Holocaust and the Stars

The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem

Agnieszka Gajewska, Katarzyna Gucio

• Editorial: Routledge India
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000508628
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Science Fiction

This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanis?aw Lem. It offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem's early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem's published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer's life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem's parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto.

Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.

1
LEM(BERG) LAND

DOI: 10.4324/9780367855642-2

Resentments and the history of Lviv Jews

In each of his many passport applications, ¹ Stanisław Lem consistently gave his date and place of birth as September 12, 1921, in “Lwów” [Lviv]. The document issued by the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland was, however, annotated: “place of birth: USSR.” The official anachronism supported the policy of casting Lviv’s Polish past into oblivion, ignored historical knowledge and disciplined the bearer of such a passport. ² Expatriates were also the cause of many other, much more serious, problems for the communist authorities, mainly due to the documents lost during the war and the Galician past of the city, which, in the case of people older than Lem, involved military service in the Austro-Hungarian army. However, even in communist Poland, Lviv was not entirely and automatically erased from official documents. In the internal report constituting the Questionnaire of the Individual under Surveillance, Security Service officers refrained from using the anachronistic form in Lem’s file (the writer was under surveillance from the end of the 1960s ³ ) and entered “Lwów” as his place of birth, apparently realizing the political significance of whether someone was born in the USSR or in the territory of the pre-war Second Polish Republic.

Just as with many other cities in that particular corner of Europe, such a creationist and anachronistic narrative about the past is part of Lviv’s history, and not just during the Cold War era. Nevertheless, Lviv’s case seems to be particularly illustrative in this regard, mainly because it used to be the third-largest city in the Second Republic of Poland, and international historical policy concerning its significance for individual ethnic groups remains a diplomatically incendiary issue to this day. ⁴ It is difficult to disregard the political entanglement of Lviv that manifests in the representations, especially since the history of the city is depicted mainly from the Ukrainian and Polish perspective, and—as George G. Grabowicz notes—the points of view of the Austrian, Jewish and Armenian minorities have yet to find representation. ⁵ Moreover, the entire region of Galicia is associated with the myth of the harmonious coexistence of ethnic minorities, even though, as historian Krzysztof Zamorski comments:

In Galicia, the cacophony of traditions, intentions and aspirations must be heard. We must see the ocean of mutual accusations, more or less warranted. It is a land where Poles and Ukrainians despised one another. Poles detested Russians, Ukrainians detested Poles, both hated Jews, and the latter responded in kind. Besides, intensifying nationalisms and growing anti-Semitism pushed them effectively out of Galicia. ⁶

While the researcher appreciates the role of such mythical imagery in assimilating knowledge about the past, he also realizes the threats it poses, as it is usually exploited for current purposes, based mainly on stereotypes. ⁷

After 1989, the Polish publishing market saw a sudden plethora of memoirs about Lviv, a city that Poles had to leave between 1945 and 1946 lest they become Soviet citizens. The nostalgic and sentimental tone of those tales situates Lviv once again in the Galician myth, ⁸ rendering it a lost Arcadia, with no mention, however, of its poorest districts or the wartime fate of Jewish residents. ⁹ A broad spectrum of resentments associated with the post-Yalta order is particularly evident in Jerzy Janicki’s Lviv cycle, first published in the early 1990s. The author, 7 years Lem’s junior, devoted his memoirs to the “Polish city,” whose center is the Roman Catholic Church of St. Anthony in Lychakiv, and while he does, in fact, mention both Ukrainian and Jewish residents, his ironic tone blurs social inequalities, making it impossible to evaluate political decisions detachedly: “So the Poles are a minority in Lviv? That sounds like saying that the blacks are a white race today.” ¹⁰ Janicki’s books are rife with such racist and misogynistic similes. For example, he described a Ukrainian woman who worked for his grandparents as a model servant, calling her a “real workhorse.” ¹¹ At the same time, he complained that contemporary domestic workers have social expectations that are too high. While Janicki makes decidedly more references to the extermination of Lviv Jews than most authors of memoirs about the city, he nevertheless reduces the survivors’ accounts to an anecdote with a catchy punchline. In Podróż Edmunda Zajdla do miasteczka Bełżec [Edmund Zajdel’s journey to the town of Bełżec], for example, he tells the story of the title character, who witnessed the death of his parents and five brothers and managed to escape from the transport to Bełżec and take refuge in the countryside. After the war, he graduated from university and started a family, and Janicki concludes as follows: “So our good Lord recompensed Edmund Zajdel for all the wrongs he had suffered in the war.” ¹² Other witnesses’ accounts and tales about the fate of the Jews are conveyed in a similar tone, not to mention that they are mainly intended to give readers a better idea of the city’s topography. The author of the memoirs uses chiefly pre-war street names. ¹³

The mechanisms of such simplifications in such memoirs, so many of which have been published over the past 25 years, are thoroughly examined by Katarzyna Kotyńska in her books Lwów. O odczytywaniu miasta na nowo [Lviv. Rereading the city] and Eseiści o Lwowie. Pamięć, sąsiedztwo, mity [Essayists on Lviv. Memory, neighbors, myths], and many insightful observations can be found in the volume she has edited, namely Lwów: lustro. Obraz wzajemny mieszkańców Lwowa w narracjach XX i XXI wieku [Lviv: a mirror. The mutual image of Lviv residents in the narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries]. In one of the papers from that volume, Magdalena Semczyszyn presented the results of her research on historical information about Lviv contained in Polish, Ukrainian and Russian tourist guides published in the twentieth century, noting that although tour routes take tourists to the same historical sites, each language group hears a decidedly different story. For example, in the contemporary Polish narrative, the city flourished in the Second Polish Republic, while Ukrainian guides describe the same timeframe as a dark age of suffering, with political prisoners, atrocities committed by the Polish police and pacification intended to suppress the national liberation movement. ¹⁴

The history of Lviv’s Jews remains on the fringes of those national narratives, even though before World War Two they constituted one third of the city’s population, and in the 1920s and 1930s Lviv was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in Europe. ¹⁵ After the war, the life of Jews in Lviv concentrated around one of the synagogues that survived the German occupation, ¹⁶ albeit seriously damaged. ¹⁷ The last rabbi of Lviv died in 1962 and the Jewish community was not revived until 1991, when they reclaimed the synagogue. The early 1990s was also when sites associated with the extermination of Jews were commemorated for the first time—in 1992, a monument devoted to the murdered in Lviv was erected, and a multilingual (Ukrainian, English and Hebrew) plaque was placed at the Kleparów station, dedicated to the victims of transports to Bełżec. ¹⁸ Jewish victims have also been commemorated by the museum located in the former prison on Łąckiego Street. In 2003, a monument dedicated to the prisoners of the Janowska camp executed in the forest was erected at the Piaski ravine, although, sadly, the execution site where thousands of people lost their lives is neither fenced off nor regularly cleaned up. In the case of Lviv, the Yalta peace agreements made it possible for the Soviet authorities to break with the past of the city: survivors were expelled and people from distant parts of the Soviet Union or displaced villagers were resettled there. Jewish inhabitants of post-war Lviv deported from the east could not identify with the history of the murdered inhabitants of the city or commemorate their fate, ¹⁹ especially since, according to the 1959 statistical survey, they made up only 4 per cent of the population. ²⁰ Many of the material traces were irretrievably erased, and the individual stories of survivors can be reconstructed mainly based on testimonies and accounts given after the war, during the trials of war criminals. ²¹ It remains unknown who should be the custodian of the memory of the Lviv Jews who were murdered and starved during the German and Soviet occupation. What can be done to include Lviv Jews in the Polish, ²² Ukrainian ²³ and Russian ²⁴ memory? How to address and process the participation of Poles and Ukrainians in the crimes for this inclusion to be possible? ²⁵ We should bear in mind that any such process would also require a critical analysis of studies written in German and American circles, which focus on mythicizing the life of Galician Jews, referring mainly to its exotic, mystical ritual, and this very version of the past is nowadays happily accepted by both Poles and Ukrainians. ²⁶ As David G. Roskies argues,

Out of several Jewish cultures that received a deadly blow from the Germans – German-Jewish, Polish-Jewish, secular Yiddish and Hasidic – only the latter, which after the war merged into one pious ultra-orthodox bloc, regained its strength and vitality. ²⁷

Survivors from assimilated Polish–Jewish families had no chance to form any community, and remembrance became a challenge for their descendants, because—as the researcher emphasizes—they have only just begun to discover the past of their ancestors and realize their diminished kinship with Jewish culture. ²⁸

Stanisław Lem decided not to return to his hometown because the murder of the inhabitants of Lviv and the expatriation of survivors stripped it of any sentiment: “Stones are not enough – it is people that matter, and those people are no longer in Lviv.” ²⁹ In his memoirs written after the political transformation, the images of carefree childhood are constantly overshadowed by the tragic, and sometimes tragicomic, specter of occupation. Although the writer was highly critical of the politics of the Second Republic, including the detention camp in Bereza Kartuska and the Brest trials, he also pointed out that for him, that era was associated with solid and durable foundations, which he felt he had lost forever:

After all, there is a foundation, some core principles and rules, a base for everything, which bears the burden of human fate. All of a sudden it turned out that it was fragile, that it could change so easily. To see how easy it is for such changes to occur, for the migration of peoples – such a thing deforms or distorts many a person. ³⁰

In Lem’s prose, the shock of resettlement is reflected in the fate of the protagonists travelling through time and space, from one place to another. Deprived of a home base and a permanent residence, they seem to have nowhere to return. ³¹ And even when they do go back to Earth—as in Return from the Stars—they can hardly cope in changed circumstances and among people whose behavior they do not understand.

Time travel

In 1921–1945, that is, within the timeframe of the writer’s residence in Lviv, the city was under Polish, Soviet, German and then again Soviet administration, and while a new set of maps came with each change of power, Lviv residents continued to use the names they remembered from the times of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Regardless of the changing names, the topography of the district where the writer and his parents lived has several fixed elements. From one side, the house is close to the university, a park on a hill and the polytechnic. From the front balcony, on the right, there is a view of the old town and Lviv’s most important landmarks. Here begins the district with beautiful tenement houses, the famous school of philosophy and mathematics, the zoological collection of Benedykt Dybowski and Włodzimierz Dzieduszycki, libraries and archives. On the other side, Lem’s house was adjacent to one of Lviv’s two main streets, leading from the station to High Castle (Polish: Wysoki Zamek). Along this street there are prison buildings (Małe Brygidki –“Little Bridgettines” and Brygidki—“Bridgettines”), and behind them stretches (or rather used to stretch) the poorer section of the Jewish quarter, with numerous synagogues, mikvahs and a historic Jewish cemetery located at the back of the Israelite Hospital. Buildings are denser, lower, covered with inscriptions in several languages, and life concentrates on market squares, such as the so-called Krakidały, that is, Krakowski Square behind the Jewish Colosseum Theater—the flea market mentioned by Lem in Highcastle. The tenement is surrounded by buildings—the church of St. Yura on...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Biographical Notes
• Author’s Note
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Lem(Berg) Land
• 2 The split
• 3 Holocaust in space
• Conclusion
• Index