Why Poland? Part 2: Commemorating Auschwitz

The anger and recrim­ina­tions between Poles and Jews in the days leading up to the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz threat­ened to over­shadow their shared commemora­tion of their common suffer­ing.  Fundamental­ly conflicting memories led to offense and fed hatreds.  For the Jews, the meaning of Auschwitz is summa­rized by the notion of the Holo­caust, the Shoah.  It is the symbol of the project of Jewish annihilation.  While it is clear that people of a vast array of ethnic, cultural, sexual, national and reli­gious back­grounds suffered in Auschwitz, the Jewish suffering has special signifi­cance.  The death camps were con­structed to exterminate Jews.  This was the culmination of Jewish persecution in Christian Europe.

Poles, that is, Polish Catho­lics, see things differ­ent­ly.  Nearly twenty percent of the Polish population died during the war.  Seventy five thou­sand Polish (Catholic) lives were lost in Auschwitz; a high per­cent­age of the survi­ving inmates of the camp were Polish.  The memory of Polish losses is one of close experi­ence.  From the Polish point of view, the inter­na­tion­al commun­ity has failed to recog­nize the depth and exten­sive­ness of Polish suffer­ing.  For Jews and for many others in the West, the immensity of the Nazi crimes has been summarized by the figure six million, six million Jews from throughout Europe consumed by the Nazi death machine. In Poland, the number has been remembered in a different way: six million Poles killed during the war (half of whom were Jewish, but this conventionally is not noted).

It was with this background that the fiftieth anniver­sary of the liberation was marked.  Many Jewish organi­zations and individuals found the Polish plans for the ceremony wanting, and many Poles viewed their objections with suspicion. The World Jewish Con­gress threat­ened to boycott the commemoration entirely.  In its judgment, the Polish authorities were trying to trans­form the ceremo­nies into a Polish event.  At times, the rhetorical con­flict over the planning of the event became very tough.  Michel Fried­man, a leading Jewish spokes­man and member of the German Chris­tian Democratic Party, complained that equal represen­tation of Polish Christian and Jewish victims presented a gross misrepre­senta­tion of history.  He declared: “If I recall the history precise­ly, I have to say that the murderers there were mostly of the Christian religion.”  Friedman, whose parents were saved by Oskar Schindler, believed that the Polish Catholic Church is still anti-Semitic.  He went on to point out: “The people in charge must realize that the world is watch­ing to see that the message of this memorial day is histori­cally cor­rect.”

But historical correctness is very much in the eyes of the beholder.  According to some reports, Polish Cathol­ics were criti­cal of the rest of the world for its tendency to “Juda­ize” Ausch­witz. The equa­tion of the Polish nation with that of the German nation was simply not acceptable in Poland, too many Poles suffered too much under German occupa­tion.  Thus, the Polish Catho­lic Bishops refused to join their German col­leagues in a joint proclamation concern­ing Catholic responsi­bility for the Holocaust because it “could be per­ceived as a joint admis­sion of guilt for the Holo­caust.” In this refusal, they raised questions about their resoluteness against antisemitism.  They choose not to be associated with “the most radical self-criticism from an institu­tion of the church,” as the Italian newspaper Il Messagero put it. But from the Polish Bishops point of view, it was perfectly clear that an equation of German and Polish responsibility is absolutely unacceptable.  This confrontation is especially poignant after the Jedwabne revelations, which I will examine in my next and last “Why Poland?” post.

In the end, a sort of symbolically acceptable resolution of the controversy was attained, despite mutual recriminations and suspi­cions.  Even the inelegance of the commemorations and the events leading up to them seemed fitting.  The two parties, the Poles and the Jews, with the world press observing, tried to accommodate each other, while they remained true to their memo­ries.  They each knew that the enormity of the event being commemorated demanded that the memory disputes had to be re­solved.  They accomplished this by holding three distinct ceremo­nial events: one on Thursday January 26, 1995, in Krakow at Ja­giellonian University, the second, an improvised special Jewish ceremony at the Birk­enau death camp, on the 26th, during a break in the official ceremonies, and the third, the main official ceremony on the 27th.

In the ceremony at Jagiellonian, where one hundred eighty three Professors were once rounded up and deported, Lech Walesa emphasized the enormity of Polish suffering.  He remem­bered that the Nazis set out to destroy Poland’s “intellectual and spiritual strength,” but he did not mention at all Jewish suffering.  A distinctly Polish form of remembrance dominated.

The separate Jewish religious ceremony was organized by the European Jewish Congress.  No Polish officials attended.  The only government figure there was the German President, Roman Herzog.  The Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was recited.  The members of the media outnumbered the participants, since the Polish government made no special effort to inform survivors about the ceremonies.  To underscore Jewish suffering, Wiesel opened his remarks in Yiddish; the speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Shevah Weiss, spoke in Hebrew, and the President of the European Jewish Committee, Jean Kahn denounced in English, the “nationalistic” ceremony organized by the Polish government.

Yet, by the next day it was evident that the Jewish protests concerning the Polish plans for the commemoration did result in changes in the ceremonies.  President Walesa did note in his opening remarks on Friday the special suffering of Jews and Gypsies, and Poles: Ausch­witz “stands for the suffering of many nations, especially the Jewish nation.” “Whole nations, the Jews and the Gypsies, were sup­posed to be exterminated here together with others – above all, us Poles.”  Elie Wiesel clarified Walesa’s statement: “It is true that not all victims were Jews.  But all Jews were victims.” One Polish survivor observed, as if answering Wiesel: “Most people who died were Jews.  But most people who lived in the barracks [as camp inmates] were Poles.” Walesa was criticized for not specifically mentioning Jewish suffering in his Thursday address, but in two separate addresses on Friday, he included such specific references.

Each side was true to its memories, but in the end accommo­dated to the memories of the other.  The problems between Jews and Poles were not overcome, but those problems were put aside as best as they could be without compromising the integrity of the competing memory sets of each group.

I observed these ceremonies with ambivalence.  On the one hand, I felt relieved that problems that bothered me on my initial stay in Poland, when I visited the Auschwitz Museum and Jews were not recognized as victims, were finally out in the open.  On the other hand, I believed that fundamental misunderstandings were being perpetuated, and knew that addressing these would not be easy.

Democratic Poland has an obligation: to confront the past in a way that is qualitatively different from communist accounts of history.  On the face of it, the obligation is rela­tively simple.  While the Communists told lies and dis­pensed propa­ganda, democrats should truthfully consider histo­ry.  Yet, the realiza­tion of this obligation is no easy matter.  Collective memory after the totalitarian experience is a troubled and troubling enterprise. Like the envi­ron­men­tal pollu­tion left behind from the great socialist industrial dinosaurs, the totali­tarian control of cultural life has had lasting effects that are not easily remedied.  This is an overlooked obstacle in remembering Ausch­witz, not appreciated by outside observers, as well as actors on the inside.

Until 1989, the remembrance of things Jewish in Poland was framed by official public institutions of the Party-state, by the Catholic Church and its lay institutions, and by the movements and institutions of the opposition.  As was the general rule, the Party-state domi­nat­ed and the society responded.  Jewish issues were not, of course, a pressing or a major problem.  But they did have a way of coming up at the center of major political confrontations, often without Jews being much in­volved.  The Jews who were very visible in the first communist governments, perhaps at the instigation of Stalin, became for the Polish anti-Semites the symbols of Stalinism.  This identification was used by the nationalist Party faction.  But once this faction employed the old xenophobic formula to attempt to gain power in a wave of repression in 1968, opposition to antisemitism took on a new importance.  It was not only a way to assert good liberal creden­tials, indicating commitment to modern western values.  It was a way to fight against the Party.  This worked until the Party itself, after martial law, started to use a respectful memory of the Jewish presence in Poland’s past to gain legitimacy in western eyes.  Then for the first time since the immedi­ate post-war period, Polish-Jewish relations were opened to critical public examination.  Although this examination was still dis­torted by censorship and the limitations of Communist control of most forms of public communi­cation and debate, it marked a change in the form and content of collective memory.  Things could be discussed openly that could not be discussed previously and the way they could be discussed was fundamentally changed.  Such changes, of course, escalated after the fall of communism.

The public discussion had then, and until quite recently continued to have, an odd abstract quality.  It was as much shaped by post-war Polish politics, i.e., in the absence of Jews and after the Holocaust, as it was shaped by evidence of Polish – Jewish interactions before and during the war.  The great theorist of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs would have understood, as would have Pierre Nora. The questions raised were broad and theoretical, and were more shaped by myths than by historical investigations.  They were instigat­ed by the passing of commemorative dates, such as the commemora­tion of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or inter­na­tion­al cultural events, such as the release of the Claude Lanzman’s film, Shoah, than by a system­at­ic con­fron­ta­tion with the trou­bled rela­tions between two peoples.  Were the Poles victims like the Jews or victim­iz­ers of the Jews?  Should the Poles apologize for their behavior during the war, as many stood by with approval or mute accep­tance as the Holocaust was perpetrated in their backyards, or even took part in genocidal actions?  While a few courageous Poles frankly explored the degree of Polish responsi­bility, loud outcries of protest denounced such explora­tions as betrayals of the national honor.  Journals in which such discus­sion was opened were besieged with anti-Semitic condemna­tions from their readers.  Memories and beliefs privatized for a half century were given public expression.  Public memory was opened; the time of an easy collective memory was over, thus the controversies over commemoration of Auschwitz.  And something even more difficult was yet to be confronted: a troubled history with significant dark unacknowledged corners.  While collective memory may serve the interests of the present, as Halbwach’s theorized, there is a way that historical investigation, and concrete evidence from the past, such as the evidence brought forward by Jan Gross, in his book Neighbors, can challenge and change those very interests. In an upcoming post I will report on these controversies and reflect on their meanings, and also try to explain what I see in the much of Central Europe, premature Holocaust fatigue.