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My dearest Jewish friend, Ms. Lizzy Ratner,
It warmed my heart to hear that your six-day sojourn through Poland’s cities, towns and villages led you to discover the one-thousand-year old history of Polish Jewry and to feel a deep personal attachment to the land of your ancestors which you wrote about in your article “In the Beloved Old Country, a Jew has Visions of her Homeland”.
I have been returning to Poland the last few years, to the country of my birth, which my family fled from communist persecution. I too feel that deep, inner longing to rediscover and connect to the Jewish half of the Polish soul, or is it the Polish half of the Jewish soul?
When I visit Poland, I make sure to take in the weeklong Festival of Jewish Culture at the end of June held in the Jewish district of Krakow, capped by thousands upon thousands of Poles crammed into the Old Jewish Square swaying to the best Klezmer music from around the world. Once, when I was employed in Warsaw for a few months, I called-in sick in order to travel to the city of Lodz, to run my fingers across the marvelous red-orange brickwork of the old textile factory owned by the Jewish magnate Izrael Poznanski—the king of cotton. Then onto to his home, the stunning baroque Poznanski Palace, now housing a museum dedicated to the history of Lodz, which resonates in my mind because of a picture of a remarkably cosmopolitan choir in pre-war Poland composed of one third Catholic Poles, one third Jewish Poles, and a third Germans. I took pictures of myself sitting next to the famous pianist Arthur Rubinstein or, rather, the life-sized bronze statue of him playing the piano on Piotrkowska Street. Of course, merriment aside, I also made the obligatory pilgrimage to Auschwitz, as well as Stutthof and Majdanek, to pay my respects to the victims of the German Nazis.
As long as I can remember, I was fascinated by Polish Jewish culture—the good and the bad. I was an odd boy, in that most of my friends at the Catholic School I attended in Canada read marvel comics and hardy boy novels, while I read Elie Wiesel and letters from Auschwitz. My friends, all Detroit Tigers fans, followed Kirk Gibson and Alan Trammell religiously, and I did too, but I also followed Pope John Paul’s visits to Auschwitz where he knelt and prayed, his visit to the Great Synagogue in Rome, and watched through tears as he placed a prayer in the Wailing Wall in Israel.
The words he issued commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising still echo in my heart, “As Christians and Jews, following the example of the faith of Abraham, we are called to be a blessing to the world. This is the common task awaiting us. It is therefore necessary for us, Christians and Jews, to be first a blessing to one another”.
What I am trying to say, is that as a Polish-Catholic raised in a conservative Polish-Catholic home, I was and remain in search of an honest conversation between Poles and Jews, and I have to admit it is disheartening to find time and again the lines of communication between these two storied peoples, sharing a beautiful and tragic one thousand year old history to become, so corroded by anger and beset by a sclerosis due to politics and campaigns of misinformation that perpetuate misunderstanding.
For all the positives contained in your article, Lizzy, I am crestfallen when I see that even an educated, curious, and sincere Jewish person such as yourself can write words like, “the Nazis (with later help from the Poles and the Communists), really did do a smash-up job of erasing a whole culture” and refer to a “pre-Nazi Poland” as if there ever was a Nazi Poland.
These words, essentially equating Poland with the German Nazis, or at the very least putting them on the same team, are printed a mere week after Poland commemorated the 65th Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising in which the entire city rose up against the might of the German Nazi war machine and held up for 63 days armed with bricks, slingshots, Molotov cocktails and rudimentary guns. In the end, the British and the Americans and the French and Russians stood by and watched as 200,000 Poles were slaughtered and 90 per cent of the city razed to the ground. Imagine, Poles suffered the equivalent of a 9/11 for 63 straight days. Six million Poles, including three-million non-Jewish Poles, were killed at the hands of the German Nazis.
My dearest Lizzy, I wonder if the ethnocentric Jewish lenses you acknowledge you had been given “like most Jewish kids” allowed you to see the basic fact that Poland was the only country that fought against Nazi Germany from the very beginning of the Second World War until its conclusion? Were you aware Poland opposed the Soviet Union which invaded from the east and deported and murdered hundreds of thousands of its citizens in the very first months of the war?
I wonder if those same lenses have not kept you from seeing facts which we Poles consider basic, pre-school history, that the Polish underground resistance, called the Home Army, which organized the Warsaw Uprising, was the largest resistance movement in Europe, and that it even organized a group—Zegota—with the sole purpose of rescuing Jews, even though the price paid for being suspected of aiding a Jew in Poland was instant death for you, your family, and your neighbors.
On this note, it pains me in particular, that you equate Poles with Nazis and the Communists. Despite the penalty of immediate execution for any Pole suspected of assisting a Jew, a penalty imposed nowhere else in Europe, neither in gallant France, or the Netherlands, there are more Poles honored in Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews than any other nationality. And I suspect that the numbers at Yad Vashem are very conservative. Why? Because my grandmother, Wladzia, hid a Jewish family in her cellar for months, provided them with food and clothing, though she herself was dirt poor, risking the lives of her entire family. Wladzia, like many Poles, does not have a tree planted in her name at Yad Vashem and never will.
Brilliant filmmakers and students of the Holocaust like Steven Spielberg moved mountains to make us familiar with the name of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist, who used his great wealth to rescue 1,200 Jews from extermination, and yet it took a group of some beautiful high school students in Uniontown, Kansas, to bring to our attention, sixty long years after the fact, Irena Sendler, a Polish-Catholic nurse, who saved 2,500 Jewish children from certain death with much, much fewer resources than Mr. Schindler and undertaking much greater risks. I dream of the talented Steven Spielberg capturing the story of her bravery as only he can do and wonder what’s the hold up?
I lived in Nashville for five years, where I studied at Vanderbilt University. My proudest achievement was being the co-chair of Vanderbilt’s 30th Annual Holocaust Lecture Series, the longest running such serious in the United States, which through its history has invited scores of thinkers and activists from around the world who study the Holocaust and other genocides. For a student of the Holocaust, it doesn’t get much better than sitting in on a lecture, and having dinner with, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Saul Friedlander.
And yet, as part of the Lecture Series, I remember taking a group of undergraduate and graduate students to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which was wonderful, except for two things. It seems even the Holocaust Memorial, dedicated I assume to an honest examination of the shoah, was handing out the same lenses that you, Lizzy are wearing.
Our tour guide, a truly lovely elderly Jewish woman, whisked us by the displays showing the execution of Poles and Polish priests at the hands of the German Nazis, while slowing down by the other ‘regular’ displays long enough to tell us that Poles were just as murderous of Jews as the Germans, and that the Nazis were Christian. I was numb.
At the end of our two hour tour through history, we gathered in a conference room to discuss what we had seen. A bright, young law student, not an undergraduate student mind you, but an advanced law student, raised his hand and said, “Okay, we know that Poles welcomed Hitler with open arms when he crossed into their country…. ”. I couldn’t let him finish. I raised my hand and politely corrected him in much the same way as I am correcting you. How is it possible for such a highly educated person to come away with such a horribly mistaken impression from the country’s most esteemed Holocaust institution? And what of the 30 million people who have visited the museum thus far?
Please allow me one final vignette from my search for an honest conversation between Poles and Jews.
Three years ago, as a member of Vanderbilt’s Holocaust Lecture Series, we invited a supremely talented Yiddish writer, a woman of immense charm, and a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, to give a lecture. I remember striking up a conversation with another elderly Jewish woman in a wheelchair who was waiting outside to get into the packed auditorium.
She started telling me about her experiences in Lodz. I corrected her pronunciation and her eyes lit up. “You know Wooodge?” She said. I said I do, and she immediately started telling me about the bakery her family owned on Piotrkowska Street before the war, not too far from where the bronze statue of Arthur Rubinstein now sits. I asked her if she would ever go back. She gestured for me to lean in a little closer and whispered, ‘no, I wouldn’t. Never. Those Poles would kill us all”.
And here is the greatest irony. That evening, as the elderly Yiddish author concluded her lecture, she became faint, and collapsed on stage. Luckily, as the rest of the crowd looked on, stunned, frozen, one of the members of the Lecture Series, the wonderful Vanderbilt music professor Michael Rose, leaped up and braced her fall.
I joined him shortly thereafter, cradling the head of this old, Holocaust survivor in my hands, placing a damp cloth on her forehead, and gently caressing the silver hair away from her eyes.
I looked up at Professor Rose, with whom I had once discussed organizing a concert at Vanderbilt University to promote Christian, Jewish and Muslim understanding, in the great tradition of the annual Vatican concerts started by Pope John Paul II.
He looked at me, a Polish-Catholic cradling this fragile, Jewish soul, in my hands, a treasure, one of the few remaining witnesses of the Shoah.
As she regained her wits, she grasped my hand, looked up, smiled, and said, ‘my, you’re handsome’. She was fine.
My eyes welled up. I looked out into the crowd and passed the Jewish woman in the wheelchair, and passed another Jewish professor who once called me ‘the son of a perpetrator nation’.
I have spent my young life searching for an honest conversation between Jews and Poles.
Irek Kusmierczyk is a PhD Student, Political Science, Vanderbilt University
Good post, Irek, and necessary. The problem in the US is that most people get their history from movies, from propaganda movies made to tell a post-war traumatized citizenry, and shape young minds, about the war.
Even the most famous 1945 newsreel about Hitler’s camps, specifically Auschwitz, was staged. But not by us, but by the Germans. The German psyops General — he could see the writing on the wall — didn’t want the Germans to continue thinking Hitler was a good guy so he hired famous director Billy Wilder (Jewish) then in Hollywood to come home and create a newsreel pronto. Billy Wilder piled the naked bodies dead from typhus, not gas chambers, eight feet high on tables and used actor soldiers and real German officers to walk from table to table expressing disgust with what Hitler had done. Billy Wilder told me, directly, in 1990 that he did this. To this day, hundreds of millions of people around the world think those were gas chamber victims the Germans failed to hide before the Soviets liberated Auschwitz.
I dont know how old you were during the Kosovo War ten years ago, but I can tell you I was alone and unique in trying to explain to anyone who listen — and no one would — that those Serbian tunnels NATO bitched about under Kosovo and Serbia built during WWII were how the Serbian and Polish Resistance got the Jews out of Poland. Poland is land-locked. The Serbs suffered an enormous fate for helping Polish Jews escape to the Adriatic, or for hiding them in the tunnels; the Serbs killed on sight if discovered, their children shot in front of them; the Serbs were the first to join with Russia in fighting back against Hitler. The Nazi and SS stronghold was closed Albania, and it separated Kosovo from the Adriatic, a further peril. The flag of the side we supported ten years ago, Hashim Thaci’s KLA flag, was the old double-eagle SS flag from WWII. Google it. And we, in our profound ignorance, fell for it.
Two-thirds of WWII was fought east of Germany, land Hitler wanted. According to Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic Monthly, Russia lost 50 million civilians and 29 million military fighting Hitler. The Americans didn’t become involved until the end of it, and the majority at home had no idea what Hitler was doing until the war was over. It was the most terrible war in human history, and we romanticize it with tales straight out of Mother Goose or knee-jerk feel-good lies like US good, Poland bad. Non-Jews mad, Jews sad. It is simply not the whole truth of it. Many Jews were complicit in what Hitler did, and many non-Jews in Hitler-controlled areas were disloyal to, and treasonous against, The Third Reich. The ridiculous laws in Europe now that dont permit any plain discussion of this dont help either, and perpetuate these fictions. Japan did the same thing after WWII: outlawed any discussion or history books about Japanese brutality or war crimes against the Chinese and Koreans; as a result, entire generations since have no idea that the Japanese made Hitler look like a boy scout.
Oops. I meant to write that Poland was effectively land-locked.
I have a question about the title: Poles and Jews. Why not Jewish Poles? Are Jews living in Poland at a particular time Poles who happen to have a different religion than the Catholic majority, or are they Jews who happen to live in Poland? If Jews can’t be Poles, is that because they don’t want to be, or because others won’t accept them? I think these questions have been significant throughout Jewish history, and have a bearing on their future too.
and refer to a “pre-Nazi Poland” as if there ever was a Nazi Poland.
Strictly, I read Nazi Poland as Poland occupied and ruled by the Nazis. After all they took great care to kill as many of the Polish leadership as possible already during first few month? 10.000? So it makes sense to speak of Nazi Poland. …
Concerning the rests. Yes, it is true, the Polish people were for the Nazis Untermenschen? Minor humans, slaves. They were in their way of conquering living space East.
The “image” may well be related to the fact that most of the extinction camps were on Polish ground. Combined with selective knowledge both historical and contemporary, such as Radio Maryja’s antisemitism. There is a tendency to sort out specific events, like Jedwabne and not e.g. Jan Karski.
On the other hand people that helped Jews didn’t get much attention until very recently anywhere apart from Israel. And that surely is an interesting story in itself.
Two or three years ago I learned about a film, Forgotten Odyssey, which details the journey of tens of thousands of Poles, mostly Catholic, some Jewish, men, women and children, from their homes in Poland, across a brutal winter and across the Caspian Sea, to safe harbor in Iran.
I tracked down the British-based producer of the film and purchased several copies, which I gave to friends and a Polish fraternal organization.
I’m a bit foggy on the details of the film and of the incident, so I tried to find information about it online. It’s been erased from every website that previously offered some clues.
The major points of the situation, as I recall, are that both the Germans and the Russians attacked Poland; that Poles were “allowed” to flee; that among the fleeing Poles were the men who later made up Anders’s Army; that the Poles finally found shelter in Iran; that the Iranian people took good care of them; that some Poles stayed in Iran, and that there is a cemetery in Iran where many of the Poles who died shortly after reaching Iran, are buried.
Iran is rightfully proud of having offered these Polish war victims the shelter and warmth of their land and resources, and Poles have expressed their gratitude.
Our small town, Stojanow [Stojanów], had about a thousand Jews and an equal number of Poles and Ukrainians. … We looked down on the small farmer, whom we called Cham, which was an old traditional way of saying Am Haaretz (people of the earth), which to us meant simpletons. …
We lived in a self-imposed ghetto without walls. The Jewish religion fostered our living together in groups which separated us from non-Jews. … All of these [religious] restrictions caused the Jews to live in ghetto-like societies so that they could maintain their Jewish way of life. …
We had virtually no contact with the outside world, surely not social contact, as our interests and responsibilities were completely different from the goish’s. … We young Jewish boys did not take part in any sports as this was considered goish. … We Jews even tried to avoid passing a church, and if that was impossible, we muttered an appropriate curse as we hurried by. …
We Jews felt superior to all others, as we were the “chosen people,” chosen by God Himself. We even repeated it in our prayers at least three times a day, morning, afternoon, and evening … The farmers, who, even considering their low living standards, couldn’t support an entire family, sent their daughters to town to become servants in the Jewish households. I never knew a Jewish girl to
be a servant in a Polish household, but the reverse was the norm. The gentile maid was referred to in negative terms as the “shiksa” .
There was a repertoire of jokes about these girls. For example, there was the joke about how Jewish mothers made sure that the servants were “clean,” because their sons’ first sexual experience was usually with this girl.
J. Hartman and Jacek Krochmal, eds., I Remember Every Day…: The Fates of the Jews of Przemysl during World War II (Przemysl: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk w Przemyslu; Ann Arbor, Michigan: Remembrance & Reconciliation Inc.,
We were strangers to the neighboring gentiles because of our religion, language, behavior, dress, and daily values. Poland was the only country where a nation lived within a nation. … In Poland the Jew dressed completely different from others, had beards and peyes (side curls), spoke a different language (Yiddish), went to separate religious schools, and sometimes even to different public schools …
Since every meal on Sabbath and holidays started with the blessing of the wine,
there was no possibility of a pious Jew sharing a festive meal with a gentile because the wine, once opened, became nonkosher if a gentile merely looked at it. The laws of kashruth prevented a Jew from eating at a gentile’s nonkosher table. Thus, there was very little social intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. We never spoke Polish at home, only Yiddish. Polish was negatively called goish. When we spoke Polish we had a Yiddish accent. The newspapers and books in our homes were in Yiddish. … We lived in a strictly self-imposed ghetto, and it suited our requirements and wishes. …
Our parents not only praised that time [i.e., Austrian occupation of part of Poland in 19th century] as being better for the Jews, but spoke with pride about the superiority of German culture and its people compared to the Polish culture.
This attitude was very badly received by the Polish people. … The belief that German culture was superior continued even to the time when Germany occupied Poland in 1939, and in its eastern part in 1941. I remember when the Jews spoke among themselves about the future under the Nazi regime: “Under the Germans it couldn’t be so bad as the press wants us to believe because they are the leading civilized nation.”
Leon Weliczker Wells, Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995),
Relations between Poles and religious Jews were burdened by prejudices on both sides. Just as our self-image was shaped by our religious tradition, so was our view of Poles. We were the descendants of Jacob, who, according to tradition, studied Torah and lived by its commandments. Poles, on the other hand, were the descendants of Esau, with all of the vile characteristics that our tradition ascribed to him: a depraved being, a murderer, a rapist, and an inveterate enemy of Jacob.
This image of Esau, which developed two thousand years ago in reaction to the oppressive domination of the Romans, was transferred onto Christians …
Traditional Jews responded with contempt for both the people and their religion. We viewed Catholicism as idolatry. Poles were stereotyped as lechers and drunkards, given to brawling and wife-beating. I remember a popular Yiddish folk song about Jacob, the Jews, who rises in the morning and goes to the Beit HaMidrash to study and pray, and Esau, a Pole, who goes to the tavern. The refrain exclaims: “Oy! Shiker is a goy, a goy is drunk! And he must drink because he is a goy.” …
Religious Jews looked on assimilationists with a mixture of pity and contempt. We felt that they lost their self-respect as Jews and were still treated by Poles with contempt. We used to say, “Pol Zydem I pol Polakiem jest calym lajdakiem” [Pół
ydem i pół Polakiem jest całym łajdakiem] (“Half a Jew and half a Pole is a whole scoundrel”).
Ben-Zion Gold, The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007),
“Intermarriage had become more common in Poland during the 1930s, but it was still regarded as a tragedy by most orthodox parents. Some disowned their children, while others sat shivah for them as though they had died, observing seven days of mourning with slippers on their feet and ashes on their head.”
Diane Armstrong, Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations (Milsons Point, New South Wales: Random House, 1998).
The daughter of a prominent industrialist in Borysław recalled that when her great-grandmother’s daughter married a Christian, she was “considered an outsider in the family. It was not until the war started, when the family wanted to find her to ask her if she could hide [from Germans] my sick grandfather, that I discovered this family secret. No one knew her married name, so the attempt to locate her did not succeed.”
Helene C. Kaplan, I Never Left Janowska… (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989),
Mila grew up in a happy home in Zaleszczyki, Poland, a beautiful and prosperous summer resort town near the Romanian border. … The family was well-to-do and traditionally Jewish. Her father, Zygmund, was an industrialist who owned several flourmills and some property, while Mila’s mother, Fanny, chaired a Jewish organization that helped the poor and the sick. The family spoke Polish at home … they had a kosher cook who prepared their Shabbat dinners and a large seder
meal at Passover. Mila remembers that Zigmund went to synagogue every week. Zaleszczyki’s population was evenly divided between Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians. Mila, who considered herself assimilated, attended the Polish gymnasium where she had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends. Her childhood and adolescence were marked by good relations with non-Jews …
Not only did the family have a number if non-Jewish friends and neighbors, they also participated in Christian Polish culture, attending Christmas dinners at the homes of Christian family friends who, in turn, were invited to the family’s Purim celebrations. One year, on All Saints’ Day, Mila’s family had gone to the Christian cemetery to see the graves lit up by candles, honoring the dead.
Yehudi Lindeman, Shards of Memory, Narratives of Holocaust Survival Praeger 2007
At home (Lindeman household), our Jewish cook and Catholic maid were both loved and respected by us, the children. Our Polish friends invited us to their Christmas dinners. Mrs. Nedilenko used to send us a plate of Christmas goodies, and my mother reciprocated with an equally elaborate plate of sweets on Purim.
In our home, I don’t ever recall hearing a derogatory remark about other people’s religion or customs. Overall, we were quite at ease in the homes of our Polish friends and did not feel out of place among them.
It would be difficult to overestimate how this ease in our relationships and familiarity with Polish life helped to ensure our survival later on, when we had to pass for Catholics and live under assumed Polish names.
Mila Sandberg-Mesner, Light from the Shadows,Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation in Montreal 2005
When the Russians liberated Lvov [Lwów] in July 1944, Mila. Lola, and Jasia (Linderman) decided to return to their home in Zaleszczyki. … Mila stayed in Zaleszczyki for a few months, and recalls that she was received warmly and treated well by her neighbors. Some of them gave her food and furniture.
Yehudi Lindeman, Shards of Memory,Narratives of Holocaust Survival Praeger 2007
“Our tour guide, a truly lovely elderly Jewish woman, whisked us by the displays showing the execution of Poles and Polish priests at the hands of the German Nazis, while slowing down by the other ‘regular’ displays long enough to tell us that Poles were just as murderous of Jews as the Germans, and that the Nazis were Christian. I was numb.”
Speechless, yet not surprised.
I have learned in America that the Poles were at least complicit in the holocaust, even though there were no polish concentration camp guards (ukrainians, yes, poles, no), no polish SS, no polish waffen-ss, and the people who informed the occupation forces on where jews were hidden for financial reward were ruthlessly executed by the Home Army.
But never mind all that, the Israeli myth uber alles, no matter the facts.
It seems that the international, poignant “Never again!”, which I learned in communist Poland while learning about WW2 and Jewish Holocaust, to the proponents of Israeli myth became (sadly):
“Never again, us”…
…someone else’s turn to suffer for our, jewish benefit, now we are the bullies!
And now for something positive.
Me and my mom were shopping in a local super store.
She spotted an Orthodox Jew, and said (in polish) something along the lines of “I didn’t know this neighborhood had Orthodox Jews”.
As we chatted in polish the Jewish guy acted as if he listened in, and then finally spoke to us in very passable (heavy accent) polish.
After the “Dzien dobry”, we learned that he lived in Lvov before the war, and he reminisced with us about pre war Poland. We spent 10 minutes or so talking to each other; it looked like “grandpa” wanted to speak a bit in polish. Perhaps he did not get much chance to do so.
Funny how the world works, two polish (now) Americans talking to a kindly Orthodox Jewish guy in polish, in a midwest boonies.
And jeez Eva, I already knew that Jews in their shtetls were a complete separate nation within a nation, united with Poland only by business interests (lots of Jews were businessmen, both small and big time).
This just rams it home.
Thanks Irek. We Jews and Poles and Jewish Poles have a lot of issues to work out, and it’s about time. The important thing is to avoid generalisations, and to try to understand our shared history, without prejudice. My grandfather was born into a hassidic family in a small town near Lvov (he used the Polish pronunciation, although he was always careful to say that it used to be called Lemberg). He attended a Polish gymnasium for as long as family poverty allowed, and spoke good Polish. He worked for a number of years in Warsaw. But in the mid 1930s, he decided it was time to leave Poland. He had a good job, but felt overwhelmed and frightened by anti-Semitism. Thanks to his profession, he managed to get a Canadian visa, and left for Montreal in 1936. He tried to convince his brothers to join him, that Poland was not a good place for Jews, but they didn’t share his feeling, and were eventually murdered, along with their wives and children, by the Nazis. My grandfather, who was the sole surviving member of his family, blamed Poles and Ukraininans as well as Germans for the annihilation of his family, community and civilisation. This was partly based on his own experiences of anti-Semitism before the war, and partly on the testimonies he heard from the many refugees who passed through his home in Canada (although he also learned that a Polish station-master had left a door open on the cattle car in which his brother had been sent to Auschwitz, so that Jews could escape). He vowed he would never speak Polish again. Yet, when we had a Polish babysitter, he couldn’t resist, and chatted with her a bit. He used to sing the Polish anthem at our Passover seder, and he wanted me to know that Poland then, was a democracy, like Canada, not a communist dictatorship. And he missed the countryside, and remembered cherries the size of tennis balls and plums the size of basketballs, that had grown sweeter as well as larger, in his memory. He was not a Catholic, and Polish was not his first language, but he was by no means “separate” from Poland and Polish life – of which Polish Jewish life was an integral part. Had they been given a chance, Jewish and non-Jewish Poles could have built a wonderful society together; a society of which figures such as Bruno Shulz (but one of many) were only the beginning. Tragically for both of us, we were never given that chance.
Thanks for your post, Ms. Kusmierczyk, and to Eva and others for their comments.
Dear Irek,
This is a very belated thank you for your immensely heartfelt and thoughtful letter in response to my article, “In the Beloved Old Country, a Jew has Visions of her Homeland.” I was honored by the care you took in responding, moved by your call for healing between Jews and Poles, and tickled by that wonderful phrase you used – “the Jewish half of the Polish soul, or is it the Polish half of the Jewish soul?” – since it resonated so eloquently with some of my own observations from my visit. In fact, I remember the jaw-dropping sense of recognition I felt every time the lovely man who guided us through Bialystok opened his mouth or gestured with his hands or told a joke. It was so familiar. The inflections, the cadences, the argumentative desire to really hash an idea out. I found myself marveling, “So that’s where we got it!” And then: “Or maybe he got it from us!” And then: “Maybe we got it from each other!”
This man who guided us through Bialystok – his name is Jerzy –has dedicated the last 25 years of his life to unearthing the Jewish history of Poland for Jewish visitors whose roots have been buried for more than 60 years. Before he began this work, he said, he had known nothing of the country’s Jewish history, had not even known that Jews had really existed in Poland before the war or had been murdered en masse by the Nazis. The history had been suppressed during the post-war/Communist years. But once he began unearthing details of this strange past, he dedicated himself to resurrecting the story of the country’s missing past – became so dedicated, in fact, that even after several decades and countless visits to Treblinka, he still got choked up with rage and sorrow when describing the horrors of that death factory.
Jerzy’s commitment moved us all deeply, as did his stories about Poland’s utter and mass destruction during the war, the Polish refusal to accept Nazi occupation (unlike all other countries, as you pointed out), and the horrible fate that the country and its people suffered as a result. He complicated, deepened, and in some cases, corrected our understanding of events, and we were all profoundly grateful for that.
I bring this up as a way of saying that, to the extent that I seemed to be equating the Nazis with the Poles, I am deeply sorry. In fact, I do recognize the heroism of the righteous women like your grandmother, Wladzia, who hid Jews at the ultimate risk to themselves; she clearly possessed a courage and humanity that I can only aspire to in the most fumbling way, a moral strength that I would like to think I would display in similar circumstances but fear I might not. And I recognize as well the horrors suffered by Poles at the hands of the Nazis and, of course, the bravery people displayed in resisting a brutal occupier. I should have acknowledged this, done it justice.
That being said, no history is pure, and there is a more complicated, less happy storyline that runs beneath Polish-Jewish relations that I was trying – albeit very clumsily – to get at. This is the story of increasing, state- and church-sanctioned anti-Semitism during the interwar years; of attacks and terror campaigns like the one in Bialystok in 1919 that ultimately helped convince my family to leave the country; of ongoing anti-Jewish sentiment and sympathies for ideas like expulsion by various segments of society (and one or two parties in the government-in-exile) during the Holocaust; and, of course, of the anti-Jewish sentiment and pogroms, like the bloody one at Kielce, that finally convinced many of the remaining Jews to flee the country after the Holocaust.
In mentioning all of this, I am not trying to point fingers or malign a whole country, but simply to point out the source of some of the ongoing pain and mistrust felt by Jews I know. Moreover, and sadly, some of these feelings haven’t been entirely eased by our visits. Even as we met lovely people like Jerzy, we were profoundly distressed by the swastikas we saw spray-painted on buildings in Bialystok as well as the Jewish stars dangling from hangmen’s nooses – in one case, on the building next to the hotel we were staying in, in another case near the entrance to my grandfather’s old street, and in still another, on Jewish tombstones in the main Jewish cemetery. A decade earlier, a visit by my mother was overshadowed by nasty, anti-Jewish comments directed at her and some of her traveling companions.
Again, I am not trying condemn a whole population or even suggest that these sentiments are in any way universal, widespread, or, for that matter, unique to Poland. But they muddy the picture for us.
In your letter to me, you very effectively pushed me to deepen my understanding, embrace the complex and kaleidoscopic nature of the past. I am very grateful to you for that. And so, just as you asked me to recognize the complexity of the Polish-Jewish experience, I would ask you to do the same.
Of course, at the end of the day, we’re both fortunate enough to have been born long after most of these horrendous events. And, I suspect we’re both ultimately a lot more interested in the present than the past, the possibilities for the future than the crippling confines of what was. So, should you find yourself in New York (i.e., the New Country) one of these days, please know that you have a standing invitation to join me for some Old Country-style latkes and pierogi. We can break bread and raise a glass to our amazingly interwoven roots.
Warmly,
Lizzy
Thanks Lizzy, this is one of the comments, that shouldn’t be buried in the comment section. It has enormous depth combined with an honesty and thus lightness that does never descend to pure condemnation …
Thanks also Shmuel.
I hope that breaking bread with Lizzy will result in an equal depth in a future article. These issue contain deep human questions way beyond our self-perceptions and the respective merits of our special ancestors. They may be an anchor but hardly more. I’ve moved to the perception, it is wrong to use their experience as adornment. The most “pure” among them, at least as I experienced them, essentially trusted deeply that live would reward them, that is there would be someone for them too in times of need. Somebody, anybody. And beyond words that was their ultimate reward. Restore trust in life. There no doubt are the most diverse exceptions to this rule, like the women who found places to hide her future husband. Her reward was keeping him alive. …