An ugly head
Just when it had seemed to have gone away, again the specter of anti-Semitism came to haunt Polish politics last week. If anyone doubted the power of past sins, both real and imagined, to influence contemporary politics, they only had to take a look at the events of last week, which showed how Poland's historic relationship with Jews even today can bring out the best and worst in its politicians.
Much of the current discussion about the relationship between Poles and Jews was brought about by the publication of a book by the Polish author Jan T. Gross, entitled "Neighbors," and which is devoted to unraveling the tragic events that unfolded in the town of Jedwabne in 1941, just after the Germans had invaded Russia. In 1939 the town came under Soviet control as a result of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland for two years, before Hitler's Operation Barbarossa expelled the Russians. Historians have always agreed that just after the Germans entered the town, the tragic murder of most of the town's Jews took place, through them being burned alive in a barn. Yet while until recently it had been assumed that the Germans had been responsible, Gross's book argued on the basis of postwar court records that the massacre had essentially been a Polish-led pogrom, only tangentially facilitated by the occupying Germans.
In the initial weeks after the publication of Gross's book, it seemed that political divisions in Poland had vanished as all sides of the political spectrum made efforts to atone for the event: a new monument is to be erected at the murder site; a special ceremony involving the president and prime minister is to be held on the anniversary of the events this coming July; the head of the Catholic Church in Poland, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, went out of his away to admit to Polish participation in the crime.
Yet underneath the perceived unity, it was clear that all was not well. A close reading of the press revealed a developing split, with the left-wing and center-left newspapers running the story with the underlying suggestion that it represented proof that the Polish nation was inherently anti-Semitic, and implying that Poles have yet to come to terms with their shady past. More right-wing newspapers, however, while not denying the massacre took place, suggested that Gross's evidence was inconclusive as to the degree of Polish complicity, and took objection to the implication that Poles during the war participated in the Holocaust. Poland was an occupied country where unlike in countries occupied by the Germans elsewhere there was no government that collaborated in the extermination of Jews, and where there is ample evidence of heroic deeds by Poles to save Jewish lives. Their perspective was boosted last week when a team of independent and respected historians started to examine Gross's source material and discovered to their amazement that Gross had ignored contradictory documentary evidence that the Germans had indeed been responsible, and seemed to focus only on those documents that backed up his presupposed thesis.
What was undeniable, however, was that the most vocal in suggesting that Poles were responsible and that an act of moral atonement was required were President Aleksander Kwasniewski and the daily center-left Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, which have long been at the forefront of seeking to improve Polish-Israeli relations. All the more surprising therefore, were the revelations by the Gazeta Polska weekly that Kwasniewski's chancellery is staffed by senior ministers with an anti-Semitic track record. By undertaking some basic detective work the newspaper had unearthed violently anti-Jewish speeches and articles by the two officials Kwasniewski's Foreign Affairs Adviser Andrzej Majkowski and Religious Affairs Adviser Kazimierz Morawski dating from 1968. That was the year of an officially sanctioned anti-Semitic purge by the communist authorities aimed at removing party rivals of Jewish origin and is universally regarded as a great stain on Polish national honor. Both Majkowski and Morawski, it turns out, were enthusiastic participants in the Jew-baiting that prevailed at the time.
What was even more curious was the reaction of Kwasniewski and Gazeta Wyborcza, who suddenly defended the two men on the basis that their statements represented no more than "youthful error." That position provoked furor in Poland's media, since it implied that yesterday's anti-Semitism can be trumped by today's political allegiance. It also suggested what many had already feared: that the issue of Poland's relations with Jews was a political football. The accusation of anti-Semitism is a useful and deadly instrument to be leveled at political enemies, but conversely when open anti-Semites are discovered in one's own political backyard, a wall of silence and exoneration rapidly descends.
The furor over Jedwabne and the staff of the presidential chancellery show the power of emotions involved in any discussion of Polish-Jewish relations, and underscores the degree to which any rational debate about the past of Poles and Jews requires intellectual and moral honesty as its basis. The sad truth is that on the basis of the events of the last few weeks, the use of anti-Semitism for political purposes or on the basis of questionable historical research has made that debate almost impossible to pursue.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl (mailto:director@cec.com.pl)
