by Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel on March 12, 2010 · 51 comments
My nephew beeped me on ICQ last night. He’s in the eleventh grade at a Jerusalem high school, which means he will be going on a school trip to Poland. He wanted to hear family stories from the Holocaust and the names of relatives who had perished, which he will use in a ceremony he is supposed to lead at Auschwitz. My mother showed him the memorial book published in the 1960s by the shtetl “ landsmannschaft”, but there is little there about our family, and the book is mostly in Yiddish – a language neither my nephew nor my mother understand. I told him some stories I had heard from my grandfather, and a little about the town itself – an important railroad junction in Polish Galicia. He told me they will visit some of the sites associated with the history of Hasidism, as well as Auschwitz and Warsaw, where they will take part in a ceremony, together with high-ranking IDF officers.
Much has been said and written about these trips – sharply criticised by prominent figures on the Israeli left, such as Shulamit Aloni and Tom Segev, as little more than chauvinistic indoctrination. While chatting with my nephew, images from Yoav Shamir’s documentary Defamation went through my mind. Shamir accompanied one such trip to Poland, and shows the process by which Israeli teenagers are inculcated with a deep belief in eternal Polish – and by extension, universal – anti-Semitism, with explicit ideological ramifications for the Jewish present and future. I said to my nephew: “You know, Poland is a fascinating country. It’s a shame you won’t be coming into contact with ordinary Poles, but your trip has a specific educational purpose.” Without batting an eyelash, he said: “You mean the Holocaust as justification for the existence of the State of Israel?” I decided to go a little further, and typed “You will be shown a superficial version of Polish history, portraying all Poles either as collaborators or ‘righteous gentiles’.” He replied: “I know, they were under occupation, but didn’t the Germans choose Poland as the location for their death camps because they knew they could count on Polish anti-Semites to collaborate and/or turn a blind eye?”
He’s leaving in a few days for what will undoubtedly be a very difficult trip, emotionally, in which he will need the support of his classmates, teachers and guides. I decided to back off a little, simply remarking that the issue is a lot more complicated than that. We will see each other in a couple of weeks, right after his trip. He said he would like to hear more about it when we meet. He’s a smart and sensitive boy, but he’s also a born diplomat. He may just have been trying to humour his old uncle, but I hope not.
A couple of weeks back I did a post on the fact that by and large my ancestors in eastern Europe were not peasants. Here’s a historical paper that explores some of the same terrain, titled "Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles," by Mark Paul, from a Polish-American perspective. I haven’t read it yet; it is booklength. But it goes into a lot of the casual smearing of Poles among Jews that I grew up with–and that MJ Rosenberg once explained to me was the backdrop to some of the anger toward Zbig Brzezinski. I see that the paper refers to jokes about Polocks told by the late Ann Landers (Eppie Lederer) and Senator Arlen Specter.
The paper was brought to my attention by my friend Mark, a Catholic with Polish ancestry, who writes:
It’s full of anecdotal recollections that paint a picture of Jewish life in Poland (as well as Polish life, for that matter) that covers the spectrum of rich, middle and poor, Chasidic, orthodox and secular, Yiddish and assimilated. When I studied Polish, two of my teachers were Polish Jews–one had fled east and the other survived the war with Polish families–so I learned a bit about this stuff from them.
This was published in English in a Polish journal called Glaukopis. The web site is in Polish and doesn’t seem to include a statement of purpose, but the archives are rather wide ranging as regards topics that are covered. I found an article at Sarmatian Review that describes Glaukopis as a "socio-historical" journal and "dedicated to decommunization of Polish and world memory concerning Soviet-occupied Poland and its neighbors." I recognize some of the names associated with the journal, and it appears to be fairly mainstream Polish nationalism, i.e., not an anti-semitic journal. Mark Paul has written extensively (book length) pieces re prewar Polish-Jewish relations which appear to be very well researched and documented and balanced in their presentation.
One interesting piece i need to read is The Massacre At Koniuchy. This is an account of a massacre of as many as 300 Polish peasants (mostly women and children) by pro-Soviet "partisans." What that means is this: during the war there were groups of pro-Soviet "partisans" (many of them Jews) who lived in the forests of eastern Poland, mostly what’s now Byelorussia, Lithuania and NE Poland. They lived by "foraging:" i.e., robbing the peasants who themselves lived on the knife’s edge of starvation, caught between the German Nazis and the Communist "partisans." If the peasants voluntarily surrendered supplies they were accused of colaboration by the Nazis, if they resisted they were accused of collaboration by the communists. This massacre, according to the diaries and accounts of Jewish participants, was expressly designed to teach the peasants in the area a "lesson."
Here’s my special interest. I first got involved with neocons over the Scooter Libby business. You’ll disagree, but I think he was a victim of prosecutorial and investigative misconduct. I freely grant that in the big scheme of things he probably got what he deserved, but I stand on the principle that justice must be meted out according to the law, not vigilante style. Anyway, I’m way, way off that reservation now, and I was always upfront that I drew a distinction between opposing Zionist ideology and anti-semitism–or even support for the state of Israel; I maintained that one could oppose Zionist ideology but still support a state of Israel.
My closest contact was a woman whose parents survived the holocaust in Poland. Scratch the surface and she was rabidly anti-Polish: she even quoted with approval (Yitzhak Shamir) the old saw that Poles "sucked in anti-semitism with their mothers’ milk." Specifically, she blamed Poles for killing her cousin, a heroic partisan in eastern Poland. I gently pointed out that many of these "partisans" were hated by the peasants because 1) they lived by preying on the peasants like brigands, and 2) their goal was to establish a Soviet-dominated Poland after the war. She wouldn’t listen: the Poles could only have acted out of the basest anti-semitism and her heroic cousin could never have rationally been perceived as anything but pure and noble. There could have been no question of anything approaching legitimate grievances against her cousin for anything he had done or participated in during the war.
These types of accounts of extreme human situations interest me for what they tell about human nature.
