LISTENING TO CHOPIN WHILE FIGHTING NAZIS

Charns reflects on his grandfather’s morally complex past as a man who fought the Nazis in Poland in this memoir.

The author grew up hearing stories of his Polish family’s dogged resistance to invading Nazis and the great sacrifices they made to save imperiled Jews in the years 1939-1941. Those tales of fighting fascism inspired the author to protest the training of Salvadoran troops at Fort Bragg in 1982, a stand which earned him 90 days in a federal prison. However, the author writes that he began to question these inspirational stories after discovering that his maternal grandfather, Alek Gwiazdowski, had held profoundly antisemitic views, even as he saved the lives of Polish Jews, blaming an “international conspiracy” of Jewish financiers for his business failures. Similarly, the author says that his mother espoused opinions that were also hostile toward Jews and blamed the widely held view of Poland as an antisemitic nation on the ingratitude of the Jews they had selflessly protected. Charns investigated and determined that the truth was deeply complicated: While Alek did in fact join the resistance, risk his life, and suffer imprisonment for his heroic actions, he was also unreservedly prejudiced against Jews, holding onto bigoted notions long after the war was concluded. With great subtlety, Charns reflects on the irreducibly complex character of the past: “History is rarely as books or family legends suggest. Our motives may be contradictory; our human frailty allows good and evil to intermingle and coexist.” The author provides an admirably unflinching account of Poland’s situation during the Nazi occupation from 1939-1945, a tale that combines a story of heroism with an account of ethnic enmity between Polish Jews and Polish Catholics. His candor is especially laudable given the critical light it casts on his own family. However, this brief book—under 100 pages, even including a short fictional story about the massacre of Jews at Jedwabne in German-occupied Poland in 1941—meanders somewhat and is more a personal chronicle than a rigorous study of history. While the lesson he learns is an important one, it’s also one well documented in the vast literature on both the war and Poland’s role in it.

A personal remembrance that doesn’t rise to the level of general historical interest.