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Friday, March 4, 2011
Gold earrings found in a grave. Source - New York Times. Full Description, below.
Grave Robbing and Other Stories
of Poles’ Complicity is the headline of a Jewish Daily Forward article
about Jan Tomasz Gross' new book, "Golden Harvest." Gross is quoted
as saying, "The Poles participated in the murder of Jews, and this was
done all over the country." The problem with the quote is, of course, the
use of "The Poles" rather than "Poles." The quote, as written,
implies that Poles, as a group – rather than criminal individuals – are guilty.
That Polish identity, not human nature, is the problem.
Not
just Poles qua Poles are guilty. Peasants qua peasants are guilty, too – thus the
National-Geographic-style photo, above, so often linked with the book. Babushka-wearing,
hand-implement-wielding, dirt-encrusted farm laborers may soon be the sartorial
and ethnographic other we can blame for the Holocaust. Forget those SS officers,
forget their squeaky leather boots, artfully carved daggers, and
Hugo-Boss-designed epaulets. Well-educated, modern, Nazis – people just like us
– were just innocent bystanders who let the primitive peasants have their way.
Certainly, as chapter seven of "Bieganski"
describes, that's what the SS officers themselves said, to escape any sense of
guilt for the Final Solution.
Since when is dressing well a crime against humanity? Source
Gross hammers the point home:
"the crops in front of [the peasants] are not beets or potatoes but skulls
and bones." There you have it: Eastern European peasants' staple foods.
Beets and potatoes. That's what the orchestrators of the most notorious crime
of the Twentieth Century ate. Not steak, not champagne, or even soda pop. Those
who carried out the Holocaust were nothing like us. They were primitive,
backward, religious. We are modern, clean, educated, secular. People like us
could never do anything like this.
As chapter two of "Bieganski"
demonstrates, after two of Gross' previous books, "Neighbors" and
"Fear" were published, the American mainstream press identified
Polish identity as the problem. Poles as Poles were guilty for the Holocaust in
a way that no other ethnic group – including Germans – was. The same may happen
with "Golden Harvest." Because, after all, no one but Poles could
commit crimes so heinous as those Gross describes. It's all about being Polish,
being a Polish peasant. It's all about the babushkas, and the potatoes, and the
beets.
Is there any other way of looking at Polish
peasants who desecrated Jewish graves? A way that helps us to better understand
humanity – not just the Poles', but the whole human condition, including our
own?
A New York Times article may provide clues. "Ghosts Wail
as Cambodians Plunder Killing Field Graves."
Here
the peasants are Buddhist, not Catholic. They are consoled by monks in saffron
robes, not priests in earth-toned cassocks. They work, harvest, and eat rice,
not potatoes. Interestingly, the article never attributes the desecration of
graves in Cambodia to an ethnic or religious Cambodian essence. They didn't
desecrate these graves because they are Cambodian Buddhists. They desecrated these
graves because their country had endured a devastating war, a war that was the
result of complex international forces over which they, peasants, had zero
control. They were hungry and desperate and left out of world prosperity. They
did what any human being would have done in similar circumstances. We look at
them; we see ourselves, had our lives and our country's history gone
differently.
Funny how that is all clear when the grave robbers are Cambodians,
not Poles, Buddhists, not Catholics, eaters of rice, not eaters of beets and
potatoes, wearers of sarongs, not babushkas. We feel compassion for these
Cambodians – the article's author speaks of trauma and healing – not of superiority
and condemnation. We wish them recovery; we wish them well. We do not damn them
and condemn them in perpetuity, as we condemn Polish, Catholic, peasants.
Simply, it makes us feel good to feel superior to Polish, Catholic, peasants.
Cambodian, Buddhist peasants make nice folk art. We can't demonize Cambodians.
That would be Politically Incorrect.
Cambodian weaving. Source
Perhaps most importantly, the New York Times is willing to acknowledge that Cambodia and Cambodians underwent severe trauma. No such allowance is given to Poles. Poles merely "imagine" that they suffered during World War II. In fact, they "profited." That's the new narrative.
There is a picture,
above, of a hand holding two gold earrings found in a grave. That photo is not
from Poland. It is from Cambodia. How do you feel about the hand, the human
hand, holding those earrings now, knowing that it was not a Polish peasant who
holds the earrings?
Excerpts from the New York Times
article:
***
By the time the
researchers arrived in early May, some 200 graves had been dug up and the bones
scattered through the woods by hundreds of people hunting for jewelry.
''Everyone was running up there to dig for gold, so I went
too,'' said Srey Net, 50, describing what seems to have been a communal frenzy
that seized this poor and isolated village. ''If they can dig for gold, why
can't I?''
It was the first such raid the researchers
had recorded in the thousands of burial grounds they have documented around the
country. Altogether 1.7 million people died from 1975 to 1979 from starvation,
overwork and disease as well as torture and execution.
''People
said, 'This goose has no owner,' '' said Ouk Souk, 60, a farmer. Few valuables
were in the graves, but villagers took whatever they could find.
''I think it has become a memory, rather than a physical thing
any longer,'' he said, speaking of the pain of the past. ''There will be no
more tears. There are no more feelings to express. Only a flash of memory when
you see a piece of bone.''
For younger Cambodians, who
know remarkably little about the Khmer Rouge period, he said, ''It's just a
dead person.''
Srey Noeun, 47, a farmer with four small
children, said she could not sleep for three nights after digging two small
gold earrings out of a grave.
''I'm afraid that the
owner will take revenge on me because she died with nothing but her earrings
and now I have taken them,'' Srey Noeun said. ''She'll say, 'Please give them
back. They are all I had.'''
Ms. Srey Noeun said she
sold the earrings as quickly as she could and bought things that she really
needed: four pounds of pork, a sack of rice, oil for cooking and for oil lamps,
salt, pepper, seasoning and milk powder for her youngest child.
''We never have enough rice,'' she said. ''Normally we can't
afford to buy pork.''
The buried treasure seemed paltry
after nearly a week of digging: one gold necklace and 27 small gold earrings.
But it was dazzling to people who live without electricity or running water,
far from the nearest clinic, school or paved road.
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