POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS DURING THE WAR: AN INTERPRETATION
Gross, Jan T.
For the last two hundred years, with the exception of a brief interval between the two World Wars, Poland has been either partitioned, occupied, or governed by proxy. Squeezed between Russia and...
...Thus, I do not believe in the direction of the causal relationship that has been suggested by the cost-benefit explanation...
...German functionaries, Gestapo agents, or professional blackmailers of Jews (szmalcownik), as the literature on the subject reveals, were few and far between in occupied Poland, and therefore the likelihood of a chance encounter with any of them was negligible for a Jew in hiding...
...To my mind the stereotypical diagnosis of Polish-Jewish relations during the war is misleading both in terms of the general image it conveys and in terms of particulars that it advocates...
...The historical record shows, I think, beyond reasonable doubt that a constant danger for a Jew hiding on the Aryan side, and for the Pole helping him to do so, came from a casual passer-by, a house superintendent, a neighbor, a child playing in the courtyard who might, and frequently did, reveal his presence outside the ghetto.' It is not that the Poles approved the murder of Jews...
...It is rather ironic, but as soon as the Poles laid their hands on the levers of a modern state, that is, precisely at the moment their destiny ought to have begun its fulfillment, when they got "bigger" and stronger than anybody else within the polity, they turned against the smaller and weaker ones...
...This became as much of a truism as, for instance, the necessity to eliminate Germans...
...There weren't any socially marginal people involved in this encounter, or scum—just children...
...Have we never heard during the occupation," he asks, "the sentence `after the war monuments will be built for Hitler' "—presumably to celebrate Hitler's "solution" of the Jewish problem...
...5 For this and following references to archival sources containing relevant documents see my Polish Society Under German Occupation—the Generalgouvernement, 1939-1944 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp...
...The Delegate understands that such moves may be necessary for the sake of foreign policy, but he advises prudence and restraint...
...How large was the "significant part" quoted in his assessment...
...If every other Pole had his Jew, just as he had his blackmarket contacts or conspiratorial connections, the Germans could not have killed everybody they caught helping a Jew, just as they didn't kill every conspirator they apprehended...
...This fate allegedly condemns Poland to an exemplary historical destiny: Polish messianism showed no hesitation in identifying the country as "the Christ of Nations...
...Over 2,000 such periodicals appeared during the occupation, and their editors enjoyed unlimited freedom to print what their wisdom, party line, or personal taste dictated...
...It is inconceivable for a decent Pole to have anything to do with these practices...
...He didn't have such horrible news to report on his first trip but what he had to say was enough, we know, for the Polish government-in-exile to falsify his report so that Allied governments or public opinion in the West would not be informed about the extent of anti-Jewish feelings in Polish society...
...The Labor Party brochure, which tackled a much more ambitious topic—"The everlasting essence of the spirit of Russia"—offered the following analysis: " . . . in Russia, which was exhausted by war, Jews have entered upon the stage...
...He tells us that while there may have been too much indifference among the Poles vis-a-vis the plight of the Jews, the Poles also demonstrated extraordinary heroism in assisting the Jews...
...2 . Rafael Scharf and Andrzej Szczypiorski, "Polacy i Zydzi - podsumowanie dyskusji," Kultura (Paris...
...Yet the Nazis and their victims had to be brought together...
...2 But his is merely a follow-up question to an earlier registered doubt—namely, can ordinary people be blamed for not behaving as heroes...
...With the quick, expert glance of hardened business people, they determined that their chance had come...
...none brings us a better grasp of why the Poles are so aggressive, or rather defensive, about the subject of wartime Polish-Jewish relations...
...two years later he spoke at the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising...
...In the December 17, 1942, issue of Poland we read in an article about prostitution entitled "The Ways of the Volksdeutsche" that: "Hitlerite periodicals and propaganda publications constantly speak of Jews as criminals against humanity, they put out many well-deserved accusations against them, they condemn the Jews ruthlessly for depravation and demoralization of the young generation as pornographers and pimps...
...Investigating the grounds on which one could expect Poles to run the risks entailed in helping out the Jews, Szczypiorski restates the issue as follows: "On what moral grounds could a fugitive from the ghetto endanger the existence of not one Pole but of the entire Polish family in the effort to save his own, i.e., one life...
...Otherwise, why didn't the Poles state at the conclusion of the war, and repeat endlessly since then: We are sorry, but we were afraid...
...they only wanted the Poles not to interfere with the Jews' isolation— and to this injunction the Poles, by and large, consented...
...What differentiated conspiratorial work from helping the Jews in Poland during World War II was not, primarily, the relative severity of sanctions but that, by contrast with involvement in the anti-Nazi conspiracy, there were relatively few people involved in assisting the Jews and they were not supported in these efforts by the society around them...
...And yet an interesting phenomenon ought to be registered...
...A photograph appears at the beginning 80 of the volume showing three young people with their hands up walking by heavily armed German soldiers...
...There is a certain hesitation, and thus an opening of sorts, in his texts as when he says, for example, that "the evaluation of how Poles behaved vis-a-vis the Jews during World War II cannot be, unfortunately, simple and unambiguous...
...A combination of anti-Semitic prejudice among the Poles and deliberate, skillful Nazi policies leading to dehumanization of ghetto residents resulted in excluding the Jews, in Polish eyes, from the brotherhood of victims...
...Indeed, he uses occasionally identical phrasing...
...I am afraid...
...And then, to seal the betrayal of their own destiny, Poles failed during the war to recognize a fellow victim not in some faraway land, but right across the street...
...Can every one of millions of ordinary people be expected to behave as a hero...
...For those "irresponsible generalizations" that one may come upon "in the world" are spread by JewsLipski says so explicitly in his speech at the Warsaw University in 1981 for example—and, as we learn from the coda of this paragraph "anti-Polonism isn't morally any better than anti-Semitism...
...none gives us a sense of why the surviving Jews are so profoundly and irrevocably injured by the Poles' behavior...
...Indeed Szczypiorski makes the suggestion that many people must have been angry with Jews for seeking their help...
...I am afraid this is wishful thinking...
...We should reject irresponsible generalizations in this matter, just as we should reject generalizations that wrong other nations...
...Now he is a bigger problem (threat) than before, but all problems are bigger now...
...By saying so we do not question the Jews' right to self-defense, we may even sympathize with their efforts to save themselves, and we still assign where it belongs the blame for a potential threat to our own life that such efforts carry—namely, we assign it to those who are after this Jew and want to kill him...
...But suddenly, and most uncomfortably, at the outset of Polish independence in 1918 the interpretative key to the alleged Polish destiny has to be put aside in view of the subsequent treatment of ethnic minorities in Poland...
...Indeed, a total curiosity among important topics in twentieth-century Polish history, this one alone has not stimulated in the emigre literature or among the uncensored publications a single piece of writing that could not have appeared in a government-owned publishing house in Poland...
...They decided that Russia offers the best opportunity to carry out the bloody assault awaited for centuries against Christianity and the Western culture...
...This is a conceptualization that moves us one step beyond the prior argument...
...Nor would these attitudes change under the impact of the Holocaust...
...Solid evidence in support of this claim can be retrieved from the underground publications...
...Jewish survivors who after the war returned to their hometowns were generally met with hostility by the local population, and not infrequently killed, presumably because of fear that they might claim back their material possessions or children, who had been sheltered and raised in Polish families...
...How did anti-Semitism manifest itself during the occupation...
...The substance of all three of Lipski's statements on Polish-Jewish relations during the war is the same...
...In the first paragraph he examines, roughly speaking, attitudes...
...Thus, I do not deny that helping the Jews was most difficult and frightening because it was so irrevocably sanctioned with death, and because one's family was inevitably endangered as well...
...Anti-Semitism is widespread now...
...Institut Littéraire, No...
...Indeed, much of the writing about the Jews referred to incidentals, barely if at all related to either German policies during the war or the so-called "Jewish problem" in Poland...
...Children are Accusing) (Krakow: Centralna Zydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947...
...Here follow two passages produced somewhere in the middle of the Polish political spectrum, not by the radical right or even the nationalist press—published in the periodical Poland (Polska) originating in a milieu of Sanacja sympathizers, and in a brochure put out by the Labor Party...
...But have the Poles ever plainly said to the world that they did not help the Jews enough during the war because they were afraid...
...Had the German-stipulated norm "Do not help the Jews" been as unacceptable to the Poles as the norm "Do not engage in patriotic activity" or "Do not engage in market transactions" it would have been enforced more or less as successfully as the other two...
...I deliberately chose to confront Jan Jozef Lipski's presentation because nobody can be more immune to the charge of anti-Semitism or even nationalism than he...
...I took advantage of a moment when one of them loosened his hold of me, kicked him, and ran away...
...Indeed the Polish boys got a thrashing at home when their parents learned about the episode from a woman whom the Jewish child told about it, and who knew his father...
...For helping a Jew the whole family dies, without being tortured though...
...What could be the meaning of such a consensus but that the matter is settled and that the record on this issue has been set straight...
...I have in mind people whose responsibility it was to be informed and to state objective truth...
...and about the German-created context—that the death penalty was meted out for helping Jews to hide...
...There are many in the Polish nation who had died a heroic death for their contribution to this most dangerous—and most deserving of admiration for those who dared to get involved— aspect of the Polish war...
...In the middle of the page, the dedication—"To the memory of those who chose to die with dignity...
...But this horrible and debasing occupation was taken over very eagerly in our cities from the Jews by the Volksdeutsche, . who are not different from the Jews at all, they only emulate their ways...
...But except for Gestapo agents and collaborators everybody, in a manner of speaking, was involved in the conspiracy...
...We, who remember, let us ask ourselves if there was not too much indifference—even though mixed up with fear, but indifference nonetheless...
...The double February/March 1983 issue of the Catholic periodical Znak, published in Cracow, devoted all of its 574 pages to the Jews...
...For your freedom and ours" has been the watchword of Polish patriots...
...One realizes immediately from such a reading that Jews in hiding and Poles helping them were vulnerable to denunciation...
...But I don't know anybody who survived after being caught while hiding a Jew...
...At the bottom of the page a date: "April 19, 1943," and a caption: "The beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising...
...Precisely the opposite was true with respect to Jews...
...Then, in the final point, we are taken beyond the wartime period to find out that the Jews have actually victimized the Poles as well...
...Lipski perpetuates the irrelevant framework of the discussion where the socially marginal phenomenon of szmalcownictwo (active collabo74 ration with the Germans in ferreting out the Jews) is contrasted with the socially marginal phenomenon of heroism (active assistance to the hiding Jews), while the investigation concerning attitudes and behavior of the missing in-between is left undone...
...Since World War II, despite the dogged persistence of the Poles to reclaim this past, to go beyond, revise, and correct the governmentapproved version of their history that has been manifested during every mass upheaval in the Polish People's Republic, there was never a temptation to reopen the subject of wartime Polish-Jewish relations...
...But they did, as the Government Delegate noted, approve the Jews' isolation, their confinement in the ghettos...
...For, as long as we remain within its logic, a proper answer to a Jew knocking on our door during the war would be: "Go away...
...The weakness of this type of explanation lies in the discrepancy between marginal cost differences and the vast difference in outcomes...
...The poet Adam Mickiewicz wrote: "Ibi patria, ubi male: whenever in Europe liberty is suppressed and fought for, there is the battle of your country...
...If we move three years forward, to the eve of the Warsaw Uprising, when the overwhelming majority of the Polish Jews had been killed, we find the political emissary Celt coming back from his mission to Poland with the following message: The Government Delegate asked me to inform you that according to him "the government exaggerates in its love for Jews...
...We know three things about the subject of our inquiry: about Polish attitudes towards the Jews during the war—that there was widespread anti-Semitism...
...184-186...
...But wartime Polish-Jewish relations 76 is such a frightening subject that any departure from what the audience is used to hearing would shatter its bond with the speaker...
...On September 25, 1941—three months after the beginning of the Soviet-Nazi war and after the first wave of mass killings of Jews— the commander of the Home Army, GrotRowecki, sent the following telegram to London: I report that all statements and policies of the government and the National Council concerning the Jews in Poland create the worst possible impression in the country and facilitate propaganda directed against the government...
...There is more to it: a soldier in the Home Army knew that in case of arrest he would be tortured, his wife might be arrested, that he would probably be executed...
...Lately these efforts were inspired by a conviction that even if present-day institutions could not be changed, a halfway victory over totalitarianism's attempts to destroy social solidarity could still be won if the community's history were rescued from the regime's ambition to determine not only the country's future but also its past...
...Somehow Poles must have been very effectively socialized to the notion of sacrifice with a happy ending, to the image of resurrection, to the idea that one may give up one's life but in a calculated and deliberate fashion—for a cause, all pointing out reassuringly that through some cunning of history the victim always comes out ahead...
...They pulled down my trousers and started shouting at the top of their voices: `Jew, Jew, Jew.' Then they grabbed me, twisted my arms behind my back and started deliberating whether to drown me or to hand me over to the German police...
...There is not...
...Extraordinary courage was required at the time in Poland to join in this struggle...
...Anti-Polonism is not morally any better than anti-Semitism or antiUkrainianism.' What strikes me in Lipski's statement— composed of one question and two almost equal-in-length paragraphs—is his search for balance, for equivalences...
...BUT THE ARGUMENT THAT THE JEWS COuld not have been helped more because of the nature of German reprisals has its own dynamic, which leads to yet another conceptualization of the Polish-Jewish relation during the occupation beyond the value-free, as it were, costbenefit framework...
...Maria Hochberg-Marianska's introduction to Dzieci Oskariaja...
...The inhuman terror to which the Jews are subjected is universally condemned and evokes a lot of pity...
...The Nazis did not want Poles to kill Jews, or even to help kill Jews...
...For even without producing a Dostoyevski, if what Szczypiorski describes had been the case there would be an avalanche of literature, second-hand literature, after the war, on this topic...
...but he could hope that his children would survive...
...Some Poles—a criminal margin—undoubtedly victimized Jews, but these Poles also victimized other Poles...
...The reason is easy to find: whereas the national liberation struggle is about rights of the majority to self-determination, political liberty is about minority rights, and in the Polish tradition the difference was never appreciated...
...for childless couples it further diminishes...
...Of course, in the underground secrecy was required as well...
...The only differences concern how to deal with the Jews...
...Jan Karski, who gave such a forceful interview in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, arrived for the first time in Angers as an emissary from the occupied homeland in the winter of 1940...
...THE GOVERNMENT DELEGATE, the head of the civilian underground structure in occupied Poland, was more specific in an autumn 1941 report dispatched to London: "German policies towards the Jewish minority stimulate two kinds of responses...
...about Polish behavior— that relatively few people were involved in helping the Jews...
...Reading Bartoszewski's and Lewin's volume, Righteous Among Nations, is the most sobering experience in this respect, since it makes one realize the precariousness of a Jew's existence among the Poles, due precisely to a generalized, diffuse hostility towards the Jews...
...The Nazis, noted Karski, were able to make of the Jewish question "something akin to a narrow bridge upon which the Germans and a large portion of Polish society are finding agreement.'" As this is not yet the period of systematic killings of the Jews by the Nazis, what the "large portion of Polish society" apparently agrees to is not murder...
...All political parties and factions, all social groups had their publications, and one could gauge from them the state of public opinion on a particular subject...
...What right do we have to expect from them such conduct...
...They did not condone Nazi atrocities—though some appreciated the usefulness of the end result—but they all spoke of the existence of "a Jewish problem" in Poland and the need to find for it some solution after the war—such as emigration, for example...
...It takes a while to discover in this heartfelt gesture of commemoration an inadvertently committed act of discrimination denying dignity to three million Polish Jews who went resigned to their death...
...Here follow excerpts from a few reports by emissaries as well as by heads of the civilian and military underground in Poland...
...Because the Poles were not ready to assist the Jews and, by and large, refrained from doing so, the punishment of death for harboring Jews was meted out by the Germans systematically and without reprieve...
...The answer to this question would be a relatively easy no but for the fact that there were other kinds of activities prohibited by the Nazis under penalty of death that the Poles massively engaged in...
...And perhaps, precisely because of the gratuitousness of comments about the Jews in these contexts, the prejudice comes out in even sharper relief.' And there is corroborating evidence about prevailing anti-Semitism among the Poles beyond what was written in the underground press...
...Influential to this day, the romantic imagination postulates two ideas with political implications: a conviction about righteousness and exemplary destiny of the oppressed, the smaller, and the weaker as well as a belief in the universality of freedom...
...How does the idea of costbenefit calculation fare in comparison, or the explanation that there is scum in every society, or the indignation at having our own good name slandered by "irresponsible generalizations...
...And yet, there are times, and causes, which demand heroism...
...A very personalized feeling of resentment ran through every community...
...There are innocuous causes explaining Poles' behavior vis-à-vis the Jews during World War II—behavior that was also, on the whole, innocuous and normal...
...It fears sanctions that ought to be feared, has its share of heroes and its share of scum...
...Paying homage to the Ghetto fighters, as well as to its defenseless inhabitants who had been killed, we 73 also have the right and duty to pay homage to those Poles who lost their lives while helping the Jews...
...Judaism began to shape up the new face of the spirit of Bolshevik Russia...
...I shall now explain the factual premises as well as the reasoning that underlies this proposition...
...411-412...
...Here is the general picture that I read into this position: In the midst of an enormity—namely, of a whole nation going to its death and of another group of human beings systematically, deliberately, and over a long period of time administering the death—in the midst of this scandal of inhuman proportions there exists yet another group of people that keeps its sanity and, on the whole, maintains a balanced judgment...
...The punishment for helping Jews during the German occupation in Poland was death...
...Take any Polish book on the subject, preferably one with a happy ending, written by or about Jewish survivors who lived through the war assisted by the Poles...
...And he can be quite daring when he states, for example, that "a significant part of [Polish] society was neutral, oblivious, to the extermination of the Jews...
...I do not want to run the risk of being killed together with my family for helping you...
...The difficulty Poles face in confronting the wartime history of Polish-Jewish relations, indeed in confronting the issue of Polish antiSemitism in general, derives from the incompatibility of Poles' behavior with the dominant romantic interpretation of Poland's destiny...
...All quotes are from the 1985 "Mysl" edition...
...One would think then that this scourge and immoral occupation would disappear from our cities, just as Germans had assured us...
...Lipski points out: I know people who were caught by the Germans while wielding weapons and who survived concentration camps...
...And so while Lipski educates the public somewhat—I noted briefly his tentative opening up of the subject—he remains imprisoned by public expectations as to what he can say...
...Jews have been locked behind walls in Polish cities or bestially murdered...
...In any case there is no evidence that they have agonized...
...Thus, a further impression of equivalence is conveyed as, on the one hand, we have the overwhelming number of Jewish dead but on the other a smaller no doubt, yet exclusive, self-selected group of freedom fighters—a general and thousands of soldiers...
...The point I am making is that if we adopt a certain framework for the explanation of people's behavior it must be consistently applicable across the range of comparable choices which they make in a given situation...
...Of course some would more and some would less actively demonstrate their opposition, just as some would display more active and some less active involvement in the underground...
...This is, then, the path leading from Szczypiorski's analysis that he does not explore...
...This follows from a simple and wellestablished sociological principal according to 79 which the enforcement of any norm of behavior depends to a significant degree on whether the group accepts the validity of the norm...
...In the November 1979 issue of Kultura, published in Paris, we 75 find two articles, by Rafael Scharf and Andrzej Szczypiorski, printed jointly under the rubric: "Poles and Jews—summing up the discussion...
...SUCH ANGER, OF COURSE, IS GROUNDED in a factual mistake...
...there is, in short, a brotherhood of victims...
...A certain fear, especially in merchant circles, goes with it— namely that the Jews might eventually return to their dominant position in the economy...
...Let us make sure that this horrible activity remains the exclusive domain of the chosen nations—the Volksdeutsche and the Jews...
...5 Frankly, there was no dominant position in the economy that the Jews could return to because they had never occupied one...
...In the latest and most concise of his statements on this issue, delivered in April 1983 as a speech at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising anniversary, after having established that the Polish underground offered no more than token or symbolic military assistance to the fighting Jews, Lipski goes on as follows: The conscience of the Polish nation would be sick and mortally wounded if we did not ask ourselves another question: Even if not with weapons in hand did we at least do as much as was possible to help and save the Jews...
...Those who were hiding Jews could not even hope for this...
...I am quite certain that more people were killed by the Germans in connection with underground activity than for helping the Jews...
...There are times, he argues, which mandate heroism and yet, he says, we cannot expect ordinary people to behave heroically...
...Except for those who were actively involved in helping them to hide, everybody was against it...
...A number of Poles whose specific task during the war involved providing or transmitting to the Polish government-in-exile evaluations of attitudes and prospects of Polish society had their opinion registered and we may 77 consult it today...
...Lipski identifies the issue—did Poles offer as much assistance and help to the Jews as was possible?—but he does not answer his own question...
...Did we all do as much as was possible, or less, or nothing at all in those times when dying people and our own moral norms called for doing more than was possible...
...See also Nechama Tec's memoir, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984...
...Indeed, one of his essays, entitled "Two Motherlands, Two Patriotisms—Remarks about Xenophobia and Self-Centeredness of the Poles," has been celebrated in the independent journals (that is, by genuine public opinion) as a masterpiece that boldly confronted various deceptively simplistic and one-sided patriotic stereotypes...
...Such is the truth about those times...
...The costbenefit explanation entirely ignores attitudes, i.e., the issue of anti-Semitism, and explains Polish behavior solely by the German-created context...
...It turns out that, with the exception of the Communist press and central publications of the Home Army, the underground periodicals were not sympathetic to the Jews...
...Once again, remembering that we are merely investigating the merits of an argument, not real motivations of people who actually had to make these horrifying decisions, let us compare what was at stake for conspirators vis-a-vis good samaritans: Undeniably there is a difference between the projected costs of the two courses of action, but it is rather subtle...
...Why is it then that so many Poles pursued conspiratorial activity and so few were involved in actively helping out Jews...
...Not only would this be dangerous (as we know, Poles lived dangerously in those days and were proud of it) but, worse, it would be rather awkward...
...But, admirable as they are in their sincerity, these observations do not serve as starting points of inquiry: what did it mean to be "oblivious" to the spectacle of the Holocaust in wartime Poland...
...by Jews reproaching Poland as a nation for its wartime behavior)—particularly since his family, as he explains, was hiding Jews...
...When, on the other hand, one questions the Jew's right to knock on one's door and gets angry at him, one blames the Jew for a threat to one's life created by his trying to stay alive...
...Szczypiorski would like us to believe that fear and guilt were precisely what the Poles experienced: "And when the Jew went away . . . this Pole, restless in his house, would converse through the night with his own conscience, his nation, the entire humanity and God Almighty in a dialogue so horrible and complicated that only Dostoyevski could express it...
...Next to the atrocious facts" [of the Holocaust], says Czeslaw Milosz in his Norton lectures, "the very idea of literature seems indecent...
...Coming late and in the tone of injury, the argument appears as a rationalization...
...The nation—a whole—was the only subject of libertarian aspirations...
...The uniqueness of the situation is removed and a straightforward cost-benefit analysis is introduced, plus an observation about normal distribution of moral character in a population...
...It is their privilege...
...The standard commentary on Polish attitudes towards the Jews includes one very powerful argument that I have mentioned only in passing and that deserves closer scrutiny...
...Common sense is invoked to explicate behavior of the Polish society when confronted with the extermination of the Jews...
...What I have suggested as an alternative explanation links attitudes, behavior, and situational context together...
...Thousands of hostages were shot in public executions throughout occupied Poland...
...This was the reaction to the "day of the Jewry" (Dzieh Zydowstwa), to Szwarcbard's speech, to the nomination of Lieberman, as well as to greetings conveyed in a radio broadcast on the occasion of the Jewish New Year...
...11, 1979), pp...
...Both under General Sikorski and now, the government is too forthcoming in its philosemitism, because the country does not like Jews...
...nor does he provide us with an unambiguous description of what actually happened: Poles were too passive and extraordinarily heroic at the same time...
...Let us state bluntly that during World War II, during the German occupation of Poland, more or less every segment of Polish society lacked sympathy for the Jews...
...Poles, by and large, have not agonized over their refusal to help the Jews as much as they could...
...and for single men and women, especially those who do not live with their parents any more, there is none...
...Almost nobody advocates the adoption of German methods...
...Let me quote again briefly from a very respectable author writing in a most respectable journal...
...None of these purported explanations can help us understand, or even describe, what has happened...
...Once before, when they lost their national sovereignty, the Poles locked in on their past spiritually and it worked: Poland was resurrected...
...This episode is recounted in Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewin, eds., Righteous Among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939-1945 (London: Earlscourt Publications Ltd., 1969), pp...
...Yet Poles are often wronged when, in the world, too far-reaching generalizations are drawn concerning the collaboration of some Poles in the tracking down of the Jews, or blackmailing them...
...To find out what the Poles think happened between them and the Jews and the Germans, let us take under scrutiny the most enlightened and open-minded version of these historical events available to the Polish audience...
...As to the question opening the quote—the important question, I think, that we must answer in order to confront the subject matter of Polish-Jewish relations during the war—it is left in midair...
...WHY IS IT THEN THAT, on the whole, the Jews are scandalized by it and Poles do not want to speak about it...
...Thus, his statement cannot be dismissed on the grounds of prejudice...
...In spite of the limitations of Lipski's argumentation, I find it appealing that in his statements he does not close off the issue...
...Quoted after David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews (in manuscript), p. 32...
...Neither does he volunteer to prescribe a norm...
...q This article was given as a lecture at Oxford University on November 30, 1985...
...Both ideas—that the persecuted weak are right until proven otherwise, and that liberty of mankind is indivisible —were embedded in Poland's fate throughout the nineteenth century when the country was partitioned by more powerful neighbors and when its patriots also fought continuously against oppression of other peoples...
...An important link is missing from an imputed causal chain on which our life allegedly depends: namely the German executioner...
...Rather, I think it is altogether opposite...
...Rather, it is the isolation of the Jewish people as well as the economic squeeze to which they were subjected...
...Thus, the second difficulty with the costbenefit analysis, even if we accepted it at face value, is that one never finds this proposition— Poles did not do more because they were afraid —advanced up front...
...Later, at the conclusion of his second mission, he would be the first credible witness to personally inform members of Allied governments about the Nazi extermination of Jews in Poland...
...Lipski spells it out: for a conspirator there is death following tortures, arrest of a wife or a husband and, as he or she will be interrogated as well, most likely there is a torture session in store for the spouse too, maybe even death or concentration camp...
...There is either Szczypiorski's question lurking behind—What right did the Jews have to expect from us more, or even to expect what had been done?—or personal indignation as in Lipski's March-1968-anniversary speech—"Why do I have to be slapped on the face...
...There is no place in such a bittersweet philosophy of history for the calamity and waste of the Jewish Holocaust...
...But I have yet to see a memoir or a piece of literature where some protagonist boasts in casual company that he was hiding Jews...
...Virtuous qua victim, Poland at the first opportunity turned into a victimizer, as if the Polish struggles for liberation throughout the nineteenth century were imbued with a different spirit than the liberty Poles had enjoyed at the beginning of the twentieth...
...In the introduction to a 1947 book of personal testimonies by Jewish survivors we read that several Poles who had helped Jews during the war asked that their names be deleted, because they feared hostile reactions in their own communities if their wartime deeds became known.' The sad truth is that those who helped the Jews during the war had to be on the lookout not for Gestapo agents, but for their own neighbors...
...Szczypiorski promptly moves to reassure us: "This is all a patent absurdity...
...124-125...
...It would most likely not meet with social approval...
...But I don't recall ever reading such stories a propos of hiding Jews...
...Anoted historian of literature, essayist, and founding member of the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR) in Warsaw, Jan Jozef Lipski, has written and spoken on the subject of Polish-Jewish relations on many occasions...
...Please accept it as a fact that the overwhelming majority of the country is anti-Semitic...
...But, despite the uneasy feeling that it is rather facile to make such statements in writing, I would argue that in the terms in which the comparison is being made, the cost difference between joining an antiNazi conspiracy and helping the Jews was marginal...
...But a Jewish owner might return to his street-corner store, which a Polish plenipotentiary had taken over...
...But the social and particularly the economic isolation are generally approved...
...Is it, therefore, surprising that Poles generally obeyed the German injunction...
...Is it indeed the case that these Poles, unburdened as yet by family obligations and already independent, presumably mostly young, engaged in , anti-Nazi conspiracies with a zeal commensurate to their efforts on behalf of the Jews...
...The Government Delegate and the commander 78 of the Home Army, to whom information filtered from all over the occupied territory, were in the best position to generalize about the Poles' state of mind during these years...
...o that the argument does not hinge solely on a sociological principle, let me rephrase it...
...In casual conversations with acquaintances or even strangers people would openly discuss their black-market transactions (to mention another activity prohibited by the Nazis under penalty of death), and the young in particular would cue (by dressing in a certain way for instance), hint, exaggerate, or even falsely ascribe to themselves, connections and credits earned in the underground...
...The child or children will survive, though orphaned and traumatized...
...It establishes, with compelling force, that Poles did on Jews' behalf as much as could have been expected of them...
...In the second paragraph he examines, roughly speaking, behavior...
...Even secret organizations remaining under the influence of the prewar activists in the Democratic Club or the Socialist Party adopt the postulate of emigration as a solution of the Jewish problem...
...Hasn't he always been a problem...
...Now that we have heard about prevailing attitudes among the Poles from the horses' mouths, it might be possible to consider some hypotheses about what actually happened, and why...
...Instead, it always comes out extracted, as a reply (which means, in the first place, that Poles do not want to talk about the matter and must be forced to do so), and it is inadvertently couched in either aggressive or hysterical rhetoric...
...Furthermore, Lipski points to the extraordinary quality of the Polish victims of denunciations...
...Criminal and amoral social margins exist in every community, and among their victims at the time in Poland were not only Jews but also General Grot-Rowecki and thousands of other soldiers of the anti-Nazi underground...
...And though Poland entirely rejected this nefarious system the danger persists, because the source of epidemics is so close...
...Thus, the folklore of the occupation includes innumerable stories about the incompetence of the underground, how people were sent to a wrong address, mumbled some absurd password only to be patiently directed to an altogether different house or apartment by a neighbor who wasn't involved in this particular conspiracy but knew where the action was nonetheless, and covered up for it...
...In March 1981 at the Warsaw University, where a symposium was organized in connection with the 13th anniversary of the so-called "March [1968] Events," Lipski read a long paper entitled "The Jewish Problem...
...Indeed, that they were few and that they were engulfed in a social vacuum explains the difference in relative severity of sanctions, not the other way around...
...As in this experience of a ten-year-old Jewish boy: "No sooner had I stood by the river when some boys came along, somehow noticed that I was a Jew and, in order to thoroughly convince themselves that I was, three of the rascals jumped me...
...Thus, the wonderful intuition that totalitarianism must destroy the entire context of social reality independent of its own dictate, and acquire a copyright not only on what is but also on what had been, came to the Poles not because they read Orwell's 1984, but because for well over one hundred years they nurtured the idea of the Polish nation against all the odds of nineteenth-century geopolitics...
...Entire families would be executed if Jews were found hiding in their house or apartment...
...Even more, it is like standing upside down the entire moral problematics of European culture...
...All three texts, plus a few other essays on contemporary Polish politics, were published in 1985 in a book entitled nvo Motherlands and Other Essays distributed by an independent publishing house, "Mysl...
...Notes In addition to the article "Two Motherlands, Two Patriotisms," Lipski addressed the issue of PolishJewish relations during the war in two speeches delivered originally at important anniversary celebrations...
...But the simplicity and familiarity of this conceptualization is psychologically plausible: the Jew is the problem...
...And then, let us not forget that collective responsibility was widely used by the Germans in their efforts to stamp out conspiratorial activity as well...
...Even socialists are not an exception in this respect...
...Squeezed between Russia and Germany, Poles took nourishment and continuity as a historical nation from remembrance of things past whenever their sovereignty as a political nation was curtailed or abolished...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
