Do Jews Have a Future in Poland?
GEBERT, KONSTANTY
DO JEWS HAVE A FUTURE IN POLAND? KONSTANTY GEBERT The Senate of Poland, in a first Polish official statement on the issue last March, condemned the Polish government's 1968 antisemitic campaign...
...Each side had flawed perceptions of the other and there was almost no communication across the lines...
...Its citizens were once a cross-section of all the different nationalities, cultures and creeds of Central Europe...
...Ultimately, 30,000 people of Jewish ancestry fled the country, having first been required to relinquish their Polish citizenship...
...giving a Jew prominence on a national television program might have cost the reporter her job...
...And with that sentiment in Poland I am not alone...
...I remember meeting a group of young Israelis in Warsaw several years ago...
...He surprised everybody—himself included—by throwing up on the secretary's carpet...
...Auschwitz had started as a concentration camp for Poles, though its ultimate horror was reserved for the Jews...
...Now, when a Rybicki saves a Goldberg, you have a story...
...the Communists ruthlessly imposed their power and what remained of the national resistance reacted no less ruthlessly...
...Defeat could—and did—mean an interdiction against learning Polish in the schools and the systematic massacre of the Polish elite...
...In the open-land vision of Poland, being part of the Polish tradition and being Jewish were mutually supportive...
...After the war all human life, not only Jewish life, was cheap in Poland...
...A smaller minority of Poles helped the Jews, at the risk of their lives...
...Most people I know are shocked by this...
...It has been intermittently on and off the political map of Europe, its frontiers move in reaction to the rise and wane of the power of its neighbors...
...But Rybicki was in fact a "pure-blooded" Pole, though his name could be roughly translated into Yiddish as "Fishman...
...But others were revolted...
...With the brief exception of the years 1949-1955, it had been possible for Jews to emigrate from Poland to Israel...
...The Polish-Jewish conflict was inherently lopsided...
...Last fall, before the Senate action, Minister of the Interior Czeslaw Kiszczak told a commission of the lower house of Parliament that there are 15,000 Jews left in Poland...
...He should know the numbers...
...Poland emerged from the war vanquished, deprived of its eastern half and saddled with a foreign-imposed Communist regime...
...Growing up, I also assumed the Jewish part of my heritage...
...It is that of a people long embattled with other nations— primarily Russia and Germany—for its survival...
...Rybicki, who had heroically saved many Jews, refused...
...The immense suffering the Poles had gone through made them indifferent to the suffering of others...
...The reexamination of antisemitism that occurred in the West did not happen overnight...
...There were two elderly educators with them...
...This shock led to a profound reexamination of earlier Western attitudes toward Jews and to the banishment of antisemitism from respectable public discourse...
...Antisemitism was the main reason they left...
...To the Poles, however, these Jews were the collaborators of foreign invaders, thus guilty of treason...
...Many of the Communists brought to power by the Soviet tanks were of Jewish origin...
...This is not yet understood in Poland...
...In Poland, however, this shock never occurred...
...There was no national law...
...The vicissitudes of history blended national tradition, language, custom and the Catholic faith into one matrix—a besieged fortress assailed by powerful foreign enemies...
...The Solidarity movement, by opposing Communism, also opposed that vision...
...We expect things of Poland, but Poland has die right to expect things of us...
...Then they met with me...
...The young Israelis started asking me, first gently—you do not offend a museum exhibit—then not so gently, what I was still doing here...
...Being born in a particular place at a particular time is not a matter of choice, nor is the attachment one naturally feels for that place and time...
...Most Poles reacted to the anti-Zionist campaign of 1968 with indifference...
...It was politically associated more often with the Right, though the Communist regime brought about its most perfect realization...
...Some increase in antisemitism comes with democracy: The Proiocoli of the Elders of '/Jon, once distributed only to the trusted few, then in certain churches, is today openly hawked on Warsaw streets...
...After the post-World War II border changes and the Communist takeover, Poland was an atomized mass of uprooted refugees, out of which the Communist "New Man" was to be created...
...Of the 50,000 Jews who survived, most survived because' of Polish help...
...Nevertheless, antisemitism became prevalent in Poland, politically and socially, by the end of the 19th century...
...Many, though, were glad that public life was becoming "Polonized...
...He wrote with brutal frankness: "I shit on names and on signs...
...Deprived of statehood from 1794 to 1918 when Poland was partitioned between Russia, Germany and Austria, the Poles relied on the Catholic church as the sole national institution to which they could turn...
...to them, it was yet another case of in-fighting among their unloved Communist rulers...
...In the 1946 Kielce pogrom a rumor that the Jews had tried to kill a Christian boy for matzos led to the bloody killing of at least 42 Shoah survivors—including pregnant women...
...Poland, in the felicitous phrase of French journalist Anne Daubenton, is "un pays dans la tele"—"a country in the head," that is, yet to be invented...
...But when a Fishman saves a Goldberg—where's your story...
...A study di' Polish peasants' beliefs concerning the Jews, conducted in the late 1970s, revealed that belief in the blood libel was universal among them, regardless of the age group...
...part of the Left used it as an easy expedient in fighting the class struggle...
...But the open-land tradition lies at the root of all Polish movements of resistance to oppression—from uprisings in 1830 and 1863 against the Russian domination to Solidarity in our own time...
...This ending abounded in tragi-comical episodes...
...Meanwhile, their Christian neighbors were rebuilding an ideology that excluded Jews and justified hatred of them...
...Soon in Poland ajew could feel reasonably safe only under some sort of Communist protection, even if the Jew abhorred the Communists...
...This was sufficient for many Jews to loathe Poland, to which the Poles reacted by accusing the Jews of "anti-Polonism...
...It is not the fetish of the borders that keeps me here, but places and friendship in the places...
...The Right used it as an instrument for shaping Polish national consciousness...
...Thousands of people were fired from their jobs...
...What is at stake is Poland herself...
...On the other hand, thousands of people, aware of their Jewish origins, live outside of organized Jewish life...
...In the mid-1960s, a special research team was created in the Interior Ministry for the sole purpose of tracking down the possible Jewish ancestry of thousands of prominent people in the arts, sciences, economy and politics...
...I had the eerie feeling of being treated as a museum piece—the authentic Polish Jew alive in his natural environment...
...It is not by accident that almost all of my Jewish friends were and are active in the Solidarity movement...
...Contrary to what happened in Western Europe, antisemitism existed in Poland during the postwar era...
...With a long period of public discussion and soul searching, a new consensus emerged gradually...
...The struggle for Poland's future is still going on...
...The TV reporter thanked him profusely and pursued the matter no further...
...There were other reasons for the persistence of Polish antisemitism...
...Jacek Kelus, a Polish Bob Dylan, expressed this feeling in one of his songs...
...perhaps Kiszczak counted them...
...Only a minority collaborated with the Nazi extermination program, however, for the Germans were not interested in Polish collaboration of any kind—not that much would have been forthcoming anyway...
...The Poland I grew up in, however, was one in which Communist order imposed a besieged-fortress vision on the country...
...Against such a historical backdrop, how is it possible to be a Jew in Poland today...
...True, but antisemitism is not only a menace to the Jews, although we cl<> have the sorry privilege of being the first on its hit list...
...she reminded me that "an American Jew denied the designation 'American' would feel hated and excluded...
...An American Jewish journalist who spoke with me last year seemed puzzled by the distinction...
...Even when oppressed by powerful neighbors, the Poles were the upper-dogs with respect to the Jews...
...Being born a Jew in Poland after the Shoah means being born to an obligation...
...While the remnants of what used to be the world's greatest Jewish community tried to rebuild some kind of normality out of the ruins, some Jews—mainly Communists—were helping to build a power structure that oppressed the majority of its subjects...
...The place to develop this togetherness is here in Poland, tt1...
...Each time I travel abroad I am struck, on my return, by how tired peoples' faces are in Poland, I told them that...
...it refers to a basic set of principles and rules of public life that ensures the utilitarian ideal of the maximum good for the maximum number...
...Antisemitism gained a new respectability of sorts—and this immediately after the Shoah...
...The Jewish issue differentiates two strains that run through Polish history...
...This process was possible in a democracy, but the Poles never had a chance for this kind of reevaluation...
...The democratic Left fought anti-Semitism as a menace to democracy and an insult to its humanitarian ideals...
...Some of it never disappeared...
...They should, however, do it otit of their own self-interest, whether they are Jews or not and whatever their personal sympathy for thejews or lack of it It is their future as Tree people that is at risk...
...The Jews are excluded from the former and more than welcome in the latter, but the Jews are not the issue...
...But it is sufficiently present in the writings of, say, Adam Michnik, a leading opposition writer, longtime political prisoner and now a member of Parliament, and in the politics of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa for there to be grounds for hope...
...Two days later his nephew, then president of Warsaw University and very active in the anti-Zionist campaign, called him: "Uncle, how could you have done this to me...
...Jozef Rybicki, long treated as a nonperson because of his anti-Communist ideas, was suddenly approached by Polish television to participate in a program about Polish assistance to the Jews during the war...
...Being a Jew in Poland means being part of a struggle for that future—a struggle for the open land...
...The fact that World War II saw the destruction of Polish Jewry was, in Polish eyes, of less importance than that World War II also meant the destruction of Poland...
...How horrible for thejews," they say...
...Two forces vie for the Polish national consciousness...
...Historically, the besieged-fortress tradition usually has had the upper hand...
...They came here, as many do now, on a Shoah tour, a week of visits to Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka...
...Of the approximately 300,000 Jews living in Poland in 1946 (50,000 survivors and 250,000 refugees from the Soviet Union), 200,000 had left the country by 1949...
...Appeals were launched to "de-Zionize" Polish life...
...A television journalist recalled how in 1968 he was summoned to the Party secretary of his station and told that his origins had been checked and found free of any Jewish ancestry...
...A Jewish kindergarten recently opened in Warsaw, it has only 10 children enrolled but it is the first one in a quarter century...
...The trap had sprung...
...He returned the next day with documents proving his German, not Jewish, ancestry and was promptly reinstated and given an apologyA Polish World War II underground leader, Dr...
...As a matter of fact, bodi expectations are the same: that the besieged-fortress become, once and for all, an open-laud...
...otherwise a suspicion of subversion would linger...
...All this need not necessarily lead to conflict, but a region saddled with warring imperialisms and nationalisms is not the best ground for pluralistic democracy...
...1 told the young Israelis: "Don't believe that this will last...
...I did not have a ready answer...
...There is an old European pattern of Jews supporting the Left, since only the Left offered them a vision of a future in which they could be free citizens...
...But what is the difference between being a Pole, as opposed to being a Jew in Poland...
...The Jews were caught in the middle of these forces...
...Three million ethnic Poles had been killed in the war, the vast majority of them not on the battlefield but in German retaliation against the civilian population...
...When people condemn antisemitism, as in last year's Auschwitz-Carmelite monastery controversy, they do so out of solidarity with harassed Jews...
...Polish identity is national...
...The Jews were neither of Polish tradition, language, custom nor of the Catholic faith...
...AJew in Poland is also obligated to keep alive a memory that is being lost or, worse, sentimentalized—the memory of the great Polish galut (Diaspora...
...Is there a future for these children...
...There seemed to be no way out of this double bind...
...Being an American is indeed different from being a Pole...
...The Jewish issue, in fact, differentiates the two strains that run through Polish history...
...I remember looking at them...
...I was born into an assimilated family after World War II and brought up in the Polish tradition...
...They guarded their heritage no less jealously than the Poles did, and for similar reasons...
...Part of this is the duty to preserve places and sites...
...As you grow old, you too will grow Jewish faces and you will need us here to tell you where you came from...
...The Poles viewed the fate of the Jews as not so very different from their own...
...When in March 1968 the authorities organized an antisemitic campaign—which was an in-Party coup in disguise—the lists of Jews were ready and waiting...
...This is more than we Polish Jews reckon...
...The West reacted to the Shoah with horror...
...he wailed...
...They stood out on a Warsaw street as a group of Chinese would—not because they looked Jewish...
...they considered themselves overwhelmingly Poles, not Jews, and experienced the 1968 purge all the more bitterly for it...
...A commitment is not a one-way street...
...Along with three million Polish Jews, three million ethnic Poles were dead...
...They simply looked Western—healthy, tall, good-looking, well-dressed, with relaxed faces that belonged in Paris or Rome, but not in Warsaw...
...True, Polish history lacks a period of combined church and state antisemitism so characteristic of most of Europe...
...One could sadly quip: In one land there is not room enough for two chosen peoples...
...It is a menace to democracy and freedom everywhere...
...The Jews died under the largely indifferent eyes of their Polish neighbors, who were, themselves, busy surviving...
...I am unclear whether they were afraid for the safety of their children or whether they feared that their children might grow tip with a Jewish identity not thrust on them, but growing naturally...
...There is a togetherness that binds a certain type of Jewish identity—the Polish-Jewish one—with a certain type of Polish identity—[lie open-land vision...
...They had the beautiful Jewish faces 1 remembered from my childhood...
...In 1988 Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a respected lawyer, wrote with approval in the right-wing Gazeta Warszawska of the "positive results of the Polonization of several important positions in the public life of the country in the late '60s...
...A second wave of emigration in the late 1950s reduced the Jewish community in Poland by another 50,000...
...During the four months following the bloody Kielce pogrom of July 1946, Poles killed 42 Shoah survivors, provoking some 90,000 Jews to flee...
...During the four moil I lis following the bloody Kielee pogrom of July 1946, Poles killed 42 Mioah survivors, provoking 90.000 Jews to flee...
...I joined Solidarity at its inception and participated in the vision of Poland as an open land...
...These associations of progressive Catholic intellectuals played an important role in the shaping of Poland's opposition groups in the 1970s and 1980s...
...Both peoples shared a common ideal of a future that would bring about their vindication...
...they did not...
...Though rooted in the English language and tradition, being American does not necessarily imply the eradication of other cultures, and it is not connected to any religious creed or deep-rooted attitude toward other nations...
...Hundreds of Jews were murdered after the Germans were expelled from Polish soil...
...The program was to be used to "combat Zionist slandering of Poland," a context he found disgusting...
...An obscure engineer, Stanislaw Judenberg, was summarily fired from his job in a small Warsaw factory for being a "Zionist," as his name indicated...
...One of the most dramatic elements of the 1968 antisemitic campaign was that it affected people who did not consider themselves Jewish...
...And what does it mean...
...Those who remained made a conscious decision to do so...
...I am Jewish...
...To be Polish one had to be Polish all the way...
...There is a besieged-fortress tradition, in which any deviation from a rigidly set code of national behavior is tantamount to treason, and an open-land tradition, in which diversity is sought as a way of enriching the complex fabric of national identity...
...It would be an exaggeration to state that this vision is a common aspiration of all those who were active in the democratic opposition...
...The declaration called for the annulment of all repressive measures taken at the time and appealed to "individuals and social groups" to scrutinize their behavior 22 years ago and assess their moral responsibility for what happened...
...Minority trends within the Church viewed it as incompatible with Christian ideals and, as late as the 1930s, some groups on the Left and center-Right still dreamed of reviving the Polish commonwealth of nations...
...American identity is essentially political in content...
...But to the antisemites he explained his response differendy: "You see, my real name is Fishman...
...Being born a Jew in Poland after the Shoah means being born to a certain obligation...
...Some parents were, to the last moment, hesitant about sending their children there...
...The only Polish elements which expressed interest and concern for Poland's Jewish heritage from the 1970s on were certain segments of the Catholic church, especially those associated with the Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs...
...Antisemitism is on the rise again in Poland...
...KONSTANTY GEBERT The Senate of Poland, in a first Polish official statement on the issue last March, condemned the Polish government's 1968 antisemitic campaign and its consequences...
...the combined membership of the religious community and the lay Jewish Socio-Cultural Association is less than 6,000...
...Still, not all Poles were affected by the virus...
Vol. 15 • August 1990 • No. 4
