Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

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