When I was in Poland, our group was scheduled to hear the Deputy Mayor of Lodz speak. It was, I knew, more than I could bear. I had survived 5 days in Poland and had 3 more ahead of me. I had broken once already before the crematoria rubble in Auschwitz and I was trying so hard to be strong for my daughter and the other girls on the trip. I was one of only a few parents and I expected better of myself, and yet, I couldn’t do it.
I went to the organizers and told them that I would not stay in the room and listen to this man on the Jewish Sabbath, in a land where almost all the Jews had died long ago. There was nothing left for him to say to me. I didn’t want to make a scene and so I listened to the Rabbi speak and then quietly slipped out the back door. A few minutes later, my daughter came out. While I had placed myself in the back of the room, intending to leave; she has sat in the front with her friends. Her departure was anything but subtle. But sitting there trying to comfort her and calm her down, I really didn’t care about the scene that had played itself out inside. She was furious. What had he said, I asked her.
He said there was no antisemitism in Poland, she answered. And he could prove it by three facts. I thought that was interesting and was about to ask, but didn’t bother. She held out one finger, “we don’t have to protect the synagogues anymore.” That was one. Of course, very few of the synagogues were actually in use. Most were tourist sites. “There are very few Jews who live in Poland,” she said as she held up a second finger. I see, so attacks against dead Jews and graves didn’t count as antisemitism? Guess not, according to the Deputy Mayor of Lodz. And the third reason, she explained as she held up another finger, “there’s more antisemitism in Germany!” That’s right – so long as the Pole could point his finger somewhere else, that was clear evidence that Poland was free of antisemitism? Apparently so.
I was reminded of this conversation when I read an article about the Poland’s Human Rights Commissioner, Adam Bodnar. Apparently Bodnar is in trouble for having stated the obvious, “There is no doubt that the Germans were responsible for the Holocaust, but many nations took part in its implementation. Among them—and I say this with regret—the Polish nation.”
Some members of the government are demanding Bodnar resign; they call his comments “scandalous” and Bodnar was quick to apologize. While it is true that a small number of Poles risked their lives to protect Jews, a far greater number were, at very least, complacent about the German drive to rid Poland of its Jewish population and in some very clear instances, Polish antisemitism.
Bodnar’s statement is very clear, and very accurate. Many nations took part in enabling the German murder machine. In 1941, before the Germans arrived and after the Russians had left, the Polish people of Jedwabne murdered almost half of their neighbors, because they were Jews. In 1946, there were the Kielce pogram(s) against Jews…after reports that an 8-year-old Polish boy was kidnapped by Jews. It took the “boy” more than 40 years to admit he was never kidnapped at all.
What angered me…what crushed me…when I stood in Jedwabne in 2004 wasn’t “just” the murder of the Jewish population, but rather the ongoing antisemitism that manifests itself as denial. It took Yad Vashem sixty years…SIXTY years…to get the monument changed from the lie that the 1,500 “Poles” of Jedwabne were murdered by “Hilterites” to the bland “1,500 Jews were murdered.” In fury, I asked why the monument didn’t honestly say that they were Jews AND they were murdered by Poles. The answer was that if it said that, the monument would be attacked. Well, it has been attacked many times, vandalized, defiled.
And more, in 2001, a ceremony took place to commemorate the new monument, the one that began to tell the truth. They weren’t Poles that were murdered; they were Jews. The mere thought of that change obviously infuriated the people of Jedwabne because, as someone who was at the ceremony told me, when the President of Poland began to speak, people in one of the houses across the field from the monument began blasting their stereo and it was only stopped when the head of Poland’s police sent a team to shut the noise down. As the President began to speak, the church bells in Jedwabne began “to ring…and ring…and ring” the man told me, and again the police had to go stop it.
At that moment, I wanted to leave Poland more than I wanted to breathe. I asked the organizers…almost told them…that I was done. I was going home. I even told me daughter that she should stay with the group; she’d meet me at the airport. I would wait there for them. I was more than an hour away, didn’t speak Polish, had no transportation available to me and no taxi in sight but I just wanted to get out. No antisemitism? No responsibility for the “German” Holocaust against the Jews?
And the Kielce pogrom – just a year after those few Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust were trying to put their lives back together and search for who survived? Perhaps one can forgive an 8-year-old boy for lying to protect his fathers and others who claimed the boy was kidnapped. Perhaps even 10 years later, when he was “only” 18, we can forgive him for lacking the decency to admit the truth. But what of when that boy, that youth, turned into a man…when he was 28. And 38. And 48. What infuriates me is that it took until Henryk Błaszczyk was 50 for the “man” to admit it. The pogram was a blight on Polish history but the coverup that continued on makes it even worse.
What enrages me is that men like Bodnar cannot make a bland statement that suggests that Germans didn’t act alone or, to be more accurate, cannot bear 100% of the guilt and responsibility. In a vacuum, the Holocaust could not have succeeded nearly as extensively as it did. For it to stretch so far, it had to have been nurtured by locals across Europe. The Germans cannot escape what they did; but sadly, much of Europe has.
What Błaszczyk and Jedwabne and the reaction to Bodnar’s statement all have in common, stands as irrefutable evidence of antisemitism in Poland. And, until Poland comes to terms with this past, the very justified accusation of ingrained antisemitism will stay with them long into the future. And that is more damning than anything that happened 70 years ago.
