My Brother's Keeper

...Occasionally one hears voices, especially among the young, who were not emotionally involved in the tragedy, saying: 'We reject the notion of collective responsibility...

...A Reply to Jan Blonski" is an article of, at times, swaggering stupidity, colossal insensitivity, and jingoistic defen-siveness...

...Neither was it an attempt to show how some other behavior might have saved so and so many Jewish lives...

...Sila-Nowicki includes other, more debatable points: he claims that the prewar quotas on university admissions for Jews was justified...

...Among the most inspiring of these responses is "Do Not Speak for Me...

...With such a record of sacrifice, he commands attention and respect even for this folly...

...Disputing most of the points made by Sila-Nowicki, he also criticizes the lawyer's tone...

...In that poem, he portrayed the destruction as an overture to universal apocalypse, and evoked the image of a mole with the countenance of a Jewish patriarch who, burrowing beneath the rubble, would find him, "a Jew of the New Testament...

...If in our country, in our presence, and in front of our eyes, several million innocent people were murdered and we were not able to prevent it and save them, this is an event so terrible, a tragedy so enormous, that it is only understandable, human, and proper that those who survived are somehow troubled, disturbed, and cannot find peace...

...Polish suffering in the war was enormous, second only to that of the Jews...

...What complicity...

...Finally, Sila-Nowicki includes this bizarre and inexplicable passage: "It is even possible to prove in the most scientific manner that in their veins flows only one percent of the blood of those people who shouted 'Hosanna to the Son of David' and then 'Crucify Him, Crucify Him!' but their nation continues to exist...

...What selective forget-fulness or acquiescence with evil?-makes Milosz's poem even less abstract...

...We do not have to return to the irrevocable past...

...This is why the calmness and good feeling demonstrated by the author of the article who is arguing with Blonski does not satisfy me...

...It is a remarkable collection, a rare example of a cathartic exploration of national honor and shame...

...What struck me was that in framing his argument Blonski avoided legalistic or pragmatic maneuvering...

...His essay was no apology written to appease the survivors, hardly any of whom lived in Poland...

...Now, along with a few other short essays published in other Polish journals, the whole debate has been translated and edited by Antony Polonsky, professor at the London School of Economics and the president of the Institute of Polish Jewish Studies...

...We must carry it within us even though it is unpleasant or painful...

...hi dread, Milosz imagines this divine and judgmental creature seeing in his uncircumcised body the sign of his own complicity...

...Sila-Nowicki is a genuine patriot, a man who headed armed fighters against Nazi and Communist occupiers and spent many years in a Communist prison under sentence of death...

...Before 1939, Jews dominated certain professions and controlled a disproportionate amount of wealth...

...Beyond Blonski's initial taboo-breaking essay, the most important article in the collection was written by Wladyslaw Sila-Nowicki...

...He clearly means Jewish blood, the genocide which-although not perpetrated by the Polish nation-took place on Polish soil and which has tainted that soil for all time...

...His voice asking-What stains...

...We cannot dispose of it at will, even though as individuals we are not directly responsible for the actions of the past...

...I don't know what he means, but I don't have to understand such words to fear them...

...Today he is the Polish ambassador to the United States...

...During the war no European nation did more to assist Jews than Poland where the risk for such assistance was the greatest, the normal penalty being execution...

...No, this was an affirmation of the awesome event, an exorcism meant to slay ghosts and cleanse the national spirit at a time when Poland was standing at the brink of a political rebirth...

...habits of accommodation, presumably different from those of rebellious Catholic Poles, led them to go to their deaths offering no resistance...

...Over the months that followed its appearance, Tygodnik Powczechny published more than a dozen responses and rebuttals...

...It cannot pretend that it never occurred...

...For me it is natural that society defends itself against numerical domination of its intelligentsia," he writes, suggesting that Jews were not and ought not to have been of that society...

...National honor was being linked not to the guilt of complicity but to the unavoidable shame of impotence and the far more avoidable silence and self-deception that had followed...

...Its author, Kazimierz Dziewanowski, was in 1987 a journalist associated with Solidarity...

...He begins by accusing Blonski of playing into the hands of Poland's enemies and he upbraids the Catholic weekly for lending its credibility to anti-Polish propaganda...

...Blonski's article took the poetic and mystical burden of Milosz's poem and made it plain, asking questions that, judging by the response that poured into Tygodnik Powczechny, seared Polish souls and psyches...

...We must also strive to expiate it.'" I was living in Warsaw in 1987 when Blonski's article first appeared...

...And yet with Blonski, it frames the debate and defines the field for all the other testimony...

...There were no Quislings in Poland...

...Admittedly they were weak and limited in their potential response to the Nazis, but in their presence, the Jews, who had become a modern nation primarily within historic Poland, were destroyed...

...The long unspoken had been uttered: Jews who lived among us, were killed in front of us and that fact demands that we, Poles, learn and testify how exactly they had lived and how they had died, how we treated them when they were a presence in our national life and how we acted when they were being destroyed...

...memory is at the core of our identity...

...That collective memory which finds its purest voice in poetry and literature cannot forget this bloody and hideous defilement...

...the Polish underground sentenced to death those who betrayed Jews to the Nazis...

...For me-by Milosz's categories a Jew of the Old Testament-it was a thunderbolt...

...Blonski began his soul-shaking argument by explaining exactly what it was that Milosz meant when he describes his native soil as "bloodstained, sullied, desecrated...

...A number of other writers in the collection point out that this stereo-typic view is, among other things, historically baseless...

...For centuries, when they were expelled elsewhere, Jews settled in Poland and their numbers increased remarkably...

...It is a home which is built above all of memory...

...Within Polish intellectual circles Blonski's article set off a passionate and reverberating debate...

...He also claims that it was the passivity of the Jews more than anything that led to their destruction...

...It is enough if we condemn this crime in toto as we do with any injustice, any act of violence.' What I say to them is this: 'Our country is not a hotel in which one launders the linen after the guests have departed...

...I am also grateful that by writing this brief for the defense, Sila-Nowicki, an eminent lawyer, opened the way for many Polish men and women to directly and honorably challenge his general argument as well as his specific claims of Jewish passivity and Jewish threats to Polish society...

...The title alludes to a poem by Czeslaw Milosz written in 1943 as the Nazis were decimating and razing the Warsaw ghetto...

...Michael T. Kaufman In January of 1987 Tygodnik Powczechny, the influential Polish Catholic weekly, published an article by Jan Blonski, an eminent literary critic and historian, under the headline, "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto...

...What Milosz means here is neither the blood of his compatriots nor that of the Germans...

...He then goes on to catalogue the familiar, and not entirely inaccurate, selection of facts with which so many Poles defined their relationship to Jews-before, during, and after the Holocaust...

...Moreover, he continued, what were the contemporary obligations of Poles to confront the fact that powerless or not, they witnessed and survived the extermination of an even weaker people who had lived in their midst in greater numbers and with greater involvement than anywhere else in the world...

...What, Blonski asked, were the moral obligations of Poles in the face of the Holocaust that took place on their soil...

...He disputes the analysis of Milosz's poem...

...Still, and ultimately, I am grateful to Sila-Nowicki...