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The newest Jewish commemorative institution scheduled to open in Europe this year is The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, built on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto According to Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, the director of its Core Exhibition, the museum will honor the memory of those killed during the holocaust and other pogroms by remembering how Jews lived in Poland for 1,000 years. The governments of Warsaw and Poland have contributed much of the funding for this venture but Jewish philanthropists have given many millions of dollars to this 200 million dollar project and luminaries such as Elie Wiesel have affirmed its importance as an exposition of the full and varied lives lived by Polish Jews throughout the centuries.
For most people, Poland remains the primal scene of the extermination of Europe’s Jews. The word Auschwitz alone is emblematic of all Nazi death camps and the ready cooperation of Polish citizens with the Nazis in the goal of ridding their own country of Jews has been well and often documented. At the beginning of World War 11, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, over 3 million people, 90% of whom were slaughtered during the war. For the remaining stragglers who made it back to their hometowns, there were incidents such as the pogrom in Kielce in which 80 Jews were killed and more than 50 wounded, and later government sponsored anti-semitic incidents in 1956 and 1968. The extermination of 6 million European Jews, half of whom were Polish, did little to abate the long-standing anti-semitism of the Polish people. After the war, 1,000 delegates of the Polish Peasants Party passed a resolution thanking Hitler for annihilating the Jews and urging the expulsion of those who had survived.
