The Spanish Civil War, my father and me

For a long time I did not much care for the Spanish Civil War.

“Veterans of Spain”: that is how the volunteers of the International Brigades in Spain called one another, still call one another, recognized one another. My father, Aleksander Szurek (“Alek”), had been the adjutant of the Polish general Karol Walter-Świerczewski, one of those who, sent by Moscow, had commanded the XIV International Brigade (“the Marseillaise”) and then the 35th division. Of Karol Świerczewski, my godfather, whose first name Karol/Charles I bear, I have no memory at all, since he died a month after my birth. “The man who did not flinch before bullets,” as communist propaganda in Poland would write of him, was cut down in 1947 in a Ukrainian ambush.¹ One of Warsaw’s main arteries long bore his name; since 1990 it has become Aleja Solidarności (“Solidarity Avenue”). Of Karol Świerczewski, my father used to say that he had “a heart of gold.” All the Veterans of Spain had “a heart of gold.” This expression irritated me for a long time, and as an adolescent I often tried to imagine what such a heart represented for him. I made no attempt to see that such an expression might belong to the language of the era.

Despite the repression they suffered during the Stalinist period — Moscow distrusted these fighters who had known the West and who had managed to display a certain independence — and their sidelining during the antisemitic campaign of 1967–1968 (many of them were Jews), the Veterans of Spain always constituted, in the Polish communist imagination, a noble point of reference, worthy of being held up as an example. “For our freedom and yours” had been the motto of the Dąbrowski (Dombrowski) Brigade in Spain, a brigade that was Polish in its majority. This motto had been that of all the Polish insurrections of the nineteenth century and of General Jarosław Dąbrowski, who had paid with his life for the defense of the Paris Commune. My lycée, in Warsaw, bore the name of this general, whom I had assimilated to some vague communist hero.

I had no liking — we are in the 1960s — for these publications, written in a solid wooden tongue and showing nothing but heroes “with hearts of gold.” I did not subscribe to this saga of adults, of veterans who pored with relish over their Spanish youth and who perceived so little how far their children were in revolt against the drab, claustrophobic socialism they had built, alert as we were to the noises of the world, to the Beatles, to the open horizon.

I had taken a dislike to the Spanish Civil War.

My parents left Poland in 1969, after the “dry pogrom” that Polish Jews underwent between 1967 and 1969. My father stopped in Vienna, alone, for a few months, letting his family leave for France. He had been barred from French territory ever since an expulsion order had dispatched him to Poland in 1950. He had come to France before the war, fleeing the Polish police that hunted down young communists. Barely twenty years old, he had already spent a year in prison. In Paris he married Berthe Szpilman, a Romanian Jew by whom he had a daughter, Hélène. Contrary to those historians who maintain that the Comintern had raised an army of disciplined militants, even of mercenaries, to aid Republican Spain, the decision to go there was taken, for many of them, entirely on their own. This was the case for Alek and many others I knew. Was the decision to abandon wife and child an easy one? I do not know; I do not think so. The political adventure taking shape transcended everything, above all for a young communist, a “good comrade” as his “bio” indicated — the one I found in the archives of the International Brigades in Moscow, in 1993, which still showed that he had been “courageous” and “trustworthy.” After the Spanish Civil War, he was interned at the Gurs camp like many an interbrigadist. What saved Alek was that he was able to adopt Soviet citizenship in 1941: when he was arrested in Paris in 1942, he was sent to a German fortress as a Soviet prisoner of war and not to a camp as a Jew. Berthe did not have this good fortune: disoriented by Alek’s absence — this is what I have been able to reconstruct from little Hélène’s letters, recently found in a box I had never wanted to open — she was arrested with her daughter, wandering the streets of Paris outside the hours authorized by the occupier. They appear on the Drancy convoy of 30 May 1944.

When Alek returned from Wülzburg in Bayern, he knew very quickly that he would not see them again. He met Jeannine, my mother. My sister, born in 1950, is also called Hélène. Between 1945 and 1950, he worked at the Polish embassy in Paris, charged, among other things, with urging the Polish coal miners to rejoin the new Poland. He was also secretary of the embassy’s Party cell (there was one, strange as that may seem for the embassy of a communist country). In 1950, in the context of the Cold War, a group of Polish diplomats, Alek among them, was expelled following the arrest of French diplomats in Poland.

During the Stalinist years, he did not quite know how to find his bearings — at least that is how it seems to me. He was a Stalinist, but his intuition impelled him to avoid the security apparatus, the political police to which so many Jewish communists rallied in order to “defend socialism.” He did indeed work for Trybuna Ludu, the Party organ, but in order to sponsor the Peace Race there, that sporting event that reigned supreme among the socialist countries. A significant part of his time was then devoted to the writing of his Spanish memoirs, written in Polish. In truth, in socialist language. At the time he knew no other. These texts form the framework of his Memoirs, which he composed mainly between 1974 and 2 March 1978, the date of his death. They were translated into English by American Veterans of Spain and published in the United States under the title The Shattered Dream,² thanks to the help of another Veteran of Spain, Gabriel Ersler, alias G. E. Sichon. The Shattered Dream is an unusual book of memoirs, for two very different kinds of writing intersect within it, the first dating from the years 1950–1954, the second from the years 1974–1978. In certain respects the second, made up of an authentic autobiographical narrative and various digressions, revisits the first, the aging man no longer having the same appreciation of events and individuals. In the final, unfinished text there are thus nested very vivid descriptions of the theater of the Spanish Civil War — but also glimpses that incorporate the events of 1956, of 1968 — and a markedly distanced view of communism.

Everything tipped over for my father in 1956. The revelations of the Khrushchev report provoked in him a definitive rupture. He lost his sleep over it, and his heart troubles began. We were then in Vienna, in Austria. He represented Poland at the International Federation of Resistance Fighters (FIR), of which he was deputy secretary-general. It was an antifascist organization dominated by Moscow, that postwar antifascism which served to legitimize Soviet policy. The secretary-general was a French communist, André Leroy. The names of the heroes of the communist Resistance were then familiar to me, those names I would later find in certain municipalities in France — Marcel Paul, Colonel Manhès…

Alek was faithful to the Polish state until 1960, the date of his recall to Warsaw. He remained faithful to it even afterward, although, exposed to the antisemitic attacks of the Moczar group that had seized power, he found himself in the worst of situations under a socialist regime: unemployed. Socialism had provided for full employment, but not for undesirables. That is what Alek had become after having been “deputy secretary-general of the FIR” in Vienna for six years. And so he went around in circles for two years, from 1960 to 1962, living off the savings gleaned in Austria. I do not recall his returning to his Memoirs during this period. In 1957, he visited Israel, reuniting with his brothers who had settled there, one in 1942 (a deserter from the Anders Army in Palestine, like most of the Jews in that army), the other in 1953. I believe he was troubled by this journey, which he annotated in a small notebook. That the Zionist dream, which had not been his own, could harbor so much socialism — the kibbutzim above all — had impressed him. At the very same moment, the Polish kolkhozes were being dissolved. During the Polish October, in 1956, another event had marked him: a meeting in Warsaw, all in ferment, of the Veterans of Spain in the face of the advance of Soviet tanks on Warsaw (Khrushchev had at one point considered a military response to the political changes in the Polish capital). At this meeting, it was indicated that the units of the KBW (Internal Security Corps), led by General Hibner, another Veteran of Spain, had been deployed to oppose the Soviet troops, perhaps motivating a change of attitude on Khrushchev’s part. From 1956 on, then, for Alek the time of doubts and second thoughts had arrived. Had he not been “posted” in Vienna, perhaps he would have gone to Israel, but it was in his eyes inconceivable that a Jew should betray. He was so anxious to appear assimilated to Poland that he persisted in speaking Polish to me even though I attended the French Lycée in Vienna and even though French, my mother’s language, was the language of our family. I answered him in French.

Back in Paris after an absence of nineteen years (I had to battle hard for the DST to lift its ban, having myself been in France only three years), Alek reconnected with a few Veterans of Spain. I found vain and ridiculous their efforts to preserve the memory of their battles of yesteryear, when, since then, the war, Auschwitz, Stalinism had ravaged the era and destroyed more than one among them. Had they not known the exaltation and the ordeals of the Resistance (Gabriel Ersler), deportation to Auschwitz (Emmanuel Mink), the Stalinist jails (Wacek Komar)? In the course of those 1970s, I, for my part, was gripped by the ambient leftism, hardly generous toward the old combatants… At most I remember a gathering of Veterans of Spain that took place in Florence in 1972: my father refused to shake the hand of another Veteran of Spain, a Polish general named Franciszek Księżarczyk who had rallied to Moczar in 1968. Membership in the International Brigades vaccinated against nothing.

Numerous interbrigadists traveled to Alek’s funeral on 4 March 1978. I had found him in the bathroom of our country house in the Brie (my mother’s house); we had left together a few days earlier, he to continue his Memoirs, I to write my thesis. We had grown closer, and our relations, deconstructed, had become authentic, freed from the guilt so characteristic of that generation. Absorbed in the future Shattered Dream, he had ceased to meddle, like a possessive Jewish father, in my life; I had become his adult son. And I observed with wonder this energy placed in the service of taking stock. It was a Veteran of Spain, Benoît Chanot (Kochanowicz), who delivered the funeral oration. A delegation of old combatants had come, the French flag at its head. I said the kaddish.

What got into me that day in 1985 when, at the rostrum of the Senate, I addressed the Veterans of Spain present in the hall to exhort them: “Leave us your memoirs, your recollections, do not leave us orphans of this unique moment of the twentieth century!” A commemoration had been organized that day in honor of the International Brigades, and the organizers had wanted “a young person” to take the floor. I lent myself to this proposal, so contrary to all I had thought until then. The times had changed; May ’68 was far off; we had entered the era of memory; Pierre Nora had begun to publish the first Lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory), an approach I would go on to apply to the other Europe in a collective work,³ Shoah by Claude Lanzmann had been released in cinemas. I had become an actor of the “duty of memory,” so disparaged today, so learnedly replaced by the very Ricœurian “work of memory.” I understand the shift intended by Ricœur, but I remain faithful to the “duty of memory,” not embracing the opprobrium with which so many specialists of memory cover it, having rejected the child they had created. So I had changed, and the Veterans of Spain had changed too. They were old, grandparents, social democrats, Zionists, visceral anticommunists. I understood then that their Spanish brotherhood, even perverted by Stalinism, constituted a unique moment in the history of solidarity. And I sensed that few of their recollections would be preserved. Today, how many memoirs of Brigadists, how many authentic documents survive? Over the course of three summers (1985–1987), I applied the duty of memory to myself, recording the recollections of Gabriel Ersler, who, after the retirada, had created a Resistance network in France, then had gone, in 1944, to the USSR, only to return in 1956 after spending twelve years in Soviet prisons. A story in the manner of Trepper that I very much hope to publish one day. No, the duty of memory does not shame me. I think back with emotion on that gathering at the Senate: I would never have imagined that the Republic could place one of its palaces at the disposal of the brigadistas, and I still recall the pride they took in it, obscure Polish Jews become heroes. I am not afraid of the word.

From then on I no longer drew back. In 1996, I accompanied Gabriel Ersler to Madrid for the commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the creation of the International Brigades, finding moving the ceremonies organized by the heirs of the Spanish communists. Several hundred Brigadists had come, whom I proudly accompanied to the Cortes, where the Spanish state received them! People spoke French, Spanish, Polish, English, German, Serbo-Croatian. The most impressive were the Cubans: small, berets screwed onto whitened heads, cigars in their mouths. The debates were conducted in a slightly antiquated communist language. It was difficult for these transnationals to practice any other. It was the language of that unique experience that had been theirs, of that experience — I realized this in retrospect — that obsessed their nights and their dreams, the only experience worth having lived. Talk to them about the POUM, about the Trotskyists, about the Soviet advisers? They could not have cared less, having learned of these realities only well afterward. Their experience of the Brigades did not confront them with these problems, whether it was Alek, Ersler, Chanot or Hibner. But with others. Alek recounts, in a sibylline manner, how he led a Ukrainian deserter, a member of the Brigades, to the firing squad. He does not say whether he executed him himself; there is doubt. He writes that the condemned man wept hot tears. Why did Alek feel the need to write this detail? I could not question him, reading this passage only after his death. I confided it to Gabriel Ersler, who invited me to avoid the pitfalls of anachronism and reminded me that the Spanish Civil War was, after all, a war, with its laws, and therefore its deserters. If Alek mentioned those hot tears, it is because nothing was self-evident.

In 1997, Le Livre noir du communisme (The Black Book of Communism) appeared, including an article on the International Brigades, signed by Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Panné. It retained of the Spanish epic only the crimes — incontestable — committed by the Soviet secret services against the anti-Stalinist opponents. I felt this article, which on the factual plane brought nothing new, to be insulting toward all those who had come to the aid of the Spanish Republic. These authors drew on the analyses of Annie Kriegel without seeing that this was not the most convincing of the historian’s approaches, she who was capable of grasping communism far more subtly (cf. Les procès de Moscou (The Moscow Trials), for example). I responded to it indirectly with a text entitled “La guerre d’Espagne et le stalinisme — un regard subjectif” (“The Spanish Civil War and Stalinism — a Subjective View”),⁴ which appeared in a collective work in which I addressed without circumlocution the Veterans of Spain’s adherence to Stalinism. I showed that from their ranks there had indeed come the likes of Księżarczyk or other men of power (General Korczyński, for instance, who bloodily repressed the demonstrations and riots of the Baltic workers in 1970), but also, if not above all, individuals such as František Kriegel, a luminous figure of the Prague Spring, spokesman of Charter 77, persecuted by the Czechoslovak communist regime. The Veterans of Spain drank Stalinism to the dregs: in Hungary, the former Brigadist László Rajk was arrested and executed; in Czechoslovakia, Artur London was imprisoned, as was Wacław Komar in Poland. “Stalinism, for its part — these lines, written a few years ago, do not seem to me to have aged — grasped well the symbolic advantage it could draw from this collective adventure, on the one hand statufying the International Brigades, on the other imprisoning a portion of their protagonists. Possessing no other political language than that of Stalinism — and for good reason: they had also been communist militants of the first hour — the interbrigadists themselves contributed to ‘statufying’ themselves, tracing a direct line between their Spanish commitment and the building of socialism. An understandable posture. Some never departed from it, tarnishing the message of their initial commitment. But others, on the contrary, managed to find the political forms of a renewed view of the Spanish experience. […] One is free to assimilate the birth of the International Brigades to the antechamber of Stalinism, but only at the price of seeing in it neither the impetus of anti-Francoism, nor the antifascist resistance, nor a certain struggle for freedom. In short, of failing to see the essential.”⁵

There remains one more point to write about Alek.

In June 2009, I gained access to his “file,” in Warsaw, at the Institute of National Remembrance, that institution which holds the archives of the political police of the communist regime. I had made the request two years earlier. What are you going looking for in these archives? a psychoanalyst friend from Plurielles had asked me. The question implied that there would be some impropriety in rummaging through one’s father’s past. I conceded his point, having always professed that one generation should not judge its predecessor, especially by the yardstick of the police archive, that bomb bequeathed by the communist regime and used, and abused, by the combatants of the eleventh hour — journalists and historians short of a subject, sundry politicians (the camp of the Kaczyński brothers excels at it). The police archive, an unprecedented source of pollution and of widespread human damage, has already served in Poland to smear Lech Wałęsa, Jacek Kuroń and many other leaders of the former democratic opposition.

In fact, it was sociological curiosity that motivated me more — I had myself had access to my own file and to others in the framework of my research — than the fear of discovering Alek to have been a police informer. But, as everyone knows, anything is possible. Moreover, the situation of the informant covers a very varied range of situations and behaviors. Some, cornered by “their” handling officers, cracked; others conducted sophisticated Kriegspiele; others still “talked” and then stopped short.

My father’s file had been opened on his return from Austria. Viennese friends had come to visit him in 1962, provoking by their presence a police investigation. The surveillance of which Alek was then the object can be followed step by step for a few years.

The file was empty: Alek was never an informer. In my heart of hearts, I strutted: a Veteran of Spain, who had passed through the Resistance and the German prisons, does not crack before the threats of the communist police. In my heart of hearts only, of course, for I knew how idiotic such reasoning was, and that this Stalinist police had broken more than one man. Probably even among the Veterans of Spain.

I breathed all the same.

Notes