Life has risen from the ashes

ALMOST SEVENTY years ago today, Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers of the Red Army’s First Ukrainian Front. If the Red Army’s advancement meant freedom to Auschwitz-Birkenau inmates, to post-war Poland it meant subjugation to the Communist regime and political occupation by the Soviet Union.

Under Communist rule, there was no room for diversity or minority narratives. You were either part of the mainstream discourse (the only one allowed) or you did not exist in public life. The totalitarian state produced its totalitarian truth and totalitarian history. Postwar Poland mourned the death of six million of its citizens without differentiating between ethnicity and faith of the victims, and the exceptionalism of the Holocaust was downplayed by the Communist regime. As British historian and film-maker Laurence Rees underlines, the Soviets were not interested in focusing on the losses of the Jewish people. Thus, when the former camp of AuschwitzBirkenau was declared a state museum by the Polish Communist parliament in 1947, the Jews were not suitably commemorated.

The trauma of the Holocaust had been repressed but it did not disappear. In the 1980s, the question of the Holocaust surfaced in public debate. After 1989, Poles confronted aspects of the Second World War that had been previously neglected, including the Shoah. Polish society started discovering not only the heroic stories of Poles who bravely risked their lives to rescue Jewish friends, but also painful truths about ruthless criminals taking advantage of the tragic situation of the Jews.

The tragedy of the Holocaust is so unimaginable that, to this day, some people ask: how can Jews still live in a place where the Holocaust happened? But the Jewish community in Poland is thriving and developing — in spite of pessimists, history, and demography. Jewish life in Poland has been reborn like a phoenix rising from the ashes, though it will never resemble what it used to be before the war. There are Jewish schools, JCCs, mikvaot, more than a dozen Jewish culture festivals, and more than a dozen rabbis. Polish Jews form a real community, several thousand strong. There is also the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews whose core exhibition opened last October in Warsaw. Its creators label it a “museum of life”. The life that flourished before the Holocaust, the life that now proudly continues, reborn. Am Yehudi chai! The writer is Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to the UK