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Sunday, February 27, 2011
A photo of Poles and Polish Americans.
Do we look like scum to you?
If so, why?
On July 28, 2007, the Boston Globe published "Silence Lifts on
Poland's Jews," an essay by Rabbi Joseph Polak, Director of the Florence
and Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University.
Rabbi
Polak's essay is now on the homepage of the Museum of the History of Polish
Jews.
That is unfortunate.
Quickly
after its 2007 appearance in the Boston Globe, a fan cut and pasted Rabbi
Polak's essay to another website, with a new title. The new title was
"Polish Scum."
Rabbi Polak, in "Silence
Lifts on Poland's Jews," exploits the brute Polak stereotype that "Bieganski"
exposes and critiques.
Rabbi Polak's essay begins with
his equation of Poland with the murder of Jews. Poland has no other identity in
Rabbi Polak's essay.
Jews, Rabbi Polak reports,
"were brought there to be murdered." Note Rabbi Polak's use of the
passive voice. Had Rabbi Polak used the active voice, he would have had to
identify who brought Jews to Poland
to be murdered. Rewrite Rabbi Polak's opening sentence in the active voice: "German
Nazis brought Jews to occupied Poland to murder them."
That is a very different sentence.
Provide a key
detail: "German Nazis brought Jews to occupied Poland to murder them in
concentration camps that included Polish prisoners and Polish victims."
With the inclusion of that key detail in the opening sentence,
the entire essay becomes a different essay.
In Rabbi
Polak's lengthy essay, Germans are mentioned, once, in passing, in the third
paragraph. What did these Germans do? They offered "a little help" to
Poles in murdering Jews.
In Rabbi Polak's worldview, now
sanctioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Germans didn't build
Auschwitz to incarcerate, torture and murder Poles, eighteen months before its
dedication to Jewish victims – although, in historical fact, they did. Germans
didn't kill Poles for helping Jews – again, they actually did. Germans didn't
commit what historian Michael Phayer called a
genocide of Polish Catholics, before they got down to the genocide of the
Jews. But they did. In Rabbi Polak's essay, none of that happened. Rabbi Polak's
selective focus contributes to his depiction of Poles as scum.
Rabbi Polak allows that, in 2007, after his visit, "Poles
are finally beginning to deal with these ghosts in their midst."
Rabbi Polak's word choices locate essentially anti-Semitic Poland,
languishing in the past, and contrast that Poland with the future, and modern,
evolved persons like himself and other non-Poles, who visit Poland and teach
Poles about their debased state.
Thanks to visits like
his, Rabbi Polak reports, Poles are learning to be "thoughtful." They
are learning to be "truthful." Poland is "turning a
corner," an American expression meaning to begin a new direction. Before
the arrival of Rabbi Polak and others like him, not thought and truth, but
stupidity and lies, had constituted the Polish character.
Poland, foolishly, saw itself as a "victim among victims" of
Nazi aggression.
In fact, Rabbi Polak and other
disseminators of the brute Polak stereotype are the ones who falsify history.
Poland very much was a "victim among victims." To deny Nazism's, and
communism's goals and crimes against Poland is tantamount to Holocaust denial.
Warsaw, 1945 source
Poland, Rabbi Polak reports, never referred to its Jews;
Poland was silent. Again, this is false. Poles very much did address the
Holocaust before the arrival of Rabbi Polak; this is recorded in English-language
books that Rabbi Polak could and should have cited, including several volumes
of "Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry" and "Bondage to the Dead."
It is true that public discourse about anything and everything
was deeply distorted and truncated under the Communists. This distortion of
public discourse was proverbial and all-pervasive. Public discourse was
corrupted around everything from Soviet economics – "We pretend to work
and they pretend to pay us" – to the chronic shortage of feminine hygiene
products. A government that penalizes citizens for mentioning consumer-goods
shortages is not going to allow vigorous discussion of the Holocaust.
Though not hampered by Soviet oppression, American and Israeli
Jews also long-delayed their own response to the Holocaust. As Peter Novick,
Jerzy Kosinski and Tom Segev have pointed out, there was measurably more
attention paid to the Holocaust in America and Israel generations after WW II ended
than during the war itself.
Even so, even under
impossible conditions, Poles managed to publish essays, poetry, and broadsides,
and to make films. Poles like Czeslaw Milosz, Jerzy Ficowski, Jan Blonski,
Marcel Lozinski and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, and institutions like the
Jagiellonian University, took up the issue of the Holocaust and Polish
culpability when it was risky to do so. Even simple Polish wood carvers chose
to commemorate Poland's lost Jews in their carvings, and announced that they
did so to rescue the memory of their lost Jewish neighbors.
Jerzy Kosinski visited Poland, his birthplace, long before Rabbi Polak got
there. In 1988, he published an essay about his experience. He wrote that returning
to Poland after many years away, he was eagerly received by young people.
"With so much Jewish cultural legacy steaming from the spiritually fertile
Polish soil, to these young men and women Polish-Jewish relations are a mystery
– mystery, not stigmata. They are as prompted to know me better as I am eager
to know them." This process was a mutually fruitful exchange, Kosinski
reported. He reported that he was so "rejuvenated by what I found within
myself during my twelve days in Poland [that] I started a new romance with my
thousand-year-old, Polish-Jewish soul."
Rabbi Polak
says that Poland's treatment of Jews was a "mixed bag," that Poland
made an effort, "centuries long, of preserving the Jews' otherness."
This statement is bizarre. Jews enjoyed a great deal of autonomy in Poland.
Leaders of the Jewish community used that autonomy to preserve Jews' otherness.
Every historian working on Polish-Jewish relations agrees on this point. The
average Boston Globe reader would not know that. Thus, Rabbi Polak gets away
with saying something that is utterly contrary to the historical record –
something that serves a racist stereotype.
Because Poles
are themselves so unevolved, outsiders, modern, superior, non-Poles, must, as
Rabbi Polak puts it, "make Poland itself cry for its murdered Jews."
No Pole, before Rabbi Polak and other superior, modern people
arrived, has ever felt any sadness over the Holocaust. As Rabbi Polak puts it,
visitors will ask, "Does anybody here miss them?" It will take
outsiders to bring to Poles' attention that they haven't the emotional depth to
miss or to mourn Poland's murdered Jews. Again, these non-Polish visitors will
force upon debased Poles a key question: "Why Poland did so little to
save" its Jews.
Why did Poland do so little to save
Jews? Rabbi Polak leaves the question a rhetorical one. He never attempts to
answer it. Answers are complicated, of course. One quick and easy answer is the
conditions of Nazi occupation in Poland. This catastrophic, genocidal
occupation is a bagatelle to Rabbi Polak. Poland murdered its Jews, Rabbi Polak
says, "with a little help from Germans," mentioning the Germans only
once, in passing, in his lengthy essay. Poland and the Poles' debased essence
are fully responsible for the Holocaust. As Rabbi Polak puts it, "death
oozes everywhere from its [Poland's] pores."
After
I read Rabbi Polak's piece in 2007, I was troubled. How to describe, in a short
essay that the Boston Globe might consider publishing, in fewer than one thousand
words, all that was misleading, racist, and harmful in Rabbi Polak's piece? How
to present deeply complicated truths?
I wrote the piece,
below, and sent it to the Boston Globe and the rabbi himself. Weeks went by. I
received no reply from the Boston Globe. I resubmitted and received a form
rejection.
***
Below, please find my response to "Silence Lifts on Poland's Jews" submitted to, and rejected by the Boston Globe:
***
In 1941, Oswald
Rufeisen was walking along a street. A peasant passed on a horse cart. The
stranger gestured for Rufeisen to join him. "The Nazis are murdering Jews.
I will hide you." Rufeisen was incredulous; Germans were civilized. Who
was this Pole? Was this a trap? The Pole persisted. Rufeisen gave in. The Pole
saved Rufeisen's life.
In 1987, I was attending a
Polish-Jewish conference. Our meetings roiled, like a summer thunderstorm. I
had been debating all night with the son of a concentration camp survivor. We
took a break around dawn, silently strolling Krakow's cobblestones. Viewing glistening
dewdrops on a spider web, this young Canadian Jew, who had never before been to
Poland, began to recite, in Polish, the poetry of national bard Adam
Mickiewicz.
I study Polish-Jewish relations. In hell,
one discovers diamonds unavailable in any other mine. One example: Stefania
Podgorska, a Polish teenager who saved 13 Jews thanks to a disembodied voice
that directed her to shelter.
I've read thousands of
books, articles, and internet posts. I've met key historical figures. I've
traveled to Poland and Israel. I've conducted hundreds of interviews. You think
I'm about to say, "This qualifies me." Think again. The more I read,
the more I am agog, the more I want to say, "I have no right to
speak." Because, in the Polish-Jewish narrative, whipsawing plot twists
never let up. One example: after the war, Podgorska was dismissed, by a Jew she
saved, as an inferior and superfluous "goyka." So, I do speak,
because mainstream media simplifies this narrative beyond recognition.
What I think I've learned is this: hate, all hate, is wrong;
and human beings, including those we least suspect, shelter reservoirs of
goodness and strength.
The years before World War Two
were a perfect storm. A toxic cloud circled the globe. Scientific Racism, a
perversion of Darwinism, pitted "races" in a struggle for survival of
the fittest. American racists cited "evidence" that Poles and Jews,
inter alia, were essentially unfit; their entry was barred in 1924. In England,
Nazism's sympathizers included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In Poland, some
nationalists, the Endeks, struggling against three occupying empires, rejected
Poland's traditional tolerance, and adopted a Poland-for-Poles stance. World
War I, the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, and the Depression set the
stage for racism's most diabolical manifestation: Nazism.
Massive, bulky narratives – a thousand years of Polish-Jewish relations
and the black hole of World War Two – are simplified by sound bite culture:
Poles become essential anti-Semites; everyone else, including the British Royal
Family and followers of Oswald Mosley and Churchill and Roosevelt who heard Jan
Karski's report and did not act, the Ivy League universities, the New York
Times, the Atlantic Monthly, that all supported Scientific Racism – everyone –
is exculpated. The essential, brute Polak takes on everyone's guilt. Important
voices like Adam Michnik and Ewa Hoffman have refuted this charge; some of
their fellow Jews have criticized them for mending fences with Poles.
Not Poland's good name – neither vanity nor even honor – is
the treasure at stake here. Read the primary documents of Scientific Racism.
Gathering only enough "evidence" to explain our fellow human beings
as essentially different is exactly racism's error.
We
may convince ourselves that this or that anecdote proves that Poles are
essentially anti-Semitic … that African Americans are essentially lazy … that
Jews are … fill-in-the-blank.
That method of thought,
that is so easy, that is slickly seductive, that rewards our synapses with the
conviction that we've got it all figured out, is what we must resist. Not for
the sake of the Poles. Not for the sake of the African Americans, the Muslims
or the Jews. We must resist that form of thought for ourselves. We must retain
our intellectual and spiritual integrity, in a world that tempts us to believe
that human beings and entire nations can be divided between the good and the
bad, with us, and our nation, always firmly in the former category.
If you asked me where I am, in my twenty years of study of
Polish-Jewish relations, I would tell you that every time I crack a new book,
every time I interview a new source, I take that proverbial
journey-inaugurating first step; I see a new horizon. I can't enumerate here
the facts that counter the sound bite of Poles as essential anti-Semites. I
can, though, say that when you find some evidence that convinces you that your
neighbor is something essentially other than yourself, that is exactly when you
must begin to question.
***
When his
"Polish Scum" essay first appeared, I emailed Rabbi Polak and
informed him of my concerns. Other concerned Polonians did, as well. Rabbi
Polak was intransigent; he reported no movement in this thoughts about Poles.
I have sent Rabbi Polak an e-mail informing him of this blog
post, and invited him to respond. If Rabbi Polak does respond, I will post his
entire response, unedited.
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