Krakow After Capitalism

Andrzej Krauze is one of Poland's most famous dissident artists. He was also a part-time illustrator for my wife's Internet company. That's the way it is in the modern world: you can be a celebrity in one country and a factotum in the next. If you're an artist, you can starve in both.

Krauze has starved most of his life. Earlier this summer, however, there was some vindication. A retrospective of his political cartoons, going all the way back to the 1970s, opened in Krakow. My wife and I made the trip. Posters of the exhibit were plastered all over town and Andrzej was featured in a national magazine. "I Draw Because I Don't Know What to Do With My Hands," said the headline. "What else could I say?" he explains modestly. "The reporter asked a stupid question?'Why do you draw?' I gave him the first answer that came into my head."

The evening was not a complete triumph. The Days of Dissidence in Poland are fast fading. A former Communist replaced Lech Walesa as president. Unemployment is at almost 20 percent. "Krakow has lots of great restaurants but no businesses," explains Andrzej. Piotr Skrzynecki's underground cabaret was the Saturday Night Live of Poland, introducing a generation of poets and singers who performed acid satires of the Soviet regime. Skrzynecki is now dead, however, and at a Grand Reunion Concert at the Jagiellonian University Medical College, many of the folksingers have white hair. Andrzej is a celebrity and is called onstage to kiss one of the performers. But only a handful of people show up for his opening the next night.

Much of Krauze's success?and much of my wife's, for that matter?has come through his association with Casimir, a Polish Jew and entrepreneur who grew up in Warsaw and spent World War II in Siberia with his Communist parents. After the war, Casimir returned to Poland to pursue a youthful career as a jazz musician and filmmaker, but he settled into publishing. He eventually immigrated to Israel and now lives in London, where he collects Picassos. Still, he manages to convey the sense that he may have wasted his life making money.

Casimir discovered Krauze in London and patronized him, buying an entire set of Kafka illustrations when Andrzej was almost destitute. Last year he sponsored an exhibit in Warsaw and has helped arrange the Krakow retrospective. Still, there is some tension between them. Andrzej suspects Casimir may have acquired his Kafka drawings for much less than they are worth. My wife has also found relations with Casimir to be somewhat strained. In their first company, she was scheduled to gain ownership, but Casimir sold it for $40 million three months before she became vested. Her consolation prize was $25,000. In the second go-round, she made sure she secured 25-percent ownership, but then Casimir sold it at a loss. He recovered half his $10 million investment as a loan, while her equity proved worthless. Relations are still friendly, but we're left with the feeling he will always be one step ahead of us.

Perhaps as compensation, Casimir now insists on paying for every meal. As he leads us through the streets of Krakow, he is trying to unload another company for several hundred million. He is not happy to be back in Poland and almost never visits. He hasn't forgotten Auschwitz.

Krakow is a treasure of medieval charm. Relatively unscathed by the war, it has emerged from Communism as a cultural center not yet overrun by tourists. The market square, the size of four football fields, is surrounded by 150 restaurants. "In 1988 there were two restaurants here," says Casimir, waving expansively. "We came here at 9 o'clock one night and there was no one on the street, not even a policeman." In August the Pope will visit. In 1993, two million people assembled to hear the former Bishop of Krakow recite Mass, but he was too ill to appear. Although he is now in poorer health, this year they expect no disappointments. "Many people are hoping the Pope will die here," says Andrzej.

In the bad old days of Communism, Andrzej was publishing cartoons of the Soviet Union offering its flaccid buttocks to Poland saying, "You must kiss this each day." Or an occupying Soviet general sitting down with European trade negotiators and offering, "How much will you give us for each worker we do not kill?" After being censored for years, Krauze fled to London, where he caught on with The Guardian?just before Solidarity emerged in 1989. Piotr Skrzynecki died in 1997 and the underground cabaret closed. Today, a fetching bronze sculpture of the founder sits beside its old entrance. Casimir commissioned the memorial.

If Casimir and Krauze still admire Poland's accomplishments, however, it is only from a distance. "This is the only country in Europe where people come up to me on the street and say, 'You're a Jew, aren't you?'" says Casimir, as we dine at another of Poland's "best restaurants." "My brother is a successful businessman in Israel and he feels the same way. He'd rather risk suicide bombers than live with this kind of discrimination." I know this is correct. A former editor of mine has a distinctly Polish name. The first time he appeared on C-SPAN, he got calls from Poles all over the country telling him, "You're not a Pole, you're a Jew."

Like most European countries, Poland is really not any closer to solving the "Jewish question" than it was in the 1930s. In 1939 there were three million Jews in Poland, most in large cities. Two-thirds of the doctors in Warsaw were Jewish, and many of the major industries were run by Jewish families. In effect, Jews were the preponderance of the urban bourgeoisie. Today there are only 8000 Jews in Poland, slightly more than in Panama. Krakow's Jewish Quarter?which dates from the expulsion of the Ashkenazi from Spain in 1492?is being revived as an early Greenwich Village, but without the Jews. A "genuine Holocaust survivor" offers daily tours, but that's about it. In some instances, the redevelopment is being held up by Jewish claims of prewar ownership.

In spite of his lingering resentments, however, Casimir does not think we should visit Auschwitz. "It's pornography," he explains in typical staccato fashion as we stroll the Jewish Quarter's narrow streets. "I'll tell you something much more interesting. They had a memorial here at the temple a few years ago. There were mountains of flowers. Way off in one corner there was a beautiful little bouquet with a sign, 'To our fellow Jews?from the Gypsies of Krakow.' The Gypsies suffered a much greater holocaust than the Jews. Almost all of them died. Why don't we make as big a thing about the Gypsies as they do about the Jews at Auschwitz?"

My wife and I are unconvinced. We visit Auschwitz the next day.

She wants to pay a cabdriver $40 to drive 30 miles to the camp, then wait outside while we tour the museum. To me this is sacrilege. I want to be herded there on public transportation, just the way the Jews were. I give in, however, and soon I realize there is no point in trying to preserve atmosphere. Huge tour buses line the parking lot like pigs at a trough. The souvenir stand sells sunny postcards. In the reception hall is p.c. Europe's latest remake of history: "Women at Auschwitz." "Where's the 'Men at Auschwitz' exhibit?" asks my wife.

What's unnerving about the place is its elegance. Originally a Polish Army outpost, the barracks are graceful brick structures resembling farm cottages. The interiors are sturdy and clean, with worn stone staircases that make it feel like an old high school. Only at neighboring Birkenau?four times the size and hastily thrown up when Auschwitz became overcrowded?did the stable-like conditions of the old newsreels prevail. Turn any corner, though, and there's a guard tower at the end of the avenue. That's when the fear begins to take hold.

On this day the camp is overrun by high school trips. You marvel at Polish youth getting a convincing lesson in anti-Semitism. Then you realize that, to the Poles, Auschwitz represents their own imprisonment as well. Until 1942 the camp housed mostly Polish and Russian POWs. The walls are lined with mug shots of inmates who died there. The Germans were amazingly formal, keeping careful records and holding brief, 30-second trials before dragging prisoners into Courtyard 11 to be shot. "You'd almost wish they'd brought everybody here and just chopped their heads off," says my wife. "It's this veneer of pseudo-science that turns your stomach." One photo shows two sets of twins who were part of one of Dr. Josef Mengele's "experiments" in sterilization. All four boys have been completely castrated.

Just outside the barbed-wire enclosure is a gallows where Rudolf Hoess, director of Auschwitz, was tried and hung by the Poles in 1947. Beside it sits the crematorium, a modest, three-oven affair where two or three corpses were slipped in on rollers, then dumped as ashes out the back. It is an early primitive prototype. Only when they scaled up at Birkenau did the Nazis turn to mass production.

Back at the hotel in Krakow, my wife meets another Polish-Jewish businessman from Chicago. He is in town with former Secretary of Defense William Cohen trying to sell the Polish government an F-15 fighter plane. "He grew up in Warsaw and says he has a love-hate relationship with Poland," she reports. "He thinks the Poles are just as anti-Semitic as ever and suspects Hitler chose Auschwitz because he knew they wouldn't object. But he keeps coming back anyway. He says it's battered-wife syndrome."

Pulling a few strings, he gets us a half-priced room for the next night at one of Warsaw's best hotels.

On our last morning we tour Warsaw's completely restored "Old City" and then head for the airport. Our cab driver is a former merchant seaman who speaks good English and says he's been to New York many times. "Life is better than under the Communists," he tells us. "But do I have more money in my pocket? No. My children graduated from college and can't find jobs. It's very hard to accept 20-percent unemployment."

Finally it hits me. It's this goddamned anti-Semitism that holds Poland back. Casimir, his brother, the F-15 salesman?they're precisely the businesspeople who could put Poland on the map, running enterprises and building businesses on a world-class scale. But they've all fled to Israel or the United States, leaving Poland with restaurants, tourism and branch offices of American banks. We're so assimilated in this country we don't even notice the difference. It's those ancient fears and prejudices that keep people trapped in provincial economies. The savvy movers and shakers may always be one step ahead of you, but at least you're going someplace.