It is not without scruple, and not without emotion, that I evoke the person of Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel. He has just published, in Polish, his own story himself, and it would suffice to refer readers to a future French translation — for which I am campaigning ardently — so as not to substitute myself for his account.1 But we are not there yet, and I therefore wish to recount the aspects of his life that fall within the problematic of invisibility/visibility. Moreover, he has authorized me, in an exchange of emails, to evoke his story, claiming the status of “Visible Jew”. It was not always so.
Another story of the Holocaust, one might say — and in Poland, no less. Yes, we will never come out of this story, as Berthe Burko-Falcman says…
Already there is this odd double name, preceded by two given names. The reason, one can guess. Jakub Weksler was born in February 1943 in the small town of Swieciany, in Lithuania occupied by Nazi Germany. His parents lived in the ghetto of that town, but, before its liquidation on 4 April 1943, his mother left him with Polish peasants she knew, Piotr and Émilie Waszkinel. She said to Émilie: “I beg you to save my baby… You are a believer, a Christian; you have said many times that you believe in Jesus. But Jesus was a Jew. Save my Jewish infant in the name of the Jew in whom you believe. When he has grown up, you will see — he will become a priest and will teach men.”
The child is adopted, the Polish parents manage to baptize him, to give him their name, Waszkinel, first name Romuald. They will love him as their own son, and it will be a reciprocal love. For the Waszkinels, the protection of a Jewish child was no foregone matter. This is what Jakub discovers the day his Polish mother decided, at a moment already late in Jakub’s life, to entrust him with the “family secret”.
“We were renting a small room with a kitchen, she told him. I had never been pregnant, and suddenly an infant appears, a boy. From where? Who is he? The only possible answer at the time was that he was a Jewish infant. There was a threat of death, including for the whole family, for keeping a Jew, even an infant. The denouncer would receive flour, sugar, and other scarce foodstuffs. There were plenty of denunciations. /…/ With your father, we were not only afraid of the Germans. We were afraid of everyone: of Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, neighbors. And the most important thing in all of it was to save your life and ours. Several times your mother told me her name, but I did not want to remember it, I did not remember it, and I do not remember it. I wanted to save you, not your name. It was easier without knowing your name. For if I had been denounced and if they had arrested me, beaten me, I might not have held out and might have said your name if I had known it. I was not a heroine. I was afraid, very afraid. The non-knowledge of your name made me a little braver. They could kill me, and I would have repeated, not lying: it’s my child, I love him.”
At the end of the war, the Waszkinels are led, in the framework of the population transfer processes, to leave Lithuania and settle in the outskirts of Paslek, a locality in northern Poland, some thirty kilometers from the Baltic coast. Romuald Waszkinel’s family is very pious and raises him in the Catholic faith; he will not know his true name until age 35. During those 35 years, he leads the life of a young Catholic Pole, distant from politics, ignorant of his origin. That origin nonetheless reminds him of itself from time to time, like a sting whose meaning he does not understand. From the age of 5, while bringing the family cow home, two drunken neighbors exclaim: “Zyd! Zydziuk, Zydowski bajstruk” (Jew, little Jew, Jewish bastard). The Polish language is very prolix in this type of vocabulary. Heart wrung, the child asks his mother: “What is a Jew?” She assures him of her love but does not answer him. Others will be surprised that he does not resemble his parents.
Their religiosity becomes his. “The reality of faith,” he writes, “was like the air one breathes”. He attends church assiduously, in particular serving the priests at the altar, an activity he will carry on until his baccalauréat and even after. It is also in the Catholic universe that the word “Jew” catches at him: during a catechism class at primary school, he hears the teacher say that “the Jews are bad because they crucified Jesus”.
One day, he looks at himself in a mirror and observes a feature of resemblance to his father. “Mama, look, I look like Papa, don’t I?” His mother stayed silent; a heavy silence was the only answer. He erupts: “If I am Jewish, you will see what I will do to myself!” “I did not want to be Jewish! I was afraid of being Jewish.”
In 1956, the Polish authorities allow the former inhabitants of the Eastern territories, now Soviet, to visit the members of their families remaining on the other side of the border. Jakub thus accompanies his father, eager to find his brother again, to his native village near Vitebsk. The two brothers had not seen each other since the war. The moment is moving; they weep with emotion, Jakub too. Then the father organizes an excursion to a town where he had done his military service. A passerby asks him: “But where did you pick up that little Jew?” Furious, the father calls him a Hitlerite. Jakub trembles with fear. “I am not a little Jew!” But then, why, why, he wonders? Whereupon his father decides not to go to Jakub’s native town, for fear, Jakub would write much later, that such a question might be asked again.
All through his childhood, other signals are addressed to him here and there, which Jakub keeps to himself. The high school years pass without incident, and after the baccalauréat, the question of his studies arises. “What do you want to do?” the catechist priest asks him. “I want to be a priest,” Jakub answers instantly, “without really thinking about it,” he will write. He runs to announce this news to his parents, and his father, after a moment of silence, says to him: “You’ve come up with a stupid idea! What a notion! You’re not made to be a priest!” Bewildered, Jakub presses on, and on 15 September 1960, he begins theological studies. His father writes him a letter indicating that he wants to speak with him as soon as possible — a meeting which takes place on 16 October. After lunch, Jakub takes his father into a chapel, and the latter kneels down in tears. Jakub asks him whether he is doing something wrong by becoming a priest, to which his father replies that he is doing nothing wrong, nor anything good either. “Your life will be very hard.”
A few days later, his father dies of a heart attack at 52, leaving Jakub guilty, bereft, perplexed.
At the seminary, he discovers Jesus and the twelve apostles, all Jews, he observes. He notes that it was not the Jews who crucified Jesus.
Jakub thought that the passage to the priesthood, subject to a few customary verifications, would pose no problem. “I was wrong,” he writes. Is he baptized? The rector summons him and tells him that serious doubts exist about his baptism. “Instantly, ‘the Jewish bell’ vibrated in me.” The ecclesiastical authorities knew, after on-site investigation, that he did not resemble his parents. But it was the absence of the original baptismal certificate that constituted the sole tangible element. His godmother, a friend of his Polish parents, witness to his baptism in 1943, visited the rector to affirm that Jakub had indeed been baptized.
On 19 June 1966, Jakub becomes a priest at the basilica of Frombork, vowing to himself to accomplish an exemplary priesthood (“I owe it to my father”). He loves the great figures of the Bible, above all Jesus, that Jew to whom he feels particularly close. “What a pity,” he thinks, “that I am not Jewish; I would be still closer to Jesus.”
He undertakes his activity in a parish in the company of four other priests, dispensing religious instruction in two schools, visiting the sick. He keeps an excellent memory of it. One day, taking a taxi for the round of the faithful, the driver says to him: “Do you know what they call you here?” Jakub did not know, and, curious, he asks: how? “Little Jew (Zydek), didn’t you know?” Wounded, Jakub answers: “That’s interesting, but did you know that Jesus too was a Zydek?”
He does not quite know why the bishop proposes to him, after a few months, that he undertake studies in philosophy. The chief priest of his parish had given an opinion to that effect. For the 1967/1968 academic year, Jakub is thus enrolled in the Department of Christian Philosophy of the Catholic University of Lublin. It is the time of the Six-Day War and of the antisemitic campaign initiated by the ruling party. “All these events interested me little,” Jakub writes. “It was said that the Jews were quarreling within the Party. What have I got to do with that?”
But at the university — it must be said here that this Catholic University of Lublin had then welcomed many students excluded from the social sciences departments of Warsaw for having participated in the demonstrations in favor of the democratization of the regime — he reads works of history and encounters for the first time expressions such as “destruction of the European Jews,” “extermination of the Jews”. The thought brushes him that perhaps his parents were Jews who had been murdered. “But how,” he asks, “could complete strangers love a foreign child as much as I was loved?”
From 1971, he becomes an assistant at the Chair of Metaphysics after having been hired for six months on the editorial staff of the Catholic Encyclopedia. The prospect of a doctoral thesis presents itself, devoted to the metaphysics of Henri Bergson, and starting 1 January 1974, he leaves for Paris to collect sources.
In Paris, he enrolls at the Institut catholique, lives free of charge in a retreat house near the Sacré-Cœur, where he officiates as chaplain, and studies Bergson under the supervision of the Catholic philosopher Jean Milet. It was a happy time for him. A second year of scholarship is granted to him when he receives the following telegram: “Return immediately. The rector.”
Returned to Poland, Jakub was not in fact expected, and no explanation was given to him, even from the bishop who had brought him back and whom he asked the reasons for his action. A discussion with a priest friend puts him on a track: “Everyone here was saying that you were going to marry.” Stunned, he wonders where such a rumor could come from. He then remembers his encounter with a prostitute at the Abbesses metro.
Come make love, she said to him one day.
You make love without loving; I love without making love.
Aren’t you a bit of an idiot? she said to him.
I am a Catholic priest.
Ah, you’re a priest, that’s funny, do you have a cigarette? Give me a cigarette.
Each time he passed her, she would call out to him: “Hi, monsieur l’abbé”. One day, a Polish priest colleague from the Catholic University of Lublin came to visit him, and as he was leading him to the metro, he heard a loud “Hi, monsieur l’abbé”. Without turning his head, he answered “Hi”. Intrigued, the colleague said to him: “Oh, oh, I see you have such acquaintances too.” “Jesus had them too,” Jakub answered.
He deduced that his recall to Lublin came from there.
He continues his activities at the University of Lublin, defends his thesis, and publishes several works.
From 23 July 1978, when his mother announces to him that his biological parents were Jews, he has the feeling of plunging into a desert. Into a rebirth, at 35. He sets out to encounter his Jewish identity, his true name first. Thanks to a religious-sister friend who often goes to Israel, and to whom Jakub communicates the only precise information concerning him — his place and date of birth (Swieciany, 1943), his father’s profession (tailor — his Polish mother had informed him of that) — he manages to obtain a piece of capital information. This nun in fact gets hold of the Memorial Book of that town, and through cross-referencing with survivors of Swieciany, the name of his biological father is revealed: Jankele Weksler. There were no longer many tailors in that small town in 1943.
In 1992, he learns that his parents’ first names were Batia and Jakub. His aunt brings him a photo of his mother. “The first person I finally resembled,” Jakub writes, “was my biological mother”. He then goes for the first time to Israel, at 49. At the airport, Zvi Weksler, his father’s brother, awaits him, and in Netanya, Rachela Sargowicz, his father’s sister.
On 1 September 1996, he succeeds in having his Polish parents recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations”. He had to change his civil status, register the name of his biological parents. “I confess,” he writes, “that it was painful for me to cease being the son of Piotr and Emilie. In my innermost self, I have never ceased to be so, but I wanted to honor my Polish parents according to their merit. Finally, my name is Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel.”
He settles definitively in Israel in 2008, finds employment at Yad Vashem, lives in a retirement home.
On 19 June 2016, he celebrates, “in absolute solitude,” the 50th anniversary of his entry into the priesthood, with the Benedictines of Abu Gosh. He no longer had a place in the Church. “That day, a part of my life ended.” Since the Church did not want him, and since he too no longer wanted it, he returns “to his Jewish home” and, on 6 February 2019, performs his bar mitzvah, at 76.
“And what of my biological mother’s promise that I would become a priest?” he asks. “I fulfilled it, knowing nothing of her. For 50 years, I was an ardent and honest priest. And, I would dare to say, if I had not been a Catholic priest, I would probably not have sought my ‘Jewish roots’. I would have a wife, children, and very different problems. It is precisely the priesthood that saved my Jewishness within me.”
Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel’s personality is complex, as much as his life. In the course of numerous trips to Paris, he met Cardinal Lustiger, and a kind of mutual recognition bound the two men. He wrote him, post-mortem, seven letters devoted largely to Judeo-Christian relations, a work prefaced by Richard Prasquier, former president of the CRIF.
Evoking the problematic of invisibility/visibility in which I intended to implicate him, he replied to me: “It seems I am a Visible Jew. That your journal is secular bothers me not at all. I adored Tadeusz Kotarbinski and Leszek Kolakowski. Personally, I am a religious Jew but, formally, I belong to none of the existing synagogues. My uncle, Zvi Weksler, my father’s brother, accompanying me one day to the airport — I was returning to Poland, I was then an ardent Catholic priest — advised me to listen, in life, neither to priests nor to rabbis, but only to my conscience. That is what I try to do; my conscience alone guides me.”
The invisibility/visibility problematic can be declined in multiple ways. In Jakub’s case, invisibility was almost total for 35 years. Almost — for the antisemitic barbs that assailed him from time to time awakened in him more or less obscure interrogations. Then, at mid-life, clarity was complete, but with its share of difficulties. Unlike other Jews, who consciously choose moments of invisibility, or even total invisibility — as is the case for converted Jews, in occupied Poland, who adopted an Aryan identity and maintained it after the war — invisibility was imposed on Jakub. Today, he says himself, and wishes himself, visible — and so he is. How does this visibility function when he goes to Poland? What reminiscences assail him?
He may answer that himself in his next book.
Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, Powrot do domu (The return home), Annual Memorial Lecture, The Judaica Foundation – Center for Jewish Culture, Krakow 2021. All the quotations that follow come from this text. I have removed the page references from the citations so as not to weigh down the reading, but I hold them at the disposal of any reader who wishes to examine them.↩︎