KSAWERY PRUSZYNSKI
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bative, Erlich conveyed the sense that amnesty and freedom did not
make him any happier.
It
was as if all that had happened to him
somehow was a side issue , only a fraction of what mattered.
People who come out into freedom are first blinded by the sun.
It seems to them that the world from which they were excluded must
have become better, more radiant, inhabited by angels and led by
wise men. The awakening is apt to be that much more painful. This
kind of illness is understandable; it is as natural as is, under some
conditions, the typhus. One catches it in a way which is mathemati–
cally predictable. These two men were the only ones I ever met who
did not contract this di ease. The irony of it is that of all the Polish
political prisoners they were the ones who spent the longest time in
Soviet jails: they were arrested as early as September 1939 . Never–
theless, when they came out into the world their eyes were not
clouded by illusions. They were inquiring about everything with the
same curiosity as everybody else. Alter, it seems, was checking off
what in fact did happen against what he had anticipated. Sometimes
what happened did not correspond to what he had imagined within
the four walls of his cell. In those instances it looked as though he
was trying to figure out in his mathematician's brain where he went
wrong so as to avoid a similar mistake in the future. The expression
on Erlich's face as he listened intently seemed to suggest that yes,
that was the way things were, and that it was hard to expect them to
be any better; in fact, they cou ld have been even worse. Were these
two men, in the total isolation of prison, truly cut off' from life? No.
One in his speculative mind, the mind of a Talmudist, a scholar, a
mathematician, a logician, a Marxist, had foreseen the conse–
quences of events which he himself observed or which, in however
distorted a form, reached him through the walls of the prison. The
other sensed them. For Alter there were few surprises; for Erlich
there were none.
I talked on a later occasion with a Catholic priest, a man of high
morals and of superior intelli gence. He spent some time with Erlich
and Alter in one cell. This was a dark moment: France had fallen,
the fall of England appeared imminent, the USSR had annexed the
Baltic countries. The priest reminisced about the time he had spent
with those two Jewish socialists: "They behaved most impressively,
unbelievably. I could not understand how these two men who did
not have the moral support of religion managed to carryon this
way." Much later, a lready in Kuybyshev, I was in the theater with
