By Anna Lisa Tota, September 10th, 2012 
There are stories that must be told. These are stories which change the world: they have the rare and precious power to change the lives of those who tell them and those who listen to them. The stories of Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca are magical in this regard. They sound like fairy tales in their beauty, although they are true. What they have in common is their power to recount the choices and actions of a woman and a man who consciously chose to put their creative intelligence into action to the service of destiny. They decided to make up an entirely new destiny, saving the lives of thousands of Polish children and Hungarian families during one of the darkest times of European history. They show us that, when creativity bonds with fate, unthinkable things happen: the order of the real world opens up to a higher spiritual space where the impossible meets the possible.
The stories of Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca are similar to that of Oskar Schindler: they must be recounted because they radically change our representation of the Holocaust. They help us remember that, even when the “utmost evil” seems to prevail, humane possibilities virtually bloom at the same time, such are the cases of this beautiful young Polish woman and this Italian diplomat who choose to transform himself into a fake Spanish consul in Budapest in 1944.
Irena was born in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland. When World War II broke out in 1939, she worked in social services. She worked to protect her Jewish friends in Warsaw from the very beginning. In 1940, the Ghetto was erected and Irena began to walk into it with various excuses: including inspections to check out potential typhoid fever symptoms and water pipes checks. The excuses varied, but not her actual intent: Irena moved dozens of children of all ages out of the Ghetto, sparing them from certain death. She hid newborns in trucks’ boxes and older kids into iuta bags. She trained her dog to . . .
Read more: Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca: Saving 2500 Children and Thousands of Families from the Holocaust
By Malgorzata Bakalarz, July 9th, 2012 
In this post Malgorzata Bakalarz deliberately responds to my posts on Polish Jewish relations from the point of view of a young Polish scholar studying in New York. I deeply appreciate her update. Jeff
At the end of his text “Why Poland?” Jeff recalls the exchange between Adam Michnik and Leon Wieseltier about Polish-Jewish relations and the public discussion about Jedwabne pogrom. He makes a statement that could become a title of a new book on Polish-Jewish relations (or, perhaps, on Polish-Polish relations). He summarizes the exchange, acknowledging the importance of the Jedwabne discussion and concludes: “but something is missing.”
Something, indeed, was missing, and that was patience and sympathy.
The debate around Jedwabne, although groundbreaking and influential, was still in most cases elitist and center-oriented. Observing it, I was under the impression that default ways of framing the Jedwabne discussion were established very early on, and it was somehow impossible to contribute outside of them. And the situation was extremely sensitive: content-wise, it was urging Poles to embrace their difficult past, to admit it’s not exclusively heroic character, when there was still a largely unsatisfied need for the public acknowledgment of the Polish suffering: from the Soviet system, from the WWII, from the 19-century partitions.
“Formally,” the official narratives about Jedwabne ignored familiar Roman Catholic rhetoric, known and trusted as the “language of truth.” Dry, factual descriptions of the event, and the discussions about it, left no room for dramatic, stilted (but familiar), ceremonial, timeless narrative, which had been framing anti-communist discourse for so many years.
The legacy of Communist “parallel realities,” with corrupted and not trusted public discourse confronted with the private, (mainly) Roman-Catholic, reliable one, made this “linguistic estrangement” of Jedwabne debate an important issue. It contributed to the fact that many dismissed the debate altogether: unacceptable content confirmed by unacceptable “official” (read: not ours) language.
Not enough time was spent to translate and make available the discourse about complex Polish-Jewish past, and, in particular, about complex Polish war history. Not enough time was spent to listen to the voice of people from the outside . . .
Read more: Why Poland? 3.5, Confronting a Difficult Past
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 27th, 2012 The publication of Jan Gross’s Neighbors fundamentally challenged common sense understandings of Poles and Jews in Poland, as the world watched on. Gross described what happened in a remote town in Eastern. “[O]ne day, in July 1941, half the population of a small East European town murdered the other half – some 1,600 men, women and children.” He reported in the introduction of his book that it took him four years between the time he first read the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn describing the atrocities of Jedwabne, and when he really understood what happened. He read the description but was not able to process its implications. And as I observe the debate over Jedwabne, it seems to me that many people still have not been able to process the implications. Here I reflect on the meanings of the debate for better and for worse.
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 19th 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 . . .
Read more: Why Poland? Part 3: Thinking about Jedwabne, Addressing Premature Holocaust Fatigue
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 27th, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth Analysis of “Why Poland? Part 3,” click here.
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 . . .
Read more: Why Poland? Part 3: Thinking about Jedwabne, Addressing Premature Holocaust Fatigue (Introduction)
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