Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman's Experience

Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman's Experience is an annotated memoir by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, a Polish Jewish woman who, as the editors of the book state in the introduction, in just a few years, went “from a prisoner of Auschwitz to one of the most powerful female journalists in Poland” (p. 1). The memoir under discussion is her last book and covers the author's life from the moment of her liberation from a camp in Germany in 1945 to her decision to leave Poland and immigrate to Israel in 1969, from where, in a few years, she moved to Canada.The process of writing this memoir took an interesting and complicated route. Toward the end of her life, surrounded by family and friends, Nomberg-Przytyk recorded her stories in Polish on cassette tapes. Since she was losing her sight at the time, recording was an ideal way to document her postwar years in Poland. Next, she orally translated her Polish tapes into Yiddish and Paula Parsky transcribed the Yiddish oral history into written English. At this stage, Nomberg-Przytyk had a chance to correct the manuscript. The original Polish tapes were not available when the final version of the memoir was being produced. After Nomberg-Przytyk's death in 1996, her son asked a Holocaust scholar, Holli Levitsky, about finalizing the memoir, and she consequently worked on a scholarly edition of the manuscript. While working on it, Levitsky interviewed Nomberg-Przytyk's family members to clarify parts that appeared to be lost in translation and to enhance the book's endnotes. Rather than a traditional memoir, the final publication is hence a multilayered translation project that involved a number of scholars as well as family members at various stages of its production.Despite having two books published in English and a biography written about her, Nomberg-Przytyk is largely unknown to the Polish audience.1 She published her first book, Więzienie było moim domem [Prison was my home] in 1964. The book covers her imprisonment for her communist activity as a teenager. Two years later, she published Kolumny Samsona [The columns of Samson] which is devoted to her time in the Białystok ghetto, where she spent three years during the war. In 1985, her Auschwitz memoir, Żydzi w Oświęcimiu [Auschwitz: True tales from a grotesque land], came out in the English translation. The complicated history of that manuscript is included in the memoir under review. She wrote Żydzi w Oświęcimiu in Polish, but after being told that she could publish it in Poland only after removing references to Jews, she decided not to do it. When she left Poland in 1969 for Israel, Nomberg-Przytyk placed the manuscript of her unpublished work in the care of the archives at Yad Vashem. Translated into English, it was published in the United States in 1985.Communist Poland contains thirty-nine short chapters devoted to the author's life and work in Poland. The chapters are short, most about three to four pages, each focusing on one particular aspect of Nomberg-Przytyk's life in Poland. She begins with her return to Lublin, Poland, from Germany where she was detained at that time, and continues through various aspects of her involvement in the Communist Party in Lublin, her work for social justice as an investigative journalist, and her private life as a wife and mother, although her private life takes significantly less space than her party work. She was in a relationship with a Polish Jew with whom she had two sons, but she did not have a religious or civil wedding with her partner. From the endnotes, we learn that her decision not to marry could have been related to trauma associated with her previous relationships: she was previously married and gave birth to a stillborn child. But it is also possible that as a couple of committed communists, they decided not to marry. Toward the end of the book, when Nomberg-Przytyk discussed her difficult decision to leave Poland we learn more about her sons, and their plans, worries, and ambitions.In Lublin, she combined her work for the party (first as a secretary of the provincial Communist Party and then in a propaganda unit) with her work as a journalist. In her description of party work, she portrayed herself as an enthusiastic communist, willing and ready to fight for the well-being of society: she, for example, mentioned opening new schools for the benefit of underprivileged youth, building new homes, and creating new opportunities for many people. Despite her enthusiasm, her early years indicate plenty of signs of impending problems and consequently disappointments, mostly due to growing antisemitism, Communist Party bureaucracy that disregarded the well-being of the people the party was supposed to serve, and also the open and multiplying lies of the communist establishment that stood in stark contradiction to the goals that communism was supposed to stand for.Antisemitism is central to the memoir. For example, in the 1940s, soon after her return to Poland, her supervisors asked her to change her name from Sara to something more Polonized (which she did not agree to). The book provides several examples of growing antisemitism: from fear evoked from the Kielce pogrom to various antisemitic comments she heard from people she worked with to increasing fear and anxiety in response to the antisemitic campaign of 1968. A number of times she discussed with her partner the possibility of emigrating from Poland, but, feeling involved and responsible for the changes happening in Poland, they decided to stay.Nomberg-Przytyk also revealed her growing doubts about the party. She criticized the role the security police played in the country, was aware of election fraud, and finally, was confused by the revelations revealed with the Khrushchev Thaw. At one point, she confessed: “Why didn't I go to the Party and give up my Party membership card? What was I waiting for? For new blows? My belief in communism was strong, so deep in my consciousness, that all this could not change my attitude, my belief, my love for the Party” (p. 106).Nomberg-Przytyk's memoir is a mixture of recollections from the past filtered through memory. The occasionally colloquial language reminds the reader of the origins of this work as an oral interview. From the perspective of her later life, Nomberg-Przytyk looked back at her past: while noticing some moments that were difficult to accept—moments when she perhaps could have turned away from communism—she nevertheless saw her involvement in the movement as something sustaining, something that was driving her and her partner, something that helped her move on after the war, something that provided her life with meaning. The book, while offering much interesting information about life in Poland in the first three decades after the war, serves as an exercise in memory studies and a critical evaluation of one's life that includes the process of making sense of losses, mistakes, and accomplishments. The short chapters lend themselves to an informative reading for undergraduate students, but the book in its entirety, while read through the prism of collective and individual memory of life under communism, can be more complex, more challenging, and hence more interesting. Regardless of how one chooses to read this memoir, it is clear that the life and works of Nomberg-Przytyk are certainly worthy of our attention. The richness of her life, the choices she made, and the way she chose to narrate her story should reach students of Polish history as well as wider audiences.

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