The matter of Poland
Concerning the controversy over Polish behavior toward the country’s Jewish population at the time of the Nazi occupation, it is important to remember who was the hunter and who was the hunted. The hunter was Nazi Germany. The hunted were obviously the Jews, but also the Poles who resisted Nazi orders.
The following true story, which happened to me in Krakow in 1998, will indicate how it is virtually impossible to point a finger at who is right and who is wrong.
I was standing outside Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, where I was attending an academic conference. A list of attendees included my name and the fact that I was from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was still a time when very few Israelis (or Jews) were traveling to Poland.
An elderly and apparently impoverished Polish woman identified me. She came up to me and told me that she wanted payment for a sack of flour that a Jewish woman had grabbed from her in 1943. Apparently, the Jewish woman, holding a child with one hand, had grabbed the entire sack although the Polish woman had only intended to give her one cup, and apparently the Polish woman was still carrying around her grievance.
I paid her what she asked for in dollars and so put paid to the whole situation – that of the Jewish woman desperate for food for herself and her starving child, and that of a Polish woman who, 55 years after the event, still felt cheated.
None of us know what happened to that Jewish woman and her child. What I do know is that it is time to stop all the recriminations and self-righteousness, for indeed, when human behavior is weighed on the scales of justice, we are all found wanting. LILY POLLIACK Jerusalem
Poland’s welcome to Jews by kings and nobles over many centuries was important in giving the country the largest Jewish population in Europe.
The cause of antisemitism in Poland was the work of two forces: the Catholic Church after the Reformation, when all non-Catholics were attacked, and the rise of integral nationalism in the late-19th century, an early midwife of fascism.
When my grandmother, my father and his brother left Polesie, a region then in eastern Poland under the new Second Republic, and now in Belarus, in 1922, they found the newly arrived Polish troops very antisemitic, more so than those of the tsarist regime, and certainly more so than the occupying Germans, who were very friendly toward the Jews. My grandmother threw the key to her home into the bushes so that the Polish troops could not find it.
The Poles at this time were very hostile toward any group – Jews, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Ukrainians or Germans – they felt weakened the new Polish national state. This attitude was never modified, not during the period after the death of Marshal Pilsudski, who was friendly toward minority groups living in the Polish Commonwealth for centuries, nor during the rule of the colonels, the German occupation or ever since.
No country in Europe – not even Ukraine, with its history of fierce antisemitism – has as bad a record as Poland over the last 100 years. I think it could be hopeless to think anything will change there for the better. NORMAN RAVITCH Savannah, Georgia The writer is an emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.