Agnieszka Holland was six years old when she heard the word “Jew” for the first time. It was in Warsaw in 1954 — several decades before one of the films she directed was first nominated for an Oscar. She was playing with the local toddlers and one of the gang called her a “dirty Jew.” The children were gamboling, as they always did, in the ruins left behind by the war. She had not yet been taught the word for the hatred of Jewish people — the foul indulgence which facilitated so much of the horror to which the rubbled playground testified. The destroyed and dilapidated buildings were the physical manifestation of the post-war anxiety which was as ordinary to Agnieszka as her mother’s smile and her father’s booming voice. Upon returning home she asked her mother: “What is a ‘Jew’? Is it true? Am I a dirty Jew?” Agnieszka’s mother, Irena Rybczynska-Holland, must have spent some amount of the preceding six years preparing for such a question. Irena was born in 1925 in Lutsk, in Lithuania, to a father who was the first of his family to make it out of the impoverished countryside where his ancestors had dwelled for generations. He became a teacher and Irena attended elementary school in Warsaw. She was in high school during the Anschluss in 1938. Like all her friends, Irena was forced to finish her studies in secret over the course of the war. Unlike most of them, Irena was simultaneously serving in the Polish underground as a liaison officer, a medic, and a senior rifleman. And, equally as dangerous, she hid Jews, protected them while in hiding, and worked with her senior officer to secure them false papers. One, a man who had escaped from the local ghetto, lived with her for a time masquerading as her fiancé to deflect suspicion about his Jewishness. When he needed a medical operation Irena organized a fundraiser to cover the cost. They remained close for the rest of their lives. Irena and her best friend, another young Christian Pole, promised one another that, if they survived the war, they would marry Jews and give the world Jewish children. Irena made good on her promise. Her first husband, Henryk Holland, was a prominent Jewish Communist who had tried to convince his family to flee Poland with him when the war started. They refused, and all of them save one sister were killed. That sister, Agnieszka’s aunt, escaped the Warsaw ghetto by hiding inside her sister’s coffin when the corpse was being transported for burial. After the war Henryk became the editor of a communist youth newspaper, which is how he met and aggressively courted Irena. She was very beautiful — blonde, lively, and warm. She made a name for herself and built an impressive career as an editor and journalist, but the most formative experience of her life was witnessing the Holocaust. It was this fierce empathy that, Agnieszka suspected, compelled Irena to marry Henryk. Agnieszka always assumed that her father exerted enormous emotional pressure to persuade the beautiful blonde Christian woman to succumb to his advances. That he was a Jewish orphan figured enormously in Irena’s decision. It was not a happy marriage. They had two daughters, Agnieszka and Magdelena, and divorced when Agnieszka was eight. Agnieszka was a sickly child and was often forced to stay home from school. She loved listening to her father hold forth with his friends. He was a charismatic man, a dramatic conversationalist who relished presiding over their small apartment, arguing with comrades about politics and philosophy. Agnieszka was enraptured, and silently tracked his ideological disillusionment from deep inside the Communist cell to his defection from it. When she was thirteen, Communist officers came to their apartment and accused her father of treason. Somehow, during the scuffle, he fell out of the window and died. Everyone suspected at the time that he had been pushed, but decades later, when the records were finally made public, Agnieszka determined that it was just as likely that he had jumped. Agnieszka was fascinated by the afterlife of the war that was so present to her from so young. It was a very exciting landscape, and very dangerous — one boy from her neighborhood was killed playing in the same ruins she did. She used to listen to her mother’s stories about being in the resistance and play them out with her friends in make believe games. The atmosphere was one of distended dread. Everyone in Agnieszka’s life expected a new war to break out again. This anxiety was a constant feature of her childhood. When there were crises — the Korean war, for example — people would run out in a panic and buy masses of flour and sugar. The war shrouded the recent past and loomed ahead as a possible future. One night while Agnieszka was lying awake in her childhood bedroom, she heard a plane overhead and assumed viscerally that they would be bombed. “Finally — it’s starting,” she thought. The afternoon when she came home and asked her mother whether or not she was a dirty Jew was the same afternoon she learned for the first time about her father’s family. Irena told her six-year-old daughter about the grandparents who had died in the Warsaw Ghetto. Irena said there was no reason to be ashamed of her Judaism, that she never had to hide it. This, Agnieszka would soon learn, was an unusual orientation. Most of her parents’ friends didn’t talk about the war with their kids, even if the evidence of it was everywhere. If they were Jews, the fact was hidden from them. Antisemitism was part of Polish identity, even in the aftermath of Auschwitz. It had been baked into Polish identity for centuries. By the 1700s, roughly eighty percent of the global Jewish population was living in Poland. When the country was partitioned into Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the end of the eighteenth century,
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