A Millennium of Jews in Poland: Matthew Kaminski….see note please
http://online.wsj.com/articles/matthew-kaminski-a-millennium-of-jews-in-poland-1414451916
My family was from Poland and I speak Polish rather fluently…..Calling the relationship “desperately complicated” is putting lipstick on a pig. It is a dreadful history of Polish complicity in the murder of two thirds of world Jewry. But, and here is a big but….Polish youth is astonishing….having overthrown the shackles of Communism they revel in capitalist freedom; while they eschew too much talk about their role in the Holocaust, it is amazing how many boast of having had a Jew in the family- many going as far as wearing Jewish stars; they respect and admire Israel; some even bemoan the “Jewish brain drain” that has left Poland without great advances in science, medicine and technology
Capturing a ‘desperately complicated’ history in a new museum, one that is also a warning to Europe.
Warsaw
The translucent green building lights up the working-class neighborhood of Muranów. Its glass exterior reflects the trees from a park and shabby Communist-era apartment blocks nearby. A memorial to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising stands outside. The architectural boldness of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews is matched by its intentions.
The opening of the museum’s core exhibition on Tuesday, coming 10 days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a fitting tribute to the possibilities of freedom in Europe.
What is most remarkable is that this institution ever came to be. To utter the phrase “Polish-Jewish relations” is a provocation. Poland is the world’s largest Jewish graveyard. Before Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust mostly on its soil, for half a millennium Poland was Europe’s largest Jewish sanctuary. Four in five American Jews and nine in 14 world-wide trace their roots back to Poland. Everything else is debatable, and these debates inevitably bring out the passions and misunderstandings of the worst family quarrels.
This past is intimate, hard and long. After the war, Catholic Poles stood accused of collective racism, passively standing by to Hitler’s genocide—“every Pole sucked anti-Semitism with his mother’s milk,” as former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir put it. Poles, in their turn, were defensive about the reality of anti-Semitism in their country and clumsy or ill-informed about the other reality of centuries of coexistence with Jews. It was the Poles alone who armed the Jewish underground during the war and did more than any other nation in Europe to try to save European Jewry. Historian Marci Shore calls it all “desperately complicated.”
The Cold War made an honest conversation impossible. Its end opened the gates. Historian Jan T. Gross ’s controversial 2001 book “Neighbors,” about a 1941 massacre in Jedwabne, forced into the open the matter of Polish civilians’ violence against Jews during and after the war. Several films, including this year’s critically well-received “ Ida, ” have tried to capture the complexities of the wartime history. An annual cultural festival in Cracow revived interest in Jewish music and arts. A democratic and thriving Poland found the confidence and voice for this overdue debate.
The idea for a major museum was proposed almost two decades ago by a couple of Polish Jews in Warsaw. In a breakthrough a decade ago, the leader of Poland’s leading right-wing party, one associated with Catholic nationalism (and, to some, with anti-Semitism), backed it. The state provided the land and paid for the stunning modernist building. A couple of Polish-Jewish exiles in America and a Catholic industrialist in Poland led the fundraising drive to pay for the permanent exhibit. It was hard. American Jews were reluctant to support such a project in Poland, still viewed with suspicion.
The chief curator of the museum—and, as a consequence, of Poland’s Jewish heritage—is Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. She is a renowned ethnographer at New York University, born to Jewish parents who left Poland before the war. “It’s bad enough that we lost three million Polish Jews and another three million European Jews,” she told me the first time I met her in Warsaw, in late 2012. “That’s devastating. But we also lost the memory of their world.”
The museum seeks to reclaim a past overshadowed by the Holocaust. The core exhibit offers a varied journey across a thousand years. You begin with Jewish traders coming to Poland in the 11th century. Tolerant and liberal for its day, it was the most welcoming place in Europe.
Communism and Zionism arrive in the 19th century, along with pogroms. Some Jews assimilate, others leave. The centrality of Jews to Polish cultural and economic life is impossible to miss. Jews were a third of Poland’s urban population and a majority in cities like Białystok. As equally clear here, there’s no Jewish history without Poland.
Of the 3.5 million Jews in Poland in 1939, one-tenth survived the Holocaust. But the story doesn’t end there. You hear about Jewish Stalinists who purged Polish nationalists, and Polish Communists who forced some 13,000 Jews into exile in 1968. The Polish leader Władysław Gomułka who railed against this Jewish “fifth column”—a video of his speech plays in a loop—as it happens was married into a Hasidic Jewish family.
The exhibit will be criticized for devoting too little space to this or too much to that. It’s worthy of this debate. But one point is unarguable: The museum shows how Jews once thrived here and how fragile that existence turned out to be. It is an implicit warning about the danger of the anti-Semitism re-emerging elsewhere in Europe.
Polish-Jewish relations haven’t been as good since well before the war. This is one fruit of the emerging clarity about their shared past. A Jewish revival in Poland may always be limited, but there’s now a clear strain of philo-Semitism in this country. In Israel, Jews with Polish heritage are lining up to claim Polish citizenship, which now usefully confers a European Union passport. No one could have imagined any of this 25 years ago.
Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
Comments are closed.
