If National Socialism and Communism are remembered primarily through the prism of trauma, pre-communist days or certain aspects of communism are increasingly remembered through the warm haze of nostalgia. Recalling the past through the eyes of traumatized victimhood runs the risk of projecting individual psychology onto collectivities such as nations or people. Museums that depict history though the eyes of victimhood remove historical events from time in order to focus on traumatic moments of suffering. Likewise, monuments to national suffering, while representing key moments, tend to reduce the complexity of historical events into clear visual images that appeal to primal emotions. Recent areas of memory studies that are devoted to the importance of trauma tend to divide the world into two groups: perpetrators and victims. However, what cannot be discussed in a traumatic reading of history are the gray areas of collaboration or passivity. What happens if individuals were neither perpetrators nor victims?

Nostalgia is even more attractive than trauma because it softens time by offering a beautiful image of the past. Inscribed in heritage sites and national folklore, nostalgia offers a simple and powerful image of the nation through the eyes of culture. Clearly there are problems in reading history through the eyes of trauma, because one receives a distorted understanding of the past solely from the perspective of the victim. In a similar way, nostalgia forgets the difficulties of the past by recalling only what was pleasant and what often coincides with the youth of the one remembering.

Both trauma and nostalgia engage in what Tony Judt would call a “mis-memory.” A mis-memory is not necessarily forgetfulness, nor is it an outright lie. However, a mis-memory borders dangerously on mythology by dividing the world into occupying forces and victims, good and evil. Both trauma and nostalgia are mis-memories because they fixate on particular aspects of the past and reject anything that threatens their singular definition.

Thus, those in eastern Europe, who see the past solely through the eyes of national victimhood might view the Holocaust as a threat to a pristine understanding of their national suffering as the central trauma. Likewise, those who cling to a nostalgic view of the interwar years before Soviet occupation also engage in mis-memory because those good old years are remembered through the misty haze of nostalgia. Both trauma and nostalgia offer true, but limited readings of the past. Both fixate on myths of the past that are frozen and removed from critical analysis and the passing of time. Moreover, they are incapable of addressing the difficult moral choices that individuals had to make during National Socialism and Communism. Such moral choices do not and cannot fit into the black and white framework of traumatic victimhood or a nostalgic golden age.

Perhaps the question can be phrased in a different way: Is there a collective responsibility to remember both the crimes of communism and the Holocaust as part of a common European past? It was Hannah Arendt who first raised the question of what collective responsibility meant in her essay entitled “Collective Responsibility” published in 1968. Unlike Karl Jaspers, who argued that there are four types of guilt after National Socialism, Arendt was careful to distinguish between guilt and responsibility. As she wrote, one cannot feel guilt for something that one has not done. “There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them.” (Arendt 2003: 147) Originally written after the Eichmann trial and during the student demonstrations in West Germany and the civil rights movement in the United States, Arendt’s argument for collective responsibility is relevant for the question of a common European past. As she famously wrote: “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Guilt is personal and linked to an individual. If law and morality begin from the individual, collective responsibility is political and connected with a group. According to Arendt, if we do not want to be held collectively responsible for something, we must leave the group. But, since every person belongs to a community of some sort – national, religious, ethnic and finally the world – he will always be part of a community. In the end, the community that we cannot separate ourselves from is the world that we share. The world is far larger than a single nation or a continent – the world is everything that we share. “This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men…”

Europe is a collective body that people belong to. Given the different war and postwar experiences throughout the continent, it becomes more important to pay attention to the nuances as well as the common points of history. Attempts to read the past through the eyes of trauma or nostalgia risk flattening the complexity of history into simplistic grand narratives. Likewise, although only half of the continent shares a communist past, most of Europe shares some experience with the Holocaust. Thus, the tendency to view the Holocaust solely as a German or Jewish problem has moral, as well historical consequences. Judt’s lecture on Europe that he gave in 1995 seems just as relevant now, as it was then: “Discussion today of the prospects for Europe tends to oscillate rather loosely between Pangloss and Cassandra, between bland assurance and dire prophecy.” (Judt 2011: 12) Questions of how to present a more balanced European history that includes both the Holocaust and the crimes of communism are not only necessary from the point of historical knowledge and collective responsibility, but will also have consequences for what kind of a European future we can imagine: an open community that is hospitable to strangers and based on a broader understanding of citizenship or a provincial fortress that can only see history through the eyes of national suffering or nostalgia for a bygone age. So far Judt seems to be right. We do seem to be somewhere “rather loosely (sic) between Pangloss and Cassandra.”

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Europe has gone through unprecedented changes. Two decades later, there are still conflicting ideas about what Europe means and who belongs or should belong. Moreover, there still is a long shadow cast by the Holocaust, with distinct differences in how to live under the shadow. While there seems to be a tacit understanding in Western Europe of the importance of the Holocaust in twentieth century Europe, there is a rising focus on national suffering in many east European countries that marginalizes the European genocide. Memory and history are in tension, weakening understanding of national pasts and challenging the connection between the east and the west of Europe, weakening European unity.

In the former Soviet country of Estonia, for example, where I have lived for the past decade, the Holocaust is viewed as marginal to the central narrative of Estonian victimhood at the hands of two occupations: Nazi and Communist. There is a lack of knowledge, coupled with the sense that even if there had been Jews murdered on the territory of Estonia, Estonians had nothing to do with them. The problems of collaboration and anti-Semitism in Estonia are not generally addressed. Instead, the Holocaust is externalized, and treated as a German and Jewish issue that is foreign to Estonian national history. Tony Judt’s distinction between memory and history in his posthumous book, Thinking the Twentieth Century (written with Timothy Snyder) highlights the problem.

I profoundly believe in the difference between history and memory; to allow memory to replace history is dangerous. Whereas history of necessity takes the form of a record, endlessly rewritten and re-tested against old and new evidence, memory is keyed to public, non-scholarly purposes: a theme park, a memorial, a museum, a building, a television program, an event, a day, a flag. (Judt 2012: 277)

Judt’s point is important because when memories of certain key events are lifted out of time, they are all too easily raised to the level of myth. Particularly in narratives of national suffering, there is less room for the suffering of others. As Judt cautions: “Without history, memory is open to abuse. But if history comes first, then memory has a template and a guide against which it can work and be assessed.” (Ibid., 278)

While new monuments and museums to the crimes of National Socialism and Communism indicate a steady interest in representing the past in stone, less emphasis might be placed on the memorization and memorialization of past crimes; and more on a common understanding of the past. As it is now, in the building of monuments to the past, old patterns of intolerance and hostility are still present.

More historical research into both the crimes of Communism and the Holocaust in Europe is needed to provide a balanced understanding of what has happened on the continent since 1933. Indeed, as Tony Judt observed, in his epilogue to Postwar: “Europe might be united, but European memory remained deeply asymmetrical.” (Judt 2005: 826) Given the enormity of Europe’s past, belonging to Europe entails bearing collective responsibility for the history not only of one’s individual nation, but also for Europe as a whole.

There are stories that must be told. These are stories which change the world: they have the rare and precious power to change the lives of those who tell them and those who listen to them. The stories of Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca are magical in this regard. They sound like fairy tales in their beauty, although they are true. What they have in common is their power to recount the choices and actions of a woman and a man who consciously chose to put their creative intelligence into action to the service of destiny. They decided to make up an entirely new destiny, saving the lives of thousands of Polish children and Hungarian families during one of the darkest times of European history. They show us that, when creativity bonds with fate, unthinkable things happen: the order of the real world opens up to a higher spiritual space where the impossible meets the possible.

The stories of Irena Sendler and Giorgio Perlasca are similar to that of Oskar Schindler: they must be recounted because they radically change our representation of the Holocaust. They help us remember that, even when the “utmost evil” seems to prevail, humane possibilities virtually bloom at the same time, such are the cases of this beautiful young Polish woman and this Italian diplomat who choose to transform himself into a fake Spanish consul in Budapest in 1944.

Irena was born in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland. When World War II broke out in 1939, she worked in social services. She worked to protect her Jewish friends in Warsaw from the very beginning. In 1940, the Ghetto was erected and Irena began to walk into it with various excuses: including inspections to check out potential typhoid fever symptoms and water pipes checks. The excuses varied, but not her actual intent: Irena moved dozens of children of all ages out of the Ghetto, sparing them from certain death. She hid newborns in trucks’ boxes and older kids into iuta bags. She trained her dog to bark whenever the Germans showed up in order to cover up the cries of despair of those children who had been taken away from their parents. Irena would later explain that the true heroes were those mothers and fathers who gave her their children, sparing them from the hard life in the ghetto, hoping to reunite with them in the future. Irena succeeded in saving 2500 children.

How many journeys did she carry out to take away so many children? Not all the children were in the ghetto: many of them were residing in orphanages. Irena abducted them and gave them new identities. She brought them to families and Catholic priests. The children lived to adulthood.

Irena’s dream was to return those children to their families of origin one day. She therefore hid slips of papers with their families’ names into jam jars, and she buried them in her yard. The Gestapo caught her. She was tortured and both her arms and legs were fractured, but Irena kept her secret. She was sentenced to death, but the Polish Resistance succeeded in freeing her through the undercover organization ZEGOTA, bribing some German soldiers. At the end of the war those jars were retrieved by Irena and utilized to contact 2000 children. In most cases, their families had been exterminated.

In 1965, her name was listed at Yad Vashem among the “The Just Among Nations,” and in 1983, a tree was planted in the museum’s garden in Israel in her honor. Yet, Irena’s story had been forgotten for many years by the general public until a group of students from Kansas discovered and shared it in 1999. They founded a project to disseminate this story. “Life in a Jar” became a show, a book and a DVD. The story of this project can be found on www.irenasendler.org. In 2007, Irena was a nominee for the Peace Nobel Prize, but she couldn’t be awarded it because one of the rules to be bestowed the prize is to carry out some meritorious activity two year prior to the nomination. On May 12, 2008, this woman with a sweet and round face, passed away in Warsaw.

Over the last decades, the film industry has decisively contributed to public understanding of the complex history of the Holocaust, which we would not have been aware of otherwise. The most famous example is Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg: it made the story of Oskar Schindler known throughout the world. There also was a more modest effort in the case of Sendler and another similar example in one made about Giorgio Perlasca, in 2002 by Rai Fiction and France 2.

Giorgio Perlasca was born in Como, Italy, in 1910. During World War II, he was an Italian diplomatic envoy to the countries of Eastern Europe as a food purchasing manager (meat) for the Italian Army. For a number of reasons, he found himself in the position to pretend to be a substitute for the Spanish ambassador in Budapest, Sanz Briz. When the ambassador was forced to leave Hungary, Perlasca decided to impersonate a Spanish consul in order to grant Spanish citizenship to thousands of Jewish Hungarians. He took advantage of the Rivera Law, which allowed him to naturalize all the Jewish people with Sephardi origins from all over the world. Thanks to this law, over a period of 45 days, between January 1944 and January 1945, “Jorge” Perlasca saved thousands of Hungarian Jews.

After the Red Army conquered Budapest, Giorgio Perlasca successfully returned to Italy, but he never told anyone about what he had done, including his family. He was a very reserved man. Nonetheless, a few years later some Hungarian girls went on a quest for the Spanish consul who had saved them: Giorgio Perlasca. This way the story about the brave and modest Italian diplomat came to light.

Our public knowledge about the Holocaust has radically changed. Because of these stories – along with the representations of a fierce Nazi executioner and the Jewish and non-Jewish victims – we have been able to collocate new images, new figures, the figures of those who did not want to just sit and look, those who did not allow it to happen, those who decided to risk and resist.

Giorgio Perlasca and Irena Sendler are a man and a woman who found within themselves the power, strength and creativity to change the course of events, and they simply did it, accepting the risks and willing to bear the costs of their choices. Irena was a most beautiful and courageous woman. Giorgio was a brave and reserved man. Their memory is a precious public good linking a horrific past to the possibility of a more hopeful future.

This in-depth post is the first in a series on the question: Why Poland? To skip this introduction, click here.

A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Lublin, Poland. I was promised that the lectures would be translated and published as a book. It was a promise, never fulfilled. But preparing and giving the lectures was a very interesting exercise, nonetheless. It gave me an opportunity to start reflecting on how my research and public activities in Poland before the fall of communism could inform public life there “after the fall.”

I prepared and presented three extended lectures. The first was on media and the politics of small things, a topic that I have focused on in recent years. The other two lectures were on topics I haven’t explored further, but I think may be of interest to readers of Deliberately Considered. I will reproduce the lectures in the coming weeks. Today’s in-depth post: the first of three posts addressing a simple question I have often been asked, “Why Poland?” Later, my second lecture, another frequently asked question: “Why Theater?”

Why Poland? It was a question first posed to me by my mother. She wanted to understand why it was that I had chosen to do research in the country from where her parents fled. It was a question motivated by the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews. It is a topic that I have not spent much time addressing professionally, though I have had to deal with it personally. The lecture I gave in Poland was one of the rare times that I publicly addressed the topic, making the personal professional.

The lecture made three distinct moves, responding to the issue of the relationship between Jews and Poles from three different vantage points: the first, today’s post, was the most personal, built upon reflections on my personal experiences as a researcher in Poland in 1973-4. The second post builds upon my thoughts as an observer of Polish democratization of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz. The third post, which is the part of the lecture written specifically with my Lublin audience in mind, is an analysis of the Polish response to Jan Gross’s Neighbors, a book in which Gross documents the fact of the active Polish participation of the Shoah in a small town in Eastern Poland, Jedwabne.

The first post is the most personal. It is formed by a cultural sensibility, “the wisdom of youth,” which I think requires serious and systematic deliberation. This is what got me to go where my mother wouldn’t. It is also that which told my son, in 2004, that Barack Obama would soon be President of the United States, and I think it is something to think about when we consider the promise of the new “new social movements” that have developed in recent years, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. Once one begins there is so much to think about.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis of “Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism,”click here.

My answer to my mother’s question was filled with the naiveté and the self-centeredness of youth.  I was looking for adven­ture.  I wanted to visit Europe after I had completed my stud­ies.  I had a good disser­ta­tion proposal to study theater in Poland, and a major founda­tion was willing to pay for a year’s prepara­tion and language study and a year or more of research and living expenses in Europe.  This was a great oppor­tunity, both personal and profes­sional.  For me, the pain of my people and my family were things of the past, to be remembered and under­stood, but not some­thing that should restrict my ambitions and plans.  In retro­spect, mine was “the wisdom of youth.”

Because I was not restrict­ed by the very recent past, which seemed not so recent to me, I could attempt to develop the capacity to remem­ber and to understand, as would never have been the case had I been constrained by my mother’s memories of her parents.  But the insight of my mother’s question persists.  It sheds light on many of the problems I have faced in the course of my research and experiences in East and Central Europe, and it may help us under­stand the prob­lems of clashing collec­tive memories in the post-­totalitarian shadows.

In this paper, I reflect upon how Poles and Jews confront each other through their contrasting memories.  I attempt to show that there is endur­ing wisdom in my mother’s question, as a question, both because it raises a signif­icant issue and it does not dogmatical­ly declare an an­swer.  Back in 1970, dogma may have come in the form of a parental prohibi­tion concerning the plans of a respectful son: “you can’t go to the place my parents fled from.”  Here, in a more public domain, dogma comes in the form of contrasting truisms which shape conflicting memories, from “Poles are hope­lessly anti-Semit­ic,” to “Jews minimize the suffer­ing of others and do not understand the causes and respon­sibili­ties of their own suffer­ings.”  Here, I am presenting reflections based upon a paper written in response to controversies surrounding ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp.  I am extending those reflections to include the controversies about the massacre in Jedwabne in 1941, the continuing controversies about Kielce in 1946, and the advance in my on going search for answers to my mother’s question.  The search started in the early 1970s, and it continues to this day.  Thus I present my thoughts in three parts: 1. Before the End of Communism, 2. Commemorating Auschwitz, and 3. Debating Jedwabne.  To anticipate my conclusion, I see these parts as revealing the development of a democratic Poland, with enduring and new problems.

Before the Fall of Communism

During my year and a half in Poland in 1973 and 1974, the “Why Poland?” question periodically became pressing.  I had to play memory games to make it less so.  This started soon after I ar­rived.  My first summer here was spent at a Polish language insti­tute.  Most of my fellow students were Polish Americans, trying to learn the lan­guage of their grand­parents.  We spent six weeks studying in Poznan and then two weeks on a bus tour all around Poland.  We visited Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Gdynia, Wroclaw, Zakopane, and Oswiecim (Au­schwitz).  The stops in Auschwitz, Zakopane and Krakow proved to be especially meaningful.  They serve as a prelude to later controver­sies over commemo­ration and memory.

Going to Auschwitz, I expected to be overwhelmed with grief, bewildered, appalled, and confused.  I experienced all this and much more.  My capacity to describe falls short of my aspirations to explain.  Yet, my most meaningful experience, from the point of view of our discussion today, was not in the field of my expec­ta­tions, and it is easily ex­plainable.  I was very angry.  My anger was not immediately directed at the Nazis, the German totalitarians, but at the Polish totalitarians: the Polish communists, who seemed to belittle the special suffer­ing of the Jews on the grounds of what is in fact the largest Jewish cemetery in the world.  At that time, it was hardly even noticeable that Jews were among the victims.  The sign at the entrance to the museum at the camp noted the suffer­ing of many nations, from the Russians to the French, from the Dutch to the Czechs; Jews were not specifically mentioned.  This was repeat­ed in the written materi­als on sale at the museum store.

To make matters worse, the pattern was repeat­ed in the old German barracks where there were special exhibits on the nations who suffered at the camp.  The barracks used to memori­alize the Polish nation were particu­larly disturbing.  One camp photo after another, with the names of murdered inmates, was dis­played. There were no Jewish names.  This was my most dramatic lesson in understand­ing that the categories of Jew and Pole commonly were mutually exclusive for Poles, even for Polish communists.  Our guide did not note such matters, nor did he point out that the Jewish exhibit had been “closed for renova­tion” since 1968, the year of the “anti-Zionist” purge.  We just passed the building housing the exhibit in silence.  As a rela­tively recent stu­dent of Polish culture and poli­tics, I was bewildered.  I later learned how silence replaced open anti-Semitism as official Party policy.

One way and another, since the war, there had been no open critical confron­tation with the Holo­caust, and the Polish relation to it, beyond the clichés of official Marxist ideology and Polish privately trans­mitted common knowledge.  The limits of the former were obscenely evident in my trip to Auschwitz.  The museum presentation of Auschwitz erased Jewish experience, memory and suffering, and replaced it with the stale clichés of official Marxism.  In such a way, the Holo­caust was avoided from war’s end to 1968.  The closing of the Jewish exhib­it, which would have been likely an exhibi­tion of such official clichés, substituted racist aggres­sion for the igno­rance of ideology.  The silence, which fol­lowed, further undermined the possi­bil­i­ty of real delib­era­tion­­.

The limits of the common knowledge of Poles as it has been transmitted privately were sug­gest­ed to me by one of my fellow stu­dents in the Polish language program soon after we left the camp.  These limits were then revealed during numer­ous encoun­ters I had while re­search­ing Polish Theater in 1973 and 1974. When I read the discussions about Jedwabne, I heard echoes of the little relatively benign story I will now tell.

Our next stop, on our tour was Zakopane, a popular mountain resort town.  A few hours after our trip to Ausch­witz, one of Polish American students was shopping for souvenirs for friends back home.  After her shopping adventure, she related her experi­ence at a shop­ping stall to one of our fellow stu­dents.  On our bus returning to our lodgings, she ex­press­ed con­ster­na­tion that she was not able to “Jew down” the sales­person on the price of some trinket.  I overheard the conver­sation and object­ed, especially in light of what we had experi­enced together at our previous stop.  What surprised me was not so much her anti-Semitic expression, but her subsequent defense of it as being meaningless: just an expres­sion, having nothing to do with Jews.  Everyone she knows uses it, she ex­plained.  It has no malicious intent and nothing to do with Jews or the Holo­caust, as far as she could see.

This is more an American than a Polish anecdote.   While anti-Semitism certainly does exist in Poland, the expres­sion: “to Jew down,” meaning to bargain, is English, and not Polish, I’m told.  Yet, the story stayed with me during my Polish so­journ for what it said about xenophobia and its persis­tence, about xenophobia and the mechanism of collective memory.  This young woman came from a lower middle class district in Brooklyn.  In her world, Jews were more symbols and linguistic expressions than flesh and blood people.  This has been even more the case in Poland and much of East and Central Europe after the Nazi occupation.  In such a world of symbols, intents need not be malicious for them to be insen­sitive and malignant.  The absence of the other, who in inter­action challenges foolishness and insensitivi­ty, as I attempted to do, makes for the unintentional transmis­sion of hatred.  This transmission is not even disrupted when the immen­si­ty of hate’s conse­quences is revealed, as it was despite all the problems of presentation on the grounds of Auschwitz.

The expres­sion “to Jew down” builds upon the lie that Jews are particularly expert with money and have their ways of getting the best from Gentiles.  The way to succeed in money matters is to act like a Jew, be greedy, heart­less, focused on the monetary and not the moral.  Even if one does not think of real Jews in this way, if one has good feelings toward Jewish friends and acquain­tances or does not think much about Jews at all, to use the phrase is to keep the stereotype alive.  And when a significant part of a cultural identity is built upon such expressive stereo­types of the other, as it is in Poland, then mutual under­stand­ing and respect becomes ex­tremely diffi­cult, if not impossi­ble.

Soon after our visit to Auschwitz and just before my wife and I said goodbye to our American friends, we, as a group, visited the city of Krakow.  While our colleagues stayed on the official tour, we went, on our own, off the formal itinerary to visit Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter and ghetto.

In 1973, Kazimierz was not the gentrifying district that it is today.  Our official tour ignored the district completely.  It was a slum, empty and decaying, some synagogues being used as warehouses and the others closed to visitors.  The oldest one had been converted into a state museum, which was apparently continuously closed for renovations since 1968.  We did manage to see the ancient Jewish cemetery and the adjacent synagogue (Remuh) where an elderly man noticed us looking around.  He introduced himself as the caretak­er of the grounds.  We spoke in our only common lan­guage, Polish, he with a strong Yiddish accent.  Yet, he insisted that he was a Polish Catholic.  The visit was extremely disturbing.

It then became clear to me that if I were to spend the next year in this country, exploring the attempt by indepen­dent minded Poles to inject cre­ativity and critique into Polish public culture through theater, I had to do so as Ameri­can and not as Jew.  The Jewish ques­tion clearly remained, even if without Jews, but I would have to put it aside, along with my mother’s, if I were not to be consumed by them.  The needed Polish – Jewish dialogue was too difficult for me to take part in at that time.  And, what was true for me was also true for the few remaining Jews in post-sixty eight Poland, and for Poles of good will as well.  There were too many more pressing problems, both political and personal, to confront the question of Jews in Poland.  The “aliens,” who were one third of the population of Warsaw before the war and who were one tenth of the population of the nation, had been eradicated.  Hitler and his collaborators (both Germans and from other nations) had succeeded and no one had time to talk about it, includ­ing me.

Of course, I am being too harsh on Poles of good will and on myself.  The “Why Poland?” question, the question that assumes the existence of intractable problems in Polish – Jewish rela­tions, but confronts them, could be addressed and tentative answers could be dis­cussed, even within the Communist system.  A key for such address and discus­sion is memory, memory of a time and a place when such relations robustly existed.  The starting point is the everyday memory of Polish – Jewish relations current in Polish society.  The start­ing point inevitably begins with cemeteries, including Ausch­witz.  This became clear to me as I traveled around Poland studying student theater.

When I began talking with my interviewees, invariably the fact that I am Jewish became evident.  Either this would be evident from my name or my physical appearance, or it would come up in conversation.

The response took on a predictable pattern.  First, there would be a personal note.  I would be told of the Jewish cemetery near the homes of just about every person with whom I spoke.  Next there would be long discussions with my new friends about the events of 1968 [a time of official anti-Semitism in Poland) and more deeply about Polish Jewish history.  The young Poles revealed a great deal about themselves and their nation in these discus­sions.  Since I was primar­i­ly talking to Polish liberals, aspiring cosmopolitan artists who looked to the West for inspiration and community, who were themselves involved directly or indirectly in the student revolt of ’68, the discussants tended to be unam­big­u­ous­ly critical of the anti-Semitism of the regime and those who responded positively to such anti-Semitic maneuvers.

The depth of their criticism became evident when we spoke about long term Polish – Jewish relations.  There were those who emphasized Polish liberalism, who pointed out that Jews were welcomed in Poland in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centu­ries, when they were treated as pariahs in the kingdoms further East and West.  They would point out that it was not an accident that so many Jews had lived in Poland.  On the other hand, there were those who emphasized the continuity of anti-Semitic troubles among Poles.  Their comments would focus on the last one hundred years, the years of the greatest troubles in Polish – Jewish relations, and espe­cial­ly on the post war period, the years of their lived experience.

I came to realize that those who most emphat­ically “taught” me about the long history of friendship between Poles and Jews tended to be anti-Semitic, and those who forth­rightly spoke about Polish anti-Semitism tended to be tolerant, truly liberal, respectful.  I did not intend to explore these discussions system­at­i­cal­ly.  I had made the decision to avoid them in order to stay focused on an understanding of the politics of the alternative culture.  I was committed to the decision I made in Krakow that my personal con­cerns and prob­lems with the region should not take prece­dence over my specific intellectual reasons for being in Poland.  The histor­i­cal memory of anti-Semitism seemed to be quite periph­eral to my pressing project.  Yet, the symbolism of anti-Semitism was not.  It became apparent that definitions of Polish identity are con­nect­ed with such symbolism, and these have since become increas­ing­ly impor­tant in the config­uration of Polish political life.

Towards the end of my first Polish adventure, I was reminded of my grandparents’ experience.  An American friend, Jeffrey Geronimo, was visiting us, and my wife and I and our close Polish friend, Elzbieta Matynia, were on a little tour with him of the Polish countryside.  In an isolat­ed village in the Kielce region, we chanced upon an elderly man, apparently well into his nineties.  He was the picture postcard vision of a Slavic gentleman, walking with a cane, with a long angular nose and flowing white moustache.  We started a conversation, talk­ing about the usual tourist fare, all of which now escapes me.  When saying our farewells, Elzbieta challenged the gentleman to guess where my wife and I came from.  By this time we were speak­ing Polish rela­tive­ly well.  He guessed Warsaw.  When we indicat­ed New York, he did not believe us.  And after some joking around, he declared he did not know who we were or where we were from, for sure, but one thing he was certain of was that we were not Jews.

Here was the Poland my grandparents fled from – the Poland in which the Jew is the definition of the other that negatively invokes common identi­ty, even humanity.

At the time, the incident seemed to be more about the past than about the present or the future.  I have since learned that this was not so.  Both the elderly gentle­man’s statement and our Polish friend’s response to it, her extreme embarrassment and consternation, tell us a great deal about the post-communist political culture of Poland.  For, in an important sense, the problem of anti-Semitism in today’s Poland and much of East and Central Europe, the anti-Semitism without Jews, has little to do with Jews and a lot more to do with the nations states of Europe, which live in the midst of Jewish graves.  This has become most appar­ent after the fall of commu­nism, during such symbolic events as the commemoration of the liberation of a concentration camp, and such pressing practical events as the political ascendancy of overt anti-Semites, and now the debates over Jedwebne and Polish complicity in the Holocaust.  The problem has to do with the way anti-Semitism is knitted into Polish common sense, but more about that after we closely consider the problems of commemoration in Auschwitz and in Jedwabne.