“YOU NEED TO MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK”

I arrived in communist Poland on October 31,1978, the eve of All Saints' Day and the Polish Roman Catholic “Holiday of the Dead.” One of my first impressions was the long lines of people waiting in dreary weather to board buses to visit cemeteries in order to light candles and say prayers. An affirmation of religious sensibilities and customs in an officially atheist country, this was a telling introduction to a society riddled with conundrums.

As a U.S. Fulbright-IREX scholar, I was only the second foreign Jewish academic, working on a Jewish studies project, officially allowed into Poland since the Second World War (Gershon Bacon was the first; still the authorities hesitated: I was the last exchange candidate approved, a month after everyone else). I had been assigned to Warsaw University; however, to pursue my research on the relationship between the Jews and the Polish aristocratic magnates I needed to be at the Czartoryski Library (Biblioteka Czartoryskich) in Cracow. It held the archival collections I needed to study. I spent a month in Warsaw making a nuisance of myself at the Ministry for Higher Education and Technology in the early mornings and then utilizing the rest of the day to learn what I could at Warsaw's archival institutions. Finally, the official in charge of me, Slawomir Klimkiewicz, relented and made the necessary arrangements for me to transfer to the Jagiellonian University in Cracow so that I could work at the Czartoryski.

It hardly seems conceivable today that there was a time within my own memory when one might enter an archive without ever having seen its catalogue previously in at least partial form and without, minimally, a preliminary list of collections and files to be examined. However, preinternet and with the restrictions on the dissemination of information that were a hallmark of communism, I had no way to inspect the catalogue of the Czartoryski's archival holdings until I actually arrived on the premises. I had spoken with scholars, especially Professor Jacob Goldberg, who were familiar with the Czartoryski's collections. I had seen descriptions in archival guides and references in footnotes. I had reviewed microfilmed (by Goldberg) material from the Czartoryski in the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem.