The 8th of May 1945 of Ionas Turkov

On May 8, Europe celebrates its rebirth following the defeat of the Nazis. But can Jews participate in this moment of jubilation that unites European consciousness? Through the experiences of playwright Ionas Turkov on May 8, 1945, Stéphane Bou examines the disconnect between the narratives and emotions of “the world” and those of the Jews. What place can the history of the Shoah find in the grand triumphal narrative of victory and European unity?

 

 

On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany signed its unconditional surrender to the Allies. On that day, the prestigious Yiddish theater actor and director Ionas Turkov, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, was in Łódź. From the apartment where he was staying, he watched the crowds flooding the streets:

“An exhilarating, even hysterical joy had gripped the population at the news of the victory over the Germans. Polish and Russian soldiers in the city mingled with civilians, forming a huge jubilant crowd that wandered happily and carefree through the wide Piotrkov Street, once Jewish. The air was filled with cheers and cries of enthusiasm and jubilation. People hugged and kissed each other. Hats flew through the air, and songs mingled in various languages. And I stood by the window and watched this terribly moving scene.”^[1]

Turkov initially sees this scene in its absolute positivity: ”The joy was immense. It was no small thing: the German armies that had sown extermination and destruction everywhere had been crushed; the plans of the architects of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ had been shattered; how miserable and insignificant the ‘proud knights’ of the so-called superior race must have felt that day!” ^[2]. He sees it in its absolute positivity and total unanimity: it is nothing less, in his view, than “the world [celebrating] the final victory over Hitler’s modern Huns”^[3] — and since then, each of the May 8 commemorations has demonstrated, if only for the duration of a ceremony, the world’s desire to think of itself as reconciled over the corpse of Nazism.

But for Turkov, on this first of the “May 8ths,” the cohesion does not last long. Something was wrong with the spectacle offered to him by the crowd on Piotrkov Street, in unison with all the streets of Europe. The same scene that moves him ends up excluding him. He finds himself on the sidelines of the “immense joy” that seemed to have infected him at first. His friend, who is accompanying him, himself Polish, Jewish, and a survivor of the ghetto, sees him standing silently at the window and asks him in surprise, “Ionas, what’s wrong? You should be jumping for joy, the war is over.” Turkov admits that his friend “may well be right, but [he] can’t say anything in response.”^[4] His memoirs provide an answer. They can be read as an analysis of his historical and political situation in Poland in the immediate postwar period, despite the victory celebrated that day. Turkov expresses the Jewish truth that gnaws at his mind, which effectively shatters the triumphant mood of May 8, 1945, revealing a sorrow, lucidity, and failure that explain his inability to fully share in the event. For what victory are we talking about?

*

In September 1944, Ionas Turkov took refuge in Lublin, located two kilometers from the Majdanek camp, in the part of Poland that had already been liberated by the Soviets. Further west, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps were still in operation: Himmler ordered their dismantling several months later, on November 25, 1944, after decreeing that “for practical reasons, the Jewish question had been resolved.” ^[5]. For the time being, as soon as he arrived in Lublin, having learned that a Polish radio station had just begun broadcasting, Turkov campaigned for a regular program in Yiddish to be included in the schedule. He explained his intentions to Wilhelm Billig, the station’s director: “The world already knows about the almost total extermination of Polish Jewry. It is eagerly awaiting any news from here. The Jewish world even more so. Don’t you want to give them the opportunity to hear directly from those who have suffered, what the Germans have done to them? How they escaped from hell? Where they are now and what they are doing? Who, despite everything, has survived?”^[6].

If knowledge of what Polish Jews call the Churban was already vibrating in the air in Europe^[7], it is a matter of participating firsthand in its dissemination, with the voices, words, and testimonies of survivors. Turkov regularly emphasized the need to be “direct,” in the sense that Jews, without mediation, must take charge of the narrative of what they had suffered.

Within the commission discussing Turkov’s project, there were heated debates about whether it was politically appropriate to launch such a program. Some fear that it would “stir up the population, whose feelings were not currently favorable toward Jews.” Others were not opposed to it, provided that it was broadcast in Polish and not in Yiddish. The Minister of Propaganda and Information, Stefan Matushevski, believed that it was important not to “show weakness” in the face of Polish antisemitism, which was becoming increasingly violent: “[we must] insist that the small number of Jews who survived this unprecedented catastrophe [benefit] from our protection in all areas and that they [can] also have their own cultural and linguistic life in the new Poland.”^[8]. The project was finally accepted. Turkov was appointed “director” of a program called The Yiddish Hour. The 15-minute program, created in October 1944 and broadcast twice a week, was given the more specific title Corner for Searching for Relatives. Years later, Turkov explained that thanks to his program, “hundreds, then thousands of people learned of the existence of Jewish survivors. For many people, this was in fact the first sign of life from the miraculous survivors. With bated breath, Jews around the world tuned in to our radio program and listened intently to the names being read out: perhaps a relative or acquaintance was on the list.”^[9]

Something was wrong with the spectacle presented to Turkov by the crowd on Piotrkov Street, in unison with all the streets of Europe. He found himself apart from the “immense joy” that had initially seemed to infect him.

In his eyes, Turkov’s gesture was a way of speaking out that did not come naturally, but had to be conquered and imposed. He emphasizes its inaugural dimension: it is indeed the very “first sign of life of the miraculous survivors”^[10]

However, it should not be forgotten that The Yiddish Hour was also part of a dual continuity: that of efforts to keep Jewish cultural life alive, which continued as long as conditions, even extreme ones, did not prevent it (Turkov and his wife Diana Blumenfeld were able to perform in front of an audience in the Warsaw ghetto); but, more fundamentally, in the continuity of the considerable documentation work that Jews had undertaken in real time on their persecution, deportation, and extermination. From the beginning of the genocide, there was an urgent need to bear witness and report on the facts. The famous words of Emanuel Ringelblum, who set up the Oyneg Shabbes organization with the aim of systematically archiving all documents relating to the reality faced by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, have become iconic in recounting the proliferation of traces left behind: “Everyone wrote. […] Journalists and writers, of course, but also teachers, social workers, young people, and even children. For the most part, these were diaries in which the tragic events of the time were recorded through the prism of personal experience.”^[11] During the war, this work, which was undertaken immediately and was contemporary with the events, was conceived as an effort to create archives for the future by men who did not know if they would survive. Many were murdered before their testimonies were later found, in the best cases, as disjointed fragments to be pieced together into a comprehensive body of knowledge (“We do not know who will survive from our group, nor who will be responsible for publishing the materials we have gathered.”^[12] wrote Ringelblum on June 26, 1942).

As soon as the war ended, the work of documentation and archiving was formally organized, both institutionally and methodologically. Turkov’s Yiddish Hour was created at the same time as the Central Jewish Historical Commission, within which “historian-witnesses” gathered testimonies “recorded according to a previously established interview grid.” ^[13] At the head of the Commission, Philip Fridman published To jest Oświęcim! (This is Auschwitz!) in 1945. Pioneering work followed. Turkov drew freely on the material collected to fuel his radio programs, whose content evolved over the weeks. He noted that “from the moment it was created, the history department launched a public appeal to collect material on the Churban [which it] used in part for [its] Jewish radio programs.”^[14] These programs were no longer designed simply to give the names of survivors. Turkov, who managed to increase his airtime, developed a full-fledged news program covering both the extermination that was still ongoing a few weeks earlier and the concrete existence of those who had escaped it. At this precise moment in the immediate postwar period, historical work and journalistic work overlapped.

*

In Turkov’s account of the history of his radio project, it is important to be sensitive to the two feelings of urgency he expresses, which are equally important and go hand in hand. On the one hand, Jews must find each other. They must do so literally, in the sense that, in the chaos of the immediate postwar period, the scattered survivors must reconnect with one another. When the program was launched, for example, Turkov had no news of his daughter Margarita, whom he would not find until a few weeks later^[15]. But also, and above all, in the sense that they must rebuild a “we,” however mutilated it may be by the millions of deaths it now encompasses; a “we” that will obviously appear at first to be in tatters and patched together, stammering from the remnants of what Turkov immediately describes as “almost total extermination.”^[16].

How can we account for the fragmented specificity of a catastrophe that made Jews special victims among all other victims?

On the other hand, it is “to the world,” and not just to “the Jewish world,” that the “miracle survivors” must speak. Turkov constantly distinguishes between “the Jewish world” and “the world,” conceived as a separate outside. “After the Churban, it would be more than normal to convey a direct message from the Jewish survivors to the world,”^[17] writes in a tone that reveals his fear that Jewish voices will be drowned out in the post-war hubbub. A new question arose: how to disseminate the history of the extermination as it was being established, not only within the Jewish world, but also to the outside world. However, in a space that had once again become public for Jews, where their testimonies were now bound to circulate, they had to take into account the fact that the narrative they were conveying was competing with other narratives. “Certain foreign circles are trying to minimize in the press the extent of the appalling crimes committed by German murderers in Poland. They want to blur the nightmarish picture of the cruel, brutal, and sophisticated extermination of Polish Jewry,” exclaims Turkov. Without necessarily—and cautiously—referring to “certain foreign circles,” but more generally to his immediate Polish environment, he repeatedly expresses in his memoirs his concern that the Jewish catastrophe is not being recognized for its true magnitude.

Turkov is confronted with a nagging problem, one that has troubled most survivors from the outset and continues to resurface to this day: how to record the history of the extermination of the Jews – ” those who suffered the most,” as he put it—as an event that was both part of a war that ravaged all of Europe and yet distinct and unique. How can this difference be conveyed? How can a minority history be integrated into the grand majority history? How can the fragmented specificity of a catastrophe that made Jews unique victims among all other victims be accounted for?

Speaking to the world / Speaking to the Jewish world… The need for a dual focus in speech reflects the experience of a divide that must be bridged. Under this condition, it would be possible for Turkov to fully participate in the celebration of the end of the war. However, nowhere is this deep wound of separation more apparent to Turkov than in the magnificent text quoted above, where he expresses the conflicting emotions that flow within him and around him when victory over Nazism is finally achieved: “On May 8, 1945 (…) [T]he joy was immense (…) I was overflowing with grief and pain that had built up inside me and would not let go. The heavy burden I carried within me continued to weigh on me and oppress me. It was only now, once the war was over, that we could draw a line under the final tally, take stock and… realize the extent of the catastrophe.”^[18]. This conflict of emotions runs through Turkov, who, of course, belongs in part to this world seized by “immense joy,” but can nevertheless only participate in the celebration of “the final victory over Hitler’s modern Huns” from a distance. It is as if this celebration were also a spectacle played out before him, who, as a Jew, is left with his “accumulated grief and pain.” As if he did not fully belong to this world. Both inconsolable and irreconcilable. Beautifully and truly separated. This observation of separation is a constant theme in the literature of Jewish survivors who bear witness to that day. Serge Moscovici, then in Bucharest, writes, for example: “The city was immediately filled with jubilant crowds [once the Red Army entered Bucharest], a joy that contrasted with the grave faces of the Jews, who were mourning their murdered people and remained convinced that the war was not over and that it might never be over.”^[19].

How can Jews, without silencing what happened to them, return to a world of joy and celebration?

Jews and other Europeans do not live in the same reality: the radical nature of the extermination they suffered is not that of war, however devastating it may have been. Now that it is the event of “39-45” as a whole that is being targeted, we understand that the question arises of what words can be used both within a community that needs to be rebuilt, with the loss that lies at its heart, and towards an outside world that considers itself victorious and where Jews must find a place for themselves again. How can Jews, without silencing what happened to them, return to a world of joy and celebration? Under what conditions? Can the world and the Jews come together in agreement on the same narrative? At the very least, if the points of view do not align, but each determines their own specific narrative, can these coexist? Is the narrative that Jews carry with them not rather destined to become an additional factor of separation? These are a series of very concrete political questions, and burning ones at a time when anti-Jewish violence, strictly Polish and no longer Nazi, is reviving the feelings of isolation and abandonment that Jews experienced during the war.

For post-war Polish Jews, it is not enough to “settle accounts”; they must remain vigilant. It was premature to assert that it was finally possible to “draw a line under the past.” The world was still a dangerous place: “The first episodes of aggression against Jews [were] recorded the very day after the government was formed, on July 22, 1944,”^[20] even before Turkov took refuge in Lublin. In May 1945, anti-Jewish violence took place as part of a continuum of hostilities that began in the summer of 1944 with the liberation of certain areas of Poland and intensified until 1946. It is understandable that, in this crowd happy to belong to a post-Nazi world, which he watched from the window overlooking the streets of Lodz, Turkov also saw another crowd. Another and the same? “I stood by the window and watched this terribly moving scene. Unwittingly, another scene similar to this one came to mind, full of joy and enthusiasm, which a gigantic mass of people had played out in the same way and with the same hysteria one day in the streets of Danzig. It was in 1938, when Hitler’s gangs seized power in the free city of Danzig. I had witnessed the explosion of completely unbridled joy that Hitler’s victory had brought about. I was there during those days of “joy” and had witnessed more than one sad event. Seven years later in Lodz, there were the same demonstrations, the same exhilaration, the same enthusiasm, but this time caused by Hitler’s defeat. That period between victory and defeat cost us Jews a million victims a year.” In the streets of Europe, history is moving forward. In the Jewish historical consciousness, it is the knowledge of a repetition that persists.

Added to the grief is the overwhelming lucidity of Turkov, who notes that Jews are not yet included in the peace of May 8, 1945. It was during the month of May that Turkov requested that the Kupa synagogue in Krakow be protected from the risk of a pogrom. “This is the life of an entire community,”^[21] adds Turkov, for whom the question of restoring a Jewish world in Poland is a constant one. Is it possible to stay? Should they leave?^[22] While waiting for each Jew, one by one, to answer these concrete questions that form one of the central themes of his memoirs, Turkov intends to be among those who help give Jews a voice that will be heard.

*

“There are no more Jews,” said Vintzenti Zhimoski, Minister of Arts and Culture in Poland’s first post-war government, to Ionas Turkov. He offered him the position of director of a Polish national theater. “You must take into account [that] the few Jews who miraculously escaped the Churban will have to blend in with us,” Zhimoski explained. “I don’t believe there will ever be Jewish life in Poland again; certainly not Jewish cultural life. You, Mr. Turkov, you and your wife, have the opportunity to work and flourish in Polish theater.” The actor and director rejected the minister’s offer. He did not want to “begin rebuilding for those who had caused [the Jews] so much suffering” and intended to devote himself primarily to the life of his community. As a member of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, the first president of the Jewish Union of Writers, journalists and artists, and co-founder of the Union of Jewish Stage Artists, Turkov was not only the host of The Yiddish Hour (for which he produced 158 programs), but also one of the key figures working to revive Jewish cultural life.

In Poland in the year zero after the German defeat, Turkov’s situation was emblematic of that of the survivors who wanted to pursue a Jewish cultural policy to “keep the Jewish masses alive” or “bring comfort.”^[23]; but not only that. Beyond this work of animation, it was necessary to give Jews a voice and “continue to weave the golden chain.”<footnote>”We find ourselves at a crossroads. This is a great historical moment that imposes great historical tasks on us. One of these tasks is to continue weaving the golden chain [Di Goldenè Keyt, “The Golden Chain,” an expression borrowed from the title of a play by I. L. Peretz and which has become canonical to symbolize the continuity of the people] between the past and the new future,” wrote Philip Fridman in a text entitled ‘Our Historic Moment’ and quoted by Turkov (En Pologne après la Libération, op. cit., p. 206).</footnote> also consists in giving an account of the coordinates of the era into which the Jews had just entered: after the Churban. What might be the reactions and responses to the “grief and pain” in the lives that continue for those who were not murdered? What kinds of subjectivities might emerge from having escaped a criminal enterprise whose goal, it is not impossible to argue, was largely achieved? This point is not only the perception felt by contemporaries such as Turkov (“The extermination [was] almost total”) or Marek Edelman (“There are no more Jews in the world. This people does not exist. And there will be no other”), but also what a thinker such as Jean-Claude Milner, reflecting on the reception of the event, has to say. Poésie yiddish de l’anéantissement, Seuil, 1993.</footnote>), but also what a thinker such as Jean-Claude Milner, reflecting on the reception of the event in the history of Europe that followed, posits as a fact whose consequences he seeks to explore: “If we stick to the generally accepted criteria for evaluating the success or failure of a political program, the extermination of the Jews was carried out to the end. Having failed completely in all other respects, Hitler achieved his goal in this one respect. Post-1945 continental Europe is just as he dreamed it would be; it is practically judenrein. Especially in the east.”

The most fundamental aspect of the obliteration, which led to the blocking of reconstruction, was the impossibility for Jews to establish the narrative of which they are the bearers.

May 8 celebrates a victory over enemies after they themselves have won their victory. Turkov thinks only of its outcome, of the fundamental defeat that made it possible—and of the violence that continues against Jews. “When I walked through the ruins of the ghetto, the ruins of Jewish life that had once been so vibrant and was now decapitated, (…) I had to come to terms with the idea that everything was over there. (…) Here, people are getting ready to start a new life; in any case, there is a prospect of a new life that must close once and for all the chapter of violence and bloodshed that the great and small Hitlers opened against us. A new life must begin here [but] all those you see now, taking part in this indescribable joy, the masters of this land soaked in Jewish blood, continue to lengthen the bloody chain of those who have been defeated, they still continue to mercilessly murder the remnants of those who have suffered the most.” ^[24]

The revival of Jewish voices in post-war Poland gave rise to a narrative program that took three directions: the history of the extermination to be told in the immediate past; the story of survival to be told in the present; but also in the future: this program was inseparable from a policy of post-extermination survival to be considered.

Leave? Stay? All narratives were considered, but the narrative of departure overwhelmed all others. Once again, Turkov’s position is emblematic and reflects the state of mind of the Jewish cultural elite at this critical moment in the history of Jewish-Polish relations, when political and symbolic violence against Jews was followed by very real violence: “The optimism that had filled me in the first days after the Liberation quickly dissipated. I no longer wanted to lift a finger to set up Jewish schools, a Jewish theater, and other cultural activities. Attempts were simply paralyzed. Impressed by the incessant murders and malicious behavior towards Jews, I concluded that rebuilding a Jewish life in Poland was a utopia.” Turkov titled the final chapter of his book about his post-war experience in Poland “I am leaving Poland forever.” The link did not hold^[25] “After liberation, I could no longer be myself and had to cover myself with foreign clothing and take on a Polish name, which was supposed to hide my Jewish ancestry. Such an atmosphere could not appeal to me; such an environment could neither attract nor retain me.”<footnote>After the Liberation, op. cit., p. 264.</footnote>. The departure was the result of an obliteration, which was expressed hyperbolically in the violence of the pogroms. But, as Turkov notes, the most fundamental aspect of the obliteration, which prevented reconstruction, was the impossibility for Jews to establish the narrative of which they were the bearers. They are not allowed to speak. It was in response to the censorship imposed on The Yiddish Hour that Turkov resigned from his post and handed in his resignation to William Billig, the station’s director^[26].

 

*

Turkov’s experience on the morning of victory reveals a structural truth: the separation of emotions, narratives, and affiliations between Jews and “the world.” Peace did not mean a return to order, but rather the entry into a gray area of persistent hostility and imposed silence. “I could not share the immense joy sparked by the victory over our worst enemy.” On May 8, 1945, Europe celebrated its liberation, but Jews, amid the hubbub of jubilant cheers surrounding them, experienced a particular narrative that was impossible to reconcile with the unanimous victorious narrative. This is not simply a difference in the emotions felt, but a profound disagreement about what constitutes the event and the meaning of the Shoah’s place in the history of World War II as a whole. As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of May 8 this year, and as current events inflame feelings of separation, the question of this integration remains, not only within the history of World War II, but within a post-Shoah Europe.

This unresolved and still open question of the historical integration of Jewish history into the history of Europe emerging from its most murderous war is one that we recognize today with the greatest acuity, an acuity that has probably never been felt to this degree since the years following the Second World War.

We feel it like a bite, even more painful in Western Europe than in the East, even though it is now cloaked in supposedly egalitarian slogans, where Jews are shamelessly castigated as those who must not under any circumstances appear as the sole bearers of an ineliminable part of everyone’s history. “Get out, dirty Zionist!” we now hear in our streets. Let us listen carefully to what is being said, with the perfectly recognizable rage of antisemitic ranting: ”Jews, get out of our history at last, merge at last into a history where your voice would be canceled out for the benefit of the forgetful majority.” The feeling experienced by Turkov on May 8, 1945, can be seen directly translated into our present experience. It remains intact in 2025, in Paris, Madrid, Brussels, or London. Post-Shoah Europe thus continues its dissolution in unadulterated jubilation, whose great collective theme is none other than a Europe finally reconciled with itself after 1945.

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Stéphane Bou