Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 09:31:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: M-I: Polish anti-Semitism MASTERS OF THE "HOWEVER" SYNDROME London Times Literary Supplement: June 27, 1997. Abraham Brumberg review of BONDAGE TO THE DEAD Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust by Michael C. Steinlauf 184 pp. New York: Syracuse University Press Cloth ISBN 0-8156-2729-7 $39.95 Paper ISBN 0-8156-0403-3 $16.95 According to a survey conducted a few years ago by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, most Poles believe that Polish society as a whole "does not like Jews." This, however, does not make the Poles "anti-Semitic." In fact, there is more to this apparent contradiction than at first appears. The notion that those who do not like Jews should not be considered anti-Semites is emblematic of the paradoxes inherent in the perceptions of things Jewish in general, and of the role of Jews in Polish history entertained by many Poles. (The question of "how many" is probably best left alone, since it has proved beyond the ken of any opinion survey, however sophisticated, to answer with any degree of accuracy, and also because the term "anti-Semitism" covers a multitude of sins from which hardly any ethnic group is exempt.) Poland is still a special case. A country where Jews settled nearly 900 years ago, it was at one time known for its benign attitude towards all minorities, most prominently Jews. By the nineteenth century, it had become the most dynamic centre of Jewish cultural, religious and political creativity on the one hand, and a hotbed of political and religious Jew-hatred on the other. In inter-war Poland, Jews constituted nearly one tenth of the country's total population (three-and-a-half million out of 30 million inhabitants), which clearly made that country the natural site of Hitler's "Entlosung." After the Holocaust, Jews in Poland numbered about 200,000, most of them returnees from exile in the Soviet Union. Only about 50,000 Jews are estimated to have survived the Nazi slaughter in Poland. The combination of Communist distrust of any form of organized independent activity and the pervasive anti-Jewish animus (Nazi propaganda, a recent survey indicates, helped to fuel the old flames) destroyed most remnants of Jewish communal life, and when 35,000 Jews left in 1967-68, following an officially organized "anti-Zionist" campaign, Poland became virtually "Judenrein." In perhaps the supreme paradox, it became the country of "anti-Semitism without Jews." Michael Steinlauf, an American historian and Senior Research Fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, discusses this and other paradoxes and incongruities in his excellent study of Polish-Jewish relations, "Bondage to the Dead." He cites widely shared convictions from the survey mentioned above: the Jews control a large share of the world's finances, exercise a disproportionate and evil influence over Polish affairs, are engaged in secret preparations to rule the world, and go to extraordinary lengths to support their brethren against the "goyim." At the same time, most of the same respondents spoke warmly about their personal relations with individual Jews. ("Kazdy Polak ma swego zydka" -- each Pole has his own little Jew -- was once a popular saying.) Such inconsistencies have always characterized Poland's brand of anti-Semitism. The pre-war primate of Poland, Cardinal Augustus Hlond, alleged that Jews engaged in white slavery, usury, cheating and spreading pornography. However, he said, violence against the Jews would be "un-Christian." Jews should rather be ostracized, Jewish merchants and shop-owners avoided. "Swoj do swego" (each to his own kind) was the slogan of the largest right-wing anti-Semitic party in Poland, the National Democrats (Endecja), who staunchly maintained that they were not anti-Semites. When the government adopted the Endeks' philosophy, Jews were to be excluded from Polish national life. The Endek goal of expelling Jews from Poland altogether was justified by Polish raison d'etat: there were simply too many jews in the country for it to develop a healthy economic and political existence. After the war, the few Endeks who had risked their lives to save Jews were given disproportionate attention; they were the exceptions to the unfortunate rule. Perhaps the most curious example of the "however" syndrome was the Catholic writer Zofia Kossak Szczucka. In 1942, she passionately urged Poles to protest against the Nazi slaughter of Jews, however they might (justifiably) detest them. Steinlauf quotes from her appeal, including a passage that was until recently omitted in nearly every text of the letter published in Poland: Our [Polish Catholics'] feelings about the Jews have not changed. We have not ceased to regard them as political, economic, and ideological enemies of Poland. Furthermore, we recognize that they hate us more than the Germans, that they hold us responsible for their misfortunes. Why, for what reason -- that remains a secret of the Jewish soul....Our awareness of these feelings, however, does not free us from the responsibility of denouncing the crime. Steinlauf rehearses and dismisses the argument that Kossak Szczucka believed she had no way to reach her putative readers without the anti-Semitic arguments, since most of them were rabid anti-Semites. In fact, she didn't deny her anti-Jewish prejudices: she was a bona fide anti-Semite, as her writings in the 1930s attest. However, she was truly revolted by the Nazi carnage. Steinlauf carefully analyzes Polish-Jewish relations and the elements that gave anti-Semitism in Poland its distinctive character, dealing concisely with the pre-war period and in exhaustive detail with the war and post-war years. One of the few issues he neglects is the ambivalence of so many Polish intellectuals, which is something of a pity, since intellectuals played and continue to play an important role in shaping public attitudes. The subtitle of Steinlauf's book is "Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust," and the passages dealing with the impact of the Holocaust on Polish perceptions of the Jews and vice versa, and with the Holocaust's impact on Jewish consciousness among the younger generation of Polish Jews, are among the best in the book. Hardly any of these younger Jews knew anything about Jewishness as they were growing up; some were not even aware of their Jewish roots until rudely apprised of them by their gentile peers or during the "anti-Zionist" campaign of 1967-8. For decades, the Holocaust was buried, ignored or falsified in history textbooks and in the Polish classroom. In the official and often in the popular version of the war, Poles -- not Jews -- were the real victims, often hounded by an unholy alliance of Nazis and Zionists, who "needed" the Holocaust to justify their struggle for a Jewish state. This species of madness gave way to the reassertion of the old "zydokomuna" myth, according to which Jews were always pro-Russian and pro-Communist, welcomed the Soviet occupiers in 1939 and again in 1944-5, and then collaborated with the Soviet security services in persecuting Polish patriots. This line was difficult to sustain officially as long as the Polish Communist Party remained firmly allied to the Soviet CP, but in periods of relative Polish autonomy -- first under Gomulka in the 1960s and then under Gierek in the 70s -- the notion of a "Jewish-Stalinist" alliance and, later, the whole concept of Jewish pro-Russian and pro-Soviet sympathies were revived. This took place with the approval of the Church, for which "Jew-Communism" -- "zydokomuna" -- had always represented a clear danger. Steinlauf shows how all of this related to the Holocaust. The role played by so many Poles -- indifferent, hostile, approving -- became the very touchstone of Polish-Jewish relations. Claude Lanzmann's film "Shoah," released in 1985, constituted proof positive for some Poles that Lanzmann -- a Jew -- was deliberately presenting the Poles in the worst possible light in order to affirm their pernicious role in the Nazi extermination programme. A long press debate ensued, despite most participants' inability, thanks to Polish censors, to see the film. Most of the articles and letters were decidedly hostile to Lanzmann, a few were sympathetic. A year later, Jan Blonski, a distinguished Polish literary critic, published a watershed essay in the liberal Catholic weekly "Tygodnik Powszechny," for the first time since the end of the war explicitly discussing pre-war Polish anti-Semitism and the degree of Polish "responsibility" for (not participation in) the Holocaust. Blonski's article, like Lanzmann's film, provoked mostly fury from Poles. Some correspondents maintained that anti-Semitism was merely the Polish response to Jewish "anti-Polonism," though none of the writers cared to cite any examples of Jewish pogroms against Poles. One wrote that Polish indifference to the liquidation of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto was unconscionable; however, wasn't Western behavior even more contemptible? None the less, after the Blonski article and discussion, Polish anti-Semitism and even the anti-Semitism of the Church became legitimate subjects for debate. In the meantime, the generation which had discovered its Jewishness now set about understanding it. In the days of Solidarity, and even under Jaruzelski's martial law, this process took the form of informal classes and discussions. More recently, Jewish Studies has become an authentic scholarly pursuit, with several universities -- including the University of Warsaw and Krakow's Jagiellonian University -- establishing formal courses and degree-granting programmes. With this came an extraordinary growth in literature on Jewish subjects, by both Jews and non-Jews. Finally, the interest in things Jewish -- history, contributions to Polish culture, Polish-Jewish literature, etc -- invaded popular culture. Concerts of Yiddish, Hebrew and "klezmer" (instrumental) music, festivals of Jewish culture, conferences of Yiddish theatre have been held with increasing frequency. How can this upsurge of fascination be reconciled with the previously persistent and strong anti-Semitic attitudes and stereotypes? One major factor is the disappearance of taboos. Communist censorship could not tolerate a candid discussion of anti-Semitism in Poland, thanks to the regime's adoption of the old Endek ethos ("You must understand, Mr Brumberg," said a Central Committee apparatchik to me some years ago, "that we are proud to have, at long last, an ethnically homogenous country"), and to its manipulation of anti-Semitic prejudices for political purposes. Once the Communist regime collapsed, the enforced prohibitions also collapsed. A second factor is the Church. Under the pressure of its own liberals and world public opinion, and in the wake of theological revisions at the Second Vatican Council, the Church has begun to put its own house in order. Recent surveys show that the old myths of deicide and ritual murder that were so integral to old anti-Semitism have now receded. In spite of these favourable developments, anti-Semitic prejudices still show themselves all too often. In the summer of 1994, for instance, a review was published in Poland's most popular newspaper, "Gazeta Wyborcza," by a young Polish historian, Michal Cichy, who mentioned that during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 a number of insurgents killed Jews -- not by accident, but because they were Jews. He was vilified as a liar and a purveyor of "distinctive racism," as was the Editor of the paper, the well-known writer Adam Michnik, who was called a supporter of "anti-Polonism" and "anti-goyism" (this from a distinguished Polish historian). Nor was this an isolated case. A year later, Henryk Jankowski, Lech Walesa's priest, declared in a sermon and then repeated on television that Jews had spawned the "Bolshevik menace" and were responsible for the Second World War. And Walesa himself, in his two public speeches at the ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1995, did not even mention Jews, who constituted more than 90 per cent of the camp's victims. A master of the "however" syndrome, Walesa, with tears in his eyes, denounced anti-Semitism in a speech delivered at the Israeli Knesset later the same year. These attitudes do not cancel each other out. Rather, they both characterize Polish reality today. What can be said is that the popular appeal of the worst anti-Semitic hate propaganda is waning, and, most important, that the younger generation is less susceptible to it than those who imbibed the poison of hatred before and during the war. I asked a young Polish-Jewish historian what she thought of the current situation: "It's getting better," she said. "However, it's not so good, either." --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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