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regularly in tribute to Poland's ruler Marshal Jozef Pilsudski and
ptoudly wore the legionnaire's uniform. The Klugers were clearly Poles
first and Jews only second. Dr. Kluger was convinced, however, that
both Poles and Jews would have to stand together to defend Polish free–
dom. He genuinely felt that his roots in Polish life, history, and culture
were as deep as any Catholic's. (In this, he differed from that majority
of pre-war Polish Jews who identified either with Jewish Orthodoxy or
with the Zionists.) A Western-oriented Jew of cosmopolitan persuasion,
he felt that anything that served to exclude Jews from Polish life could
only cause trouble. Hence, he concluded that Yiddish was an encum–
brance (though he spoke it fluently) and a source of separateness. This
attitude seems to have corresponded to Dr. Kluger's passage from being
a one-time Bundist agitator to becoming a supporter of the moderate
wing of the Polish Socialist Party.
Dr. Kluger was determined to preserve good relations between Jews
and Catholics despite the intensifying anti-Semitism at the end of the
1930S. His efforts at inter-faith communication included the promotion
of dialogue through music, and it was this (as well as his friendship with
Jerzy) that particularly encouraged the very musical young Woytyla to
visit the Kluger household regularly. Woytyla's respect for Dr. Kluger
was further increased by the courageous way that Kluger defended both
Jews and Catholics in legal cases.
If
I have dealt at some length with Jerzy's father, it is not only because
I found O'Brien's portrait of him so interesting, but also for a more per–
sonal reason. During the 1950s, Dr. Wilhelm Kluger was a tenant in my
maternal grandparents' house in Golders Green in northwest London,
where he lived on the first floor. I remember him as a kindly, distin–
guished-looking elderly man who was a compulsive newspaper reader
and seemed extremely well informed about current events. Every day,
after primary school ended at four o'clock, I would go to see my grand–
parents, and would also visit Dr. Kluger's room (which reeked of strong
tobacco) to ask for one of his papers. His favorite reading was the
Labour
Daily Herald
(which no longer exists), the
Manchester Guardian
(as it was then called), and the Polish-language gazette
Dziennik Polski.
He took a great interest in me during those years
(I
was between six and
eleven years old), treating me almost like a grandson and encouraging
my precocious appetite for what was happening in the wider world. Fre–
quently he would eat with my grandparents Helena and Szymon SiI–
biger, modern Orthodox Jews from Krakow who had recently landed on
British shores, and they would, of course, converse together in Polish. I
vaguely knew that Dr. Kluger had once been a prominent lawyer and a
