Poland: The ghosts of Jews:

...Often they ignored or belittled the sacrifices of the Poles, and even worse, assigned them leading roles as collaborators in the extermination of the Jews...

...Six million Jews from all over Europe were killed...

...My broken body will betray me in His sight And he will include me, uncircumcised, among the accomplices of death The article stimulated a profound reaction and for the next six weeks, the newspaper carried articles that ranged in tone from confessional and apologetic to defensive...

...If he was, they would extort money from him under threat of exposing him to the Nazis...

...I have heard from some of them how their parents and grandparents experienced persecution and bigotry before the war...

...Though he was using exaggerated dialect, there was nothing offensive in the act...

...If Poland was anti-Semitic, how was it possible that professions such as medicine and law had been virtually dominated by Jews, or that Polish Jews such as Arthur Rubinstein could rise to international preeminence in their fields...

...Yet, taking up arms against the Germans was also punishable by death, and this did not prevent more than a hundred thousand Poles from joining the Warsaw uprising, and a whole nation took part in an underground conspiratorial state...

...They may have seen Poles taken to work battalions...

...In my bones I knew that there was much more that united Jews and Poles than separated them, but often it seemed this was my secret knowledge...

...Not all the schoolchildren who come on the buses to Birkenau and Majdanek and Treblinka comprehend these statistics the same way as do Jews visiting from the West, but they see the Jewish stars that were carved into the wooden barracks by people awaiting death...

...On the eve of the Second World War, 10 percent of Poland's population was Jewish, a level that until the establishment of Israel was unmatched in any other country...

...At times they were barred from certain occupations...

...Some nationally revered writers were Jews, and Jews took part as Jews in Poland's uprisings...

...Clearly the history of the entire seven-hundred-year relationship between Jews and Poles was viewed very differently by Jews and gentiles, with Poles generally stressing their hospitality to a people banished by others while Jews emphasized their persecution...

...The song was unmistakably Jewish and when the singer came to the first deedle-deedle-deedle refrain, the audience suddenly burst into spontaneous applause, standing and clapping...

...But there is another explanation that is also hard to absorb, which is that Jews lived in Poland for a longer time and in greater numbers than anywhere else in their long history...

...They might force a man they suspected of being Jewish into a hallway to check if he was circumcised or not...

...Blonski cited all the mitigating circumstances-that Christian Poles suffered enormously, that there were no Polish quislings, that there were numbers of gentiles who saved Jews, risking their own lives-but in the end he allied himself with the sentiment of a poem by Czeslaw Milosz called "A Poor Pole Looks at the Ghetto," in which the poet linked passivity and guilt...

...The more powerful is the simple but still incomprehensible fact and scale of genocide by the Nazis...

...I even heard an intellectual argue drunkenly but eloquently that if Poles claimed Joseph Conrad as their own true son, despite the fact that he wrote in English, then they should stake equal claim to Singer, the Polish-born novelist who writes in Yiddish...

...What was anyone to think of the man I knew who saved Jews but habitually still used anti-Semitic language, talking of kikes...

...There was a farmer who told me that he had taken in a Jewish couple one morning and hidden them...

...Both peoples sustained themselves with romanticism and mirrored dreams of messianic fulfillment...

...That is cited sometimes by Poles explaining why there weren't more such people, and this is persuasive...

...Even now, the guides may not always point out-may not be aware-that it was only Jewish and Gypsy children who were doomed for simply being or that it was only Jews and Gypsies who were brought in from other countries of Europe expressly to be destroyed...

...Among the Poles there were righteous gentiles, people who, at a risk of death, hid and rescued Jews...

...Or, how is one to judge Zofia Kossak-Szczucka...

...That couple survived the war under his care...

...As we talked in his apartment he invited me to go with him that evening to a performance at the musical theater in nearby Gdynia where he was to be given the seat of honor in the front row...

...They see the display of confiscated prayer shawls and the bales of human hair shorn from victims, most of whom were Jewish...

...If I had asked more people I was sure they would have supplied even more explanations, touching on matters of shame, guilt, honor, and pride...

...Heroes...

...He said he did it to deflect attention from his farm and to save the first two who came to him...

...Villains...

...And yet here an ordinary crowd of pleasure seekers, not particularly intellectual or worldly, was spontaneously cheering a few simulated echoes of vanished Jewish life...

...Real anti-Semitism had fouled Polish history and honor and I knew that many Jews saw Poland solely as a land of chronic and perpetual anti-Semitism where their ancestors had forever been MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and its bureau chief in Warsaw...

...Less than a century ago, 75 percent of all the European, or Ashkenazi, Jews in the world lived in the then trisected historical Polish commonwealth...

...The more I heard of wartime recollections, the harder clear judgments became...

...They quite likely may have never known a live Jew, but they are increasingly aware of the millions who died in their land...

...It was obvious that Jewish ghosts were stirring...

...They mentioned how some Jews, who in 1939 fled eastward from Hitler's invading armies, presented flowers to Soviet commissars who invaded eastern Poland two weeks later...

...Some took over the houses and properties of Jews...

...There were large numbers of Jews, particularly those now living in the West, who felt that Poles were uniquely and perpetually anti-Semitic...

...For Jews, and for much of the world, the greatest tragedy of the war had been the Holocaust, in which the Jewish people very nearly perished and in which Jewish children, even those too young for any sins, were marked for death by the Nazis...

...Before the war she was an austerely pious Catholic whose view of Jews was that as many as possible should convert to Catholicism...

...Walesa himself said he thought that Polish society was growing increasingly sympathetic to Jews as it realized how anti-Semitism was used as an instrument of rule by the Communists...

...There were times when school trips omitted visits to the Jewish pavilion at the adjacent Auschwitz work camp and instead stressed the lives and deaths of those inmates and victims who wore red badges marking them as Communists...

...scorned and persecuted...

...But why...

...More Jews were killed and tormented on Polish soil than anywhere else...

...Presumably there were many more people willing to run the risk of death for their idea of patriotism than for a sense of brotherhood with a still weaker group of people, who were considered different by many Poles and alien by some...

...On the contrary, it was meant as an evocation of something worthy that had disappeared...

...The women had been called parszywe zydowki, lousy Jewesses...

...Sometimes the Poles would bridle defensively at what they felt was the blanket accusation of national anti-Semitism...

...She was similar to a good many other people who felt that Jews who did not convert should leave Poland for Palestine or wherever...

...The underground Home Army had declared that the betrayal of Jews was punishable by death, but then that same Home Army had anti-Semitic units who would not accept Jews and who even published in underground papers articles envisioning a victorious Poland free of Jews...

...Everyone who was over fifty years old had real memories of horror...

...All the Jewish religious national and cultural movements-Ha-sidism, Zionism, Bundism, Hebraism, and the rise of Yiddish literature-originated or grew largely in Poland, often in an awkward symbiosis with Poles...

...You know," the woman said, "there is an opinion that then the cakes tasted better, the streets were livelier, and one of the most noticeable differences was that then, we had Jews...

...Every right-wing and centrist prewar political party was in varying degrees anti-Semitic and in churches some priests openly preached against Jews...

...I was not there...

...Their number increased at a faster rate than that of their Catholic neighbors...

...Despite anti-Semitism, or perhaps because of it, Polish Jews developed their own thick cultural cohesion...

...To prime the discussion the newspaper printed a long piece by Jan Blonski, a literary critic...

...He picked up his guitar and began singing a lament about a long-vanished village, Lumbartow, where the beer was better and the girls were sweeter and the neighbors friendlier than anywhere else...

...About twenty minutes into the program, the lights dimmed and Rosiewicz put on a tight-fitting cap that resembled a yarmulke...

...When Claude Lanzmann's remarkable film, Shoah, was released, a national debate ensued over whether the movie's portrayal of contemporary Poles making anti-Semitic comments was appropriate or not...

...The attitudes of Poles toward Jews were complicated, deep, and obsessional...

...There were many of them...

...In the past their guides may not have always clearly distinguished between the specific sufferings of millions of Jews, Gypsies, and the agonies of others...

...Moreover, Jews, both as groups and as individuals, were more deeply involved in Polish history than they were in that of any other European state...

...Their fathers, as university students, had been forced by anti-Semitic toughs to sit on separate benches in the rear of lecture halls, or they were denied access to higher education by quotas...

...On several occasions visiting Jews told me that the Germans built the camps in Poland because they could enlist Poles to build them...

...That afternoon, when another two Jews came to him, he turned them over to the police...

...From Catholic Poles, I would sometimes hear another set of facts and impressions...

...My Catholic informants would note that for many Poles life was at least as hard and miserable as it was for many Jews...

...With so many impressions and experiences it was hard to sort it out according to neat categories of guilt, honor, and valor...

...In only remembering some, it is hard not to slight the memory of others...

...They may have seen mass graves, walled-in ghettos, or trains carrying human, mostly but not exclusively Jewish, cargoes to concentration and death camps...

...The stress that each of these peoples placed on their own catastrophic losses often was viewed by the others as insensitivity to their pain...

...The Polish middle class for long periods of time was significantly, even predominantly, Jewish...

...As for the people in the audience, it was obvious that they were enthusiastically and good-naturedly clapping for Jews, for the idea of Jews, for the memory of Jews...

...I was startled by the display and I asked people seated near me what they thought the clapping meant...

...Virtually all Polish pupils visit such places on school trips...

...here are two reasons for the growing dominion of Jewish ghosts in Poland...

...With pride as well as injured self-esteem, the Poles would note that while England, France, and Spain threw Jews out, Poles welcomed them, gave them sanctuary and even privileges...

...The ghosts of Jews were everywhere...

...An appearance in Warsaw of the Israeli Philharmonic proved to be a cathartic event...

...It did not matter that there were hardly any actual Jews left in the country...

...It may be lamentable, but it also seems all too human...

...This prim, patrician woman, already in middle age, took mortal risks daily as she set up and maintained the Home Army's division to rescue and help Jews...

...Certainly, no one can stand among the barracks of Birkenau, as I often found myself doing, and not sense the passage of Jewish multitudes to the gas chambers...

...Meetings sponsored by the influential Club of Catholic Intellectuals to discuss Polish-Jewish topics began to draw hundreds of people of all ages...

...A few general conclusions, however, seemed obvious...

...But when German fascists began herding and killing Jews, she knew it was her duty, precisely as a Polish Catholic, to assist Jews...

...Then there were also numbers of Poles who enriched themselves as szmalcownicy, which literally means people who render chicken fat, but which was used to describe blackmailers and extortionists who lived off Jews who were passing as Aryans outside the ghetto walls...

...Milosz wrote: What am I going to say, me a Jew of the New Testament Who has been waiting for 2,000 years for Jesus to return...

...This article is excerpted from the book Mad Dreams, Saving Graces by Michael T. Kaufman ©1989 by Michael T. Kaufman...

...In the nineteenth century, when new European nation-states were rising, the Poles failed to gain their own state...

...It was not a political evening and the show was built around musical numbers and burlesque bits of sexy patter and double-entendres...

...Some would note that communism was in large measure brought to Poland by Jews and that in the postwar period Jews often served as police and prosecutors interrogating those suspected of Home Army activity...

...I felt I was the only Jew in the theater...

...I looked around...

...Both the official government press and the underground publications devoted more and more attention to Jewish contributions to Polish life...

...Poles, who rightly view themselves as victims of the war, were often offended by such charges, often noting defensively that they had lost more people than any other group except the Jews...

...Perhaps, one man said, it reflected admiration for the courageous defiance of refuseniks like Anatoly Sharansky in the Soviet Union...

...A capacity audience of fifteen hundred people filled the hall to hear a popular song and dance man named Andrzej Rosiewicz...

...Three million of those were from Poland...

...At the ghetto hospital in Warsaw, a nineteen-year-old Jewish nurse was admired by the staff for the strength she showed in smothering newborn babies to spare their mothers the inevitable pain of watching the children die slow deaths of starvation...

...The Nazis wanted to limit the costs of transport...

...Scantily dressed chorus girls strutted and kicked to the beat of a heavy-handed drummer...

...Again the crowd stood and applauded wildly...

...The major Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny, used the controversy over the film to inspire a national debate over the question of how honorable, in fact, Poles had been in regard to the Jews who lived among them...

...At the very least, Poles had seen roundups or street executions of Jews and, in some cases, of Poles...

...Rosiewicz stopped singing, peered into the crowd and in the singsong of a Jewish dialect that now exists only in jokes, declared "Aha, so there are many of us here tonight...

...All these responses seemed to be partly true...

...Understandably, Jews see only the awesome murder of their brethren...

...Many remember hunger...

...When the musicians played both "Hatikvah" and the Polish national anthem, many in the hall were openly crying, In Krakow, a group of Polish students met in private homes and studied Hebrew...

...Another couple told me that they considered the outburst as part of the fashion for Jews that stemmed from a nostalgia for prewar Poland...

...For Poles, the greatest tragedy was that they lost their state, a loss that many of them feel has yet to be redeemed...

...Reprinted with permission of Random House, Inc...

...In Poland, unlike in Western Europe, harboring Jews was punished by summary execution...

...Often my head would literally ache from trying to sort out the contradictory subjective memories of Poles and Jews who all saw themselves as victimized peoples...

...As these distinct views of the Jewish past in Poland moved forward to encompass the period of the Second World War, their disparity widened still further and confusion grew...

...As for building the camps, it seemed clear that convict laborers, threatened with death and torture, built what they were told to build, whether they were Poles or Jews...

...For 123 years, as their neighbors raised national flags and sang national hymns, they suffered the humiliation of statelessness, of partition and foreign domination, and in that time, among them, the Jews, even weaker, grew in population...

...Perhaps, I thought, the singer might also be Jewish, but I later learned he was not...

...The death camps were built in Poland because that is where the bulk of Jews lived...

...Only in Poland were there Jewish masses belonging to all levels of society, poor and rich, pious and secular, rural and urban, illiterate and highly educated...

...Performances of Fiddler on the Roof were always sold out...

...just as Jews had once been perceived stereotypically as Communists and pro-Soviet, they were now being stereotypically viewed as anti-Communists and anti-Soviet...

...University students began writing dissertations on Isaac Bashevis Singer, on the role of the Jew in Polish literature, even on Jewish tavern keepers...

...A photographic exhibit about the scant remnants of Jewish life, put together by a Catholic Pole, drew constant crowds in Warsaw, Gdansk, and Krakow...

...These assertions were illogical...

...In all, six million Polish citizens died in the war, one out of every six people in the country...

...They would tell how before the war 40 percent of the houses in Warsaw were owned by Jews and how there used to be a children's street rhyme that said, "Poles live on the street, Jews live in brownstones...

...But, even with the best intentions, exclusive martyrology can give offense...

...Life was often hard and miserable for many Jews...

...No one could write a history of Poland without significantly including the role of Jews and no one could write a history of the Jews without significantly writing about Poland, and this simply was not the case anywhere else with the exception of Israel, and, to a lesser extent, the contemporary United States...