Burning the Qur’an

When I think of the thread to burn the Qur’an and of the many divided voices in the media, I can’t help but to admit the strong clash I feel between what we call the liberties of this country with what I remember as the history of my family, of my country, of Europe.

I didn’t expect to discover in the past week, but I did, that I am against the liberties of this country, of the country I love also for its liberties.

I remember being a child, growing up in a multi-generational  family and learning some aspects of the history of my country and of Europe almost every day of my life.

On many occasions, when I didn’t want to finish my meals, my elders reminded me of the horrors of World War II. “Don’t waste food.  Children in Auschwitz were dying of starvation.”  Sometimes I had heard a different version of the same message: “If you won’t eat your food you will look like children in Auschwitz.  All skin and bones.”

I still see myself staring absent-mindedly into the plate of unfinished kotlet schabowy (a pork chop dish) and wishing I could either erase history or be transported into the horrific past to share my food with the ones who needed it most.

I also think of the relatives I had never met because they were killed by the Nazis.  I look at the picture of my grandfather’s brother, Leon Jank, a young priest, printed in Pomerania Magazine in September 1995 in the article about my family, Szesc Pokolen Rodziny Jankow (Six Generations of the Jank Family) and I wonder what would had become of him and his life if he hadn’t been murdered at the age of 33.  I see a young face and intense eyes behind round glasses, short haircut, and a priest’s collar.  I imagine him hunched over a book for long hours into the night.  No one knows where his body was buried.

I think of my grandfather Joseph, whom I carry in my heart remembering the many stories he shared with me when I was a child.  And I remember the stories about him told to me by my mother when I was a teenager.

“Grandfather lost his mind after the war,”  she told me.

“What do you mean?”  I couldn’t imagine him being different from the grandfather I knew.

“He saw too much during the war and couldn’t forget.  He spent many months in Kocborowo, psychiatric hospital,”  she said in a whisper.

Everyone whispered about my grandfather when the war was mentioned in his presence, because losing one’s mind was stigmatized as weakness and not accepted as a medical condition.  One had to be strong to live through the horrors of war and this is what was expected of all.

And I think of my father, Jerzy (George), who still, at the age of 73 is tormented by what he remembers.

“I remember them here.”  He had pointed to the ground next to the bridge near my house for the first time when I was a teenager and then repeated the story many times throughout my life.  “The woman was lying on her back and the little boy was next to her.  She had holes in her sweater and her tights.  I was six years old.  They were buried right here, in the same spot where they were shot and killed.” He have been haunted by this image since the day it happened.

“I think we should dig them out and give them a proper burial,”  he says sometimes, “We need to dignify their lives and their passing,”  he says, “I need to talk to the Mayor one day,”  he says, “I see them as if it happened yesterday,”  he says.

When someone says, “There is no book that is too holy to be burned,” I remember that moment in history when books by Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Jack London, H.G. Wells went up in flames. The moment of burning those books preceded the horrific atrocities of the Word War II and marked millions of lives, including mine with knowledge that should never be learned.

And here is a list of incidents of book burning in our human history.  Can we point even one that came down the history as justified or noble act?

I want to remember the words of a Jewish-German poet, Heinrich Heine who said:

“Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.”

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Plastic Prayers

This is not a secret that we learn from each other but if it comes to my students I always feel a certain unease knowing how much I enjoy learning in the classes I actually teach.

I am paid for teaching not learning after all, right?

I meet interesting people in my writing classes, they all are called my students.  They share with me their lives, their passions, their sorrows, and sometimes their most intimate secrets and they always, always, always teach me something new.

Last semester, a question of ones identity was raised during a writing assignment titled “Journeys” and inevitably a question of higher power or god became a part of the preceding discussion.

As we struggled to find answers one of my students, David asked why we have to do it.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t understand his reservations.

“I mean,” he said after a moment of hesitation, “Why do we have to continuously ask questions that don’t have any answers?  What’s the point?  Who cares if God exists or not?  Would you live your life in a different way if you knew the answer?  I wouldn’t.”

“What do you propose, David?”  I asked mechanically, feeling myself being stretched beyond my expectation.

“Just be,”  he said.  “Just live. Just be your best and enjoy life.”

When I teach I feel like a child in a candy store.  So much to see!  So much to taste!

And then I ask myself the same questions: Is it wrong for me to learn from my students?  Is is wrong to look forward to the new class of students with the highest anticipation knowing that our exchange will teach me something new?

Later on, David had sent me his interpretation of the “journey/life.”  This is the image you see above in this post. Make sure to click on the image to enlarge it and to see the rich fabric of the “journey/life” as seen by David.

I became very excited seeing the hands holding praying beads.  I have immediately imagined a life of a monk who devoted his life to meditation.  I could see him walking slowly through a zen garden contemplating his breath and at the same time focusing on the rhythm of his steps.

Many questions, that sprouted from the imagined monk, came to my mind and I have contacted David.

“My goodness, I love the piece!”  I couldn’t hold back my excitement.

“Can you tell me something about the person on the picture?  Is this a monk?”  I asked with the highest hopes.

“This is a manikin,”  David answered.

“No, no, no!”  A silent yet loud scream invaded my head.

“I wanted something beautiful, alive, perhaps romantic!”  I wanted to say but didn’t.

“The title is Plastic Prayers,”  he added. I am still dwelling on David’s interpretation of the journey we call life as I read the quote he forwarded to me along with the Plastic Prayers.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?

–Epicurus

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Catching the fugitive pieces of our days

Anne Michaels is one of my favorite writers.  Her “Fugitive Pieces” is one of my favorite novels.

In her novel, not only was she able to resurrect for me the most mystical places of Poland, like the city of Biskupin, but she also was able to draw a magical map of the most beautiful places of Greece, like the island of Zakynthos. And all of it in the horrors of World War II.

Her prose is mesmerizing and taunting.  Once you step into her world, you won’t leave.  Michaels’ words will be etched into you forever and you will be coming back to the source, to her world, to remember the nature of language, to understand memory, to learn how joy is lost, and how suffering becomes the fabric and essence of one’s life.  She will show you how to live, and how to die.

I know why we bury our dead and mark the place with stone, with the heaviest, most permanent thing we can think of: because the dead are everywhere but the ground.

Michaels knows how to make the reader her prisoner and her salvation.

You will be her prisoner in a small room and she will let you see just the blue sky and the blue water.  She will push you into the wall and let you hear what happens to your family, the people you love most.  She will bury you under the ground and will let you feel the roots of trees and grass.  She will place you under a coat of a giant and will let you hear his heart.

Her salvation comes with your remembrance of the world she created — of Poland and Biskupin, of Greece and Zakynthos, of Jews and the Holocaust, of the beginning of everything, and of the end of everything.

And she will reveal to you the beginning and the end of everything — like in the story of a respected rabbi.

The rabbi decided to travel disguised as a poor peasant on a train.  While on the train, he is ignored and even disrespected.  Later on, when the community learns that it was him on the train, they apologize to him many times for many months but are unable to receive his forgiveness.

Finally, they ask him what they need to do to be granted his forgiveness and he answers that he can’t forgive them because he was not ignored or disrespected. Instead, it was the poor peasant on the train who was ignored and disrespected.  He tells them that they need to seek forgiveness of the poor peasant on the train.

All this time you have been asking the wrong man.  You must ask the man on the train to forgive you.

According to Michaels, every word spoken, every gesture,  every action, and every thought  stays in the place of forever and can not be erased or changed.  The personal becomes universal in every single second of every minute of every hour of every day of every life.  And in this concept one can learn how to sustain life and how to escape death — in every single second of everyday.

But the rabbi’s point is even more tyrannical:nothing erases the immoral act.  Not forgiveness.  Not confession.

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Life after 9/11 – the persistence of memory

I remember myself standing in front of the television set in my basement for hours.  I wasn’t able to move.  The couch was just a couple of feet away but I wasn’t able to sit down.

I live in the same house I lived on 9/11.  My basement has been repainted since then.  I have a hardwood floor instead of the carpet I had before, and I have a colorful rug in the middle of the floor.  I also bought a new couch.

None of the changes changed anything in my memory, though.  After almost 10 years, sometimes, when all is quiet in the morning the way it was on the morning of 9/11 and I pass the spot on the floor where I stood watching the attacks on the World Trade Center, I still remember.

When I think of memory, I think of the painting The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvadore Dali in which the landscape is almost bare and the time ceases to exist.  The motionless view seems to be alive and dead at the same time.  It feels as if something is supposed to happen any minute.  The longer I watch the melted clocks the stronger feeling of unpleasant anticipation fills my mind.

This is how I feel about the spot on the floor of my basement when I remember.  The same anticipation fills my mind: What next?

Here is a short story I have written on the struggles of teaching my Fundamentals of Spiritual Awareness class at Howard Community College after 9/11.

The story was published recently in the Muse, Spring 2010.

Read the After 9/11 story here.

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Poland: tragic history repeats itself

The plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński on Saturday reminded me of the most painful moments in Poland’s history.

The 97 who died included the army chief of staff, the head of the National Security Bureau, the national bank president, the deputy foreign minister, the deputy parliament speaker, the civil rights commissioner, and other members of parliament.

Ironically, also aboard the plane were war veterans and surviving family members of Poles killed by the Soviets in World War II. There was 90-year-old Ryszard Kaczorowski, Poland’s last “president-in-exile” during the Soviet years.

Another symbolic figure of Polish history,  Anna Walentynowicz was also aboard the plane.  She was the shipyard worker whose dismissal in 1980 sparked the Solidarity union protests (led by Lech Wałęsa)  that eventually resulted in the collapse of Polish communism.

And in an eerie way the crash reminded me of  Władysław Sikorski, who during World War II became Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile.  He was the  Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army Forces. He supported the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union. However, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin broke off Soviet-Polish diplomatic relations in April 1943 following Sikorski’s request that the International Red Cross investigate the Katyń Forest massacre.  And in July 1943, Sikorski and almost all of his entourage were killed in a plane crash when it plunged into the sea immediately after takeoff from Gibraltar.

Lech Kaczyński’s plane was crashed in Russia on the grounds of Katyń, where over 20,000 Polish intelligentsia consisting of military officers, intellectuals, police officers, and other public servants were murdered by the Soviets during World War II.

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