Holocaust museum also looking to WWII suffering of Poles
Former U.S. diplomat to Poland and Holocaust scholar John K. Kordek of DePaul University in Chicago was a moving force in this week's Washington commemoration of the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland.
"Most who study the Holocaust think only of Jews dying there," he said. That's not the full story and with the collapse of communism and Cold War politics, new and explicit examinations of the state-sponsored genocide and terrorism during the German rule of Poland are being undertaken.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has launched one of the most intensive of these, looking at the brutality of the Nazi occupation of Poland starting 60 years ago this month, where 3 million Polish Catholics and 3 million Polish Jews lost their lives, the highest percentage wartime loss of any European country.
Kordek, who was a top U.S. embassy official in Warsaw from 1978-1981, has been a member of the Holocaust Museum for five years. He is an administrator at DePaul, but also teaches a law-school course at DePaul on the history of the Holocaust.
While the Nazis made extermination of Jews the main goal, with 6 million deaths, they also had "singled out the Poles as sub-human and it was their policy to single out the Polish intelligentsia, including the clergy. Poland was the only country where they killed bishops, not just priests. They were targeted. The first (intelligentsia) victims were Jagiellonian professors, Jews and Catholics alike," Kordek said.
The weeklong museum events include a conversation between the museum's oral historian, Joan Ringelheim, and Jan Nowak. His 1982 book, "Courier from Warsaw," details his activism with the anti-Nazi underground and his efforts to alert British politicians up to the level of Prime Minister Winston Churchill about the Holocaust unfolding in Poland. He had also tried to drum up British support for the Warsaw-based Polish Home Army attempting to take control of Poland as the Nazis lost ground and before the Soviets could seize the day.
"Most people don't know the history," Ringelheim said. "They know the persecution of the Jews. They don't know what the Poles went through - the murder of the intellectuals, the constant terror; and the Catholic resistance, in attempts to save Jews."
The museum will show a film with historical footage on the 1939 Nazi attack on Warsaw and the film "Zegota" about the plight of Polish Jews and the Zegota group of Polish Catholics that defied major dangers to try and help them.
Ringelheim, who was to meet Nowak shortly before interviewing him, said "it is clear that there are two things that were most important to him: communicating about the genocide of Jews and how if the (Nazis) succeeded, he believed they would then kill the Poles. And how to save Poland from the Russians. That was extremely important for him."
Ringelheim said of the museum's 6,000 oral history interviews, "We certainly have interviews with non-Jewish Poles and with rescuers. We also have 80 to 90 interviews recently done with witnesses in Poland - people who are still there and who lived or worked near the camp and ghetto sites and might have seen something and might be able to talk about this."
Until now, most Holocaust-related interviews in the world have been with Jewish victims. The museum is expanding those to try and glean the broadest possible understanding of the "genuine circumstances of everybody in these countries."
Kordek says the museum's approach to the 60th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland also reflects this broader slant. In addition, he says, "now, since Poland is newly independent, you could look back very carefully at the past and look at the Jewish heritage in Poland and look at some of the main issues that still exist and try to resolve them; which is what the Polish government is trying to do."
Yes, there are controversies in doing this, he agrees. But that is "part of democracy."
"There were no 'controversies' prior to Poland becoming a democracy because the communist regime couldn't care less what people felt abroad. They just did what they wanted to do at Auschwitz-Birkenau or anyplace else," Kordek said.
Since the Solidarity government came to power in 1989, there has been one furor after another involving preservation and protection of the death camp sites and counter-protests by Polish nationalists who planted thousands of crosses on the outskirts of Auschwitz.
"But that has now been resolved and it is my understanding that this is going to be moving further ahead," said Kordek, who has been a member of the Holocaust Museum board for five years. "Some very tough decisions had to be taken on both sides and this is something that never would have occurred under communism."
