Spring marches on with signs of Jewish-Polish reconciliation
It's that time again when more than 5,000 Jews come in from Israel, Canada, the United States and other countries to take part in the March of the Living and pay homage to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. And to make plain that Jews survived and are prospering today.
In the decade since these marches became politically possible and Israeli travel agencies planning them began to sign up thousands of new demonstrators, tensions also increased between the marchers and Poles including Polish Jews.
Too often, the march became a vehicle for blaming Poland and its people for the World War II extermination plan, while ignoring or downplaying that Poland itself had been an occupied country in which Hitler located death camps and used millions of non-Jewish Poles as slave laborers.
The very existence of Polish Jews made some of the organizers nervous. After all, there were only supposed to be miniscule numbers left after the war if any at all. The fact that an increasing number of Polish Jews are "living" a full and public life here has been a revelation to some overseas Jews and a jarring shock to others.
"I never felt welcome at the march," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a Warsaw University philosophy professor and a leader in the Warsaw Jewish Community who also co-chairs the Polish Council of Christians and Jews.
The last time he did attend, he was offended by the fact that the ceremonies and prayers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were in many languages English, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish and others but not a word in Polish.
The organizers have also never invited Yale Reisner, the Jewish ethnographer who works for the Ronald Lauder Foundation in Poland, helping emigre Jews trace their families as well as easing elderly Poles through a late-in-life discovery that they are Jewish, made when their parents sicken or die and are found to have been adoptive, not natural, parents.
But there are changes that have been occurring this year, both from the Canadian and the U.S. Jewish camps. The Canadians "have been holding meetings between Canadian Jewish youth and Polish Christian youth for a number of years now," said Eli Rubenstein, a delegation leader.
This year, the American-Jewish Committee held preparatory meetings in New York in March for more than 200 participants. Three speakers from Warsaw were flown over to talk about Poland today and to answer questions. And this week, before and after the march, these participants were slated for follow-up meetings in Poland.
Dr. David Machlis of New Jersey is planning an interfaith March of Remembrance and Hope for the Christmas-New Year's break in Poland.
And Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek continues to make groundbreaking statements that help heal the breach in relations between Poles and emigre Jews.
In a statement commemorating the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, Buzek noted that this was "the first outburst of mass armed resistance in Nazi-occupied Polish territory." He said those who "had been condemned to extermination by the Third Reich rose with arms in hand. They openly defied the butchers of Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. They had no hope of victory. They fought for a dignified death."
"Their heroic struggle amid the ruins of the flaming ghetto as Warsaw watched, as a silent world watched, was an example of exceptional courage and bravery. It was one of the most tragic and at once most noble pages in the annals of the Jewish nation and in Polish history," Buzek said.
Buzek has been at the forefront of contemporary Poles calling for revisions in education here and abroad, including in Israel, so that it may begin to address the realities of what happened during the Holocaust (as well as at Katyn, which the texts written during the last 50 years didn't mention either).
Buzek's statement that the uprising happened "as Warsaw watched, as a silent world watched" is a step toward dealing with accusations by some that many Poles stood by while the Jews died but also a reminder that the world at large did the same.
That helps. Lots more is needed, especially since there seems to be a new crop of outspoken folks overseas whose criticisms are based on outdated stereotypes.
Last month, for instance, New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser said she wouldn't accept Pope John Paul II's apology for what happened to the Jews in World War II. "The pope grew up in Poland at a time when too many of his countrymen turned their back on Jews or collaborated with killers," she wrote. "At the dawn of World War II, 3.5 million Jews called Poland their home. By the end of the war, 500,000 remained alive. Today, following postwar persecution by the government, only about 20,000 Jews call Poland their home."
She never mentions Germans or Nazis; she leaves the impression that the Poles did the killing.
In this case, Jan Karski and Jan Nowak were among the prominent Poles trying to set her straight. That's helpful, too.
In Warsaw, a group of about 50 sponsored by the Polish Council of Christians and Jews held a march from the Uprising Monument to the Umschlagplatz on the anniversary of the ghetto uprising. In addition to Krajewski and Reisner, the speakers for the prayers and psalms were two Roman Catholic priests, Roman Jedrzejczyk and Marek Nowak, as well as the Rev. Slawomir Sikora of Holy Trinity Lutheran.
It was a sign of the tension that surrounds the March of the Living pilgrimages that the Warsaw marchers couldn't follow their original plan, which called for prayers at the Mila 18 death mound. The reason: three dozen Israeli high-school students were firmly ensconced at that monument, saying their own prayers and singing songs and they weren't budging. A half-dozen other Israeli youth groups were waiting in line for their turn.
