Abstract
I am not a personality of great achievements, just an ordinary person who once was an ordinary teenage girl trapped in the walls of the Warsaw ghetto and who later grew into an ordinary woman coping with three children and with the communist regime in Poland. I think I should rather call myself a creature. Janina Bauman (Bauman 2002: 28)
Meeting the distinguished writer Janina Bauman in her retirement and in Leeds, I never felt I truly got to know her. It was my impression that the real Janina Bauman lived fully in the Polish language and that English was never truly the place to meet her. Yet Janina Bauman wrote in English with an elegance and a vivacity that makes reading and re-reading her two major memoirs, and her cultural reflections on memory and writing, a source of both constant admiration and renewed affect.
Janina Bauman’s lucid prose always transports me to Polish places and often terrifying times of her teenage years in the Warsaw ghetto or in a hunted life in hiding that, of course, I cannot truly comprehend. She is equally compelling writing of post-war, communist Warsaw. I can better grasp that historical space now that I have myself visited Warsaw several times, and can through my own eyes and body sense the strangeness of its restored architectural splendours and the still menacing presence of grand Stalinist eyesores like the Palace of Culture. Visiting Poland has allowed me to lend the material reality I could see for myself to some of the places and their histories that I had already imaginatively tried to inhabit through the vividness of Janina Bauman’s always-evocative prose. On my last visit, I walked to the area in which Janina Bauman and her family had lived in their final years in the city, a leafy residential area near to the almost invisible remains of the bunkers of the ghetto and the desolate space of the monument to the ghetto Uprising in 1943, next to which an architectural marvel of a museum of Polish Jewish history and culture is being slowly built. Yet in the restored post-communist city, there are still precious few traces of the Jewish world into which Janina Bauman was born, and to whose destruction her first memoir adds its own, extraordinary testimony.
There are two moments of historical encounter with Janina Bauman through her writing that bear witness to this double scene of Central European history: a destruction and a (failed) reconstruction in which the complexity of European Jewry’s pre- and post-war history is uniquely articulated across the breach that has become a rightly determining caesura: what we name the Holocaust.
Read on its own, Winter in the Morning (1986) takes its place in the canon of Holocaust literature which is primarily a testimonial literature of suffering, persecution, mass destruction and exceptional personal survival. In such writings, typically, the survivor bears witness through writing to his or her participation in and unexpected survival of a single, historically defining event of unimaginable horror. Endowed by the chance of having escaped the destiny of mass annihilation, the survivor embodies this event for the rest of the world, and is asked to bear almost legal witness on behalf of history to it. Perhaps as a result s/he is still confined within the experience to which s/he alone can bear witness for the millions engulfed and destroyed.
I have worked in Leeds with a community of survivors of the Holocaust who came together during the 1990s as a friendship association and decided on a project to share their stories not only of how they came to be in Yorkshire, but how they had built new lives in this region. Adding to the traumas of their experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe, the trauma of forced migration opens onto the ‘making of new lives' in new spaces, cultures, countries, and languages. Attention to the ‘after-life’ of the survivor and the continuing potency of traumatic pasts defied by extraordinary courage in founding new families and engaging in a range of political, professional, intellectual and cultural productivity has only recently become a topic of serious consideration and research, allowing a different kind of portraiture of the individuals who have been asked to embody a history that shattered their lives but not necessarily their capacity to make new ones, however continuously shaded by the inescapable past.
Janina Bauman participated in this research project (Making a New Life: Holocaust Survivors in Yorkshire, 2007, and Refugee Voices, 2003). But Janina Bauman had already shown the way towards this different perspective on life after through her second memoir, The Dream of Belonging (1988), which is not the story of forced migration and relocation that these two life-narrative projects record but of a choice made to remain in Poland and to contribute politically and culturally to the dream of the reconstruction of her own society in the image of everything that was not fascism. The communist dream, now so soured by its Stalinist totalitarian betrayal, was lived with as much intensity and as much disillusion by Janina Bauman as her teenage years were shattered by the invasion of Poland by the soldiers of the Third Reich bearing its racist and ultimately genocidal programme. It is only in holding to the double space of the two memoirs, traversing the breach opened into a young girl’s life in 1939 with the post-1945 story of her adulthood that leads to the forced migration in 1968, that the significance of Janina Bauman’s place in post-war European literature and cultural memory becomes truly visible.
There are few literary testimonies to this other momentarily hopeful post-war experiment in creating social justice and its betrayal of the democratic vision that plot that process from the inside with an almost diaristic vividness seeking to remain true to the subject of hope even while being written from the disillusioned future. In post-1989 Europe, the excavation of the experiential world of the societies impacted by the Soviet experiment and local communisms is producing its own memorial, testimonial and imaginative cultural inscriptions. Janina Bauman’s Dream of Belonging (1988) has, however, a singular place in the historical inflection of modern European literature and in the literary inscription of modern European history because it is written as if tracking the events, at which we now knowingly look back, as they unfolded. Furthermore, this history is being written with the inflection of what had been endured in the course of the war from a Jewish position.
The testimony to the ‘dream of belonging’ is written in a fashion closer to a diary than a retrospect, although, of course, it is just that. Janina Bauman’s prose recreates her own self as a character embodying the power of hope placed in communism arising precisely out of the intensity of her missed encounter with racially targeted mass murder effected by fascism. She allows us to see how this dream of belonging to an emplaced but not racialized or classed humanity became a means of living through the almost equally difficult years of deprivation during reconstruction, managing her desire to be someone in her own right, to fulfil both her intellectual and professional longings, while being passionately in love and creating new lives born into the world she, her husband and their hopeful generation were building.
As the dream soured and the anti-Semitism of the regime subjected their family to its own racialized persecution, a third trauma unfolds that brought Janina Bauman to the city of Leeds and the language of English in which she would initially set down the story of the two worlds across which she had been formed, but which became so invisible in the English context. That Janina Bauman wrote her utterly European, totally Polish stories into this language before their return in her mother tongue marks both the double scene and the double fracture into these texts.
As a scholar working on the cultural memory of the Holocaust, I regularly set my students to read Janina Bauman’s Winter in the Morning as part of the canon of literary works that not only bear direct witness to varied aspects of the terror of Nazism but which inflect it with a specifically gendered perspective and with the diversity within gendered experience created by age and stage in life. Thus Janina Bauman’s Winter in the Morning takes its place beside, and thus positively reinflects, the over-iconicized Diary of a Young Girl (1995), first published in 1947, by Anna Frank, another Jewish teenager marking her personal evolution on a script of terror written by exceptional history. It can also lie beside French political deportee Charlotte Delbo’s three volumes of retrospective prose poems which were collected and published as Auschwitz and After (Delbo 1995).
The comparison with Anna Frank’s writing is built on both writers using the diary form to register the experiences of young teenage girl in the ghetto and in hiding. Linking Bauman and Delbo becomes possible because of the refined exploration of language as the transport into eidetically seared memory within books that acknowledge the disturbed temporalities of traumatic experience through shifting time zones within the writing itself. Delbo evolved the concept of deep memory versus common memory to explain the fissure within the survivor’s psyche implanted by traumatic reality so that the past is not experienced as a memory weakening with passing time. Instead this past periodically flashes up in all its vividness, breaking sensorially into a present that knocks out the quotidian reality actually inhabited (Delbo 1990: 1–4). In Days and Memories (1990), Delbo also shares with Janina Bauman the capacity to expand her own experience to attend to comparable traumas of others.
In my classes, I listen avidly to each generation of students' responses to Winter in the Morning not only because the book is so much less known. I am also waiting to see if they come to recognize the philosophical and sociological insights so elegantly embedded into the text, which are articulated in two passages to which so many of us experienced readers of the book constantly return. In concluding sentences of the preface, Janina Bauman formally presents her philosophical reflection on the implications she draws from what she witnessed in the ghetto and in hiding: During the war I learned the truth we usually chose to leave unsaid: that the cruellest thing about cruelty is that it dehumanizes its victims before it destroys them. And that the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions. (Bauman, 1986: ii)
The final sentence chimes with Hannah Arendt’s recognition, immediately in 1945, that ‘The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe’ (Arendt 1994: 134). In a manner akin to Primo Levi, Janina Bauman writes through her own experience with the insight that it must be told ‘as it was experienced’. Yet the very fact of being able to recall this ‘experience’ already contained the will to order its chaotic occurrences into a narrative form by means of which a point of view, that of a thinking subject, is inscribed. In the same writerly movement, a reflective position is also produced so that life-narrative is neither dismal testimony alone nor self-inscribing autobiography. I am not saying that Levi and Bauman find meaning in the utter meaning-defying horror in which they were caught up. It is that they exercise a resistance to the attempt at destruction by enacting ‘thought’ in whatever means they could and observing the terrible experiment enacted on humanity by the Third Reich.
Janina Bauman’s text is built on actual diaries created at the time of her enclosure in the ghetto and life on the run beyond its walls. These originals were buried in the ruins of Warsaw, recovered, some pages copied, and finally lost when she had to flee from the city in 1968. When she sat down to write in Leeds she decided to reconstruct the diaries through a brilliant act of self-ventriloquism, enabled by the power of deep memory, and refinding the voice and perspective of the teenage girl still vivid beneath the layers of maturity and post-war life that could once again ‘speak’ her subjectivity through a newly fashioned prose.
In that temporal disjuncture of the diary as the contemporary recording of life-changing times and authorial return to the spaces of seared memory, Janina Bauman arrived at an acute observation about the sociological experiment inflicted by Nazism upon those it aimed to destroy, an experiment to expose, if only ultimately to eradicate, the moral limits of humanness. She saw that the Nazis had tried to create for their victims spaces in which the normal conditions of human sociality were forcibly suspended. Each individual was thus subjected to what I name the concentrationary realm invented in various forms by the Third Reich and its terrorizing instrument, the SS, and was thus obliged to face moral decisions and ethical challenges at every moment at every level of his/her being. We may call these challenges moral: to save oneself or others, how to survive, how to face death and so forth. We might also call them social, for they concerned pitting individualized struggles to live against the social bonds from family to community.
If Janina Bauman elegantly concludes her preface with this question of how to remain human in inhuman conditions, her book affirms with startling directness the long journey Hannah Arendt would take as the political theorist of post-Nazism from her remark of 1945 in her essay ‘Nightmare and Flight’ to her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and finally The Human Condition (1958), namely an understanding that the political analysis of the evil created by totalitarianism would necessitate the rethinking and respecification of what indeed constitutes the human condition.
The other key moment for me in Winter in the Morning to whose analysis I direct my students is the long final paragraph that describes the teenage Janina’s encounter on the last day of the war with a fleeing German soldier, perhaps younger than she, to whom the Catholic Polish farmer who had given her family refuge obliged her to take food. The dramatic retelling of this moment becomes the defining scenario through which the reader is made witness to a revelation Janina Bauman had to receive from this critical moment. Having been forced to live on the run, in disguise and in constant terror of exposure that would surely lead to horrible death, the moment that this scared remnant of the powerful enemy cowers before her becomes a kind of primal scene for understanding the terms under which she had been protected by this rural Polish Christian family.
The ethos that secured her survival was this woman’s unquestioning fidelity to a certain Christian and personal morality: whomsoever comes seeking my protection, irrespective of who and what she/he is, will receive it. No conditions. No questions. Despite any personal anti-Semitism (Mrs Pietrzyk expresses openly the usual stereotypes about the physical signs of Jewish otherness), or even justified hostility to an invading enemy, the other in need – be it Janina and her mother and sister or this terrified German boy – is safe within Mrs Pietrzyk’s absolute morality.
The stunned young girl Janina must follow through her protectress's morality in person by handing to the embodiment of those who sought to kill her, and had indeed murdered millions, the very same steaming bowl of soup – the nourishment shared – that had secured her continuing existence. The power of the scene now as a piece of writing lies in the sentence structure with which it concludes that declares her state of mind at that very moment. Janina Bauman writes simply, as if there is nothing to be said but the barest statement of a shattering confrontation it might take a long life to comprehend: ‘I felt no pity, no hatred, no joy. The war ended’ (Bauman, 1986: 190).
Between these two bookends – the question of inhumanness and humanness posed in the abstract and the vividly painted scenario through which that truth was encountered for herself, battling with her own confused emotions – lies the brilliance of this book’s writing of both the subject who experienced the event and the subject of retrospective understanding of the experience which becomes a combination of a moment and a monument to the thoughtfulness derived from the moment. The war ended, she declares, without qualification. What did not end was the need to use the knowledge it had brought into view for the purposes of enacting its lessons. To be human is to act with humanity and to construct a world perhaps based on those principles. For a while the nascent communist project in Poland offered a dream of such proportions, a dream of translating the unquestioning performance of human solidarity experienced with Mrs Pietrzyk into a social system.
Thus I read Dream of Belonging as perhaps the more painful book to read, and perhaps to have written. Sharing a commitment to an unvarnished version of events written as if through the almost breathless eyes (if such a metaphor can stand) of the hopeful, naïve, committed young woman who had emerged from the Holocaust and war in Poland bearing the marks of her exposure to the corrupted and the faithful members of her own society, Dream of Belonging is a book about the betrayal of hope, the unsuppressible return of self-serving racist totalitarianism in the guise of what had been promised as its opposite. From such hope as well as its country, Janina Bauman is forced into a perpetual exile. This is a courageous and desperate book, full of passionate love for the handsome captain turned sociologist who shapes her post-war life. It is as much a testament to a forgotten or unexamined moment of history as the first book was when it appeared at the beginning of the avalanche of Holocaust remembrance that only developed in the 1990s.
Dream is a text about becoming a communist in post-war Poland, when the dream of socialism was a lived hope for the humanizing antidote to fascism and capitalism. The thoughtful and heartfelt socialist dream was progressively betrayed and turned into the darkening mirror of all that it was meant to negate. Capturing the cold of the water, the crampedness of the tiny living spaces, the meagreness of food alongside a cultural history of working towards a communism that the increasingly Stalinist regime corrupted, Janina Bauman’s prose paints a picture vivid enough for me to know that I cannot comprehend that world of which she writes so movingly, so far is its extremity, physical and political, from my own comfortable experience of hot and cold colonial childhoods. (Not until I briefly attended a British boarding school in my teens did anything come close to post-war Warsaw.) But what shines through her narrative is the intensity of intellect and political life: Janina and Zygmunt Bauman lived a real life beyond the bare life of post-war scarcity through art, music, literature, cinema and above all friendship which carried into a desolating world of failed five-year plans and Stalinism a pre-war Polish-European vision of what life means: socially vivid engagement with the social life of the creative mind.
Slowly, therefore, coming to know the true intellectual, thinker and ambitious professional behind the quiet, shy but warm woman I met in her perpetual exile in the English language, I have become a student of Janina Bauman in three ways through casual comments that I have treasured up, and acted upon. What she told me in conversation about the concerns she explored through various papers in the 1990s has since become published articles appearing in this journal. I shall quote from that source, discovered through academic research long after the impact of the spoken exchanges had already reshaped my own thinking.
The first lesson clearly derived from coming to an understanding of the power and significance of the preface and the conclusion to Winter in the Morning, which I have already discussed at length. The publication of this text placed Janina Bauman in the canon of literature emerging out of and analytical of the Holocaust through direct personal testimony to survival of a racially targeted genocide of European Jewry. Janina Bauman was twice persecuted for a Jewish ‘racialized’ identity that had nothing to do with the complex nature of her cultural formation as the child of a secular, professional Polish-Jewish metropolitan family. After 1986, she had to deal with becoming a ‘Jewish’ writer and translating her own understanding of the meaning of being made Jewish in order to be killed, and becoming Jewish in order to be persecuted and excluded in a regime for which one had worked, into a position shaped by the moral questions posed through that singularity of experience.
One day she told me that she had decided no longer to speak about her own, specifically Jewish experience of the Holocaust. She felt she could not do so in all honesty because she had come to understand how little was being told about the parallel genocide of the Roma and Sinti. How could European culture recall only one aspect of Nazism’s genocidal assault, thus participating in the continuing erasure of another people’s comparable suffering and attempted destruction? Caught out myself in the exclusive focus in Holocaust discourse on Jewish experience, I was momentarily arrested by this courageous position.
Her words, however, echoed the impact made by London Rabbi and Holocaust survivor Hugo Gryn (1930–96) in a film, Chasing Shadows (Gryn, 1991), directed by his daughter, the documentary filmmaker Naomi Gryn, recording a post-Glasnost return to the town of his childhood, Berehovo, then in Czechoslovakia, incorporated into Hungary in 1938, and now in the Ukraine in the beautiful region of the Carpathian mountains. In this film, Hugo Gryn reflected back on the almost complete separation of the various Jewish, Christian and Roma communities in their shared space and wondered if their distant co-inhabitation was not part of the problem that meant no Jewish victim was rescued by a non-Jew in this town. Gryn propounded his post-Holocaust politics that depended not only on fighting racism by cherishing tolerance, actively overcoming intercommunal and interfaith barriers, but also on what he called the ‘celebration of difference’. We find here another echo of Arendt’s definition of the human condition: irrefutably plural (Arendt 1951).
In one telling scene that enacts this philosophy for the present, Gryn is shown joining with the other survivors of Nazism from his town – the depleted Roma families – dancing and making music under the moon. Over the following shot of a tiny Roma girl in a red dress playing in the street, Gryn reminds us of Roma suffering and speaks joyfully of the fact of the existence, despite all, of their delightful children. With that one adjective, Gryn moves a mountain of inherited racism, including that within the Jewish world, not only to demand a human response of solidarity towards the innocent child, but also to incite in us care for her in her own culturally marked singularity. In her paper outlining her new position, ‘Demons of Other People’s Fear: The Plight of the Gypsies' (Bauman 1998). Janina Bauman remarks: Unlike the Jews, the Gypsies do not have many professors, writers and journalists to make their private sufferings into a public human problem, and this is one of the reasons why in our world so little is known about their life and plight. Another reason for such ignorance is the fact that Romani have never had any tradition of keeping written records of their circumstances, and so their past died with them. (Bauman 1998: 51)
Tracing a history of the truly wandering peoples, the various groups of Roma in Europe, through to their terrible encounter with National Socialist racial policy, Janina Bauman also extends her analysis to the plight of the Roma under communist regimes post-war and to more recent initiatives to assist the securing of human rights for the Romani. Janina Bauman concludes:
There seems to be a stream of light piercing the darkness. And yet, Roma are, among the many suppressed and oppressed populations in Europe, in a virtually unique situation. They have still not enough advocates of their own to exert continuous pressure upon governments who are slow or reluctant to promote equality, and to alert enlightened opinion to their plight. Secondly, unlike the case of most other minorities, they have no politically sovereign homeland that could use its recognized voice to defend their brethren. (Bauman, 1998: 61)
Correct as this statement is, it also bears witness to Janina Bauman’s own analysis of the problem of belonging and displacement in a world when European Jewry also had no national advocacy to present in the forums of world nations.
Ironically, her own forced migration from Poland followed upon the anti-Zionist turn of the Polish regime in the wake of the Six Day War in 1967, a war during which the fragile State of Israel seemed on the brink of extinction. The sovereign state that can represent the rights of a people even beyond its territorialized citizens is for Janina Bauman a factor enabling the defence of minorities' rights, while the deterritorialized minority such as the Romani peoples remains entirely vulnerable because of the continuing lack of a totally denationalized concept of human solidarity. Thus deprived of ‘social and political hope’ and figured only as ‘the demons of other people’s fear’, the Romani peoples, seen now through the eyes of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, are written onto the text of contemporary culture as the still unfinished business of expanded Holocaust memory and a continuing challenge to turn historical experience of one people into solidarity with the continuing plight of another that shared not only the genocidal assault but also the failure of post-war societies in Europe to grasp the lesson of that history and transform themselves entirely.
As a result of Janina Bauman’s lesson on this matter, I never teach the Jewish Holocaust exclusively. I insist that my students know of the two peoples specifically and racially marked out by the Wannsee Protocol for genocidal destruction, and constantly naming the Romani peoples alongside European Jewry has transformative effects on the students' understanding. It focuses the issue of racism and the call for the celebration of difference to become concrete strategies to secure human rights and human solidarity in the face of the present and continuing failures to overcome racialized persecution.
The third lesson is a further extension of Janina Bauman’s transformation of Holocaust memory. To the future, she posed the question: By what aspects of popular culture will the Jewish Holocaust be remembered a decade, let alone a century hence? She reviewed the varied sources that will be used, which range from primary documents produced almost contemporaneously by eyewitnesses to texts composed in retrospect, often with literary or autobiographical dimensions. This leads her to reflect on the nature of writing and of subjectivity that inevitably inflect the writing that is at once a testimony to a life survived and a potential document of historical significance that will be tested for its validity. It is generally agreed that the Holocaust altered everything in its wake. This is true precisely of literature in which a crisis of truth occurs at the point at which lived historical realities require the mediation of language to be shared while that very mediation alters the nature of access to the historical reality that is being inscribed both through the filter of subjectivity and the rhetorical power of language itself. Janina Bauman astutely remarks: Now you have the right to ask: ‘How true is this story?’ My answer is: it is a true story of a young girl as she experienced it and as I, the author, remember it. It is not a historical document: it is this young girl’s truth. And mine. (Bauman, 2002: 32)
In another text on the question of truth in autobiography, Janina Bauman joins a debate initiated by Primo Levi in one of his last books, The Drowned and the Saved (1988), about the ambiguous function of memory:
Memories come in bits and pieces, leaving all too many larger and smaller gaps. Bits and pieces don’t make a story. In order to tell a clear story of my survival I had to fill the gaps, linking the bits and pieces in a plausible way. When writing my book I tried hard to forget all of my subsequently acquired knowledge about the Holocaust. I also made a strong, conscious effort not to hide things I would have preferred to hide. Nevertheless, I cannot be sure whether I managed to say it all. And yet my story is true even if it is not the whole truth. I believe this can be said about most of the late accounts of survivors. That’s why, in my opinion, they make a valuable source of knowledge about the Holocaust – although not as reliable as the direct testimonies. (Bauman 2007: 82–83)
What interests me, however, is that Janina Bauman moves on to consider the potential of cultural representations of this past, notably cinematic fictions, when the question of testimony and the reliability of survivor memory is long over. What might a classroom of 14-year-olds know about the Holocaust in 2020? Apart from school history lessons and possible visits to memorial museums, might fiction films function as significant sources? Janina Bauman thus shifts the current debate about the politics of any use of fiction to represent so heinous a reality towards the question of bringing the children and young of the future to an affective understanding not of history’s truth, but its implications for their own lives. Janina Bauman reviews Schindler’s List (1993), The Pianist (2002) and Korczak (1990). In my conversation with Janina Bauman about this in about 2005, I recall the question she posed as being simply this: Will the prism of memory be Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak? Which should it be, and why?
My ignorance of the third film in this series sent me shamefacedly off to acquire a copy of Wajda’s black-and-white Polish film, and the Ghetto Diary written by Janusz Korczak. Korczak, I discovered, was a distinguished physician whose already established international reputation ensured the possibility of his own rescue and escape from the Warsaw ghetto. As a man dedicated to orphaned children, he chose to remain throughout the Warsaw ghetto period with the children in his orphanage, ultimately accompanying them on the train and into the gas chambers of Treblinka. Offering no platitude of Messianic redemption of a Christian ilk which so disfigures the real, and ultimately pathetic, story of Oscar Schindler as it was rescripted for a melodramatic Hollywood blockbuster (whose profits have none the less financed one of the major archives of oral testimonies of survivors), Wajda’s film poses a deeper challenge to our thought that echoes in another much debated film Janina Bauman does not consider: Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni.
Criticized for daring to make extermination appear as a mere backdrop or incidental to a wryly humorous film about a Jewish waiter and his family, Benigni touched on another moral dilemma: not what makes some do evil and others retain their humanity before it, but what is the substance of humanity if not in actions that go to the utter limits to protect the most vulnerable from the corrupting knowledge of evil? Benigni’s poignant film is not at all trivial; like the story of Korczak, it tells us of the absolute demand on human love that may be made on us to be faithful to our care for the other, the vulnerable in the face of what Adriana Cavarero names horrorism: the novel 20th-century creation of cruelty towards the vulnerable (Cavarero, 2009). Now I screen Korczak for my students in the hopes that Janina Bauman’s probing question about the politics and selectivity of cinematically crafted cultural memory will continuously disturb their easier consumption of entertainment cinema. Janina Bauman’s conclusion maintains its fidelity to her post-Holocaust thought. She writes, after comparing two films about men who acted to try to save the humanity of the vulnerable: In sharp contrast to Spielberg’s message, Dr Korczak reveals that the highest value in life is dignity, rather than survival at all costs. When the imminent deportation to the gas chambers becomes a certainty, he rejects the idea of closing the orphanage and sending the children out to give them a chance to escape. When out – he says – they will learn fear, humiliation and hatred. They will lose the most precious of values – their dignity. And once robbed of that value, what point is there in staying alive? (Bauman 2007: 88)
This may at first sight be challenging or even problematic since so much Holocaust testimony and representation, including The Pianist, stresses the heroism of the struggle at all costs to stay alive at least. Those Jewish parents who sent their children on Kindertransports, desperate to give them lives, had to make a terrible choice. For the lives that might well be lived would be lived in the perpetual exile from not only homeland and mother tongue but as perpetually bereaved orphans. Thus these parents faced this impossible question that Janusz Korczak decided in favour of maintaining a dimension of psychic safety within the children over the absolute value of simply remaining alive, as if being human was so much more than mere living, and also that living with emotional terrorism can be as permanently destructive. Janina Bauman troubles the normal responses when she concludes this projective review of the nature of the message young people in the future might derive from the varied cultural representations of this past and all the massive questions it raises for human sociality and ethics beyond its historical function: Of the three films discussed, only Korczak presents an optimistic message. Young people of future generations will learn from him that during the Holocaust putting self-preservation above moral values was not inevitable and that it does not really matter how many people chose to remain human – what matters is that some did. They will learn that evil is not all-powerful: if it is not defeated, at least it can be resisted. (Bauman 2007: 88)
This argument advances beyond the position of the preface to Winter in the Morning and its conclusion because Mrs Pietryzk is now accompanied in the pantheon of the human before the inhuman that Janina Bauman has created in her writing by Janusz Korczak, a man who defied the attempted destruction of the human that would apparently reduce him to abandon all morality in the face of the necessity to survive. Korczak is not a Jewish victim to be pitied, but an emblem that proves that there was an alternative to the question posed by Primo Levi of the utterly reduced living corpse of the concentrationary universe: ‘If this is a man?’ Korczak’s tragic gesture and the unbearable image of the gentle doctor leading his beloved charges to their horrible deaths offers no easy relief from troubling reflections as that offered by the saviour hero of Schindler’s List. It is the image of moral choice having to be made in circumstances of relatively equal catastrophe. Korczak was not redeemed. He and his children were murdered. But the gesture, replotted through the cinematic narrative of Wajda, holds before the future the lesson of the necessity of resistance in the name of the human before evil, wherever it is to be found.
The deep irony is to be found in Dream of Belonging, where Janina Bauman, working as a film script editor/censor in an official film agency, admits to delaying the work of a young Polish director not approved by the regime. His name was Andrzej Wajda.
I want to end on a more personal note with one final gift of Janina Bauman’s writing. On a brief holiday in 2010, I re-read Dream of Belonging one more time. I was waiting for a concert to begin, and had brought the book to while away the time. Each chapter starts in the present of the adult Janina Bauman’s life in Britain and an anecdote prefaces a sudden plunge back into memory. Thus the structure of this book involves a constant assertion of the mature writer in her British present preparing for repeated encounters with what is clearly now memory. My only aim was to serve as an eyewitness, herself deeply involved in striking historical processes of our times. It was history, I believe, that made my life significant and worth writing about. To say more, I have to set my two books apart because the reason for writing each of them was different, as was the language, the style and the method I used. They are not two volumes of the same book but two different books written, as it were, by two different authors: a young one and an old one, an innocent one and a responsible one. (Bauman 2002: 32)
As I read the preliminary scenario that opens Chapter 3 of Dream, however, a chapter which tells of the effect on her daughter Anya of their having to leave Poland in 1968 and narrates the actual event, tears welled up in my eyes and I feared I would burst out with a sob that arose from deep within me. As a preliminary to the story, Janina Bauman was simply describing her mixed feelings as she took off from a British airport and then landed in Tel Aviv where her eldest daughter now lived, having moved with the family to Israel in 1968 and remained there when the rest of them moved to England (Bauman 1988: 32–33). The coming and going captures the strange loneliness of the solitary traveller leaving one loved behind in order to see the other. This is all fine.
But it was when she almost obliquely registered the terrible pain of leaving her daughter, over and over again, as the visits to Israel repeatedly came to an end and the plane returning her to her beloved husband also wrenched her once again from her first child that I felt this rising anguish take place in me. Having, over and over in the last three years, myself wept uncontrollably on the streets of New York where I would take the bus to the airport and on the plane as it took off from JFK, when I again and again and again had to part from my own daughter who had chosen to study and live in New York, I recognized a pain in this passage that I had not noticed in earlier readings. I was, however, just grateful for Janina Bauman for having written of this mundane but harrowing experience of separation, having thus allowed this simple unending cycle of joy and pain that is motherhood in modern life with its new diasporas within our families to enter literature. Her writing not only bore witness to her love for her daughter Anya, but also gave a literary form to an experience that remains, when only private, a shameful grief at the compelling bond that the daughter creates in the mother by her being. This bond is not reciprocal. It is a form of the love for the other who comes to stand before me in her singularity, not as my child, but as the one whose existence implants in me a love which needs to be near this other. This love has nothing to do with banal misrepresentation of clinging mothers and empty nest syndromes. It is that primary human and humanizing love originating that can none the less, and clearly did, become the ground for the political ethics enacted by men such as Korczak.
Janina Bauman not only lived an extraordinary and inspiring life: she wrote of it with tender beauty and compelling honesty. Her books are rightly considered important works of contemporary literature and life writing. But these works with her other writings constitute a singular and distinctive intervention in the ethical reflections on historical experience and the critical function of cultural memory. Reviewing what she taught me in those privileged moments of conversation, even in the alienating terrain of spoken English, I am obliged to pay my tiny homage to Janina Bauman as a post-war philosopher through the form of literature and cultural reflection. She was my teacher in the realm of cultural memory.