MY POLISH GRANDFATHER

...Compared to what happened to her, my family had it easy...

...I looked back as well...

...When she handed my grandfather's book back to me, she shrugged her tiny shoulders...

...Still, the behavior of individual Poles, and individual Polish anti-Semites, varied enormously...

...Last July, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski went to Jedwabne, where he offered an apology for the killings on behalf of the nation...

...My mother regularly sang the Polish national anthem, and I grew up believing that for all its sufferings Poland was the "Christ of nations...

...They were executed on May 3,1943, in the same East Prussian penitentiary where my grandfather was imprisoned...

...But after confirming his imprisonment, conviction, and his aid to Polish Jews during the war in a Communist-era Polish history book about the underground, I've concluded that he was both a hero and a bigot...

...Gross, a Polish-American historian at New York University, revealed that Jedwabne's Jews were not murdered by the Nazis, but were stabbed and clubbed, and those still standing were herded into a barn and burned alive by the town's Polish Catholic villagers...

...The slaughter at Jedwabne has forced a reconsideration of the Polish sense of martyrdom and of the relationship between Poles and Jews...

...The Jews are an ideal instrument of social evolution...

...Later, these victims were shipped to concentration camps, where, as far as is known, they all died in abject misery...

...Shortly thereafter, on a day my mother was absent, her grammar school classmates were rounded up and taken to Germany as slave laborers, where many perished...

...My grandfather was sentenced to death, but his sentence was later changed to seven years hard labor...

...There was a qualitative difference between the likely fate of Catholic and Jewish Poles...

...our frailty allows good and evil to intermingle and coexist...

...Jedwabne is in the same part of eastern Poland where my family lived during the war...

...I know about the non-Jewish Poles slaughtered by the Nazis...

...Still, I was offended and hurt by her words...

...Surviving Polish Catholics point out that 3 million non-Jewish Poles died in World War II...

...She would run past their homes...

...When my mother talked about the war, she usually mentioned that our family saved Jews...

...Fifteen thousand were Jewish...

...But it is a place from a nightmare in a faraway time...

...The preface began: "Probably no race has been subjected to such long and almost continuous harrying and persecution as the Jewish people...

...The book ends with my grandfather's words: "Will Hitler and his followers save Germany's hungry and unemployed...

...Despite many philo-Semitic tributes and descriptions of interfaith friendship, the book is infected by the repeated canard about Jewish wealth and influence...

...By choosing to stay and fight the Nazis, rather than return to America, my grandfather had risked his own life and the lives of his wife and children...

...In the final weeks of the war he escaped the Germans during a forced march west as the Soviets approached from the east...

...There must be some even darker truths about my grandfather's behavior, I thought...

...I know it's true because my Polish grandfather was an anti-Semite who fought in the patriotic resistance against the Germans...

...As cultural anti-Semites, my grandfather and his fellow right-wing nationalists believed Jews were "socially corrosive" because they didn't assimilate...

...My mother told me of being afraid of Jews in Suwalki before the war...

...It took the Jews a few generations to ruin imperial Russia-Hitler's Germany will be ruined in our days...Mutual extermination may start soon...Evolution sometimes uses war, revolution, and even massacres as the tools to accomplish the desired results...

...Gross's book was the cause of much anger in Poland, a nation that arguably suffered more than any other under the Nazis, and felt itself betrayed and abandoned by the West when it was handed to the Soviets at Yalta...

...Anti-Semitism was prevalent, but few thought Poles could be complicit in Nazi crimes against the Jews...

...He made his way to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen, and married my grandmother, Agnes Gradalska...

...After my grandfather's arrest, the Nazis seized our family home, and my grandmother and mother fled hundreds of miles to a relative's home near Kracow...

...At times I've doubted the family history I was taught...

...But she usually added that the Jews in general were not grateful for this sacrifice...

...Hears ago a friend, a Holocaust survivor, asked to read my grandfather's book...

...They forged documents, collected arms, and were couriers to the My grandfather was sentenced to death, hut his sentence was later changed to seven years hard labor...

...My grandfather, however, did not share those views...

...It makes me cringe when I read it...

...A snitch had infiltrated the group...

...Also, through words, deeds, and inaction, my beloved Roman Catholic Church laid a foundation for the Holocaust...

...But terrible as conditions were for my family, Catholic children were not ceaselessly hunted by the Nazis merely because they were Catholic...

...In all his writings that was the only time he mentioned how Jews were singled out for extermination...

...They represent the hatred, and so-must perish...

...History is rarely as books or family legends suggest...

...In the 1930s he returned to Poland where he received the Polish Medal of Independence for his revolutionary exploits...

...Polish Jews affectionately called Pilsudski "Dziadek"-grandfather-because of his progressive views on issues of concern to Jewish people...

...The shtetls are no more...

...My uncle, himself tortured by the Gestapo's men, his wife a slave laborer, once said, "We didn't suffer...

...He blamed his business failures on the "international conspiracy" of Jewish bankers...

...Go through every Polish village and city, and much the same will be true...

...In 1903, my grandfather, Alexander Peter Gwiazdowski, escaped a lengthy prison sentence for his revolutionary activities against Czarist Russia...

...I know well that Poland has more "righteous gentiles" honored at the Israel memorial Yad Vashem for saving Jews than any other country...

...When she was a little girl, my grandfather moved his family back to his hometown, Suwalki, Poland, near the border with Lithuania...

...The subject of Gross's book was not an anonymous place on the other side of the world...

...Wydornik and sixteen others in Revival of the Nation paid for those actions with their lives...

...We were the other chosen people, even though that didn't make it into the Bible...

...In 1938, a year before the war, Stanislaw Wydornik, the leader of my grandfather's resistance group, had joined a far-right, anti-Semitic political group, OZN, which proposed anti-Jewish policies much like those in Germany...

...led to much soul searching in Poland and in the United States...

...Instead, at the site of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other concentration camps, Poland has become a symbol of genocidal anti-Semitism for many...

...To the Jewish martyrs abandoned by their rich coreligionists and rabbis...

...Worse, it cannot be denied that Polish anti-Semitism made it easier for the Nazis to carry out their plans...

...I confess these sins, and find hope in the words written in a Jerusalem memorial: "Remembrance is the way to redemption...

...There are still thousands of Catholics living in Suwalki, but there are no Jews...

...why the majority watched as their neighbors were slaughtered by the Nazis, or rounded up for annihilation elsewhere...

...They contend that the suffering of Polish Catholics was just as real as the Jewish Holocaust...

...During Hitler's occupation, the Polish nationalistic and anti-Semitic right didn't collaborate with the Nazis, as the right wing did elsewhere in Europe, but actively participated in the anti-Hitler underground," Michnik, who is Jewish, wrote...

...We were special for having been persecuted...

...It is necessary for Catholic Poles and Polish Americans to acknowledge, as the Polish president recently did, that distinctly Polish and Roman Catholic anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudices were a reason why more Poles did not risk their lives to save their Jewish brothers and sisters...

...In one instance, my grandmother, along with my uncle, smuggled a Jewish man across the Polish border into Lithuania in a horse-drawn cart...

...I know that except for a fateful missed day of school for my mother, I might not have been born...

...He also possessed an illegal radio and used to listen to Allied war news...

...Gross's book tells of the 1941 massacre of Jedwabne's sixteen hundred Jewish residents...

...He detailed what happened to the Catholics: "I have witnessed in that same town of Suwalki the torturing of Polish priests, teachers, lawyers, judges, workmen, and farmers...

...All but a few of his comrades were executed by guillotine...

...In May 1941, more than a month before the Jedwabne massacre, the Gestapo arrested members of my grandfather's resistance unit, including its leader, Stanislaw Wydornik...

...Sometime after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, my grandfather and others started an anti-Nazi resistance group called "Revival of the Nation...

...In his resistance work, he helped to rescue Jews from the Nazis...

...He spent four years in various Nazi jails...

...Nor could a Polish Jew receive a ration of sugar for revealing where a Catholic was hiding...

...The book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross (Princeton University Press, $19.95, 261 pp...

...The book claimed to be a repudiation of German anti-Jewish fascism by giving examples of a young woman's "record of her actual experiences with typical representatives of this remarkable race [Jews...

...But courageous as he was (my mother says reckless), life was very different for a Catholic Gwiazdowski than for a Jew in Poland...

...He spent four years in various Nazi jails...

...My grandfather was the editor of the group's underground newspaper...

...On September 1,1939, there were twenty-five thousand people living in Suwalki...

...A place where a smiling, round-faced Basia, my mother, will forever peek out of a black-and-white photo taken just before the German invasion...

...My grandfather's generation grew up on that teaching, and worse...

...The proof of this, she said, was that Jews accuse Poles of being anti-Semitic...

...Now I think that even using the phrase, "Christ of nations," implicitly denies the existence of Polish Jews in much the same way as the giant cross that was put up outside the gates of Auschwitz...

...As such, she had worked in a German officer's home taking care of his children, and subsequently wrote her own book about the war...

...Most Poles think that the sufferings of the Polish people have never been fully acknowledged in the West...

...All but a few of his comrades were executed by guillotine...

...Human motives may be contradictory...

...She had survived, after being helped and then betrayed by fellow Poles, by posing as a Polish Catholic girl...

...Poland's "image of itself [is] as an innocent and noble victim of foreign violence and intrigue...

...Still, my grandfather and his group, along with local farmers, helped Jewish people escape...

...Polish anti-Semites fought against Hitler, and some of them even rescued Jews, though this was punishable by death...

...The way I now view that picture is forever changed...

...My family argued about it, and we uncomfortably looked back sixty years at our own secrets, reevaluated the family's experience of persecution during the war, and questioned our claim to an uncompromised, heroic past...

...Of course, all those murdered by the Nazis deserve to be remembered and atoned for...

...The Jews suffered...

...There is another passage in the book in which he blames rich Jews for the fate of poor Jewish victims...

...Polish war hero and dictator Marshal Josef Pil-sudski awarded him the medal...

...But none of that can change the anti-Semitism that predated and survived the Nazis, and the failure-including my own failure as an adult-to admit the extent of anti-Semitism among Polish Catholics, and in my own family...

...ten thousand Catholic...

...When he returned to the United States in 1945, he wrote a long letter to American war-crimes prosecutors about Nazi prison officials and about the Volksdeutscher (persons of German descent living outside Germany): "This traitorous group of scum had already tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of European Jews even before the Nazis set up their systematic mass executions by use of machine guns and gas chambers...

...MY POLISH GRANDFATHER A dark history, with flashes of light Alexander Charns Poland was forced to take a new look at its World War II past last year after the publication of a book about a horrific massacre in one village...

...As a product of more enlightened times, I wasn't taught that all Jewish people are Christ killers who, without conversion to Catholicism, would suffer eternal damnation...

...Nevertheless, Wydornik, the anti-Semite, led a conspiracy that helped Jews avoid capture by the Nazis...

...why neighbors denounced Jews in hiding, or, in the most hideous of pogroms, murdered them years later when the few survivors of the concentration camps tried to return home...

...Though paradoxical, what Michnik wrote is true...

...Some have observed that post-war Poland is a Jewish cemetery...

...My grandfather's anti-Semitic theories appeared in a bizarre, sickening, but prescient postscript to a relative's 1933 book, In the Clutches of the Jews...

...In his book, I Survived Hitler's Hell, my grandfather's anti-Semitic references begin in the dedication: "To the millions of men, women, and children who perished in concentration camps, in gas chambers, and under guillotines...

...May our past failures instruct us, warn us, and prepare us for these uncertain and dark times.epare us for these uncertain and dark times...

...Warsaw underground...

...My mother also tells the story of how she was walking down the street one day when an old man nearby didn't produce his identification card fast enough for a German soldier, and was executed before her eyes...

...She remembers blood and bits of brain raining down...

...She is a Polish Jew whose family was murdered by the Nazis...

...In occupied Poland, it was a capital crime for Poles to offer help to the Jews...

...The Catholic Church officially disavowed the charge of deicide against the Jewish people only in 1965, nine years after my grandfather died, and two years after my First Communion...

...Holding such views, why did my grandfather risk his life and the lives of his family to save Jews from the Nazis...

...Our Lady, Virgin Mary Queen of Poland, interceded to save "us" time and time again, we told one another...

...Maybe my penance, as a civil-rights lawyer, is to remind everyone, myself included, that we are lucky to be living in a nation where our Constitution was amended to proclaim that black or white, rich or poor, Jew, Muslim, or Christian, are all equally human and equally precious under the law...

...She says she can't remember why she was afraid...

...The Poles respond by arguing that the Germans, not the Poles, carried out the Holocaust, and that Poles were also mentioned as targets for extermination by the Nazis, but then chosen as a source of slave labor...

...Poland's largest daily newspaper, wrote in the New York Times (March 17, 2001), most Poles initially found Gross's accusations hard to believe...

...After earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Columbia University, he taught at a number of technical schools and universities...

...He didn't have it so bad," she said...

...I've gone back and forth on this question for many years...

...My mother was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1929...

...She was right...

...As Adam Mich-nik, the famed dissident and current editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, Alexander Charns is a lawyer, author, and parishioner of Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Durham, North Carolina...