THE OTHER WARSAW UPRISING

...In Rising '44, Davies adverts briefly to the massacre, since it is unrelated to the insurgency, and notes of "the shameful event" that it "cannot be used to fuel stereotypical misconceptions...

...They certainly cannot result in sentences for the "convicted...

...That widely publicized 1987 statement effected a crise de conscience and challenged the nation to re-think its past...

...Its foreign ministry declared that "the thesis" of Allied responsibility was "tendentious and subjective...

...they do not argue over extenuating circumstances...

...Perhaps now, Jews and Poles will find a symbolic meeting ground in the city where during the war the Nazi-created ghetto was divided from "the Aryan side...

...The chief agents of victory are rarely punished, and certainly it would be absurd to blame living Americans for those decisions...

...All condemned together to a single history...

...Two non-Polish scholars have questioned the received reading of the massacre...

...Unfortunately, that structure often smothered the teaching of "love one another"—as the idea of Christendom smothered the heart of Christianity...

...96 pages...

...The Rising had been planned since September 1942 with a view to the Poles participating directly in the liberation of their capital and thus assuring a role in their country's future...

...Jews and Poles might also find they have more to share in the future by recalling together these two events of the past...

...Mention Promo Code NI33 73 Liguori Publications, l Liguori Drive, Liguori, AI() 6307-9999 . w w.liguori.org L Commonweal 17 September 24, 2004 Print/Woodcut What if the work doesn't save us and we must set down the stencils, brayer and the ink: return to a wood not carved, to faces featureless, where the eye relearns its opposite—yes—just as words must be written backwards so that they'll come out right, and the letters —we remember now—are only glyphs, stalks of wheat that once stood full in a field until a minstrel wind caught the tips and curved them down in a form like c, a bent of sound we'd heard and heard but had no picture of but that which hung in rain and sun could this be our remaking one of one: the blade that is the word, the pine before it's cut...

...Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of friendship between nations," wrote the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, referring to the Rising in his 1980 Nobel lecture...

...ack of attention to the Rising in the United States can be attributed to several factors...

...Also, only in occupied Poland was any form of help for Jews punishable by death for the helpers, for their families, and their friends...

...This may topple the menacing image, and give radically new and redemptive life to the term, "Warsaw Pact...

...Nouwen Daily Scripture and Prayer Together With Nouwen's Own Words A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication The inspiring words of Henri J.M...

...One of the causes for the failure to honor the victims and heroes of the Rising is that it is often confused—by every-one from sovereigns (including the British queen) and journalists to the general public—with the Jewish ghetto insurgency of the previous year...

...This disclosure in Jan T. Gross's Neighbors (Penguin), published in Polish in 2000, exposed the most widely bruited and controversial act of Polish wartime anti-Semitism...

...So what was it all...

...One sequence of such events doesn't cancel out the other, but a score of such counterbalancing sequences—which could be readily adduced—illustrates the complexity of the histories involved and the perils of the univalent perspective that leads to anti-Semitism or anti-Polonism...

...To take events relating to the wartime period in the United States, few would question the guilt accruing to those who ordered the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in "concentration camps" (a term once used in a verbal slip by Roosevelt), or the destruction wrought by the terror-bombing of Nagasaki ("my ace in the hole," said Truman, anticipating the cold war...

...According to Blonski, this fear which "warps and disfigures" Polish thinking, can be overcome—in a country which is 95 percent Catholic—by emulating Pope John Paul II at the synagogue of Rome, and by living in the spirit of the conciliar documents "written at the time of Pope John XXIII...

...That the book has drawn such wide attention among Poland's intellectuals indicates that accusations of wartime crimes are still sharply divisive...

...After the war, the Communists filled the universities, the media, and the government with hacks who followed the approved line about wartime events...

...A statement made by Jews and Poles alike recognizing the truth of Davies's words would make a small but helpful contribution to disentangling the network of congruent and conflicting viewpoints held by these two persecuted and traumatized peoples...

...A Commonweal 19 September 24, 2004...

...They speak clearly about the failure to fulfill the duties of brotherhood and compassion...

...This numerical difference occurred because Polish rulers over the centuries had provided a haven for Jews driven out of those other "cleansed" nations...

...That "myth," however, is only a small part of the explanation of why the 1944 Rising has so often been misunderstood or ignored...

...Each day of Advent (28 days in all) and each day of Christmas (12 in all, ending with Jesus' baptism,) contain a pertinent excerpt from the beautiful and personal writings of Father Nouwen, a related quotation from Scripture, a prayer for the day, and a suggested activity that offers a concrete response to mark the season...

...and the conviction that only active resistance would rouse London and Washing-ton to send support...

...Whether present-day decisions and occurrences echo an anti-Polish bias will probably have to be left to the researchers at the National Opinion Research Center...

...The second, and more delicate, cause for the indifference to Polish suffering has to do with prejudices—some very old, and some of more recent origin...

...Through, with, and in him, God calls us, especially in our weakness and brokenness, to become divine...

...There is the fact that, like the Roman razzia of 1943, when a thousand Jews were shipped to Auschwitz, the mass of recorded detail makes the event starkly emblematic and its monstrosity more recognizable—if not comprehensible...

...The expulsion and the razing occurred by direct order of Hitler...

...Nevertheless, the evidence strongly suggests that centuries of contempt for Jews, partially engendered and certainly reinforced by Roman Catholic Christianity, made the murderous goal of the Nazis more attainable...

...Thus the Rising was primarily the achievement of young people the Nazis had marked for death and who would have been the intellectual leaders of their emerging nation—but who died in the battle or were murdered...

...The number of reports about massacres with a similar scenario can be counted on the fingers of one hand...

...The Black Book of Polish Censorship, made up of texts smuggled out of Poland, and preoccupied with Marxist minutiae, is a model of newspeak regarding the Rising, which it referred to as a "right wing" effort...

...In Poland, the problem of complicity was a marginal phenomenon, important as a topic for research, but not a problem for a collective Polish culture today...

...This meant that events presumably of interest mainly to Poles—such as the 1944 Rising—would often be scanted by the media...

...The historian Norman Davies, whose recent book, Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (Viking), is the definitive analysis, has stated that the conflation of the two How a nation survived Commonweal 16 September 24, 2004 rebellions is now "an established piece of contemporary mythology...

...Of bombed-out cellars...

...There are some signs that this is already happening...

...There were mild protests from Churchill, and near silence from Roosevelt who had the leverage of being head of the nation whose industries were supplying the Russian war machine...

...Outside Poland, the reason for such keen interest is less readily discernible...

...Britain and the United States will never desert you...

...Three days earlier, Gazeta Wyborcza reported that Russia had reacted similarly...

...Grounded in the gritty Gospel of Mark and drenched in the deep cisterns of monastic wisdom, Casey invites us to a fresh encounter with the pulsating humanity of Jesus...

...1990...

...The more recent are now being called "anti-Polonism," and in this country during those same decades took the form of the conventional bias against newly arriving immigrant groups...

...There are some things in life that are dearer than life itself...

...Several factors determined the actual date: the attempted assassination of Hitler, which indicated Nazi weakness...

...It may be noted too that the documentary was initiated by a Pole who was born in Warsaw but educated at McGill and Harvard, Zbigniew Brzezinski...

...Finally, on January 17, 1945, that machine lumbered into the city where it encountered negligible German opposition...

...And a pile of corpses...

...In the event, none of these factors favorably affected the outcome of the insurgency which ended brutally on October 2, sixty years ago...

...Anne Coray War II, appeared not on any of the major networks but on CNN...

...They had no reason to consider Jews as a "damned" nation, a nation responsible for the death of Jesus Christ....The new church documents do not attempt to exonerate the past...

...One can share the responsibility for the crime without taking part in it," said the Polish literary critic, Jan Blonski, in "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto...

...The bulk of the underground Home Army was destroyed, two hundred thou-sand Poles were killed, the remaining half-million were expelled, and the entire city of Warsaw was razed—a vengeful task that took the Wehrmacht and Polish slave laborers three months to carry out...

...Paperback • ISBN: 0-7648-1149-5 • ID #R3685 • $19.95 To order, call 800-325-9521...

...In The Neighbors Respond (Prince-ton University Press), Istvan Deak of Columbia University has raised doubts about how a hundred enraged but unarmed villagers could herd fifteen hundred Jews into their crematorium...

...They recall as well the promise by Churchill four years after the war started that Poland would be "a free, independent, sovereign and great state...

...The other part is cultural in the larger sense, since it relates to political and social conditions both in Poland and abroad...

...The title alludes to Czeslaw Milosz's "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," in Selected Poems which I published in 1973...

...But as a matter of historic justice, it must also be affirmed that it was Catholicism as a structured society that also made possible the survival of the Poles as a Western national group...

...Accusations of culpable wartime prejudice are now, for the most part, of theoretical import...

...This irony has not been lost on Poles who recall the essential role of their mathematicians at the University of Poznan in breaking the German Enigma code, of their pilots in the Battle of Britain, of their ground troops in the Italian campaign and the Normandy invasion...

...Paperback . ISBN: 0-7648-1218-1 . ID #27780 • $9.95 Christology from the heart for the heart Fully Human, Fully Divine An Interactive Christology Michael Casey, OCSO "A Christology from the heart, to the heart, for the heart...

...The general form of the accusation is that "traditionally" Poles have discriminated against Jews...

...While Warsaw was leveled, the Soviet forces, by direct Justus George Lawler is author of Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust (Continuum...

...Lost in such charges is the historical reality that there were more Jews in Poland—and thus occasion for more querulousness and more righteousness—than in all other Western European countriescombined...

...wrote the poet, Miron Bialoszewski, who was among the survivors...

...The poem ends with its persona expressing fear that he too will be "counted among the helpers of death...

...One could certainly consider the instance of the two major newspapers mentioned earlier, and also the fact that this year's acclaimed documentary, Warsaw Rising: The Forgotten Soldiers of World Perfect for Gift Giving Advent and Christmas Wisdom from Henri J.M...

...Nevertheless, this institutional strength in turn contributed to the survival of European civilization when in 1683 the elected king of Poland, John Sobieski, drove back the Ottomans from the gates of Vienna...

...Eleven percent of the original population—1.3 million at the time of the Nazi invasion—now remained in the wreckage of Warsaw...

...It is a term employed in self-defense by those who have been accused of indulging in its mirror image, "anti-Semitism...

...This raises the question why in Poland, wartime blame should be shared by the society today...

...It is in Europe that anti-Polonism implies something more sinister and hoary than any of the more or less genteel expressions of it considered above...

...Still, the number of victims in either case is almost infinitesimal in light of the six million, or when contrasted with count-less other massacres (Kiev and Odessa come immediately to mind...

...Here are the final words of Davies about the events of 1943 and 1944: "The Warsaw Rising carries a deathless moral message...

...Certainly the obscene manner of death, evocative of an auto-da-fe, attracts the compassionate and the curious—who do not, though, seem to have been comparably moved by such "martyred villages" as Oradour-sur-Glane or Lidice...

...The second scholar is Norman Davies, whose Europe: A History, written before the Jedwabne disclosures, is recognized as a masterpiece of contextualization and evenhandedness—the latter in emulation of one of his admired exemplars, Cardinal John Lingard...

...The specific form is that because of this tradition, many, though not most, Poles during the war were guilty of collaborating with the Nazis...

...Davies had been accused of skewing his interpretations by Lucy Dawidowicz—though she failed to make a convincing case...

...The answer is that many Poles themselves have insisted on "shared responsibility" for the Holocaust...

...A growing number of organizations in Poland, in Israel, and in the Anglophone world are now devoted to the furthering of mutual understanding and compassion between Jews and Poles...

...broadcasts from Moscow calling for rebellion as the Soviet army advanced toward Warsaw...

...This has come about because all tragedies of the war are understandably considered in the shadow of the enduring mystery of the Holocaust...

...One might well wonder whether the anti-Polonism considered earlier is a factor in what seems an inordinate focus on Jedwabne...

...The rest is left to history...

...In that mutually consecrated place where death was swallowed up in victory, both parties may share their common triumph...

...Like the heroes of the Ghetto uprising, who had fought the same enemy in the same doomed city only one year earlier, the most devoted insurgents of 1944 faced death willingly—not gladly, but by choice...

...Lastly, and since the leitmotif of this discussion is irony, the documentary was first broadcast on D-Day when the world was honoring the "remembered soldiers" of Operation Overlord which resulted in the liberation of Europe—or at least the western part of it...

...This led him to ask, "Why the Jews did not defend themselves," since there were other occasions when "Polish Jews dared to confront heavily armed SS soldiers...

...Among the major ironies of twentieth-century history is the fact that although it was the ruthless invasion of Poland that precipitated the war, after the Allied victory the Polish people were left in a state of subjugation much like that envisioned by their Nazi invaders in 1939...

...Nouwen guide the faithful on a spiritual journey through the Advent and Christmas seasons in this book of waiting, hope, anticipation, and celebration...

...In Poland, the Nazis set up concentration camps such as Auschwitz to eliminate the Polish ruling and educational elites—only in 1942 were Jews sent to Auschwitz...

...Apart from rabid hysteria, the still-controversial answers are either that there was effective coercion by the Nazis—known to be in the area—or that the alleged number of victims and/or murderers has been seriously skewed...

...Ironically, a week after the recent anniversary of the Rising, the British journalist Simon Heffer upbraided the Polish prime minister in the Spectator for "griping" about Britain's refusal to acknowledge that failure...

...THE OTHER WARSAW UPRISING Why the world has forgotten Justus George Lawler W orld War II, it is often forgotten, did not end in the liberation of the whole of Europe...

...An encouraging aspect of that history has been the generally sympathetic responses to Blonski's statement by Polish intellectuals collected in My Brother's Keeper...

...Similarly, the major adviser to the project was Norman Davies, mentioned earlier, whose two-volume history, God's Playground (Columbia University Press), is recognized as the most important effort at reorienting historical views on Poland...

...In the early decades of the twentieth century, Polish immigrants were so preoccupied with the struggle for economic survival that only a fraction of their offspring entered such civic arenas as education, government, or the press, where they could make known to the general public the role of Poland during the Hitler years...

...A pile of ruins...

...Context explains why: "Occupied Poland contained between ten and twenty thousand towns and villages like Jedwabne...

...In light of that fact, it is but a minor irony that the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Rising of August 1, 1944, received little attention from the American media—not even a paragraph in the New York Times (although New York contains more people of Polish descent than any other state), or the Chicago Tribune (although Chicago is second only to Warsaw in the number of Polish-speaking residents...

...order of Stalin, dawdled on the eastern bank of the Vistula...

...The Black Book's references to "historical truth" and "the socialist character of the goals of patriotic education" clearly evoke Orwell, who was in fact the only significant voice in England to condemn his country's failure to help the Poles...

...That promise took all of five decades to be fulfilled, and when it was fulfilled it owed very little to the English or Americans...

...And in the literal sense it was a single history, one detached from the greater story of the war—merely the history of some since-forgotten Poles...

...As Blonski points out, in the pope's synagogue speech as well as in those documents, one thing is clear: Commonweal 18 September 24, 2004 Christians of the past and the church itself were wrong...

...less encouraging aspect of it is represented by Jedwabne, notorious as the town where hundreds of Jews were burned alive by Polish villagers in 1941...

...In any event, it makes more sense to heed the words of Ysrael Gutman, a ghetto survivor and director of Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem: "all accusations against the Poles that they were responsible for...the 'Final Solution' are not even worth mentioning...

...Even today, the archaic jargon of Soviet orthodoxy prevails...

...Michael Downey 448 pages...

...Twenty years after the Holocaust, when a bishop made an intervention at Vatican II in favor of Jews, some prelates asked him, "How much did they pay you...