Wladyslaw Szpilman Photo: Wikipedia |
We were
celebrating the success of Romanian-Americans, a diaspora composed of individuals
who belonged to my generation that escaped communism and others who were recent
arrivals and successful entrepreneurs, people who won the citizenship lottery,
or remained in the U.S., following their education in Ivy League schools.
Romanians
are generally very smart and make exceptional students – it is easy for them to
get an education abroad, especially in the U.S., on full merit scholarships.
I watched
and listened to my interlocutors speak with reverence about socialism,
communism, and the need to have a communist global government and global
citizenship in order to promote the rights and freedoms of all people, no
matter where they live.
These young
people have not experienced the tragedy of having to grow up under communism;
they only knew what was taught to them by teachers and books written by academic
socialists. By the time Ceausescu’s tyrannical regime was gone, they were small
children, babies, or not yet born.
Their
parents chose to shelter them from the horrors of communist life; they grew up
in a relative free and abundant life. Democracy to them was how to make a quick
enterprise at the expense of generous grants and investors. Opportunity knocked
very hard and they responded quickly – adaptation of the fittest.
Grandparents
perhaps spoke with nostalgia about the times when they were paid so little and
had no freedoms but a cement roof was assured over their heads and a stale loaf
of bread on the table.
The new
crony capitalism and politically-corrupt “free” society that ignored the
elderly and their plight of continued poverty scared their grandparents so much
that they wanted the welfare safety of socialism back.
“Yes, we are
free now to say whatever we want but nobody listens, nobody pays attention to
us,” said one eighty-something lady I interviewed on my last trip.
I listened
to one teacher from California who was bemoaning the fact that she was going to
miss her favorite CNN personality, Fareed Zacharias. I really had to bite my
tongue into silence.
I can
understand how these young people have been brainwashed into globalism by the
western academia and by their lack of a reference point to the suffering that
their families had to endure for decades under Soviet Marxism and the
leadership of the “Maverick” Ceausescu who brought his people to the brink of
disaster.
It is for
this reason that Romania had such a hard time catching up with other nations
that were former Soviet satellites under the Iron Curtain. Most of these
countries had better living conditions for their people and amassed huge debts
to the west that were eventually forgiven once communism “fell” in 1989.
Romania’s “Maverick”
president, Ceausescu, paid back every cent to the west by stealing as much food
that he could possibly steal before starving his people to death in the
streets. When communism fell, Romania owed precious little to the west, there was
negligible debt to be forgiven. But the people’s standard of living was so low,
and the infrastructure so poor, they had a much harder road to catch up to
prosperity.
Young people,
I learned, think that stories of starvation and man’s inhumanity to man are
just stories, nobody in his right mind would mistreat their fellow man. Life is
just a bowl of cherries, there are no pits inside. Besides, history and truth
have been greatly sanitized.
My breakfast
under communism, almost every day, was a piece of dark bread with prune jam made
by grandma and the occasional butter, if we were lucky to find any in the perennially
empty “laptaria,”(dairy shop) where
we had to stand in line as early as we could, even though the store did not
open until 6 a.m. The line would wind around the block and there was never
enough milk, butter, or cheese delivered to satisfy all the customers waiting.
Socialism,
like you see in the today’s starved Venezuela, is not very good at basic
economics and planning based on supply and demand. Socialists are good at
propaganda and lies and centralized control of the population.
Prunes were
plentiful to make jam but sugar was a different story. Grandma, like any other shopper,
was entitled to only so much sugar a month on rationing cards. We all pooled
the rationed sugar and grandma was able to make prune or sour cherry jam for
everybody.
The scene in
the 2002 Polansky movie, The Pianist,
is fascinating and highly emotional in many ways, not the least of which is the
utter joy of tasting something again that seemed impossible to find. In some
ways it reminds me how I felt when I opened the first jar of prune marmalade or
jam of the season. On my last visit, I actually brought back with me four sealed
jars made by cousin Ana.
Szpilman,
the pianist in the movie, hiding from the Nazis in the attic of a bombed-out
house, is discovered one day by an SS officer while he is desperately trying to
open a can of pickles with a fireplace poker and a shovel.
Closing his
eyes, knowing what his fate was going to be, Szpilman is surprised by the sympathetic
SS officer who is interrogating him about his profession, asking him to play
something on the piano in the room, instead of killing him.
The
beautiful classical music reverberates in the dilapidated and frigid room,
while his warm breath and flying fingers on the piano keys are the only
evidence that he is still alive, transported on a realm of beauty, joy, and
hope that touches all senses and does not need translation in any language.
The officer
is listening intently, mesmerized by this “Jude” as he calls him
disrespectfully. He leaves and returns unexpectedly with a loaf of bread, a can
opener, and a large serving of jam wrapped in waxed paper. As a last gesture of
humanity, he hands the “Jude” his warm coat.
Szpilman
licks his fingers of jam, with his eyes closed, in total culinary ecstasy. He
is someone who barely survived, who had not eaten anything so delicious in many
months; the officer wants to know his name so that he can listen to his music
on Polish radio later. The Russians were approaching and the liberation of
Poland was imminent.
House at 223 Niepodlegiosci Avenue
in Warsaw where Captain Hosenfeld found Szpilman
Photo: Wikipedia
In this true
story, the real Wladyslaw Szpilman, pianist and composer, searched for the one enemy
officer who found kindness in his heart and had spared him. Szpilman eventually
learned in 1951 the SS officer’s name, Wilm Hosenfeld. Despite his efforts to
rescue him, Hosenfeld died in a Stalingrad prison camp in 1952 after seven
years of captivity.
I wonder how
young people would feel if they were forced to suffer such deprivation of food
and freedom in a war or in a tyrannical government like communism, theocracy,
or fascism? Would they still be so willing to be multicultural globalists?
One of your best columns, ever. What a weird historical revisionism, so complete, that young adults are ignorant of what your generation went through. How indescribably sad that they don't know how heroic and resilient their grandparents are.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Caro. These young whippersnappers should be forced to do internships in communist and third world countries as part of their curriculum so that they can better appreciate what they have here in the U.S.
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