I have no doubt that the works of Jan Gross, and the writing of many Polish journalists, historians and sociologists, contribute to the foundation of democracy in Poland.  They advance the project of freedom for Poles and for other nations, to echo the famous slogan of Polish patriots of the 19^th Century.  They address the Jewish question; for me, they address my mother’s question, with their dignity.  There has been an extended debate, an official apology by the President of Poland and an official inquiry and correction of the public record.  All of this has been noted and admired abroad, even as it sparks controversy.

On the other hand, there was much that was said and written in response to the revelations about Jedwabne, that brought me back to my Polish American compatriot’s “Jew down” remark, as reported in my first “Why Poland?” post, and much worse.  It has been very hard for me to read the primitive, but also the more refined, anti-Semitism, which is now very much a part of Polish public discourse.  I realize now that my travels in Poland back in the seventies, and my intensive work with the democratic opposition and underground Solidarność, though extensive and long enduring, were in important ways limited.  I knew how Jews and anti-Semitism were symbolically central to modern Polish identity, but I thought there had been a significant collective learning process that had put its more pernicious aspects into the past.  Now, I am not as sure of this as I once was.  Apparently there were broad segments of popular opinion that I did not perceive.

I wonder now whether I really understood the nature of the problem then, whether I really understand it now.  Did I really confront Polish complicity in the Holocaust?  Clearly, I didn’t.  Only after reading Gross do I begin to understand the dimensions of the problem.  Did I really understand the meaning of the Kielce pogrom?  Perhaps I did, but it is so much clearer after reading Gross’s latest book, Fear. I suspect that my learning was not that different than that of many of you in this audience, although we may have started from a different place.

I have not been easy on Poles, or Europeans in general, when it comes to anti-Semitism.  I have had few illusions about my European roots.  I, as a Jew, represent the other in the European tradition: vilified through the dominant interpretation of Christian doctrine, at least until Vatican II, and the subject of folk beliefs that are horrific, fantastical and ominous. And it was not just a matter of simple folk who knew no better, great works of European literature as well are saturated with anti Semitic assertions and allusions. I understand that some pretty articulate anti-Semites opposed genocide, some openly, some secretly.  I know that there is a significant distance between the traditional anti-Semite and the genocidal killer, but I understand, as well, that the former in some way is a precondition for the latter.  I am not sure how much different Polish Christians were from other Europeans.  But that does not absolve either group.  I understand the wisdom of my grandparents’ flight from Europe.  I owe my life to it.

But apart from such melodramatic reflection and accusation, how do we, Poles and Jews, get beyond this?  I think I saw people of good will trying to do so in 1995, as they commemorated the memory of the liberation of Auschwitz.  But, finally, they failed.  There were obvious problems, which have become clearer in the debates over Jedwabne, and in revelations and accusations about Kielce.

I must start with the most obvious, something I have been guilty of until this point in my presentation: the very idea of Poles and Jews.  The language makes sense, Polish memory as distinct from Jewish memory.  I think the greatest contribution of Gross is to show how this common sense and usage, which implies that there is a distinct separation between the Polish Jewish and the Polish Catholic experience, is not only ethically problematic but also historically misleading.  Polish Catholics and Polish Jews cannot really understand their pasts without confronting their very mixed up connections.  Thus it is highly problematic that there were separate ceremonies at the Auschwitz memorials in 1995.

I find this all so depressing. My years as a Poland watcher taught me to expect more, although my recognition of the wisdom of my mother’s “Why Poland?” question should have prepared me.  Permit me to reflect back and forth between what gives me hope to what disgusts, from what angers to what puzzles, to what gives me hope again.

The official ceremony honoring the victims of the Jedwabne atrocity, unlike the commemoration of Auschwitz, was a noble affair.  Every effort was made to do the right thing, to correct the official record, to honor the victims and the righteous.  Not everyone supported the memorial.  Some notably chose not to be there, but those at the event made significant progress in transcending the problem of Polish versus Jewish memory.

As I was preparing this presentation, I spoke to an Israeli sociologist, Natan Sznaider, who happened to be at the event.  His father in law was the Israeli Ambassador to Poland at the time.  He remembers the grace of President Kwasniewski in his impeccable address:

We know with certainty that among the persecutors and perpetrators there were Poles.  We cannot have any doubt that here in Jedwabne, citizens of the Polish Republic perished at the hands of other citizens of the Republic.  People prepared this fate for people, neighbors for neighbors…We express our pain and shame; we give expression of our determination in seeking to learn the truth, our courage in overcoming an evil past, our unbending understanding and harmony.  Because of this crime we should beg the shadows of the dead and their families for forgiveness.  Therefore, today, as a citizen and as the president of the Polish Republic, I apologize.  I apologize in the name of those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime.  In the name of those who believe that we cannot be proud of the magnificence of Polish history without at the same time feeling pain and shame for the wrongs that Poles have done to others.

But as you know, better than I do, this was only one response to the Jedwabne revelations.

I read an interview with Cardinal Glemp by the Catholic News Agency (KAI). It astonished me, dripping with anti-Semitism.  He is so unreflective about this, like my Polish American colleague so many years ago, that I doubt he even realizes it, as she didn’t.  Polish Jewish conflicts in the thirties had no religious basis, according to the Cardinal.  Asked if he thought that Jews experienced a rise in attacks during Holy Week because of accusations of God-killing, he expresses astonishment.  “This statement strikes me as improbable.  The first time I ever heard of this rise in anti-Jewish feeling was in Mr. Gross’s book.  Clearly the book was written ‘on commission’ for someone.”

What could he be referring to?  Is Gross in the pay of the Zionists, or the international Jewish conspiracy, or is it the Jewish lobby, or perhaps even “The Elders of Zion?”  Near Churches, it has been reported, literature about all of this has become available in democratic Poland. A radio station makes its niche on the listening dial with this kind of stuff.  The Cardinal goes on: “Polish-Jewish conflicts did occur in those times, but they had an economic basis.  Jews were cleverer, and they knew how to take advantage of Poles.”  In American English: they could “Jew them down,” I guess.   He does qualify this point. I think realizing that it was not quite politically correct, adding: “In any case, that was the perception.”  Why was the church commemorating the atrocities on May 27^th and not July 10^th?  The 10th was not convenient.  The major lesson of Gross’s inquiry is lost on Glemp.  He and many others were not open to learning.  Arguing for the exhumation of the site of the atrocities, contrary to a request by Jews to honor religious law and refrain from desecrating the graves, he defends his position by asserting “Jewish law is not binding in Poland.” As if that were the issue, not realizing that it is a matter of honoring and respecting customs other than your own, so that you may honor and respect people who you don’t consider to be of your own.  Poles versus Jews, yet again.  He wants to do this “because it is important to know the number of victims.”

I know that this is an issue that Glemp and many respected Polish academics and scholars think is central.  As a matter of principle, I am in favor of trying to understand the truth in the details. I’ve dedicated my life to this.  It is a major theme of my recent work on “the politics of small things”.  But that the number of victims is an issue, with great moral and political importance, escapes me.  Does it change the moral challenge if “only” 400 people, “Jews,” were brutally murdered by their neighbors, “Poles,” instead of 1600?  Glemp goes on and on, wondering why Jews slander Poland, “when Jews had it relatively the best with us, here in Poland.” And further: “We wonder whether Jews should not acknowledge that they have a burden of responsibility in regard to Poles, in particular for the period of close cooperation with the Bolsheviks, for complicity in deportations to Siberia, for sending Poles to jails, for the degradation of many of their fellow citizens, etc.”  In his reflections on Jewish cleverness, there are the Jewish banker and lawyer, the capitalists.  In his reflections on the Soviet occupation, there are the Jewish communists.

The leader of the Church in Poland does not stand alone, clearly.  In the Church there are strong and articulate alternative voices, I know.  I read a moving piece by Rev. Stanislaw Musial just after I read the Glemp interview.

But in the reaction to the Jedwabne revelations, there is also much that is worse than is revealed in the Cardinal’s interview, with vile and more aggressive anti-Semitism.  And, it seems to me, these are given support by the manifestly less pernicious and refined refusal to face the legacies of the past.  They open a space for refined and vulgar anti-Semitism. There are those who worry about the numbers, who think the evidence of the murder is still not in. There are those who ask “Is the hubbub surrounding Jedwabne intended to eclipse the responsibility of Jews for communism and the Soviet occupation of Poland?” And there are those who question Gross’s approach to survivors’ testimony: i.e. take them to be truthful unless proven otherwise.

Gross wisely makes this recommendation because of the profound and systematic ignorance of Polish complicity in the murder of their Jewish compatriots when the more normal alternative skeptical approach prevails.  He is suggesting a way of restructuring historical practice so that it encourages a systematic examination of dark corners in the national past, instead of systematically ignoring them.  Prominent historians defend their professional ethics and accomplishments.  Gross and his supporters question how it is possible that they have for so long overlooked the anti-Semitic atrocities both during and after the war.

I find myself engaging the debates, moved and heartened by some contributions, dismayed by others.  Reading anxiously Gross’s next book, Fear, I realize how radical is his challenge and am convinced by his careful analysis of the post war pogroms and individual murders of Jewish survivors after Auschwitz.  Some of his explanation for how this happened I find persuasive: the legacies of totalitarianism and the continuities between Nazi and Communist practices, the brutalization of the population, the normalization of stealing from and the murder of Jews that was part of the landscape during the Nazi occupation and for some time afterward.  I am not convinced by his arguments completely.  The projection argument, his thesis that Poles couldn’t face the survivors because of their own complicity, I am not sure about.

I have read others who make a significant contribution to my understanding of my mother’s Polish question, the Polish Jewish question, and their relationships.  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Jerzy Jedlicki, Hanna Swida–Ziemba, Jerzy Slawomir Mac, Marta Kurkowska Budzan, among others. The depth and seriousness of their reflections on the cruel facts of Jedwabne mark a noble confrontation with the past.

In light of all of this, the noble and the base, I am deeply ambivalent.  Let me be honest, the ascendance of anti-Semitism in Poland after the fall of Communism has been a great disappointment to me, revealing the limits of what I called at the beginning of this presentation “the wisdom of youth.”  If I had kept in mind the experiences of my grandparents and parents a little bit more, I may have been less surprised, less disappointed.  But on the other hand, the seriousness of the Polish debate about the legacies of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, I know, is very impressive.  A Polish president distinguished himself and honored the memory of my ancestors in a way that would have astonished my grandfather who had very bitter memories as a soldier in a Polish army unit in the First World War.  I am not sure that this would happen today, that the present Polish president would have so astonished my grandfather, but it did happen.  The debate in Poland has negative voices, but very importantly they are being confronted.  In sum, the three parts of this presentation add up to democratic or at least liberal progress.  There is more free discussion and open debate, and Polish Catholics and Polish Jews, and the international Jewish community benefit, as the weaknesses of the demos are revealed.

Yet, I must conclude with a note of concern.  As I have been writing and rewriting this lecture, I have wondered how you will receive my observations.  I wonder whether I have breached the boundaries of the politically correct or polite.  I made some of my observations with some reluctance.  Are my critical comments unnecessarily provocative, or are they just obvious?  Did I go too far, or not far enough?  Should I have expressed my concerns about the Church authority as bluntly and personally as I did?  I have thought about these questions not because I am afraid to reveal to you what I take to be the truth, but because I am well aware that in dealing with difficult problems with the other, the embodiment of discourse is important.  It is not just about words, but who says them, when and where.  I thus deeply appreciate Kwasniewski’s words.  It really depends who says what to whom.

In this light, I understand that I have an obligation here to express my appreciation of the great and often heroic efforts of my Polish friends and colleagues, some with Catholic background, some with Jewish background, some with both, in addressing the continuing problems of anti-Semitism in Polish political culture.  And I express my criticism of the limits of the address with reluctance.  But I must go a bit further, having to do with the limits of democracy in the appraisal of these events by many of the most sympathetic observers.

They advise that the most rabid anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon.  I want to believe them, but I am struck how it keeps on coming up, and how significant cultural and religious authorities, and political leaders, some with ascendant power, keep on using anti-Semitism, including members of today’s governing coalition. (Remember this lecture was given in 2007. This is no longer the case) It is so central that it persists for decades even with the absence of Jews and even with open democratic discussion about that embarrassing fact.  I think this is at the center of the most provocative of Jan Gross’s contributions to the consideration of Polish-Jewish relationships in Jedwabne.

Toward the end of his book, reflecting on the two memorials then in Jedwabne, he notes that one propagates the lie that the Nazis killed the 1600 Jews of the town. The other reads “‘To the memory of about 180 people including 2 priests who were murdered in the territory of the Jedwabne district in the years 1939-1956 by the NKVD, by the Nazis and the secret police [UB].’ Signed ‘Society’ [spoleczenstwo].”   He observes that Jews were killed not by Nazis, Soviets, or Polish Stalinists, but by that same “society.”   And the number 180, apparently does not count Jews as people.   The controversy has been about his blaming of society, apparently the accusation of collective guilt.  Yet, it is clear that the first memorial was a political lie, and that the second reveals a deeply problematic common sense definition of humanity.

Objecting to collective guilt has been an important part of my answer to my mother’s question.  But I think that Gross is onto something beyond such accusation.  Anti-Semitism is not in the mother’s milk of Poles (this is a vulgar, an obscene accusation) but it is in a kind of cultural code of Polish society.  Those who are critically appraising the role of Polish anti-Semitism during and after the Holocaust, and also after the fall of the Communist regime, are making significant contributions to transforming the code.  Those who deny the strong tradition of Polish anti-Semitism and its tragic consequences, or approach historical and sociological questions doubting its significance, are helping to reproduce the code.  Speaking as if Poles and Jews are mutually exclusive categories, thinking about Polish and Jewish history as being apart, nurturing collective memory as distinct, bracketing my mother’s question while studying the development of the democratic opposition (my little contribution), all help to reproduce the code.

Two components of democratization of the Polish Jewish question must confront each other.  The post communist inclusion of anti-Semitism into Polish political life, as the conviction of a portion of the population, must be subjected to open and forceful democratic critique and democratic persuasion, with an honest appreciation of the dimensions of the appeal of anti-Semitism.  The outcome is not a foregone conclusion.  The positive result would mean that the symbol of the Jew would come to be less important in Polish political culture, and anti-Semitism won’t be continually reproduced.  I sincerely hope that some day it will be possible, indeed normal, to be a Polish patriot or a Polish liberal without using the symbol of the Jew.  The pious patriotic Catholic would enact patriotism and religiosity without reference to Jews.  And Polish liberals also would be able to reveal their positions on all other issues without Jews somehow playing a central symbolic role in constituting their identity.

I enjoy reading Adam Michnik on such things.  He moves the Polish audience away from the clear categories, as he challenges the Jewish audience abroad.  His mixed up identity, self identified as a Pole primarily, Jewish secondarily, identified by others, not so gallantly, as a Jew, lends a special quality to his observations on the debate.  In the U.S., he had a notable exchange with Leon Wieseltier, the book review editor of The New Republic. I was very much in Adam’s corner, but there was something to Wieseltier’s critical thrust.  There is something overly exquisite about the opening of the debate about Jedwabne in the elite media of your country and mine.  History is corrected.  Public discourse is enriched and is much wiser.  But something is missing.

As Karolina Smagalska has observed, common sense, in the understanding of Clifford Geertz, for far too many people, has not been subverted – that anti Semitic common sense that has a long and deep tradition in Poland and in Europe. Somehow the democratic public discussion has not undermined the anti-Semitic common sense, the cultural code that could either act on its own, or be incited by the Nazis in Jedwabne, that was manipulated by the Communist party or was the work of indigenous Kielce locals.  The communist period helped fortify this common sense with its cynical use of anti-Semitic sentiment, and its ideological ignorance of the Holocaust.  It is the common sense of every day practices that has deep and enduring effects.  It comes in relatively benign forms.  One can “Jew down” people after all without being directly implicated in the Holocaust.  But if you do “Jew people down” in your daily life, if you are without awareness that Jews perhaps didn’t have it so great here, you cannot yourself be free, let alone understand history and constitute a collective memory that supports democracy and decency.

Now my final words, concerning my continuing project of answering my mother’s question.  I confirm the truth of what I had assumed as a young man.  Simplistic unitary characterizations of a people or a culture are not acceptable. Human groupings are too heterogeneous.  And in the case of Poland, the heterogeneity is not just accidental.  Along with the tragic history of my people on these grounds, there are broad humane currents in the culture, recently epitomized by the work of Jan Gross and the many people who have informed his work and have been informed by it, and those who add insights beyond it.  The fresh attempts to address the problem is what I choose to focus on, the work of honorable Poles seeking alternatives in the details of their interactions, what I now call the politics of small things.  And so focused, I recognize that the alternative project is incomplete.

This is my third “Why Poland?” post. In the first, I addressed the question as it was posed by my mother most directly. I reflected upon my experience as a Jew in communist Poland in the seventies, as I observed the official anti-Semitism and the official silence about the experience of my ancestors in that land. In the second post, I consider how that silence made it difficult for people, Poles and Jews, of good will to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and how they somehow managed to join together, even as their collective memories in significant ways did not overlap. Here, I report and reflect on a debate in Poland which confronted the gaps in collective memory, a debate stimulated by the publication of a book, Jan Gross’s Neighbors, which tells the story of Polish Catholics killing Polish Jews, their neighbors, in the small town of Jedwabne during the war.

The book sparked a ferocious debate in Poland: denounced by extreme nationalists, but also the leader of the Polish Catholic Church, Cardinal Glemp, and many scholars and public figures. On the other hand, the book had many appreciative readers including citizens,officials, scholars, intellectuals and Church leaders. My report on the debate speaks for itself. My conclusion is that the debate has been difficult, but indicates that at long last there is responsible collective memory about the Shoah in Poland, which is a very positive sign, even as it reveals very negative attitudes and beliefs.

The first two parts of my “Why Poland?” reflections were written in the mid nineties, soon after the Auschwitz ceremony. This last part was added as I presented my thoughts to an audience in Lublin in 2007. I post here my address, with a few minor edits, that I presented in Lublin.

I worried about the reaction of my audience to the very critical things I had to say. I wondered if I would be taken to be too critical of the church or of Poland, or too soft. I struggled to get my tone exactly right, wanting to advance discussion not silence it. What surprised me was the relative calm of the response. I was asked one or two interesting questions, notes of appreciation were offered, but the talk did not generate much heat. I was particularly surprised and concerned that for the young people in the audience the talk seemed not to be of any special concern. It was almost as if I were talking to a group of German young people who have been through intensive instruction about the Holocaust for sixty years. But the Poles, like others in post- Communist  Europe haven’t had such instruction. Thus, I do have a concern that there is a kind of premature Holocaust fatigue, enabling  the rise of a rabid anti-Semitism, as can be observed in Hungary today.

To read “Why Poland? Part 3: Thinking about Jedwabne, Addressing Premature Holocaust Fatigue,” click here.