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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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