses Yad Vashem of ignoring the Jews who chose to remain in Eastern Europe. “They can’t comprehend why we stay here,” she says. “Those people don’t have the great wisdom of the Jews. Jewish wisdom sees the world as one whole picture.”

One whole picture, ironically, is no longer within the realm of possibility. As a single composition, Schulz’s Drohobycz murals have been destroyed, partly taken to Jerusalem, the rest removed from the walls, restored, and framed, forming the centerpiece of a fledgling Schulz museum in the building where the writer–artist used to teach (now part of Ivan Franko Pedagogical University). In 2003, the portions of the Schulz murals left behind by Yad Vashem were shown in several Polish cities as a traveling exhibition entitled “The Republic of Dreams”; the images from the exhibition’s catalogue have circulated primarily in the Polish news media. More recently, in July 2004, Drohobycz celebrated a weeklong Bruno Schulz festival, complete with exhibits and research meetings designed to emphasize both Schulz’s major role in interwar Polish letters and his importance to the cultural heritage of Galicia, the region that spans southern Poland and western Ukraine. Meanwhile, the fragments of Schulz’s work removed by Yad Vashem have not yet been shown publicly.

As with any controversy drawing on such sensitive issues as national identity and historical trauma, only a small minority of those publicizing their opinions have demonstrated any familiarity with Schulz, his work, or the region where he lived. In comparison to the equanimity with which this controversy has been treated in the Polish and Israeli press, the response in the United States has been sustained and often vitriolic, which is hardly shocking given our polarized political climate. Opinions in editorials and open letters cover the range between condemning Yad Vashem’s actions as outright theft and declaring anyone who even questions Yad Vashem an anti-Semite. Among the more civil conversations was a trio of open letters that ping-ponged across the pages of The New York Review of Books in 2001 and 2002. In these letters, scholars of Central European art and culture patiently argued the merits and drawbacks to the manner in which Schulz’s frescoes were removed. The initial letter denounces Yad Vashem’s assertion of cultural or moral superiority over Ukraine and suggests that “the proper role of wealthier artistic and philanthropic institutions is to nurture the respect for the artistic heritage they believe Central Europe lacks.” The rebuttal diminishes the artistic value of Schulz’s work and argues that “these pieces would not have their current enormous significance were it not for their Holocaust context”—a position that makes Schulz’s many admirers around the world wince. The final volley reasserts the first, emphasizing that regardless of identity politics, Yad Vashem’s Drohobycz operation represents poor museum practice: “This is not the time to embark on a new wave of predatory collecting.”

Perhaps the most venomous response to the Schulz controversy appeared in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture in January 2004. In an article entitled “Harvard Death Fugue: On the Exploitation of Bruno Schulz,” James Russell, a professor of Armenian literature at Harvard, responded to a screening of Benjamin Geissler’s film by attacking Geissler himself. “The whole point of the film,” Russell writes, “is . . . to shift the mantle of humanism from the shtetl Jews onto the new Germans and to transfer the stigma of violence from the Nazis to the Israelis.” He continues:

Usually the Israelis are cast as the new Nazis because of their supposed mistreatment of the Palestinians. But here is a new motif, more elegant, and more insidious: to present Israel as the crude vandal pillaging Schulz’s delicate paintings and thereby persecuting the Jews themselves! A German film director exposing the crime then can become the suffering Jew himself. It is a brilliant tactic, enabling Germany to become the accuser (the satan, the diabolos) onceagain, righteous and guilt-free.

It is difficult to understand how one could watch Geissler’s film and arrive at such a conclusion without having formulated it in advance, which helps explain why so many people who have not seen the film echo essentially the same misguided sentiment. For some, questions about Schulz’s identity—not to mention the interpretive possibilities of his writings and drawings—have become subsumed in us-versus-them polemics that Schulz himself would most likely have found wholly absurd.

On all sides of the Schulz controversy, no one questions the dignity and importance of Yad Vashem. The point of contention is whether it is possible for a venerable institution to err despite its best intentions, and whether it is reprehensible even to suggest that possibility. Even those who believe that Yad Vashem is as good a place as any to preserve and display Schulz’s work see its methods as unnecessarily damaging to international reconciliation efforts and to the artworks themselves. Omer Bartov, who runs Brown University’s project on Central European borderlands and who was a signatory to the letter supporting Yad Vashem in The New York Review of Books, recently told me that the deplorable state of Jewish buildings and artifacts in western Ukraine gives little hope that Schulz’s murals could have been preserved in situ, but that the question of conservation itself becomes moot once the artwork is broken into pieces. “Could the frescoes have been saved by Poles in Drohobycz?” he asks. “I don’t know, but somehow doubt it. At least, I wish I could have seen them there.”

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A sense of lost opportunity has always troubled the legacy of Bruno Schulz, although now the focus has shifted from how to find his lost works to whom to blame for what happens to them once they are found. Yad Vashem did not deliberately victimize Bruno Schulz; the intention was certainly to honor him. But foregoing an opportunity to work as a partner—instead of an opponent—in local efforts to understand what was lost in the Holocaust seems a high price to pay for half an artwork. More damaging still is the perception in Poland that, as far as Yad Vashem is concerned, the Poles are not worthy stewards of their own Polish-Jewish heritage.

The most pervasive dilemma on the Polish side, however, is that few have wondered whether, in this regard, Yad Vashem could actually be right. It is still not unusual in Poland to find open displays of racism and anti-Semitism, even among the educated elites. Graffiti depicting a Star of David at the end of a gallows are common (as is a similar, anti-neo-Nazi graffito showing a swastika at the end of the hangman’s rope), and crowds of soccer fans taunt their opponents by calling them “Jews” from across the stadium. Recent polls suggest the possibility of a victory for a coalition of far-right nationalist parties in upcoming elections. (The situation in western Ukraine, which has enjoyed far less economic development and international contact in the post-Soviet years, is much bleaker.) Place all this against the backdrop of Poland’s Jewish festivals and buoyant interest in Jewish culture, and one is likely to arrive at the conclusion that Poles today love Jewishness, but they are no great fans of the Jews.

The work of interethnic relations consists in asking oneself, without needless self-flagellation, what can be done to understand the other group more deeply. Neither bald assertions of “moral right” nor annual displays of cultural appreciation hold much water in the absence of such inward-directed inquiry. In recent years, figures like Bruno Schulz have been the starting point for these discussions in Poland. As Polish writers and critics try to understand the interplay of Polishness and Jewishness in Schulz’s work, they have also been discussing the contributions of other cultures to Polish life and are, slowly, beginning to talk about cross-cultural dialogue in a way that illuminates not just the future, but the past. It is aconversation with Bruno Schulz at the center, and which the more cynical participants in the Schulz debate continue to distrust. And yet it remains a conversation about literature at the highest levels of immediate social relevance, and it is gaining momentum all the time.<

Benjamin Paloff's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is a regular contributor to Boston Review.

Originally published in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review