By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 18th, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth Analysis, click here.
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 . . .
Read more: Why Poland? Part 2: Commemorating Auschwitz (Introduction)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 18th, 2012 The anger and recriminations between Poles and Jews in the days leading up to the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz threatened to overshadow their shared commemoration of their common suffering. Fundamentally conflicting memories led to offense and fed hatreds. For the Jews, the meaning of Auschwitz is summarized by the notion of the Holocaust, the Shoah. It is the symbol of the project of Jewish annihilation. While it is clear that people of a vast array of ethnic, cultural, sexual, national and religious backgrounds suffered in Auschwitz, the Jewish suffering has special significance. The death camps were constructed to exterminate Jews. This was the culmination of Jewish persecution in Christian Europe.
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 . . .
Read more: Why Poland? Part 2: Commemorating Auschwitz
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 9th, 2012 
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 . . .
Read more: Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 9th, 2012 My mother was not pleased when I told her that I would be going to Poland to do my dissertation research, thirty-five years ago. “Why Poland?” This was not a simple or innocent question, motivating it were the horrors of the twentieth century, and the pain and suffering of her family. For, I am the grandson of Victor and Brana Frimet who came from the small town of Bulschwietz near the city of Lemberg (Lwow to the Poles, Lviv, to the Ukrainians). The Frimet’s memories of their times in that place, then Poland, were not sweet. This was a town, a city, a nation and a region where multiculturalism has not been a very happy matter, as it was not for much of twentieth century Europe, especially for my people. My grandparents left in 1920, and they never looked back, never regretted leaving “the land of their fathers.” Our relatives who remained perished in the Holocaust. Why, then, was I going back?
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 . . .
Read more: Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism
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