Adam Daniel Rotfeld, born in 1938
I lost the silent “h”
Interviewed by Teresa Torańska
ADAM DANIEL ROTFELD: I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I knew that my name was Adaś. I knew that when I was saying goodby to my parents, I was 3-and-a-half.
TERESA TORAŃSKA: The other children didn’t know their age?
No. In children’s homes, they just took one look at your height, and wrote in the older ones’ birth certificates 1 January 1937, and the younger ones’ 1 January 1939. I tried to write about it. I even started. But then I thought: How? In what language? Are there words that can be used to talk about children locked in wardrobes or pigsties for three or four years?
What can a 3-year-old child remember?
Bits and pieces. Round-ups mixed with pogroms. The Germans came to rob and shoot. My aunt fell on the threshold. She didn’t get up. A hiding place. We sat in the hiding place, I tried not to breathe. The monk’s arrival.
From the monastery in Uniów?
The Greek-Catholic Studite monastery. It was located seven kilometers away from Przemyślany. He brought back my cousins who had been put in their care. My cousins didn’t want to stay there. The boys from wealthy homes didn’t like the austere monastery life.
Did they perish?
All of them. The monk asked my father, I remember that moment very well, I often replayed it in my mind. “Doctor, would you like to entrust your son into our care?” My father was a lawyer. He had a big legal office in Przemyślany. I could tell everyone’s eyes were on me. I got up. I was ready to leave. This was in December 1941. A horse-drawn cart waited in the yard. This was the last time I saw my parents.
Do you remember your father?
Of course.
And your mother?
After I published a fragment of my memoir in Polityka weekly, an elderly lady from Katowice got in touch with me. Her name was Janina Hrycekowa. Her son is a well-known doctor there. She wrote me a beautiful letter. This letter came to me as if from another world. Almost seventy years ago (she was 18 years old at the time), she met my mother at a lawyers’ ball in the Sokół Gymnastic Society in Przemyślany. She talked to her. My mother wore a willow-green dress.
Several people got in touch with me then. One of the directors of a department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called me. He was touched. I hadn’t known him before. I wrote about his stepfather, Franciszek Pawuła, the director of the Childcare Department at the Ministry of Education, who took me on a repatriation train from Ukraine to Poland in 1951. “You have no idea,” he said, “how happy it made my mother that he hasn’t been completely forgotten.” Another lady, Hanna Józefiak, sent me a court calendar from 1939 with an index of attorneys from Warsaw, Lvov, and the nearby area. I found the name of my distant cousin, Adolf Rothfeld, in the Lvov Bar Association.
Spelled with “th”.
The silent “th” got lost during the war, over the multiple translations of my documents into Russian and Ukrainian. The index of Warsaw attorneys featured the name of Maurycy Wilhelm Rothfeld—the brother of my father who was a deputy in the Sejm from Rivne, and the name of my father in the list from Przemyślany: Leon Rothfeld. The third of the brothers, Józef, was a doctor from Brzeżany, and the fourth, Adolf, a principal of a middle school in Warsaw.
Did they perish?
Only Józef was fortunate. He died before the war. Do you know how many attorneys there were in Przemyślany? Eighteen! And until I saw that index, I had thought that my father was the only one. Przemyślany is a small town. At that time its population was over five thousand.
When I’m asked where I’m from, I don’t say from Przemyślany. I say I’m from Podolia or from around Lvov, because they confuse Przemyślany with Przemyśl. They know of Drohobych, Stryi, or Stanisławów, but who remembers that Przemyślany, Brzeżany, or Gliniany were in Poland? Beautiful names, aren’t they?
In 1999 I had a private audience with Pope John Paul II. I visited him as the director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The Pope welcomed me in English. “May I,” I asked him, “speak Polish?”
“How do you know Polish?” “I’m from Poland,” I replied.
“I became the director of the SIPRI because I won the contest.” […] John Paul II listened carefully to me speaking and suddenly asked: “Why do you have such a strange accent?”
A coronal “ł” and a hard “h”: “herbata” and “hałas”, and not “cherbata” and “chałas”.
“Because I’m evidence,” I answered him, “ of the thesis that a man who becomes an expatriate and loses his homeland, especially a small homeland, loses everything but his accent.” He smiled. “You mean, you’re from around Lvov,” he recognized flawlessly. He said: “not from Lvov. From around Lvov.” He was also from a different world. One that doesn’t exist anymore.
Like your parents?
My parents completed their studies in Vienna and Germany. They spoke German and they thought—I can only surmise—that they knew Germans. When the German-Soviet War broke out, they didn’t flee to Russia. They stayed in Przemyślany. They probably thought that the German civilization, a rational world that the Germans had created, excluded crime. It probably didn’t occur to them that the Germans were capable of committing a crime. The Russians, Bolsheviks—yes, but not the Germans. […]
I arrived at the monastery. The monastery in Uniów was built by Belgian monks in the thirteenth century, in the middle of nowhere. There was a village, very poor with straw-thatched houses, a long way behind it. Three boys from Jewish families were being hidden in that monastery. And no one made a denunciation! Despite the fact that all the monks in the monastery surely knew who we were. They must have known.
You… knew?
I did.
From where?
I have no idea. From air, maybe.
Maybe from your last name?
No, I didn’t know my last name. Just first my name. I also didn’t ask anyone about my parents. At the monastery there was a rule that you didn’t talk about others and you didn’t try to find out anything about them. Because it was dangerous. It was better to stay quiet. You didn’t discuss things other than everyday subjects.
You talked to a mare.
But that was in my sleep! Not when I was awake, but when I was asleep. Apparently the need to talk and share my thoughts was so strong. I was a shepherd. I watched over thirteen cows and twenty sheep. And a mare. I dreamed that I was talking to her. I dreamed that I was sure that regardless of what I told her she wouldn’t pass it on, that I felt safe with her. My flock grazed in the pasture. The pasture was near a school. It was a village school, perched on a hill, where the road bent. It was the only brick building in the whole village.
Recently, out of the blue I got a fax from Cornell University in the United States. It was from Professor Roald Hoffmann, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for chemistry, a poet and playwright. One of his colleagues read in a Polish newspaper that a Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs had visited the monastery in Uniów where he had been hidden, and funded a plaque for the Szeptycki brothers. He immediately decided to inform me that he was there, too. Right there! With his family. Some decent people were hiding them in the attic of the school building. I walked by it every day with my sheep and cows! If I ever go back to writing down my recollections, at the end I will include an index of decent people I’ve met throughout my life. The list will be very long.
The Szeptycki brothers?
Klemens, the younger one, was the prior of the Studite monastery in Uniów, and later my confessor. No one who hasn’t lived through those times will ever be able to appreciate how much courage and selfless kindness the monasteries and the people of the Church showed to the persecuted, the hungry, the poor, and the helpless.
Andrzej, the Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church in Lvov, called on all his subject churches to hide Jewish children among the Ukrainian and Polish orphans. One hundred fifty children were saved in Greek Catholic monasteries while hatred wreaked havoc outside.
On the mountain there was a fish pond. When the upper pond was drained, the water filled the lower pond, and we could pick fish from the sludge into buckets. Once I went to collect fish by myself. My legs burned, my feet were cracked from the sun and the mud. Suddenly, they opened fire. On one side of the pond, Bandera’s followers were shooting, on the other—some other group of militants. The pond was less than fifty to seventy meters wide. I was caught in the crossfire. The bullets whizzed over my head. I skipped to the pond’s edge, lay close against it, and waited. Several dead bodies lay around the pond. I helped the monks dig a trench and we buried them in one grave.
Bandera’s followers—Ukrainian right-wing and antisemitic partisans—trans. note.
Another time, we went to pick blackberries. We stumbled across a camp. The campfire was still burning, while fifty corpses lay scattered around. They were killed in a surprise attack while doing their morning routines. Some had been washing, others were holding spoons, someone was just getting up. We went back to the monastery for shovels. We dug trenches.
At that time, you were 5 or 6 years old?
More or less. To this day, I don’t know who those people were, why they were killed, or by whom. We prayed for them at the monastery.
The monks christened me. They named me Daniel. For a long time, I thought that it was because the monk who fostered me was named Danyło. And suddenly, after twenty years, when I was getting married and needed my original birth certificate, I discovered in the Archive of the Bug River Acts that my parents had given me two names: Adam Daniel. Did the monks know about this? Or was it a coincidence? I don’t know. My name was Daniel Czerwiński.
Did you believe in God?
I believed in a very specific God with whom you could talk, who would react to your words. I believed that nothing happened without His will, that the Lord Almighty would deliver you from misfortune. And I didn’t understand—I understood less and less why God would allow these mass murders and common savagery to happen. The Germans’ soldier belts read “Gott mit uns,” God is with us. And I thought more and more that if God was really with them, then this God was insensitive to human suffering.
Did you start doubting?
I doubted that you could call on Him and ask for anything.
Did you start hating?
I churned in my mind how to punish Hitler. Afterwards, after the war. Because the evil around us was his fault, specifically his—I thought. He unleashed it in people.
Then—kill him?
No, no. Killing is a moment. I figured that locking him in a cage and displaying him around the world like a monster would be better.
When the Russians entered, I thought it would be different. I went to school. During the German period, they were giving us textbooks. There was a large picture in brown of a man with a small mustache printed on the first page. He was standing and was surrounded by children whose heads he was stroking. That was Hitler. After the Soviets entered, we got textbooks with a new picture, black and white. In similar scenery. Some man with a mustache was standing amidst children and also stroked their heads. That was Stalin. The German textbooks said that the Soviets were communists, Bolsheviks and criminals, and the Germans were the liberators. The Russian textbooks said the opposite, that the Germans were fascist, Nazis, and perpetrators of a genocide, while the Russians liberated us, which was true, after all.
You can’t see the difference?
One time, journalists from Der Spiegel weekly asked me how I explained the scale of the horrendous crimes committed by Germany. I replied that I couldn’t explain it. For seventeen years I worked on the German question in order to comprehend it, and I quit because all the sociological or economic theories can only explain the phenomenon, but they won’t explain the behaviors of individual people. How does it happen that a person in whom ethical principles were instilled suddenly starts accepting a genocide? Because the difference between Stalinism and Nazism is that Stalinism promised a bright future for which some unbelievably high price had to be paid, and if someone was a fanatic of communism, they could believe that reaching this aim was worth sacrificing human life. An individual didn’t matter; an individual was nothing. A lot of decent people unfortunately believed in that bright future, which incidentally is thrown in their faces to this day. However, when they realized that they had made a mistake, they became the harshest critics of communism.
Hitler, on the other hand, said openly from the very beginning that he was going to kill. He didn’t deceive anyone. He said that the German nation had the right to be a nation of masters and that the inferior race—according to him—ought to be liquidated: Jews, partly Slavs. By accepting fascism, the Germans accepted crime. In Germany, there was no family in which some member wasn’t an avid Nazi. Just like in the USSR, you’ll struggle to find a family unaffected by persecution.
It was the year 1944 and families started arriving at the monastery. They came to collect their children. I waited. I waited for them every day.
Your elder sister survived.
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know for a long time. No one was coming to get me. Why?! Maybe… At the monastery, there was a rumor that eleven Jews were murdered on their way to one of the monasteries to collect their children. Miraculously, they had survived the war and then they were killed. Two Jewish boys suddenly disappeared from the monastery in Uniów. In the morning, I saw that they were gone. The families took them at night, in secret. One of them—it’s an unbelievable story—I met in July of 1994, exactly 50 years later.
How?
There are 6 billion people in the world. We didn’t know each other’s last names and suddenly, in 1989, I got a phone call. My wife Basia answered. Someone with a foreign accent was calling. We met. He was coming to Poland from France and the people from Przemyślany who lived there asked him to find me. It emerged that on French TV, after Louis Malle’s movie “Au revoir garçon” a discussion took place in which two men participated. They survived the war at a monastery near Lvov. And they were looking for the third one. His last name had something to do with “red”. One of the people from Przemyślany thought of me. “Is that you?” asked my new acquaintance.
Louis Malle’s movie—the author refers to the movie Au revoir les enfants—trans. note.
“red”—the author’s last name during the war, Czerwiński, sounds in Polish similar to the color red—“czerwony”—trans. note.
One of them was Łewko Chamiński. I have a picture of him. We’re standing in a group of boys with the monk Danyło. This photograph from 1943 is the only thing I have left from my stay in Uniów. He has it too. We started corresponding. And later, when I was in America, we met. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut. He is a well-known pediatric cardiac surgeon.
When did you see your sister?
In 1946, I think. She came to the monastery with an escort. Two soldiers accompanied her. She was afraid of coming alone. I didn’t recognize her.
Did she recognize you?
They brought her to me, so she did. She surely really wanted to recognize me. She was eleven years older than me. She told me that our parents had fled from the ghetto to the forest, where 150 Jewish families were hiding. Father bought them food from the local peasants. In the winter of 1942 the director of one of the village schools, a Ukrainian, offered the parents to move to his barn for Christmas, to recover a bit. Our parents were exhausted. Someone from the village noticed that he was taking food to the barn and informed the Ukrainian police. Our parents were sent to the prison in Przemyślany. It was in the cellar of the court where my father had worked as a defense attorney before the war. The former bailiff was the guard. He approached my father, he knew him.
“I don’t know what will happen to you, Doctor,” he said, “but if you wish, you can write a note to your children. I’ll pass it on to them after the war.” My parents were executed. My sister survived in the forest until the Russians entered, that is, until the summer of 1944. She left the forest in a nightgown. She didn’t know where I was. All she knew was that I was being kept somewhere. She was 17 years old. She returned to Przemyślany. The bailiff found her and passed on our father’s letter.
Did it include your address?
Maybe vaguely. Or maybe there was a clue to ask this or that person for more information about me. I never saw that letter. She’s long gone. I blame myself for not asking more.
She couldn’t take me out of the monastery. She wouldn’t have been able to support me. She worked in a spirit factory and made peanuts. She also studied in a chemistry technical school. I stayed in Uniów. The NKVD came to the monastery. I was there when they put Klemens Szeptycki, who was the archimandrite and the abbot, that is the prior, in the car. He was almost blind and very old. He could barely move. He had a long beard and a weathered, noble face. He was very tall. All the Szeptyckis were extremely tall. Andrzej, the Metropolitan of Lvov, was two meters tall. Klemens was over 190 centimeters tall. I brought him food parcels from the monastery to the prison in Przemyślany. The prison was in the building of the NKVD. In front of the entrance the bodies of two young men were hanging, their pants down and genitals out. I’ll never forget it. They killed them and hung them up. They lowered their pants to humiliate them post mortem. They had notes stuck to their shirts which read: “I fought against the Soviets.”
NKVD—People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—an agency of the Soviet Union—trans. note.
In Ukrainian?
No, in Russian. People avoided this street so as not to see them. One day, the parcel was sent back. At the monastery it was suspected that he had died in prison or had been murdered. Years later I learned from the Swedes who were looking for the traces of Raul Wallenberg that they shared a prison cell in Vladimir, and that he died on May 1, 1951. His older brother, Andrzej, was more fortunate. He had died in November 1944 and avoided the persecution. He had been very sick for years and was paralyzed. All of Lvov went to his funeral. Even Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of Ukraine, came. Stalin hadn’t made the decision yet about the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church. No clergyman of the Church had received a good-by with such honors in the Soviet Union. Several months later, the decision was made. A large-scale operation to defame and physically eliminate the clergymen of that Church was undertaken. […]
The Greek-Catholic Orthodox Church was delegalized in 1946.
A year later, my monastery was shut down. The monks were allowed to stay, but the children were moved to the Orphanage in Złoczów. The director looked at me and asked: “First and last name? Father’s name?” “Daniel Czerwiński.” “And the patronymic name?” “I don’t know.” “Well, well,” he said. “I’m Borys, so you’ll be Borysowicz.” He did that spontaneously. This way, he let me know that if I had any problems, I could count on him. If I ever write down my memoir, I’ll also put him on my list of decent people.
And what will you do with the indecent people?
You know, it may sound strange, but I don’t think I’ve met them.
That can’t be!
Then I must have erased them from my memory. I don’t remember bad people.
I don’t want to remember them, do you?
I don’t. Judging people cast in extreme conditions is all too easy. I wasn’t happy at the Orphanage in Złoczów. I felt as if I had been transferred from a normal world to an artificial one.
What was artificial?
At the monastery, there was no electricity. You went to bed early and you got up early. You read by daylight or a kerosene lamp. These were barn lamps, wrapped in a wire that protected the glass from breaking. You could take them to a pigsty or a barn without worrying that the straw or hay would catch fire. Time was organized around seasons. In March you went to the forest to incise birch bark to collect the sap. In the summer we collected linden flowers; in June, July, and August, we picked blackberries and raspberries, hundreds of kilograms. For juice and preserves. In July and August we reaped grain, millet and buckwheat. Later we picked apples. We dried them (there were special furnaces for that) and pickled them in barrels, layered with cabbage. In the fall, potato harvest began.
And in the Orphanage in Złoczów we were taken in fours to a bathhouse in shorts, and we had to go to evening assemblies. In assemblies, we sang the hymn “Children of the World Unite” in Russian. This hymn seemed awful to me. And I was supposed to sing it every day? No way, I thought.
After several days, I concluded that I couldn’t take it anymore. I plotted with two other friends to go back to Uniów. When all the children were walking to school in fours, we took off. It was January of 1947. We had no shoes, only several pairs of felt slippers. We had to cover sixty kilometers. I got frostbite on my feet.
Do they itch?
I have scars. We walked down a road covered in snow. I remember the hum of telegraph wires. In severe frost and wind, they moan and whistle. When a truck was approaching, we hid in ditches. We were afraid it was coming for us. When the monks saw us hungry and with injured feet, they were delighted, like owners who had found their lost dog. At the monastery the monks no longer wore cassocks and habits but simple peasant garments.
Later they were exiled to Siberia?
Many were. Fear came back. It wasn’t explicitly said, but I suspected that the monastery sympathized with the Bandera partisans and secretly supported them. Perhaps it also printed their papers. In the crypt of the church there was a printing shop. I saw it. It had printed the Bible, prayers books, and psalms. The action of transporting people to Siberia began. The only form of survival, I thought, was to blend into the surroundings, to become invisible.
People were loaded onto trucks. Later the families of the exiles would come to the monastery to have the letters, which came from Siberia and Central Asia, read out loud. The local peasants were mostly illiterate. I fulfilled the role of a scribe. In the fall of 1947, after a great drought, a huge wave of hungry fugitives arrived at Uniów. They would wait in a line that was over one kilometer long to get a bowl of broad bean and vegetable soup. Their bodies were swollen with hunger. They didn’t have the energy to stand. One asked me for a slice of bread in exchange for an egg. An egg was a novelty to me. I decided to eat it in the barn. I peeled it gently, it was oddly soft. I hadn’t seen one like that. At the monastery we’d gotten them hard-boiled on Easter. I decided that it had gone bad. I threw it against the beam of the barn. It splattered. I felt that I’d been tricked. At the end of 1949 I was taken to my sister’s, to Przemyślany. She had gotten married to a soldier, a Red Army sergeant returning from Germany. He was a Yakut. They both worked at the liquor factory. He was an accountant, she worked in the laboratory.
Yakut —a Turkic people native to eastern Siberia—trans. note.
My sister told me what my real last name was, and what the names of our parents were. I thought about it for several days. And I made up my mind: I wanted to go back to my real last name, at the first opportunity.
For them?
No. I figured that it was pointless to pretend to be someone else all my life.
Many people changed theirs.
I know. Around that time, a great number of people in Poland did just the opposite. I understand them. They had had horrible war experiences, and they wanted to cut themselves off from them. They felt that if they changed their last name, they would no longer stand out. They’d blend into the surroundings, become a part of Polish society and then they’d rid themselves of everything that made them different, everything that was a threat. I made the right decision. To this day, I feel that it was the right thing to do.
We were hungry again. We mostly survived by eating nettles. I went to school. I remember a friendly principal. His name was Petrenko, I think. Soon he was arrested and sent to a gulag for twenty-five years. They said it was for nationalism and collaboration with Germany during the war. My sister’s husband was arrested. Someone was stealing alcohol out of the factory, so they put everyone in jail, guilty or innocent. I took him cigarettes in jail. I also made a little money delivering milk. When I brought it to the wife of the factory’s director, she invited me for breakfast. […]
When I think about it today, it’s as if I were thinking about another civilization. That reality was so extremely different from today’s that I often catch myself unable to describe it. It’s incomprehensible. There is no language that could approximate the events I’d like to describe.
One day two officers of the NKVD showed up at our place. My name was still Czerwiński. They said that the Polish Embassy in Moscow was looking for me—Adam Rotfeld. They asked if I’d be willing to go to Poland. I said: Yes.
Just like that?
Yes.
You didn’t hesitate?
No.
Like when the monk came and you got up…
I’ve made the majority of my life decisions instinctively, without thinking. If I had considered them more carefully, probably my life would have been different. Worse—I think.
But how did they find you?
Right, that’s interesting. […] In 1950 I was 12. I lived with my sister in Przemyślany. These areas had just been incorporated into the Soviet Union. They didn’t have yet, couldn’t have had, an expansive network of informers. And suddenly, they come to our apartment and ask about Adam Rotfeld.
And what was your sister’s last name?
After getting married, her name was Alina Łobanow. One fact led to another and they figured it out. They found me like a needle in a haystack. One of them, leaving the apartment, already at the door, stopped and asked, “And why do you want to go to Poland after all?” He probably asked out of curiosity. He was intrigued that a child who was living in the best of worlds, in paradise really, wanted to voluntarily leave it. I replied that I’d never been to Poland, that I wanted to see it and if I didn’t like it, I’d come back. Looking back, this reply sounds ironic. It wasn’t true that I had never been to Poland. I had. And it wasn’t that I had left Poland but that Poland had departed from me. It’s around seventy kilometers from Przemyślany to the new border.
Your sister wasn’t coming?
No, she already had a child. It wasn’t until 1956, after she had gotten divorced, that I brought her to Poland. Several years later she died.
So, she wasn’t keeping you in Przemyślany?
No. We both knew that getting away was an opportunity for me; an opportunity to change the environment, to get an education. In the Soviet Union, my education would have stopped at the vocational school adjacent to the factory—Fabryczno-Zawodskoje Obuczenije.
They put me on a train. We stopped in various cities for several days. More children got on the train. In the early spring of 1951 I reached Grodno. In Grodno we bathed and changed into new clothes. Over three thousand children, collected from across the Soviet Union, were going to Poland. There were huge signs on the walls: “Dear Stalin, thank you for the happy childhood.” If I ever write an autobiography, I’ll call it: Born with a Silver Spoon in my Mouth, and the first chapter will be entitled “A Happy Childhood”.
To make it ironic?
No. I really think mine wasn’t the worst. Across my generation, millions of people experienced far worse. How would I have felt if my parents had been arrested and tortured and I had been forced to be ashamed of them? If I’d had to condemn them publicly, in spite of myself, so as not to put them in danger? No, no, I didn’t see any irony in those signs at the time. A sign was a sign. For me, it meant as much as the name of the station or a no smoking sign. […] We reached Dusznik-Zdrój. For two months, families visited the State Holiday Homes for Children “Odra,” “Nysa,” and “Bałtyk.” Only a Lithuanian with his little sister and I weren’t collected.
In that case, who was looking for you?
They were elderly people, my parents’ acquaintances. They knew that I was hiding somewhere. Later, I found them. He was a lecturer at AGH University of Science and Technology. They had lost everything in the east and lived in a single room. They had been notified (they gave me that notice) that “thanks to the amenable decision of the Soviet government and the efforts of the RP embassy in Moscow, the child named Daniel (Adam Rotfeld) was found and repatriated to Poland… and he could be transferred to the family at any moment.” They were extremely happy that I was in Poland, that they managed to bring me to Poland. But they couldn’t afford to take care of me. […]
The four of us were transferred to the Orphanage in Kraków. It was a home for war orphans, mainly Jewish ones. I became worried. Bummer, I thought, there will be problems. But I had no choice.
Tough luck. It was a new situation, I had no better alternative and at that moment, I had to look around and wait to see what would transpire. I was standing calmly with Adam Seinfeld and the Lithuanian with his little sister. He was tall, probably 14, and she was tiny—she was maybe 7. He wouldn’t let go of her hand. Suddenly, they went out into the hallway and Adam and I stayed behind. He looked at me and asked: “Are you staying here?” “Instead of what?” I replied. He said: “I’m not staying.”
“Why not? There are Jews here,” he said. “You’re a Jew too, stop pretending.”
“No!” He lunged at me. “I’m not a Jew, I’m Catholic, I believe in Lord Jesus.” And he started hitting me. During the war, Adam had been raised by a Catholic family in Drohobych.
When the director of the Orphanage came in, Mrs. Eugenia Gostyńska, we were rolling on the floor under the table. “Boys!” She was startled. “What are you doing down there?” We crawled out, all sweaty. It was a hot day in July and we were wearing thick winter coats. Adam, with tears in his eyes, started explaining: “I don’t want to stay here, there are Jews here, and I believe in Lord Jesus. I’m not a Jew, I don’t want to have anything to do with Jews.”
“Son,” Mrs. Gostyńska tried to calm him down, “no one is preventing you from believing in Lord Jesus here. You can believe what you want, in whomever you want, that’s your right.” That was in 1951, and in 1955 Adam, as one of the first ones, left for Israel, changed his name to make it sound Hebrew. His name is Nir. He joined the army and became an avid Israeli patriot.
Did you speak Polish?
A little bit. We spoke a Polish-Ukrainian medley with my sister. But that wasn’t a problem. After two months, I could communicate freely. A language, if you knew it in the early childhood—and I did because my parents had talked to me in Polish—quickly comes back to you. I made a ton of mistakes, though. I called a factory a “zavod”, and one time, I referred to the sons of a king as rabbits and the whole class laughed at me.
zavod—the Polish word for factory is “fabryka” while in Ukrainian, it is “zavod” (завод)—trans. note.
rabbits—“król”—a king, “królik”—a rabbit. The words sound similar but have very different meanings—trans. note
Did it make you feel bad?
No, no. After several months, I was the best at Polish and History. The Orphanage in Kraków was beautiful and very well equipped by American charity organizations. In that poverty, which today is unimaginable, children in orphanages often had much better conditions than those in complete families. In our home, the storage area was full of new clothes. I could choose whatever I wanted. I could be the best-dressed boy in the whole school.
To show off?
But I didn’t want to, I wasn’t interested. In that reality, we orphans really didn’t want for anything. Neither food nor clothes.
What about a family?
Well, yes. But the children had a sense of community, which stemmed from the fact that they only had each other. And there was Mrs. Gostyńska, our director. She was a woman of infinite kindness. At one point, she even wanted to adopt me. During a lesson, someone came to the classroom with the headmaster and said that I was called to the minors’ court. I didn’t know what it was all about. It turned out it was an adoption case. The judge asked me: “Does the minor consent?” I said: “No.”
You didn’t want to have a family?
No. I wanted to decide about it myself. “Why not?” the judge asked me. She was surprised. She thought that the case had been agreed upon. I said: “I’m too big, children who are too young to remember should be adopted.” Mrs. Gostyńska became my legal guardian.
Soon, I think it was 1952, two homes for war orphans merged. The children from Śródborów near Warsaw were brought to Kraków, along with their things and their director. We concluded that the country had come to the city. Mrs. Gostyńska was removed, and the director from Śródborów became the head of the entire orphanage. He was an ambitious educator.
A communist?
No. But like many people at that point, he believed that everything that came from the Soviet Union was progress. He believed in Makarenko, discipline, obedience, imposing one’s idea on how you should live, and educational methods that we Kraków children wouldn’t accept. Once, to discipline us, he decided to punish two girls and two boys for insubordination. The punishment was sending them away for some time to another orphanage. At that point, I was the vice-president of the children’s council. I was responsible for the library. The director’s wife, who was the head of pedagogy, asked me to support that decision and pass it on to the children. I refused. I was 13 years old.
Makarenko—a Soviet pedagogue—trans. note.
The director was taken aback: Why? These were decent people. They had taken in the orphans from Central Asia whose parents had been exiled to Siberia or executed. They brought them to Poland and took care of them.
I replied that I wouldn’t do it because I felt that the punishment was unfair. All four of these children had gone through hell, and sending them away from the Orphanage where they felt at home and safe was the worst, most humiliating, punishment that they could get. […]
Were you a member of the ZMP [Association of Polish Youth—trans. note]? For a short while. When I was at August Witkowski General Secondary School in Kraków. I was removed for telling political jokes. […] My classmates took my side. It’s amazing. I’ve moved dozens of times, I’ve lost a lot of things, but I’ve kept their letters, typed in clumsy Polish. “The circle of the ZMP at grade X was strongly moved (they meant, disturbed) after our classmate and chairman, Rotfeld, was removed from the ZMP and […] we request that the City Board repeal the convention’s decision.” Another group of my classmates submitted an “application for reconsideration of the case of classmate Daniel Rotfeld.”
I wasn’t readmitted to the ZMP, but partly thanks to the kindness of the principal of the secondary school, I was selected to participate in the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students. I got a participant’s card.
It took place in 1955.
Thanks to that, I was accepted at university. I used a ploy. In the column, “Organization Membership,” I wrote: “a participant of the Fifth World Festival of Youth,” letting the commission know that I was right-thinking. No one asked me about the ZMP. And after 1956 the Association was disbanded.
You are an alumnus of an elite university, the Diplomatic and Consular Department at the Main School of Foreign Service in Warsaw.
After completing my studies, I applied for a job at MSZ [the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—trans. note]. I sat for the aptitude tests. I took them with Sławek Dąbrowa, later our ambassador consecutively in Stockholm, Belgrade, and Sofia. They asked him several questions. He answered. I waited for my turn. Suddenly, I realized that the commission was trying to eliminate me from the exam. Sławek was asked which citizenship the population of the Vatican has. He said: “They are citizens of the Holy See.” “No,” they replied, “Wrong answer.”
They asked me the same question. I said: “My friend gave you the correct answer.” At that point, the chair of the commission, the HR director at the ministry, made a comment to me: “Why are you taking this exam in the first place? Your friend”—he pointed to Dąbrowa—“is answering all the questions flawlessly and you can’t answer a single one.” No one from the commission reacted, a total silence. Despite the fact that Dąbrowa was just as invested in getting a job at the ministry and in that exam as I was and I was his rival, he spoke out: “Mister Chairman, my friend answered your question the same way I did, and so far, he hasn’t been asked anything else.”
The commission realized that churlish behavior wouldn’t be tolerated and started asking me questions. I passed with flying colors. I was pleased. Out of twenty-four candidates, only three people passed with A’s. Jerzy Nowak, the current ambassador to NATO, Sławomir Dąbrowa, and myself.
Nowak was your friend.
Yes, we’ve been friends since we were students. He and I lived in a dorm. And I think he was the only one who was interested in why I wasn’t going away on holidays. “What are you going to do here all by yourself?” he asked. “Nothing,” I replied. So he offered: “Then come with me to my parents’.” His parents were teachers near Grójec. I visited them numerous times.
Jurek and Sławek were notified that they had gotten the job, but I wasn’t. I went to the HR to ask what happened. The department head looked at me. “I thought you were smarter. From the beginning,” he said, “it was obvious they weren’t going to hire you.” “Why?” I asked. He replied: “Figure it out.”
Did you?
You know, I didn’t think what you’re thinking now.
[The persecution started—trans. note] already in 1961?
The campaign of eliminating Poles of Jewish origin from central offices started earlier, after October 1956. Naturally, not in the form of officially declared policies, but decisions on the sly. At that point, no one was losing their job yet, but they froze new hires. Unless you had special connections. I didn’t. The MSZ’s HR was located on the fourth floor. I went downstairs, shocked and devastated. I didn’t know what to do with myself. In the hallway, I bumped into my professor from the university. “Why so glum?” he asked. I told him. He shrugged it off: “Don’t worry about it, come see me on Monday” (it was Friday), “I’ll find you something.”
He worked at the Polish Institute of International Affairs [PISM—trans. note]. I got an assignment. My job was to do a search for articles on Polish international politics in the interwar period, based on two dailies: the government’s Gazeta Polska and the ND’s [National Democracy’s—trans. note] Warszawski Dziennik Narodowy. Between November 1918 and September 1939, I read them cover to cover. For me, this was a very important lesson in the history of Poland. After several months I got a full-time position. Again, I got lucky. Working at PISM, I avoided a number of unpleasant situations, which I surely would have experienced working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
And PISM was free from them?
There were ups and downs. But I would say that I asked for them.
What do you mean?
I refuse to paint myself as a veteran, or a victim. I’m neither. I’ve had a normal life, maybe a little more interesting than others have, but the total amount of unpleasantness which I’ve experienced doesn’t exceed the national average.
Tell me exactly what happened.
I was applying for a foreign stipend. Of course, with the consent of the Institute’s director. It’s hard to become a good researcher—and that was my ambition—if you live in isolation from the world, from key research centers. On March 4, 1968, on my thirtieth birthday, I was taking an exam in English at the American Embassy. I did well. After several days, the Embassy informed me that I had received a Fulbright Fellowship. I was elated. I really wanted to be fluent in English. I applied for a passport. A few days later it was March 8 and the so-called March incidents began. […] I got a termination notice and I was banned from the Institute. The ban was lifted after two months and I was re-hired, but with a 50 per cent pay cut. Previously, I was making 4400 zloty, and after that my salary was 2200 zloty. I didn’t occur to me that forty years later it would affect the calculation of my pension.
You didn’t think about emigrating?
There was a moment when I expected I might be arrested. There were rumors that lists were being drawn up, camps formed.
Fear — mongering?
So people would leave. At that point, I lived in an apartment building opposite the Grand Hotel, in a studio of 23 square meters and 60 centimeters. It was on the seventh floor, and the elevator stopped at the sixth floor. I went down to my neighbors. I didn’t know them at all. I knocked and said that times were uncertain, that I lived alone and didn’t know what was going to happen to me. If I were to be arrested, I would make a scene by the elevator, and I asked them to call my friends. I gave them the phone numbers.
Some functionary of MSW [the Ministry of Interior— trans. note] contacted me. “There’s no chance you will go to America on a stipend,” he declared, “ but you can leave for good.” I replied: “I might just do that, but whether I stay or go, it’s my decision, not yours.” I didn’t get a passport.
For the first time?
I didn’t get one in 1962, either. I was supposed to go to the Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki. At that point, I was the chair of the Student Association of Friends of the UN. Several hundred people from Poland were going to the Festival. Only I was “distinguished” this way.
Can you think why?
Perhaps because I refused to cooperate. As a student, I worked as a translator with the Peace Race. I oversaw the Soviet and East Germany team. A guy came and asked me to report what the cyclists were talking about, because there might be anti-German and anti-Soviet provocations. I found this proposal bizarre and ludicrous. He asked me to sign, on pain of criminal liability, to keep that conversation confidential. I signed it. They left me alone for a few years.
When did they call you?
I think in 1962. But I don’t remember if it was before or after I was denied a passport to go to Finland. Some guy called me and invited me for a coffee. He tried talking me into cooperating. I told him that every country needs secret services and I understood that. But the thing was that even if I wanted to join them, I couldn’t because I wasn’t cut out for this. I didn’t like to hide anything; I liked talking, I talked a lot, and I wasn’t discreet.
He replied, “I know you worry that we’ll expect denunciations from you, but we really don’t. We have more future-oriented plans with you.” He explained: “You have friends abroad, so keep in touch with them. And in fifteen or twenty years, when you reach some position and so will they, these contacts will be very useful for Poland.”
“Funny you should say that,” I replied. “I don’t have friends abroad because I’ve never been abroad.”
“Oh, you don’t, don’t you?” He pulled out copies of letters and postcards sent to me for Christmas and Easter by friends who had left Poland.
This upset me. “I respect every job,” I said, “also the job of a prison guard because a state needs both prisons and prison guards. But I don’t have the mentality of a prison guard. And if you,” I blurted out, “are reading people’s letters, then I have nothing to say to you.” I walked up to the waiter and paid for my tea. “That man,” I pointed to him, “will pay for his.” And I left.
After many years I learned from one of the vice-ministers at the MSZ who was trying to unblock my passport that I had offended that functionary. Because I supposedly compared the PRL [People’s Republic of Poland] to a concentration camp, and the MSW’s employees to guards in that camp.
How did he know?
He looked in my file. In Poland, there were always some kind of files. He wanted to help me. Many people tried to help me.
The Fulbright Fellowship fell through in 1968?
And in 1969. And at others times. My appeals didn’t help. I wouldn’t get a passport for the next five years.
Who unblocked it? […]
The name that I’ll give is also frowned upon today. Cyrankiewicz. I think it was him.
The Prime Minister between 1948 and 1970, with a short break, and since 1973, the chair of the Committee for the Defense of Peace.
His secretary, Mrs. Elżbieta Kolankowska, called me, saying that Cyrankiewicz asked me to write him a speech. I didn’t really want to waste my time. I thought that he wouldn’t be happy with what I would write for him. Mrs. Elżbieta insisted. She called again and again. She said that Cyrankiewicz was very intelligent, wise, and experienced. I agreed. I thought: I’ll go talk to him, learn something, ask him how he—a socialist activist—could become the prime minister and deputy prime minister in the worst period of Stalinism, and ostensibly, lend his support to Stalinism. “I’m Józek [Józef, informally—trans. note],” he welcomed me. “Prime Minister,” I said, “let’s agree that you can call me by my first name but I’ll keep the official form.”
He was almost twenty years older than you.
A whole generation.
And what about the speech for him for the Congress of the World Peace Council in Warsaw?
I wrote it. I was sitting in the room when he gave it. He didn’t use a single word from my draft.
“What did you think?”
“Prime Minister,” I said, “you spoke, as usual, with great eloquence.” “You mean, yours was better.”
“No, no, that’s not it. But mine was built around an idea.”
“A lot of ideas,” he laughed. “You have time? Let’s grab lunch, my treat. […]”
One day in April or May 1979 Cyrankiewicz called me again. “I heard that you’re from Lvov,” he said.
“Not exactly. I’m from around Lvov.”
“Wouldn’t you like to go to Lvov to a conference on European security as the representative of the Polish Peace Committee?” “With great pleasure.”
“In that case, you’re the head of the Polish delegation. You’ll give a speech there.”
I asked who the members of the delegation were.
“A seamstress, a cleaner, and a washerwoman,” he replied. (Laughter).
Meaning?
A representation of a wide range of social classes, as they would put it. A teacher from Krosno, an athlete, and a model farmer. I picked each of them up in the car. The conference took place in the auditorium of the Opera House in Lvov. It was attended by the head of the Supreme Council of Ukraine, the prominent writer Oles Honchar, the head of the municipality of Lvov, and other figures. All of them spoke Russian.
I realized that the representative of individual states spoke out in the order of the Russian alphabet: Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany. I went out to the hallway.
“Excuse me,” I interrupted some cable technician, “do you speak Ukrainian?”
“Only Ukrainian,” he said.
“And could you help me translate a few sentences from Polish to Ukrainian?”
“Sure.”
We did the translation. I went back to the auditorium. The representative of the Polish delegation could speak now. I started in Ukrainian. The auditorium went quiet. I discovered then that silence can speak louder than any applause. I was the first person in that auditorium, at that conference, who spoke Ukrainian. I said that many Poles spoke Ukrainian and even more Ukrainians spoke Polish, and that was why I deemed it appropriate to welcome all the attendees in Ukrainian. I got thunderous applause.
During the break, Oles Honchar approached me. A few year later he wrote an outstanding novel entitled Chram and was shunned as a nationalist and revisionist.
“How do you know Ukrainian?” he asked.
“As a child,” I explained, “I stayed in a monastery in Uniów, and now”—I decided to share this—“I came to Lvov to visit that monastery.”
“That’s impossible,” he said. “It is possible,” I replied.
“No,” he answered, “out of the question.”
“I’ve already bought a bus ticket to Przemyślany.” I showed him. “From there, I’ll walk to the monastery.”
“No, please, don’t do it, I beg of you. It’ll be considered a provocation.”
Provocation?
Every act unauthorized by the authorities was called a provocation. I dug my heels in. It wasn’t about provocation. For me, it was about nostalgia. Later, I learned from Russian scientists that there was a long discussion about me. The Russians said that they knew me and that the trip could be organized but under supervision. The whole delegation went to a kolkhoz in Złoczów, and I was put in a car with a representative of Raycom for company. A police car was driving in front of us. We entered Przemyślany onto Mickiewicz Street. It was renamed Lenin wułycia.
Kolkhoz—a collective farm in the Soviet Union—trans. note.
And today…?
Today, it’s Hałycka wułycia. This is my home,” I said. “No, no,” the representative of Raycom said, “there are two identical villas on Mickiewicz Street. This one belonged to the Wójtowicz, yours is next.” The representative of Raycom knew everything. Five families lived in mine. “We’re planning to expand the street and remove the porch,” he said.
The porch where you shattered your hand as a 2-year-old?
Yes, my fist. This scar is a souvenir from a different life. I took a picture. After returning to Warsaw, I compared it to the picture that my sister had taken in 1947, maybe 1948. At that point, I was still living at the monastery. Yes, it was the same house, our pre-war home. My sister had hired a professional photographer and we posed in front of a house.
She didn’t say whose it was?
No, I suspect for fear that it would cause me a sense of loss. The Ukrainians invited me to a restaurant for lunch. After we ate, I thanked them for their hospitality.
“And now,” I said, “let’s go to Uniów.”
“Not going to happen. We only have permission to go to Przemyślany.”
“No problem,” I said. “I’ll walk.”
“Don’t do it! The authorities will read it as a provocation.” “Provocation?” I was taken aback. “What are you keeping there? A secret? Are you producing a biological weapon there?”
“No, no.” They became defensive. “But the monastery is no longer there.”
“I know, it was closed down. I was there when it happened.” I took presents out of my bag. I brought a lot of vodka and chocolate from Poland. We had a drink. “We’ll take you there,” they said, “providing you won’t tell anyone.” I swore.
The monastery housed a home for mentally ill elderly women. The church was boarded up and transformed into a trash and filth dump. I couldn’t go inside. The utility room, where the manure tank used to be located, was poured over with concrete, on top of which a Lenin statue was placed on a pedestal. Lenin was painted gold and shimmered in the sun. For the mentally ill women, Lenin became the subject of a religious cult. They would kneel in front of Lenin and pray to him. It was terrifying and sad. […]
In August of 2005 you went back to the monastery in Uniów.
For the third time. Two years ago, I visited it with my wife and daughter. I wanted to show them this place. This time, I went to pay my debt of gratitude. There was a crowd of journalists, television—Polish and Ukrainian—the officials of both the Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic Churches.
At the monastery, which had been beautifully and meticulously restored, I unveiled a plaque devoted to the Szeptycki brothers. This plaque was funded with an eye towards the new generations, especially the young Ukrainians. So that every person entering the church could see and read it, that in a time when evil ruled this land, they had the courage to face it. That evil ought to be resisted. auguSt 2005
❦
Adam Daniel Rotfeld was born on March 4, 1938, in Przemyślany in Podolia. He spent the German occupation at the Greek Catholic monastery in Uniów. He was repatriated to Poland in 1951. For the next five years, he stayed at the Orphanage in Kraków. He studied at the Diplomatic and Consular Department at the Main School of Foreign Service in Warsaw. Between 1961 and 1989 he worked at the Polish Institute of International Affairs. He earned his doctorate degree at the Jagiellonian University in 1969, and his Habilitation in 1990. Ten years later, he obtained the title of Professor of Humanities.
From June 1989 he was the director of a research project, and in 1991 he was appointed the director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) for two terms. Between November 2001 and 2005, he was the Deputy Minister and later the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. Currently he is a member of the Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters of the UN Secretary-General, a member of editorial boards and research committees of various research centers at home and abroad. He also lectures at the College of Europe in Natolin and the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw.
He has published over twenty monographs and three hundred scientific studies and articles. In 2006 the Polish Institute of International Affairs published his book entitled Polska w niepewnym świecie [Poland in an Uncertain World]. He is an honorary citizen of the town of Przemyślany (2004). By the decision of the Chapter of Polish-Ukrainian Reconciliation, he was presented with an Award, which he collected from the hands of the Kraków metropolitan Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz in June 2007.
The interview of Teresa Torańska with Adam Daniel Rotfeld was published in the book entitled „Są” [They are] (Świat Książki, 2007). We are publishing it in a slightly abridged form.
