This is the second in a three part “In-Depth” post reflecting on the relationship between Jews and Poles in the relatively recent past, as I have observed this relationship over the last forty years. In the first part, I reflected upon the circumstances that led me to engage in Polish cultural and political life and upon my initial experiences during my research there in the 1970s. In this post, I address the conflicting collective memories of Poles and Jews, particularly as they worked to remember together in a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in August 1995.

I observed the event from a distance in New York, reading newspaper accounts from The New York Times and other foreign sources (from which the non-digitized quotes in the account are drawn). Viewing the event from the outside emphasized my ambiguous connection with the memory conflicts. As an American Jew, with many relatives who viewed this with little or no knowledge about the Communist experience, I understand their dismay about apparently insensitive things said and done by the Polish authorities. But as a scholar engaged in Polish affairs for much of my adult life, I realize how difficult it is to respectfully remember the Shoah when its existence was systematically underplayed, distorted and even silenced by the Communist authorities, and, in addition, when much of the Western world hasn’t recognized the degree of Polish suffering at the hands of the Nazis. I noted that even people of good will under these circumstances have great difficulty getting beyond their own limitations and reinforce misunderstandings and worse.

In my next “Why Poland?” post, I will explore what happened when all of this exploded out in the open, in controversies over Jan Gross’s book, Neighbors. It is a difficult book with a very difficult central finding, the Polish Catholics in a small Polish town, Jedwabne, killed their Jewish neighbors in mass, on their own, without Nazi direction. The publication of the book and its reception shows how the wounds of twentieth century atrocities are still quite raw, and how symbolic complicity in the horrors continues, as does resistance.

Today’s post, I think, shows how difficult collective memory can be. I think I reveal that there is an etiquette of remembering. Who remembers and how is as important as what is remembered.  This etiquette made it difficult to write and publish my account and makes deliberate consideration of the problems involved challenging. Slowly over a long period of time, discussion becomes possible. I wonder whether there is enough time, something I will explore.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis “Why Poland? Part 2: Commemorating Auschwitz,” click here.

Poles, that is, Polish Catho­lics, see things differ­ent­ly.  Nearly twenty percent of the Polish population died during the war.  Seventy five thou­sand Polish (Catholic) lives were lost in Auschwitz; a high per­cent­age of the survi­ving inmates of the camp were Polish.  The memory of Polish losses is one of close experi­ence.  From the Polish point of view, the inter­na­tion­al commun­ity has failed to recog­nize the depth and exten­sive­ness of Polish suffer­ing.  For Jews and for many others in the West, the immensity of the Nazi crimes has been summarized by the figure six million, six million Jews from throughout Europe consumed by the Nazi death machine. In Poland, the number has been remembered in a different way: six million Poles killed during the war (half of whom were Jewish, but this conventionally is not noted).

It was with this background that the fiftieth anniver­sary of the liberation was marked.  Many Jewish organi­zations and individuals found the Polish plans for the ceremony wanting, and many Poles viewed their objections with suspicion. The World Jewish Con­gress threat­ened to boycott the commemoration entirely.  In its judgment, the Polish authorities were trying to trans­form the ceremo­nies into a Polish event.  At times, the rhetorical con­flict over the planning of the event became very tough.  Michel Fried­man, a leading Jewish spokes­man and member of the German Chris­tian Democratic Party, complained that equal represen­tation of Polish Christian and Jewish victims presented a gross misrepre­senta­tion of history.  He declared: “If I recall the history precise­ly, I have to say that the murderers there were mostly of the Christian religion.”  Friedman, whose parents were saved by Oskar Schindler, believed that the Polish Catholic Church is still anti-Semitic.  He went on to point out: “The people in charge must realize that the world is watch­ing to see that the message of this memorial day is histori­cally cor­rect.”

But historical correctness is very much in the eyes of the beholder.  According to some reports, Polish Cathol­ics were criti­cal of the rest of the world for its tendency to “Juda­ize” Ausch­witz. The equa­tion of the Polish nation with that of the German nation was simply not acceptable in Poland, too many Poles suffered too much under German occupa­tion.  Thus, the Polish Catho­lic Bishops refused to join their German col­leagues in a joint proclamation concern­ing Catholic responsi­bility for the Holocaust because it “could be per­ceived as a joint admis­sion of guilt for the Holo­caust.” In this refusal, they raised questions about their resoluteness against antisemitism.  They choose not to be associated with “the most radical self-criticism from an institu­tion of the church,” as the Italian newspaper Il Messagero put it. But from the Polish Bishops point of view, it was perfectly clear that an equation of German and Polish responsibility is absolutely unacceptable.  This confrontation is especially poignant after the Jedwabne revelations, which I will examine in my next and last “Why Poland?” post.

In the end, a sort of symbolically acceptable resolution of the controversy was attained, despite mutual recriminations and suspi­cions.  Even the inelegance of the commemorations and the events leading up to them seemed fitting.  The two parties, the Poles and the Jews, with the world press observing, tried to accommodate each other, while they remained true to their memo­ries.  They each knew that the enormity of the event being commemorated demanded that the memory disputes had to be re­solved.  They accomplished this by holding three distinct ceremo­nial events: one on Thursday January 26, 1995, in Krakow at Ja­giellonian University, the second, an improvised special Jewish ceremony at the Birk­enau death camp, on the 26th, during a break in the official ceremonies, and the third, the main official ceremony on the 27th.

In the ceremony at Jagiellonian, where one hundred eighty three Professors were once rounded up and deported, Lech Walesa emphasized the enormity of Polish suffering.  He remem­bered that the Nazis set out to destroy Poland’s “intellectual and spiritual strength,” but he did not mention at all Jewish suffering.  A distinctly Polish form of remembrance dominated.

The separate Jewish religious ceremony was organized by the European Jewish Congress.  No Polish officials attended.  The only government figure there was the German President, Roman Herzog.  The Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was recited.  The members of the media outnumbered the participants, since the Polish government made no special effort to inform survivors about the ceremonies.  To underscore Jewish suffering, Wiesel opened his remarks in Yiddish; the speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Shevah Weiss, spoke in Hebrew, and the President of the European Jewish Committee, Jean Kahn denounced in English, the “nationalistic” ceremony organized by the Polish government.

Yet, by the next day it was evident that the Jewish protests concerning the Polish plans for the commemoration did result in changes in the ceremonies.  President Walesa did note in his opening remarks on Friday the special suffering of Jews and Gypsies, and Poles: Ausch­witz “stands for the suffering of many nations, especially the Jewish nation.” “Whole nations, the Jews and the Gypsies, were sup­posed to be exterminated here together with others – above all, us Poles.”  Elie Wiesel clarified Walesa’s statement: “It is true that not all victims were Jews.  But all Jews were victims.” One Polish survivor observed, as if answering Wiesel: “Most people who died were Jews.  But most people who lived in the barracks [as camp inmates] were Poles.” Walesa was criticized for not specifically mentioning Jewish suffering in his Thursday address, but in two separate addresses on Friday, he included such specific references.

Each side was true to its memories, but in the end accommo­dated to the memories of the other.  The problems between Jews and Poles were not overcome, but those problems were put aside as best as they could be without compromising the integrity of the competing memory sets of each group.

I observed these ceremonies with ambivalence.  On the one hand, I felt relieved that problems that bothered me on my initial stay in Poland, when I visited the Auschwitz Museum and Jews were not recognized as victims, were finally out in the open.  On the other hand, I believed that fundamental misunderstandings were being perpetuated, and knew that addressing these would not be easy.

Democratic Poland has an obligation: to confront the past in a way that is qualitatively different from communist accounts of history.  On the face of it, the obligation is rela­tively simple.  While the Communists told lies and dis­pensed propa­ganda, democrats should truthfully consider histo­ry.  Yet, the realiza­tion of this obligation is no easy matter.  Collective memory after the totalitarian experience is a troubled and troubling enterprise. Like the envi­ron­men­tal pollu­tion left behind from the great socialist industrial dinosaurs, the totali­tarian control of cultural life has had lasting effects that are not easily remedied.  This is an overlooked obstacle in remembering Ausch­witz, not appreciated by outside observers, as well as actors on the inside.

Until 1989, the remembrance of things Jewish in Poland was framed by official public institutions of the Party-state, by the Catholic Church and its lay institutions, and by the movements and institutions of the opposition.  As was the general rule, the Party-state domi­nat­ed and the society responded.  Jewish issues were not, of course, a pressing or a major problem.  But they did have a way of coming up at the center of major political confrontations, often without Jews being much in­volved.  The Jews who were very visible in the first communist governments, perhaps at the instigation of Stalin, became for the Polish anti-Semites the symbols of Stalinism.  This identification was used by the nationalist Party faction.  But once this faction employed the old xenophobic formula to attempt to gain power in a wave of repression in 1968, opposition to antisemitism took on a new importance.  It was not only a way to assert good liberal creden­tials, indicating commitment to modern western values.  It was a way to fight against the Party.  This worked until the Party itself, after martial law, started to use a respectful memory of the Jewish presence in Poland’s past to gain legitimacy in western eyes.  Then for the first time since the immedi­ate post-war period, Polish-Jewish relations were opened to critical public examination.  Although this examination was still dis­torted by censorship and the limitations of Communist control of most forms of public communi­cation and debate, it marked a change in the form and content of collective memory.  Things could be discussed openly that could not be discussed previously and the way they could be discussed was fundamentally changed.  Such changes, of course, escalated after the fall of communism.

The public discussion had then, and until quite recently continued to have, an odd abstract quality.  It was as much shaped by post-war Polish politics, i.e., in the absence of Jews and after the Holocaust, as it was shaped by evidence of Polish – Jewish interactions before and during the war.  The great theorist of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs would have understood, as would have Pierre Nora. The questions raised were broad and theoretical, and were more shaped by myths than by historical investigations.  They were instigat­ed by the passing of commemorative dates, such as the commemora­tion of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or inter­na­tion­al cultural events, such as the release of the Claude Lanzman’s film, Shoah, than by a system­at­ic con­fron­ta­tion with the trou­bled rela­tions between two peoples.  Were the Poles victims like the Jews or victim­iz­ers of the Jews?  Should the Poles apologize for their behavior during the war, as many stood by with approval or mute accep­tance as the Holocaust was perpetrated in their backyards, or even took part in genocidal actions?  While a few courageous Poles frankly explored the degree of Polish responsi­bility, loud outcries of protest denounced such explora­tions as betrayals of the national honor.  Journals in which such discus­sion was opened were besieged with anti-Semitic condemna­tions from their readers.  Memories and beliefs privatized for a half century were given public expression.  Public memory was opened; the time of an easy collective memory was over, thus the controversies over commemoration of Auschwitz.  And something even more difficult was yet to be confronted: a troubled history with significant dark unacknowledged corners.  While collective memory may serve the interests of the present, as Halbwach’s theorized, there is a way that historical investigation, and concrete evidence from the past, such as the evidence brought forward by Jan Gross, in his book Neighbors, can challenge and change those very interests. In an upcoming post I will report on these controversies and reflect on their meanings, and also try to explain what I see in the much of Central Europe, premature Holocaust fatigue.

This in-depth post is the first in a series on the question: Why Poland? To skip this introduction, click here.

A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Lublin, Poland. I was promised that the lectures would be translated and published as a book. It was a promise, never fulfilled. But preparing and giving the lectures was a very interesting exercise, nonetheless. It gave me an opportunity to start reflecting on how my research and public activities in Poland before the fall of communism could inform public life there “after the fall.”

I prepared and presented three extended lectures. The first was on media and the politics of small things, a topic that I have focused on in recent years. The other two lectures were on topics I haven’t explored further, but I think may be of interest to readers of Deliberately Considered. I will reproduce the lectures in the coming weeks. Today’s in-depth post: the first of three posts addressing a simple question I have often been asked, “Why Poland?” Later, my second lecture, another frequently asked question: “Why Theater?”

Why Poland? It was a question first posed to me by my mother. She wanted to understand why it was that I had chosen to do research in the country from where her parents fled. It was a question motivated by the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews. It is a topic that I have not spent much time addressing professionally, though I have had to deal with it personally. The lecture I gave in Poland was one of the rare times that I publicly addressed the topic, making the personal professional.

The lecture made three distinct moves, responding to the issue of the relationship between Jews and Poles from three different vantage points: the first, today’s post, was the most personal, built upon reflections on my personal experiences as a researcher in Poland in 1973-4. The second post builds upon my thoughts as an observer of Polish democratization of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz. The third post, which is the part of the lecture written specifically with my Lublin audience in mind, is an analysis of the Polish response to Jan Gross’s Neighbors, a book in which Gross documents the fact of the active Polish participation of the Shoah in a small town in Eastern Poland, Jedwabne.

The first post is the most personal. It is formed by a cultural sensibility, “the wisdom of youth,” which I think requires serious and systematic deliberation. This is what got me to go where my mother wouldn’t. It is also that which told my son, in 2004, that Barack Obama would soon be President of the United States, and I think it is something to think about when we consider the promise of the new “new social movements” that have developed in recent years, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. Once one begins there is so much to think about.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis of “Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism,”click here.

My answer to my mother’s question was filled with the naiveté and the self-centeredness of youth.  I was looking for adven­ture.  I wanted to visit Europe after I had completed my stud­ies.  I had a good disser­ta­tion proposal to study theater in Poland, and a major founda­tion was willing to pay for a year’s prepara­tion and language study and a year or more of research and living expenses in Europe.  This was a great oppor­tunity, both personal and profes­sional.  For me, the pain of my people and my family were things of the past, to be remembered and under­stood, but not some­thing that should restrict my ambitions and plans.  In retro­spect, mine was “the wisdom of youth.”

Because I was not restrict­ed by the very recent past, which seemed not so recent to me, I could attempt to develop the capacity to remem­ber and to understand, as would never have been the case had I been constrained by my mother’s memories of her parents.  But the insight of my mother’s question persists.  It sheds light on many of the problems I have faced in the course of my research and experiences in East and Central Europe, and it may help us under­stand the prob­lems of clashing collec­tive memories in the post-­totalitarian shadows.

In this paper, I reflect upon how Poles and Jews confront each other through their contrasting memories.  I attempt to show that there is endur­ing wisdom in my mother’s question, as a question, both because it raises a signif­icant issue and it does not dogmatical­ly declare an an­swer.  Back in 1970, dogma may have come in the form of a parental prohibi­tion concerning the plans of a respectful son: “you can’t go to the place my parents fled from.”  Here, in a more public domain, dogma comes in the form of contrasting truisms which shape conflicting memories, from “Poles are hope­lessly anti-Semit­ic,” to “Jews minimize the suffer­ing of others and do not understand the causes and respon­sibili­ties of their own suffer­ings.”  Here, I am presenting reflections based upon a paper written in response to controversies surrounding ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp.  I am extending those reflections to include the controversies about the massacre in Jedwabne in 1941, the continuing controversies about Kielce in 1946, and the advance in my on going search for answers to my mother’s question.  The search started in the early 1970s, and it continues to this day.  Thus I present my thoughts in three parts: 1. Before the End of Communism, 2. Commemorating Auschwitz, and 3. Debating Jedwabne.  To anticipate my conclusion, I see these parts as revealing the development of a democratic Poland, with enduring and new problems.

Before the Fall of Communism

During my year and a half in Poland in 1973 and 1974, the “Why Poland?” question periodically became pressing.  I had to play memory games to make it less so.  This started soon after I ar­rived.  My first summer here was spent at a Polish language insti­tute.  Most of my fellow students were Polish Americans, trying to learn the lan­guage of their grand­parents.  We spent six weeks studying in Poznan and then two weeks on a bus tour all around Poland.  We visited Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Gdynia, Wroclaw, Zakopane, and Oswiecim (Au­schwitz).  The stops in Auschwitz, Zakopane and Krakow proved to be especially meaningful.  They serve as a prelude to later controver­sies over commemo­ration and memory.

Going to Auschwitz, I expected to be overwhelmed with grief, bewildered, appalled, and confused.  I experienced all this and much more.  My capacity to describe falls short of my aspirations to explain.  Yet, my most meaningful experience, from the point of view of our discussion today, was not in the field of my expec­ta­tions, and it is easily ex­plainable.  I was very angry.  My anger was not immediately directed at the Nazis, the German totalitarians, but at the Polish totalitarians: the Polish communists, who seemed to belittle the special suffer­ing of the Jews on the grounds of what is in fact the largest Jewish cemetery in the world.  At that time, it was hardly even noticeable that Jews were among the victims.  The sign at the entrance to the museum at the camp noted the suffer­ing of many nations, from the Russians to the French, from the Dutch to the Czechs; Jews were not specifically mentioned.  This was repeat­ed in the written materi­als on sale at the museum store.

To make matters worse, the pattern was repeat­ed in the old German barracks where there were special exhibits on the nations who suffered at the camp.  The barracks used to memori­alize the Polish nation were particu­larly disturbing.  One camp photo after another, with the names of murdered inmates, was dis­played. There were no Jewish names.  This was my most dramatic lesson in understand­ing that the categories of Jew and Pole commonly were mutually exclusive for Poles, even for Polish communists.  Our guide did not note such matters, nor did he point out that the Jewish exhibit had been “closed for renova­tion” since 1968, the year of the “anti-Zionist” purge.  We just passed the building housing the exhibit in silence.  As a rela­tively recent stu­dent of Polish culture and poli­tics, I was bewildered.  I later learned how silence replaced open anti-Semitism as official Party policy.

One way and another, since the war, there had been no open critical confron­tation with the Holo­caust, and the Polish relation to it, beyond the clichés of official Marxist ideology and Polish privately trans­mitted common knowledge.  The limits of the former were obscenely evident in my trip to Auschwitz.  The museum presentation of Auschwitz erased Jewish experience, memory and suffering, and replaced it with the stale clichés of official Marxism.  In such a way, the Holo­caust was avoided from war’s end to 1968.  The closing of the Jewish exhib­it, which would have been likely an exhibi­tion of such official clichés, substituted racist aggres­sion for the igno­rance of ideology.  The silence, which fol­lowed, further undermined the possi­bil­i­ty of real delib­era­tion­­.

The limits of the common knowledge of Poles as it has been transmitted privately were sug­gest­ed to me by one of my fellow stu­dents in the Polish language program soon after we left the camp.  These limits were then revealed during numer­ous encoun­ters I had while re­search­ing Polish Theater in 1973 and 1974. When I read the discussions about Jedwabne, I heard echoes of the little relatively benign story I will now tell.

Our next stop, on our tour was Zakopane, a popular mountain resort town.  A few hours after our trip to Ausch­witz, one of Polish American students was shopping for souvenirs for friends back home.  After her shopping adventure, she related her experi­ence at a shop­ping stall to one of our fellow stu­dents.  On our bus returning to our lodgings, she ex­press­ed con­ster­na­tion that she was not able to “Jew down” the sales­person on the price of some trinket.  I overheard the conver­sation and object­ed, especially in light of what we had experi­enced together at our previous stop.  What surprised me was not so much her anti-Semitic expression, but her subsequent defense of it as being meaningless: just an expres­sion, having nothing to do with Jews.  Everyone she knows uses it, she ex­plained.  It has no malicious intent and nothing to do with Jews or the Holo­caust, as far as she could see.

This is more an American than a Polish anecdote.   While anti-Semitism certainly does exist in Poland, the expres­sion: “to Jew down,” meaning to bargain, is English, and not Polish, I’m told.  Yet, the story stayed with me during my Polish so­journ for what it said about xenophobia and its persis­tence, about xenophobia and the mechanism of collective memory.  This young woman came from a lower middle class district in Brooklyn.  In her world, Jews were more symbols and linguistic expressions than flesh and blood people.  This has been even more the case in Poland and much of East and Central Europe after the Nazi occupation.  In such a world of symbols, intents need not be malicious for them to be insen­sitive and malignant.  The absence of the other, who in inter­action challenges foolishness and insensitivi­ty, as I attempted to do, makes for the unintentional transmis­sion of hatred.  This transmission is not even disrupted when the immen­si­ty of hate’s conse­quences is revealed, as it was despite all the problems of presentation on the grounds of Auschwitz.

The expres­sion “to Jew down” builds upon the lie that Jews are particularly expert with money and have their ways of getting the best from Gentiles.  The way to succeed in money matters is to act like a Jew, be greedy, heart­less, focused on the monetary and not the moral.  Even if one does not think of real Jews in this way, if one has good feelings toward Jewish friends and acquain­tances or does not think much about Jews at all, to use the phrase is to keep the stereotype alive.  And when a significant part of a cultural identity is built upon such expressive stereo­types of the other, as it is in Poland, then mutual under­stand­ing and respect becomes ex­tremely diffi­cult, if not impossi­ble.

Soon after our visit to Auschwitz and just before my wife and I said goodbye to our American friends, we, as a group, visited the city of Krakow.  While our colleagues stayed on the official tour, we went, on our own, off the formal itinerary to visit Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter and ghetto.

In 1973, Kazimierz was not the gentrifying district that it is today.  Our official tour ignored the district completely.  It was a slum, empty and decaying, some synagogues being used as warehouses and the others closed to visitors.  The oldest one had been converted into a state museum, which was apparently continuously closed for renovations since 1968.  We did manage to see the ancient Jewish cemetery and the adjacent synagogue (Remuh) where an elderly man noticed us looking around.  He introduced himself as the caretak­er of the grounds.  We spoke in our only common lan­guage, Polish, he with a strong Yiddish accent.  Yet, he insisted that he was a Polish Catholic.  The visit was extremely disturbing.

It then became clear to me that if I were to spend the next year in this country, exploring the attempt by indepen­dent minded Poles to inject cre­ativity and critique into Polish public culture through theater, I had to do so as Ameri­can and not as Jew.  The Jewish ques­tion clearly remained, even if without Jews, but I would have to put it aside, along with my mother’s, if I were not to be consumed by them.  The needed Polish – Jewish dialogue was too difficult for me to take part in at that time.  And, what was true for me was also true for the few remaining Jews in post-sixty eight Poland, and for Poles of good will as well.  There were too many more pressing problems, both political and personal, to confront the question of Jews in Poland.  The “aliens,” who were one third of the population of Warsaw before the war and who were one tenth of the population of the nation, had been eradicated.  Hitler and his collaborators (both Germans and from other nations) had succeeded and no one had time to talk about it, includ­ing me.

Of course, I am being too harsh on Poles of good will and on myself.  The “Why Poland?” question, the question that assumes the existence of intractable problems in Polish – Jewish rela­tions, but confronts them, could be addressed and tentative answers could be dis­cussed, even within the Communist system.  A key for such address and discus­sion is memory, memory of a time and a place when such relations robustly existed.  The starting point is the everyday memory of Polish – Jewish relations current in Polish society.  The start­ing point inevitably begins with cemeteries, including Ausch­witz.  This became clear to me as I traveled around Poland studying student theater.

When I began talking with my interviewees, invariably the fact that I am Jewish became evident.  Either this would be evident from my name or my physical appearance, or it would come up in conversation.

The response took on a predictable pattern.  First, there would be a personal note.  I would be told of the Jewish cemetery near the homes of just about every person with whom I spoke.  Next there would be long discussions with my new friends about the events of 1968 [a time of official anti-Semitism in Poland) and more deeply about Polish Jewish history.  The young Poles revealed a great deal about themselves and their nation in these discus­sions.  Since I was primar­i­ly talking to Polish liberals, aspiring cosmopolitan artists who looked to the West for inspiration and community, who were themselves involved directly or indirectly in the student revolt of ’68, the discussants tended to be unam­big­u­ous­ly critical of the anti-Semitism of the regime and those who responded positively to such anti-Semitic maneuvers.

The depth of their criticism became evident when we spoke about long term Polish – Jewish relations.  There were those who emphasized Polish liberalism, who pointed out that Jews were welcomed in Poland in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centu­ries, when they were treated as pariahs in the kingdoms further East and West.  They would point out that it was not an accident that so many Jews had lived in Poland.  On the other hand, there were those who emphasized the continuity of anti-Semitic troubles among Poles.  Their comments would focus on the last one hundred years, the years of the greatest troubles in Polish – Jewish relations, and espe­cial­ly on the post war period, the years of their lived experience.

I came to realize that those who most emphat­ically “taught” me about the long history of friendship between Poles and Jews tended to be anti-Semitic, and those who forth­rightly spoke about Polish anti-Semitism tended to be tolerant, truly liberal, respectful.  I did not intend to explore these discussions system­at­i­cal­ly.  I had made the decision to avoid them in order to stay focused on an understanding of the politics of the alternative culture.  I was committed to the decision I made in Krakow that my personal con­cerns and prob­lems with the region should not take prece­dence over my specific intellectual reasons for being in Poland.  The histor­i­cal memory of anti-Semitism seemed to be quite periph­eral to my pressing project.  Yet, the symbolism of anti-Semitism was not.  It became apparent that definitions of Polish identity are con­nect­ed with such symbolism, and these have since become increas­ing­ly impor­tant in the config­uration of Polish political life.

Towards the end of my first Polish adventure, I was reminded of my grandparents’ experience.  An American friend, Jeffrey Geronimo, was visiting us, and my wife and I and our close Polish friend, Elzbieta Matynia, were on a little tour with him of the Polish countryside.  In an isolat­ed village in the Kielce region, we chanced upon an elderly man, apparently well into his nineties.  He was the picture postcard vision of a Slavic gentleman, walking with a cane, with a long angular nose and flowing white moustache.  We started a conversation, talk­ing about the usual tourist fare, all of which now escapes me.  When saying our farewells, Elzbieta challenged the gentleman to guess where my wife and I came from.  By this time we were speak­ing Polish rela­tive­ly well.  He guessed Warsaw.  When we indicat­ed New York, he did not believe us.  And after some joking around, he declared he did not know who we were or where we were from, for sure, but one thing he was certain of was that we were not Jews.

Here was the Poland my grandparents fled from – the Poland in which the Jew is the definition of the other that negatively invokes common identi­ty, even humanity.

At the time, the incident seemed to be more about the past than about the present or the future.  I have since learned that this was not so.  Both the elderly gentle­man’s statement and our Polish friend’s response to it, her extreme embarrassment and consternation, tell us a great deal about the post-communist political culture of Poland.  For, in an important sense, the problem of anti-Semitism in today’s Poland and much of East and Central Europe, the anti-Semitism without Jews, has little to do with Jews and a lot more to do with the nations states of Europe, which live in the midst of Jewish graves.  This has become most appar­ent after the fall of commu­nism, during such symbolic events as the commemoration of the liberation of a concentration camp, and such pressing practical events as the political ascendancy of overt anti-Semites, and now the debates over Jedwebne and Polish complicity in the Holocaust.  The problem has to do with the way anti-Semitism is knitted into Polish common sense, but more about that after we closely consider the problems of commemoration in Auschwitz and in Jedwabne.