The Woman from Hamburg (12 page)

Stefan was mild-mannered; he had gray-green eyes and a trusting smile like his father. He greeted me with
“Dzień dobry, pani”
and then switched to German, having exhausted his fund of Polish words. He said that he was in Poland only once, at the airport, changing planes. When he and his friend entered the transit lounge, they noticed a most wanted list on the wall with a photo gallery of terrorists whom the police were searching for. They had no trouble finding their own photographs. Luckily, no one paid any attention either to the photos or to them; they were told to board their plane half an hour later. His second contact with Poland was via the intermediary of that Polish WZ 63 machine pistol. It was purchased abroad. It was a very nice gun, because it was small, not that much larger than a revolver. His colleagues loved it because it was easy to conceal.
Unfortunately, it has a serious drawback: its cartridges are too short. He wouldn’t have a chance in an exchange of bullets with a NATO pistol. Makarov cartridges can be used only in a Polish gun. The policemen and Schleyer’s driver were shot with Makarov cartridges. Stefan W. said that the driver was definitely not supposed to die. That was a mistake. The policemen also were not supposed to die, but no one knew that there would be policemen. Previously, Schleyer had not had a police detail; they had begun guarding him shortly before the kidnapping after another attack, on a bank director. In short, a botched job. Although, on the other hand, said Stefan W., when a person takes a gun into his hands he has to accept the fact that he will kill.

There were more than a dozen victims of the actions that began with the abduction of Schleyer: his driver, the three policemen, the three airplane hijackers, the plane’s captain, the Stammheim prisoners … Yes, Stefan W. agreed, many victims. But it had never occurred to any of them that the government would not accede to their demands. It simply never entered anyone’s mind. They had long since known that imperialism is bloodthirsty, but they didn’t think it was that bloodthirsty.

For the first time in sixteen years, Stefan W. left the Maximum Security Section and came to the general prison visiting
hall. It was a fairly large room with two doors. One door opened to allow the prisoners to enter; their guests were ushered in through the other door. Each prisoner was accompanied by a guard. The guard held a card that he placed on a table. At the table, facing the hall, sat a woman supervisor. She was a corpulent brunette wearing gold earrings and a low-cut top edged with black lace. She wore a skirt that buttoned down the front. The bottom buttons were undone so that the skirt revealed her thighs, which were so heavy that the supervisor couldn’t bring her knees together. She sat there with her legs, encased in black patterned tights, spread apart.

In addition to the supervisor’s desk there were six tables and chairs in the hall. The prisoners were led in first. They were predominantly young men. They entered slowly, looking around, holding plastic bags with their dirty things in their hands. The visitors were admitted afterward. They were women. They entered more quickly, running actually, pushing chairs out of the way and throwing themselves into the men’s embraces. They wore long, loose skirts. They sat with their backs to the hall and immediately began talking. They would listen for a moment to the men’s responses, burst out laughing, and continue telling them about whatever it was.

Stefan W. began by explaining the sources of RAF ideology. It is derived from guerrilla movements, from urban partisan struggle in South America. Nowadays, imperialism feeds on exploitation of the Third World. The
people of the RAF are those in Western Europe, in the very center of imperialism, who act in support of the Third World and its liberation movements.

“We attack the bastions of imperialism,” said Stefan W. “Military bases, banks …”

The women were moving from the chairs onto the men’s knees; now their long skirts flowed to the ground and shielded them like screens. Their laughter changed into fitful, muffled giggling.

“Mao taught that the working class in imperialist countries is no longer a revolutionary class,” Stefan W. continued. “And it profits from the exploitation of the Third World. The revolutionary subject of society …”

The women were unfastening the men’s buttons; the giggling slowly subsided.

“… became the people of the social margins. The homeless, the unemployed, former prisoners, youth from reformatories. We have to rely on them in our struggle.”

The women began rocking on the men’s knees, gently, like boats on calm water; in the visiting hall of the prison in Ossendorf only Stefan W.’s voice could be heard:

“The marginalized must organize!

“We demand the factories!

“When the capitalist summons the police we will respond with force!

“Marx said that violence is the midwife of a new world. Freedom is only a question of time!”

The woman supervisor began making signs. The visit
was over. The women slowly fastened their own and their men’s buttons, arranged their blouses and their hair.

“Eastern Europe?” Stefan W. now spoke more softly, lost in thought. “Why does Europe matter? One failed experiment. The idea is alive. Millions of people in the whole world still suffer from poverty. The idea is alive …”

The guards came to collect the prisoners. The hall emptied out.

His conversations with his father, conducted in his maximum security cell, ended in a silence behind which Stefan W. could feel a stubborn, unreconciled disapproval. At first this had rankled. In time he realized that it made no sense to keep on arguing with him. One cannot persuade a person who survived Dachau without fighting back and who then sought justice in a slim book with the title
We Sing to the Lord
. He turned to another person. To Czesława, his father’s mother, his grandmother. She had worked like a dog. She was poor. She was exploited by factory owners. She was a person whom Stefan W. and his friends wanted to defend against the exploitation of capitalism. She had to be an ally in his struggle. She had to understand him. He could feel her sympathy and turned to her with unlimited trust. He missed her. He didn’t know how
old she was. He could not know that, dying, she was younger than he was, sitting here on his prison bunk. Had he known the story told by Stanisław W.’s younger brother about the room in the garret and the basin with the burning alcohol, he would certainly have addressed the woman seated in the chair. The frozen woman, wrapped in a blanket, with a blue flame at her feet like an eternal flame.

One day, Stefan W. received a letter from an unknown correspondent. She wrote that she was twenty-three years old, was fighting for women’s rights, sympathized with him and would like to visit him. He invited her to come. She was tall, slender, dressed in a black sweater and black leather pants. They conversed through the bullet-proof glass about women’s rights, world imperialism, and love. Since then she had visited him once a month and wrote him letters and postcards several times a week. There was never a beginning or an ending in these letters. She would begin in midsentence, even in the middle of a word, and end in midsentence. They could guess each other’s mood from the handwriting. They had an agreement that they would not pretend. When she was sad she did not attempt to smile, and when she looked ugly she did not put on makeup. They were afraid that they thought better of each other than they should; that they were creating idealized
images of each other. That was their constant worry and an unvarying theme in their conversations.

“You probably think that I am good,” she would shout to the glass. “Please, don’t think that. I am a lot worse than you would like me to be.”

“You probably think that I am wise,” she shouted another day. “I am getting stupider all the time.”

“You probably think …”

For seven years they could not touch each other. They made love with their eyes through the bullet-proof glass.

For three years they met in the visitation cell, in the Maximum Security Section, under the depictions of Petersburg in the winter.

One day, she wrote that she was in love with another man. Since they had sworn not to pretend to each other, she would not deceive him and would never write again.

She kept her word.

He calculated that she had come to see him over ten years, so she must be thirty-three already.

He couldn’t count the letters and cards she had written over five hundred weeks.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the Paris students in 1968, was recently named director of the Intercultural Department attached to the Frankfurt mayor’s office. He
has a spacious office with a secretary who brings in coffee and flaky pastry. He said that terrorism derives from the atmosphere of the fifties and the silence at that time about the war. Young Germans wanted to know what it had been like, but their parents had said, “Why open old wounds?”

Only in 1963, at the trial in Frankfurt of the Auschwitz war criminals, did people begin to speak publicly about those crimes. When the war in Vietnam began, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and their colleagues said, “We will not be silent like our parents.” They started to commit murders. They believed they had the right, in revenge for Vietnam, to murder American soldiers who were stationed in West Germany, and to murder a German judge in revenge for bourgeois justice. They believed they were on the side of right. When someone is on the side of right, everything he does is just and even murder becomes a sacred act. Andreas Baader summoned Cohn-Bendit, the hero of 1968, to join in a common struggle. Cohn-Bendit told Gudrun Ensslin and Baader that it is a crime to entice youth from the reformatories into the RAF. He denounced terrorism. In the first place, he didn’t like murder. In the second place, he didn’t like Andreas Baader and had no intention of building a new, better world with him.

The government dealt with the terrorists in a cruel fashion. The SPD, the Social Democratic Party, was in power, and it had promised Germans that the year 1933 and the weakness of the social democrats would never be repeated.

The terrorists said, “You will never accuse us of silence.”

The Social Democrats said, “You will never accuse us of weakness.”

“It was a psychodrama,” said Cohn-Bendit. “A German psychodrama, in which both sides were reacting to Nazism.”

One of the cards sent by the girl in the black sweater was a reproduction of a painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Stefan W. liked it; he wrote to the company that had printed the postcard. The publisher sent him a new reproduction and a letter: “You have a Polish surname. Are you interested in Polish affairs?” In the next parcel there were German translations of a couple of Polish authors.

From then on Stefan W. started reading Polish books about the Second World War. He became interested in the Warsaw Ghetto. He decided that there was a similarity between the Jews in the Ghetto and the prisoners in the concentration camps. He read a book about the ghetto by Władysław Bartoszewski, and Kazimierz Moczarski’s account of his conversations with Jürgen Stroop, and also Czesław Miłosz’s poetry. He and the girl thought about why there were disparities between Jürgen Stroop’s version of the uprising and Marek Edelman’s
in
To Outwit God
.
¹
Or, why Edelman doesn’t like communists even though they were the first to send a gun to the ghetto, the one with which the Jewish police commander was shot at. He gave all the books to the girl to read; she hasn’t returned some of them to this day, perhaps out of forgetfulness, perhaps for other reasons. Marek Edelman became the greatest authority for him. It distressed him that a leader of the uprising in the ghetto thinks of the terrorists’ contempt for human life as a posthumous victory of Nazism.

He said, “It’s a shame that I didn’t know about this before.”

The best day for Gizela W. is Sunday. She doesn’t work, she doesn’t assist her elderly neighbor lady, and she doesn’t meet with the parents of other RAF prisoners. (She doesn’t like these meetings. Only professors and doctors attend; she is the sole worker among them.)

First she eats her Sunday breakfast. Then she writes a letter. That her legs are less painful. That she still has enough strength to help the old lady. That the chestnuts by the river are in bloom, and any day now the Japanese cherry blossoms will come out. She seals the envelope and writes the address: Ossendorf, the prison.

Next, she prays. She starts with thanks: that it’s a new day, that her legs are less painful, that the chestnuts by the river …, after which she presents her plea. Not to God; she wouldn’t dare to burden Him with her concerns. She addresses her plea to Stani, who endured so much, never complained, and went to church every Sunday. He is undoubtedly dearer to God than she is, and if Stani should ask Him God will not refuse and will allow her to remain alive until her son returns.

She addresses herself to Him directly, and not through Stani, about only one of her concerns.

When she asks that He forgive their son his terrible sin.

Adam S., tall, handsome, blue-eyed, with a white-toothed smile, teaches the history of architectural design at an American technical college. He’s spent time in Poland. He had an interest in the wooden synagogues that burned down during the last war.

I asked Adam S. why an ambitious, six-foot-tall American, born after the war, would be interested in something that no longer exists. He answered in a letter. It was composed on a computer. It seems he was in a rush, because he didn’t tear off the perforated edges on either side. His
father, he wrote, was a Polish Jew who had lost his wife and son in the ghetto. After the war he moved to France and married again. His new wife was French. Adam was born in Paris, and they spoke French at home.