What’s (Not) Missing From the “J” (No. 5)

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I was pleasantly surprised, and frankly relieved, that the “J” printed my letter to the editor on the subject of the much ballyhooed dedication of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Here is what I wrote:

Poland is wrong location for Polish Jewish museum

I am writing about your April 26 cover story (“Building the dream: Poland’s new Museum of the History of Polish Jews”) and philanthropist Tad Taube’s April 19 op-ed (“This is our story: Museum of Polish Jewish history a symbol of renaissance”).

Who is going to visit this museum? Not Polish Jews. There are only 5,000 of them. Nor is it likely that the visitors will be Poles. A recent article in the Jerusalem Post indicated that 44 percent of Polish high school students polled would “not be happy to have a Jewish neighbor,” that 40 percent would not like to have a Jewish classmate, 60 percent would not like to have a Jewish partner and 45 percent would “not be happy” if they had a Jewish relative. (The poll also strongly suggested that even this generation of Poles refuses to acknowledge Poland’s anti-Semitic history.)

So the visitors to the museum, presumably, will be Jews like us. Earning foreign exchange for a country that has not actually grappled with, much less overcome, its terrible history of anti-Semitism does not strike me as a particularly good idea.

This museum belongs in Israel or the United States, where Polish Jews and their descendants live and, thankfully, flourish, not in Poland, which persecuted them.

Robert White | San Francisco

(Readers interested in the poll referenced in the letter can read all about it in Poll reveals anti-Semitism still rages in Poland (Jerusalem Post, Apr. 20, 2013).)

The reason for my relief that the “J” printed my letter (it was printed a week after I hoped that it would appear) is that I believe that the Museum was built, if you would, on a false premise, actually several false premises.

Jewish life in Poland, notwithstanding the hype, is hardly “flourishing.” While my research suggested that there are 5,000 Jews in Poland, the “J’s” coverage indicates that the number is really more like 4,000 out of a Polish population exceeding 38 million. There are high schools with more students enrolled than there are Jews in Poland. And there is no way – no way – that this tiny group is going to revive the religious and cultural life of the long departed 3 million plus Jews of pre World War II Poland. The odds that this tiny group will have any significant impact on modern day Poland is incredibly daunting. Here is why.

I saw little or no evidence in the “J’s” coverage or elsewhere that the Polish government, much less the Polish people, are willing in any significant numbers to engage on the subject of their centuries of virulent anti-Semitism, including sickening collaboration with the Germans. Some years ago I was chilled to the marrow when I read Jan T. Gross’s account of the post World War II treatment of the Jews of Poland, including extensive discussion of the Kielce Pogrom, in which Jews were murdered by Poles after World War II was over when some Polish Holocaust survivors had the temerity to return to their home towns try to reclaim their stolen property. Gross’s book, FEAR Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (Random House 2006), can be found on Amazon via this link. It is superbly reviewed by Vanity Fair Contributing Editor David Margolick in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (July 2006). The review is entitled Postwar Pogrom, but, like Gross’s book, goes far beyond the specific events of the Kielce massacre to sketch out a horrifying picture of pervasive Polish antisemitism. (Blog readers may also be interested in Gross’s prior book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (here’s the Amazon link.)) While disputed by apologists, Gross makes a powerful case that the massacre of the approximately 1600 Jewish residents of this Polish village was at the hands of fellow Poles and not the Germans.)

Readers should note that a recurrent theme of apologists for Polish antisemitism is that the Poles, too, were victims of the Nazis, and before them the powers that ruled Poland (Czarist Russia, Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) as well as the powers who ruled them thereafter (the former USSR and its client Polish Communist puppet regime). Unfortunately for the apologists, this particular “dog doesn’t hunt” either. During the interwar period (between World Wars I and II), a free and independent Poland had no hesitation in enacting economic legislation that was intended to favor Poles and injure Jewish businesses, in addition to imposing quotas on Jews in the professions and otherwise engaging in official antisemitism. (For a brief discussion, see Antisemitism in Interwar Poland 1919-1939; I’m not familiar with the sponsoring organization (World Future Fund) to comment on it but the article is accurate as far as it goes. See also Josef Marcus, Social & Political History of the Jews in Poland: 1919-1939 (“That there was economic discrimination against the Jews in Poland has never been disputed; indeed it as so deep-rooted that it was regarded as normal.”); see also J. Flaws, Bystanders, blackmailers, and perpetrators: Polish complicity during the Holocaust (Iowa State University 2011) at 18-20.

The same, unfortunately, is true of post Communist Poland. Close family friends visiting Poland in 2004 observed with horror Poles looting Jewish cemeteries of tombstones in order to re-use them, doing so in broad daylight and without fear, apparently, of any police or other intervention. The encounter was all the more painful as they were looking to locate the grave of a grandparent in a cemetery that had clearly been totally neglected for decades. The only difference, of course, is that there are no longer any Jews (at least not in significant numbers) to discriminate against. (Not that this has stopped the revival of antisemitism elsewhere in Eastern Europe – see my blog piece Visiting “Judenrein” Lands in which I discuss how a 21 year-old Croatian college student must be writing his anti Semitic diatribes without the benefit of many, if any, Jews to hate since Croatia has virtually no Jews living there any more.)

The latest “rationalization du jour,” that Poles resented Jewish participation in the Polish Communist Party is equally a non-starter – there were plenty more non Jewish Poles than Poles who served their Soviet masters and the ultimate decision makers, Polish and Soviet alike, were not Jews. Apparently the great majority of Poles will find some way to avoid dealing with this uncomfortable issue no matter what government is in charge. The defensive, and often disingenuous character, of the attacks on scholars like Jan Gross and others who have the temerity to take on the party line is itself indicative of Polish uneasiness with coming to grips with Polish antisemitism.

Thankfully, not all Poles mistreated Jews during World War II, as Margolick acknowledges in his book review, and there are heartening accounts of individual Poles risking their lives to save Jewish neighbors, business associates and friends. YadVashem’s Database for The Righteous Among the Nations identifies 1,000 rescuers of Jews where the rescue took place in Poland. However, Yad Vashem also notes how exceptional such rescuers were -- “[I]ndividuals from within the nations of perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders, who stood by the victims' side and acted in stark contrast to the mainstream of indifference and hostility that prevailed in the darkest time of history.” Moreover, Margolick, in his review of Fear, points out that even those “righteous Gentiles” had to tread very warily to avoid the censure, or far worse, of their neighbors for being “Jew lovers,” so pervasive was the anti Semitic zeitgeist of Poland. Readers may be interested in an innovative effort at classifying the degree of participation by Poles during the Holocaust in J. Flaws, Bystanders, blackmailers, and perpetrators: Polish complicity during the Holocaust (Iowa State University 2011).

Like the Museum’s principal benefactor, Mr. Taube, my ancestry is Polish Jewish (on both sides). My father was born in Poland (actually Russian Poland); my mother’s parents both came from East Galicia (now part of Ukraine but, at the time, indisputably part of ethnic Poland). Both they and their contemporaries viewed Poland as Europe’s answer to Dante’s Inferno -- an evil, terrible place that they thanked God, early and often, their parents had had the wisdom to flee. They did not leave Poland solely (or even principally) because of Russian or Austro-Hungarian governmental oppression (Galicia was part of Austro-Hungary back then) although the Russians and the Austrians have little to say in their defense either when it comes to Jew-hating and discrimination. They also left because of the Poles, who were their neighbors and with whom they had day to day contact, had treated them so terribly.  They would have agreed wholeheartedly with the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir's (Polish birth name Icchak Jeziernicky's) controversial statement that "every Pole sucked anti-Semitism with his mother's milk."  Now that's pretty rough talk, but from their perspective it also reflected a terrible truth.  They would have nothing to do with anything Polish and my father, who was very good at languages, could not remember even ten Polish words from his childhood.

I thus grew up in an atmosphere where my father was uneasy if, as I child, I played outside the house on Easter Sunday – he had memories of violent anti Semitic incidents from his days as a child in Poland.  Likewise, for years at our Passover seders, like my father I would recite the Hallel and other triumphalist prayers with an ironic tone in my voice. In so doing I was echoing my father’s view that there was something very discordant for a Jew in Poland to sit at a seder table pretending to be a Roman aristocrat at a feast and celebrating Jewish victories over Pharoah while living in a place where Jews were routinely despised, discriminated against and persecuted. He was haunted by his childhood in Poland and what he had learned while growing up from my grandmother and his older siblings.

Speaking of Easter, another area where Poland has to address its antisemitic past involves the Roman Catholic Church, a leader in historical Polish antisemitism. The Polish Church was in the forefront of antisemitism in Poland and often offered a veneer of respectability to antisemites. The Church’s deplorable behavior did not end after the Holocaust either. Some readers of this blog may well remember the opposition of then Polish Cardinal/Archbishop Josef Glemp to the moving of a convent on the periphery of Auschwitz along with a large cross that was all but in the face of Jews coming to visit the largest mass grave of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Supported by local inhabitants, it took nothing less than a direct order from then Pope John Paul II before Glemp relented, and only after making a speech condemning Jewish influence over the mass media that was uniformly condemned as antisemitic. (A fuller account can be found in the Jewish Virtual Library in its article entitled Auschwitz Convent.  His obituary in the New York Times (link here) is also instructive and not a little depressing.) The Polish Church, too, has much to answer for if there is to be a true reconciliation between Poland and the Jewish people, including the survivors of Polish Jewry and their descendants like me.

My parents’ views were uniformly echoed by those of the other Polish Jewish immigrants to the United States among whom we lived and with whom we shared synagogue membership (the synagogue in which they were members was founded in 1904 by Polish Jewish immigrants). The notion that somehow Poland is now a fit place for Jews to visit would, frankly, astonish them. I saw very little in the “J’s” coverage or Mr. Taube’s remarks that suggests that they were wrong then or would be wrong now. Specifically, I still see no evidence of any top-down effort by the Polish government, or a significant grassroots effort on the part of the Polish people, to address Poland’s deplorable history of antisemitism, much less apologize for Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

I was skeptical of Germany’s post war efforts to confront its past, to try to reach out to its surviving former Jewish citizens, to apologize, and to try to understand what had gone so tragically wrong in a country that had been regarded as among the most civilized in Europe. But at least Germany has made a concerted effort and the members of my family (including my wife, whose parents fled Germany in the 1930s) have made a strong, if not necessarily compelling case, that Germany is worth visiting now, at least Berlin (they are less sanguine about places like Bavaria). While I have limited my visits to airport transits, perhaps it is time to try to come to terms with a country that is at least trying to come to terms with people like me.

But I am not aware of any similar process in Poland, and certainly not on the scale of Germany.  Sadly it is far too late for a “truth and reconciliation” process on the South African model. With whom could there be reconciliation when the Holocaust survivors are themselves on the verge of completely dying out?   It would be little less than tragic if the opening of this museum represents the extent of Poland's efforts to address this sore subject as it could actually impede the process of reconciliation by avoiding substantive issues.

Instead, I see in the new Warsaw museum a tribute to the single minded determination of its principal benefactor (with whom I respectfully disagree) and a cynical exploitation by the Polish government of his generosity to promote a kind of perverse “Holocaust tourism” that simply rationalizes away when it does not ignore Polish antisemitism. I can accept visits to the death camps, particularly in conjunction with a trip to Israel (i.e. the “March of the Living” model) because the linkage is hugely educational. But there is something almost tragicomical in building a memorial to Jewish life in Poland across from the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghetto fighters desperately needed arms to fight the Nazis. They turned to the Armja Krakowia (AK), the Polish resistance, for help. They hardly got any. (See Chapter 6, The Jews of Poland (The Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings) at 203 (Facing History & Ourselves Foundation (1998) although in fairness, and as usual, this conclusion is not without controversy -- like so many other aspects of the Polish/Jewish relationship, the relationship between the AK and Jewish partisans seems to be freighted with, at best, ambivalence on the part of the AK.)

Speaking of Facing History & Ourselves, this very worthy organization, devoted to combating racism, antisemitism and prejudice through educational programming, is planning to hold its next international board meeting in Warsaw, and if I have heard correctly, at the new Jewish Museum. In light of Poland’s failure to confront its own pervasive racism, antisemitism and prejudice, I have to wonder if this is really a good idea. But maybe it can be made to be what educators call “a teachable moment.” But that would require getting representatives of the Polish Government into the room, perhaps kicking and screaming, and forcing them to answer some very hard questions as to whether the symbolism of the museum is going to be matched by actions going beyond creating a Polish Potemkin Village in which Yiddish theater is reenacted by Polish actors mouthing Yiddish words and a museum is erected celebrating a vanished past but otherwise in a total vacuum. Neither represents a revival of Jewish life in Poland. Neither addresses Polish antisemitism. I would think otherwise if the Polish Government is going to ensure that every Polish school child is required to visit the museum, if the museum contains exhibitions that directly address Poland’s history of antisemitism, if docents are hired and trained to enable honest discussion on these difficult issues, and real money is put into a concerted effort to address Poland’s terrible past. It is only then that Poland deserves a full welcome and reintegration into European life. It is only then that Jews can think of forgiveness. The process of teshuvah, repentance, requires two things. The first is a sincere apology. The second is a concrete effort to undo the wrong and make things right. So far Poland has done neither.