by Geoff Vasil
Czesław Miłosz is sometimes called Lithuania’s Nobel Prize winner, although he never claimed to be Lithuanian. Neither did he call himself Polish exactly. His “national identity” was as complex as that of his uncle, Oskar Miłosz, the “French symbolist poet” who was the son of a father from a noble family from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and a Jewish mother.
Czesław Miłosz was born in the village of Šeteniai (Szetejnie) just outside Kėdainiai on June 30, 1911, a period when Lithuania was firmly inside the Russian Empire. He moved to Vilnius and attended the Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium, then studied law at Stefan Batory University (Vilnius University), visiting his uncle Oskar in Paris in 1931. Oskar Miłosz ran in exalted literary circles including some very famous names from the period. This might have influenced the younger Miłosz in helping found the Polish literary circle Żagary in Vilnius that same year. After being graduated from the law faculty he went back to Paris for a year, and then worked at Radio Wilno when he returned to Vilnius.
He spent the period right up to World War II in Vilnius before removing himself to Warsaw, where he helped rescue Jews and was eventually recognized as a Righteous Gentile as well as later becoming a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He describes the period when Lithuania and Vilnius hung in geopolitical limbo in a chapter in his 1959 autobiography, Rodzinna Europa, published in English as Native Realm in 1968, called “Peace Boundary,” the name then used by both sides to describe the Molotov-Ribbentrop line under the peace agreed by Hitler and Stalin.
At this time Miłosz spent most of his days in Vilnius in the company of a group of fellow writers and a Jewish man from Warsaw named Felix who, from the sounds of it, paid for their drinks in exchange for the intellectual company and conversation. Felix was an interesting character in his own right and lived as a long-term guest with his wife at the Hotel Europa which once stood at the corner of Trakų and Dominikonų streets in Vilnius, according to Miłosz. The Polish writer lost track of his Jewish friend during the war and afterwards tried to determine whether he’d survived the Holocaust. He had, and his story involves another Righteous Gentile, whom Miłosz did not identify, and perhaps could not have, since Chiune Sugihara never bragged about what he did, and the world did not know of his great act of mercy at that time.
From Peace Boundary in Native Realm by Czesław Miłosz:
“Nor could I say goodbye to my friends because the gossip would have made the rounds of every coffeehouse in half an hour. So I did not say goodbye to Felix. I shall have to recreate his subsequent adventures from the accounts I heard later on. Felix was scared. One night a crony of his, the lawyer X., first persuaded, then helped him to bury his treasure in the garden. Anxiety, however, seized Felix the next morning. He was worried about whether the place had been well chosen. That night the two of them again went out with shovels, but found nothing. It could only have been sheer coincidence that the lawyer, from that moment on, swam in money, while Felix’s drinking companions had to pass the hat to buy a train ticket to Manchuria for him and his wife. Felix’s departure bordered on a miracle, since the authorities granted rights of transit only to the possessors of Japanese visas at a time when it was already impossible to obtain such a visa.
“It seems that a certain foresighted Rabbi helped them out of the fix: in his unfathomable wisdom he had collected absolutely all possible visas (even unnecessary ones) while all the consulates had still been operating. The Japanese visa, which the experts had copied from his passport, sold for a high fee, but it was marked by one defect: no one in the city knew the Japanese alphabet, and therefore could not have guessed that each visa contained the name of its first owner. When the five-hundredth Silberstein passed over the Manchurian frontier, the Japanese began to worry. Whether the story is true or merely an anecdote, Felix, at any rate, made it to Shanghai and from there to Australia. He enlisted in the American Army and perished in an auto accident in Hawaii. I shall do no discredit to his memory, perhaps, if I make the conjecture that he died in an unsober condition.”
Large portions of Native Realm are available on the internet here and here.