Confronting the past: Poland grapples with its lost Jews

Exploring Poland's relationship with the Holocaust.

By SAM SOKOL
Rabbi Michael Schudrich (photo credit: REUTERS)
Rabbi Michael Schudrich
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Standing outside of the journalists’ tent in the parking lot of Auschwitz, shivering in the biting cold and snow, I turned to the correspondent standing next to me smoking a cigarette.
 
“It’s ridiculous that they won’t let us in,” I remarked bitterly. “I should be inside right now.”
 
“I know,” he replied in a thick accent, leaving me feeling somewhat chagrined that I had just complained to someone who I now knew to be German that I could not enter the infamous camp.
 
In Poland for the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the death factory in which so many members of my grandparents’ extended families and communities perished, I was resentful that members of the press had been relegated to a giant tent outside, unable to see the ceremony within the second tent enclosing the gateway through which trains full of victims had once entered Auschwitz and which now housed row upon row of dignitaries and survivors.
 
The Jewish grandson of survivors, I seethed that on my first trip to Auschwitz I was barred from entering by Polish authorities who had managed to alienate German, Polish and Jewish journalists alike.
 
During the ceremony, the Polish President began discussing the suffering of the Poles, in addition to the travails of the Jews, at the camp, which felt like a further betrayal by a government many of whose citizens had been complicit in the murder of my people and which had now barred me from entrance to the largest Jewish graveyard in the world.
 
The day before, I had entered a shop selling tchotchkes for souvenirs to check out the famed Jew dolls of Poland for myself. This was something else that enraged me, although I must admit a certain humorous aspect to the entire matter.
 
I had seen an article on Vice detailing the history of these good luck charms which many Poles believe bring good luck and financial success and was curious to see them for myself.
 
Wandering into the store I found row upon row of little figurines of Jews, portly and short, tall and lanky, but all sporting side-curls and long beards. Many of them held shiny coins in their small, sculpted hands.
 
“Do you really believe that these things bring good luck,” I asked the shopkeeper as she rung me up.
 
She responded noncommittally.
 
“Not all Jews are good with money,” I persevered.
 
“I know,” she replied.
 
“If I come back in a month and I’m not rich do I get a refund,” I queried, eliciting a laugh.
 
Walking down the cobblestoned streets of the picturesque European city, I came upon an outdoor art gallery set against a tall stone wall. Paintings of horses, nude women in repose and hasidic Jews counting money were incongruously juxtaposed against the hewn rock.
 
Examining the paintings of Jews I was captivated by the amount of effort put into producing works that would have been considered the most gauche and unacceptable pieces imaginable in my native New York.
 
If such canvases were on offer in the bohemian galleries of lower Manhattan the Anti-Defamation League would be all over the case in no time flat.
 
In one painting, a bearded elderly Jew, regal in a black hat and frock coat, looks over the tops of his spectacles at a gold coin that he is clutching in one hand. He raises an eyebrow and stares outward, as if to share a private joke with whoever is viewing the canvas on which he has been depicted.
 
As I am frequently forced to deal with issues of anti-Semitism due to my position as the Jerusalem Post’s Jewish World Correspondent, I decided to purchase one of the paintings to hang in my office, a reminder of the resurgence of European Jew hatred.
 
Anti-Semitism in Poland, however, is very different from anti-Semitism in other countries and the issues that seemed so simple to me in my rage upon the blood soaked soil of Poland, was somewhat defused when I returned to Israel and was able to contextualize what I had seen.
 
To find out more about the figurines and paintings I turned to Dr. Erica Lehrer of the Departments of History & Sociology at Concordia University.
 
What I had originally taken at face value as anti-Semitic may really have a broad range of explanations, Lehrer explained.
 
“The paintings and the figurines holding money represent the meeting of a number of themes,” she wrote me in an email exchange.
 
“First, there is a general ignorance of or insensitivity to the historical use of stereotype of the rich Jew as anti-Semitic propaganda. And there is a great deal of mythology about Jews as good with money. Of course there is historical truth that Jews formed a merchant class in Poland, as opposed to Catholic Poles who were largely peasants. But reducing Jews to this one image, and suggesting that Jewish connection to a money economy means they are generally rich, is a very selective and distorted picture.”
 
That being said, she continued, “the pictures and the figurines themselves offer a range of depictions. Some of them may look particularly caricatured, ugly, or greedy, others are simply nostalgic simplifications, and link into literary images of a rosy, uncomplicated past.”
 
Some Polish scholars, she recalled, have theorized that “Jews are becoming a positive symbol of wealth, a patron saint of Polish capitalism, or that these talismans – which are treated as good luck charms – are an expression of repressed trauma about the Jews murdered during the Holocaust, in which Poles had an ambivalent role.”
 
All of these theories are worth considering, she asserted, “along with more general magical thinking that accompanies existential anxiety” which has made Jews into a “Polish version of the rabbit’s foot.”
 
Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the American-born Chief Rabbi of Poland, sees both the paintings and the figurines as something that needs to be combated but was also somewhat ambivalent regarding the intent behind them.
 
“The old folklore is that we poles are not very good at making money but Jews are better at commerce therefore if you have a painting of a Jew counting money in your house it will  bring you good luck. Now is that anti-Semitic or is that anti-Polish,” he asked.
 
In any case, it is “obnoxious and it lacks in sensitivity,” he continued, saying that the use of such images must be combated.
 
However, given the progress that Poles have made in confronting their pasts since the fall of communism, there is hope of eradicating the use of such imagery, he intimated.
 
“When I grew up on long island forty fifty years ago it was absolutely normal to have on the lawn a little black guying holding a lantern,” he recalled.
 
“Certainly fifty years ago it was normal. Forty years ago it was getting less normal. But people said wait a second that’s insulting to African Americans. People for decades didn’t see it. They just thought it was funny. That doesn’t make it right but there had to be, and this is my key point, there had to be a process by which white americans could understand that what they were doing was hurtful and wrong to their african american co-citizens. And that took a process.”
 
“Poland is going through that process. After fifty years of double occupation of nazis and communists, for twenty five years they now on their own and they are going through a process. It is our responsibility to help them further in the process. There is an openness among many people to make a change. Not everyone. There is certainly a percentage that wants to remain xenophobic and closed. But lets work on the rest of the country that is open and still may have stereotypes and they still may be doing obnoxious hurtful things like little statues counting money. Lets work with them so they could understand what they are doing is wrong to us.”
 
Dr. Laurence Weinbaum is the director of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, which operates under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress. He is also a scholar specializing in contemporary Polish-Jewish history and lived and studied in Poland in the 1980s.
 
“Today Auschwitz is understood in a very different light than it was many years ago, particularly during the communist period when the history of the camp was distorted, and what we could call  ‘the narrative’ was used in an instrumental way to advance the Polish communist political agenda. At that time, Auschwitz was exploited as a symbol of Polish wartime suffering, which meant a priori deemphasizing the Jewish identity of the victims. Auschwitz was portrayed as a place of Polish martyrdom, though 90% of those who were murdered there were Jews. Jewish victims from various parts of Europe were presented as Greeks, Hungarians, French, and Czechoslovaks, ” Weinbaum told me during a chat in his office in downtown Jerusalem.
 
“Poland in 2015 is a very different place than it was during communist times, and that has to be taken into consideration.”
 
It is impossible to state what the Polish opinion on the Jews is today; Poland is a  country with a multiplicity of views. However, it must be recognized that  “Fearless Polish scholars are today confronting history in a way that would have been completely unthinkable thirty years ago. To their great credit, they are not recoiling from research on the most sinister chapters in Polish wartime history,” he said. “What they are doing does not have a parallel in any post-communist country in Europe.”
 
When I mentioned that I had been offended at what felt to me like a comparison of Jewish and Polish suffering at Auschwitz, Weinbaum explained that it was important to understand that the President had also been speaking to an internal, domestic audience. “There are political considerations there and had he not stressed the fact that tens of thousands of Poles lost their lives in Auschwitz and that Auschwitz was established, at least initially, as a place to which Polish political prisoners were sent, he would have had to face an angry audience at home. In some Polish quarters, Auschwitz remains a symbol of Polish suffering.. But I would invite you to compare the way this ceremony took place and where the emphasis was, with how such commemorations had been held in the ‘60s, when there was no mention at all of Jews.”
 
When asked about anti-Semitism, he replied that in his view, “the emergence of an energetic Jewish community in Poland notwithstanding, the issue is more about dead Jews than live ones, because what you see at play in Poland is really a struggle for the place of Jews and Poles in their common history, and how that history will be written.”
 
What we see today in contemporary Poland is a “sea change” compared to the Soviet period when objective historical research was verboten, he explained.
 
Lehrer aired similar sentiments, adding that “the reception of this kind of work gets pushback from conservative, right-wing Poles who feel that any suggestion that Poles were anything but innocent.”
 
“Social psychology and sociology research suggests ~20% of Poles hold far-right nationalist views, including showing some kind of aversion to Jews,” she said, adding the caveat that the far right has much greater antipathies toward Roma, homosexuals, Chechyn immigrants and other minority groups.
 
More interesting than anti-Semitism, however, she averred, is “philo-Semitism.”
 
“There has been such a profound outpouring of heritage preservation projects, festivals, major museums – this deserves attention. It’s not to say it’s all to be embraced uncritically – celebration of music, dance, food, and theater is much easier than dealing with the difficult past or present (like kosher slaughter laws or property restitution). But the expansion of the idea of what Polish heritage is, is significant. More Poles now think of Jewish culture as part of their own Polish heritage. And that creates the kind of incremental shift in national identity that bodes well for pluralist democracy. The idea that “we” is a bigger category than a single ethnicity or religion.”
 
This resonated with something that Schudrich had said. According to the rabbi, he is sometimes approached by Polish people in towns where there are no Jews but cemeteries remain.
 
Some Poles have asked him how they can save “our cemetery” rather than how can we save “your cemetery,” he recalled.
 
“Non-jews also feel that the jewish cemetery is also something that belongs to them. They have a responsibility,” he said.
 
“There were more Jews in Poland [before the war] than the entire population of some European countries. They were a nation within a nation,” Weinbaum explained. “When Poles, resisting the communist narrative, began to reflect upon their history, it was understood, at least in certain quarters, that this group had been written out. Some people became curious about that void. It has been said that the Jewish population in Poland was amputated from the Polish body and that Poland is today suffering from the well-known ‘phantom-limb’ phenomenon.”
 
According to Schudrich, any progress has to be measured against \where things stood only a quarter century ago. That is the baseline.
 
“So in a sense when trying to measure what poles know today about the holocaust compared to 1989 it's only a positive picture because it couldn’t be less and second of all poles really have made an effort now that their people should know the truth.”
 
Manifestations of anti-Semitic stereotypes such as the dolls and paintings are “wrong but I don’t think you should be surprised because if you started 25 years ago it was basically only stereotypes and [given] how much has changed you have to say ‘wow things have really improved.’”
 
Trips to the death camps of Poland for Jewish youth can often create more suspicion of Poles rather than building a relationship, Lehrer said.
 
“But when individuals or small groups of Jews from abroad visit Poland and have the opportunity to make contact with Polish individuals and organizations doing work on Jewish heritage, and meet young people who are learning Hebrew and Yiddish and preserving Jewish cemeteries, it’s very inspiring. It points to possibilities for reconnecting cultural threads that were torn apart by war and trauma and silence. And it can help change views on both sides.”