This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, August 10, 2007

Balinesia


Was it my parents' early travel with their children that made me a traveler? All my life I've had flashbacks of Venice when I was eight. Stepping off of a black boat into a loud city, sunlight pressing on my shoulders.

Plenty of sunlight this morning on the beach at Nusa Dua. That, plus the island wind, the warm ocean, and the curvature of the beach ending in a headland on which the waves crashed, created a sense of the world as surreally perfect. The surreality came from a funeral procession which suddenly appeared on the beach -- a scene out of Fellini. Men and women in yellow robes carried the long narrow banners of Bali, which curve up to a tight curl at the top.

A man chanted sadly as they moved along. Drummers beat a slow pulse. I looked up to see the moon out at midday over the ocean.

Topless Italian floozies on the beach pulled their bras to their chests to gawk. Rich hotel guests gawked at the Balinese and the Balinese gawked at the rich hotel guests.



Yesterday we visited the new Four Seasons Sayan hotel with Michael, who flew up from Melbourne to spend a few days with us. It's the most beautiful hotel I've ever seen. The setting along the Sayan Ridge opens up the river, fields, palms, and sky with more drama and generosity than I've seen anywhere else here. The architect built Monet ponds in midair, long curving light wood decks, and a dark green pool alongside the river that flows the way the river flows.

The place is stepped down a steep ridge, so there's lots of walking to get anywhere. The hotel provides little electric cars to move you from the river to your room, or from the restaurant to the pool.



Last night at the Kokokan's restaurant, Michael, a Polish Jew who moved in the 'fifties to Australia, talked to Ania and me about his history with the Soltan family. Karol's mother and her parents saved Michael's life [details below] during the war.

"I will always feel terrible about having lost touch with the Soltans over the years. I will never forgive myself for this, just as I will always be grateful that Joanna and Karol found me again. But one reason for it was that I always felt I was a very small person, and the Soltans very important people, and I hesitated to approach them."

"Well, Michael, you must know that with my American attitudes, I don't have much time for those feelings."

"But the Soltans were in fact very distinguished, Madzia. At Jerzy's father's funeral there were twelve bishops."


-----------------------------------


['State of Israel Honors Polish Family for Righteous Acts

Nearly 100 people gathered beside the Boston Holocaust Memorial on November 24 [1999] to join the State of Israel in honoring the late Michal and Zofia Borucinski and their daughter Hanna Soltan as Righteous Among the Nations, for risking their lives to save a Jewish child named Michael Lippman in Warsaw during the Holocaust.

Under a program created by law in 1953, the Righteous Among the Nations award is the "highest honor bestowed by the Jewish people, through the State of Israel, on non-Jews." The Borucinskis and Soltan have been added to the list of close to 15,000 people whose names grace the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial. Cambridge residents Joanna Soltan and her brother Karol Soltan accepted the award posthumously on behalf of their late grandparents; Jerzy Soltan accepted the award on behalf of his late wife, Hanna.

Lippman, 67, a retired mechanical engineer, traveled from his home in Australia to speak and express his gratitude to his second family. Thanks to a chance encounter on a train platform in Warsaw as he searched for his sister in August of 1942, Hanna Soltan nee Borucinska and her family became the instrument of his survival.

"There must have been some superior force that guided me, as a ten-year-old child, to sit next to Hanna on that train platform and reveal myself to her," Lippman said. "To tell her that I was Jewish and needed help."

At the beginning of the war, Lippman's father heard that Jewish men were to be taken, and fled east to Lvov. His sister, also named Hanna, had already been separated from the family. Lippman was living with his mother in the Otwock Ghetto, an hour train ride from Warsaw. In an attempt to survive and find his sister, he escaped the ghetto through the forest in search of homes where he was told he might hide. En route to people and places that would provide at least temporary shelter, Lippman went from house to house, but nothing worked out permanently.

After a few temporary respites from the ubiquitous danger, he believed that if he could only find his sister, everything would be fine. He went into a store and asked how he might go about looking for her, whether or not he should go to the police. The store owner warned against revealing himself to the authorities and recommended he go to the Warsaw Ghetto and inquire about her there. He went to the train station.

Since Lippman had heard horrific stories about the infamous area, he was uncomfortable with the idea of going, and unsure even where in Warsaw the ghetto stood. It was then on the train platform that he saw 31-year-old Hanna Borucinska. She told him to follow her onto the train and then to her family's apartment.

"She took me to her home and told her mother that she had brought home a little boy," Lippman said. "I no longer felt like a hunted animal. She always made me feel safe and protected. There is no doubt that I survived the war because of the courage and love and caring of Mrs. Borucinska."

According to Joanna Soltan, her grandparents' apartment had a number of rooms that made it possible to conceal the Jewish child in their care. But because of their involvement with and prominence in the Warsaw artistic community, they had many visitors from whom Lippman was required to remain hidden. Soltan said that her mother and grandparents did not set out to be heroes, but believed taking Michael in was "the obvious thing to do."

Michal Borucinski, (1885-1976) born in Siedlce, Poland, was a painter and professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. ... Zofia Jackimowicz, (1883-1969), was born in Warsaw to a family of artists, scientists and writers and was a graduate of Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She married Michal in 1910. Their one child, Hanna (1911-1987) was born in Warsaw, graduated from Warsaw Polytechnic and became an architect. She married Jerzy Soltan by proxy in 1944 when he was in a Prisoner of War Camp in Germany.

The Borucinskis were one among many families and groups who chose to help people survive at great personal risk to themselves. But, they recognized that Lippman might not wish to stay, not having found who he was looking for. "At the beginning," Soltan said, "my grandmother asked Michael if he wanted to go and look for his sister in the ghetto. He said 'no'. And that was the end of that conversation."

Seven months after they took him in, in April of 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began. From their apartment, the family could see the flames from inside the walls. Lippman watched as he remained concealed, still unsure if his sister Hanna was inside. At one point, Lippman said that Mrs. Borucinska expressed to him that "what we are witnessing is a great tragedy and that the people in the ghetto are heroic."

As the situation in the ghetto worsened, the Borucinskis felt that Michael was no longer safe in their home and moved him to a house in the country where he remained hidden until the Soviets defeated the Nazi army over one year later.

According to Soltan, after the war, while inside a Holocaust Survivors Assistance Center in Poland, Lippman heard his family name uttered. Reportedly, when he turned around, he was miraculously reunited with his sister, who had also been hidden during the war. The two stayed in Poland for the next twelve years. Michael studied and earned a degree in engineering, married and had one son; Hanna married and had two children. At Hanna's encouragement, they all emigrated to Australia in 1957, where an uncle had moved before the war.

Lippman said that he and his family have been bound to the Borucinskis and Soltans by the strongest of ties. When asked what the passage "Whoever saves a single life it is as though he has saved the whole world" means to him, through the smiling eyes of a young child, he responded simply that "she saved me. The world is open to me because of her."']

Labels: