|
|
Post by Bonobo on Mar 8, 2008 21:30:21 GMT 1
Today the President of Poland took part in the official commemoration of the 30th anniversary of expelling Jews from Poland. It is good they organised that celebration. Are Poles slowly accepting the bitter truth about how they treated Jews in the past? WARSAW, Poland (AP) - After the horrors of the Holocaust, Poland's Jews suffered once again under the anti-Semitic policies of the new communist regime. This week, Poland marks the 40th anniversary of a purge that drove an estimated 15,000 Jews _ survivors of the Holocaust and their children _ from Poland. The March, 1968 campaign gave an official government blessing to widespread anti-Jewish sentiment. «It is important because for the first time it legalized anti-Semitism in Poland,» said Professor Feliks Tych, a Holocaust survivor and historian at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. «It was, as the French say, the coup de grace to Jewish life in Poland. Almost all Jewish institutions were liquidated, young Jews that were the future of the community left. The commemoration, which includes a series of academic conferences and a handful of documentary film viewings, has garnered more of the public spotlight than in years past and fueled government efforts to rectify some of the wrongs committed by the communist regime. www.pr-inside.com/poland-observes-40th-anniversary-of-r475202.htmA short summary of events in 1968
The communist government, faced by massive anti-Soviet opposition of Poles, used hate propaganda to divide the nation. The campaign equated Jewish origins with Zionist sympathies and thus disloyalty to Poland. Jewish organizations were shut down, Yiddish was banned and anti-Semitic slogans were used in rallies.
By 1968, most of Poland's 40,000 Jews at the time had already been assimilated into Polish society. The campaign, despite being ostensibly directed at Jews who had held office during the Stalin era and their families, affected most of the remaining Polish Jews, regardless of background. Approximately 20,000 Jews lost their jobs and had to emigrate.The term “anti-Zionist campaign” is misleading in two ways, since the campaign began as an anti-Israeli policy but quickly turned into an anti-Jewish campaign, and this evident anti-Jewish character remained its distinctive feature. Firstly, the words Zionism and Zionist, were a substitute and code-name for “Jew” and “Jewish.” Secondly, “Zionist” signified Jew even if the person called Zionist was not Jewish.Let us remember that Jan Gross, today the author of controvercial books about Polish crimes on Jews during WW2, was also forced to leave Poland at the time. |
|
livia
Just born
Posts: 121
|
Post by livia on Mar 10, 2008 9:29:36 GMT 1
It is good they organised that celebration. Are Poles slowly accepting the bitter truth about how they treated Jews in the past? WARSAW, Poland (AP) - This week, Poland marks the 40th anniversary of a purge that drove To be more precise. It was not the Pole's democratically elected and supported representation that organized the purge. It was the Soviet-backed communistic governement. The major part of Poles call the members of which the traitors. But yes, Poles still remember the anticommunist protests of 1967-1968, and remember those innocent Poles of Jewish origin who were forced to leave Poland at that time: News (Polish Radio – External Service) We remember March 1968 08.03.2008 Poland continues to mark the 40th anniversary of the events of March 1968. In January 1968 the communist authorities of Poland banned the performance of "Dziady" - a play by Adam Mickiewicz, saying that it was russophobic and anti-socialist. Intellectual and student protests followed. On March 8th, 1968, a 1500 people strong student demonstration at the Warsaw University was attacked by the authorities, but the idea of mass protests spread, and other cities, such as Krakow, Lublin, Gliwice, Wroclaw, Gdansk, Poznan and Lodz held their own rallies. The communists organized workers and militia to attack the protesters. The communists later came up with the idea of blaming the revolt on Zionists, which led to an anti-Jewish campaign resulting in the expulsion of about 20 thousand Polish Jews, who lost their jobs and were forced to emigrate. Celebrations of the events of March 1968 anniversary today include a debate at the Warsaw University, a special ceremony at one of Warsaw's train station to remember those Jews who were forced to emigrate from Poland 40 years ago. Polish President will visit the Warsaw University to pay tribute to participants of the demonstrations crushed by the communist militia. A number of exhibitions in the memory of March 1968 are held all over the country. At a solemn ceremony, Polish President Lech Kaczynski granted Polish citizenship to fourteen person expelled from the country in March 1968, as a symbolic sign to those who would like to have their citizenship rights returned. According to present regulations, all they need to do is file a letter saying that they will accept the Polish citizenship. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Mar 12, 2008 6:43:30 GMT 1
It is certainly time to open a new/old thread..... It is good they organised that celebration. Are Poles slowly accepting the bitter truth about how they treated Jews in the past? WARSAW, Poland (AP) - This week, Poland marks the 40th anniversary of a purge that drove To be more precise. It was not the Pole's democratically elected and supported representation that organized the purge. It was the Soviet-backed communistic governement. The major part of Poles call the members of which the traitors. But yes, Poles still remember the anticommunist protests of 1967-1968, and remember those innocent Poles of Jewish origin who were forced to leave Poland at that time: News (Polish Radio – External Service) We remember March 1968 08.03.2008 Poland continues to mark the 40th anniversary of the events of March 1968. In January 1968 the communist authorities of Poland banned the performance of "Dziady" - a play by Adam Mickiewicz, saying that it was russophobic and anti-socialist. Intellectual and student protests followed. On March 8th, 1968, a 1500 people strong student demonstration at the Warsaw University was attacked by the authorities, but the idea of mass protests spread, and other cities, such as Krakow, Lublin, Gliwice, Wroclaw, Gdansk, Poznan and Lodz held their own rallies. The communists organized workers and militia to attack the protesters. The communists later came up with the idea of blaming the revolt on Zionists, which led to an anti-Jewish campaign resulting in the expulsion of about 20 thousand Polish Jews, who lost their jobs and were forced to emigrate. Celebrations of the events of March 1968 anniversary today include a debate at the Warsaw University, a special ceremony at one of Warsaw's train station to remember those Jews who were forced to emigrate from Poland 40 years ago. Polish President will visit the Warsaw University to pay tribute to participants of the demonstrations crushed by the communist militia. A number of exhibitions in the memory of March 1968 are held all over the country. At a solemn ceremony, Polish President Lech Kaczynski granted Polish citizenship to fourteen person expelled from the country in March 1968, as a symbolic sign to those who would like to have their citizenship rights returned. According to present regulations, all they need to do is file a letter saying that they will accept the Polish citizenship. The communists were Polish, not Soviet. Did Brezhnev order his Polish stooges to start the antisemitic debacle??? No. It was organized by the so called patriotic communist Poles and supported by the crowd on the official level. People went to antisemitic rallies, they carried banners and boards, they listened to speeches, shouted out slogans, read the newspapers full of antiJewish venom and kept silenced when Jews were spitted on and purged from institutions such as schools, universities, factories. Someone had to organize this. They weren`t Soviets and they weren`t only communists. The purge was so widespread that communist weren`t able to handle it by themselves. What is worse, there was also individual approval from the crowd too. The memories of Jews who fled Poland prove that they left because they felt so lonely after their old Polish friends had turned away from them, either fearing consequences or believing the propaganda. Putting the whole blame for antisemitic brawl on Polish communist traitors is a great simplification. Antisemitic rallies, slogans: Zionists to Israel.        |
|
livia
Just born
Posts: 121
|
Post by livia on Mar 12, 2008 9:53:18 GMT 1
What is often lost today is the fact that 'March 1968' is most of all a history of the protest against communism by the students and patriotic (not 'so called' patriotic) intelligentsia, and a history of communist governement retalliations to the protests.
These retalliations included the anti-Zionist reaction. The latter resulted in some 20 000 Poles of Jewish ancestry leaving Poland (and part of them communists who lost the internal party brawl and for many years disinforming the Western society about Poland in general as their individual act of revenge). Some 10 000 of Poles of Jewish ancestry have however declined to leave Poland - in spite of the communist pruges and a huge part of them have excellently served Poland - the 'real' Poland - in her quest for independence.
The purges were preceded by the anti-semitic campaign organized by the Polish communist party PZPR. This campaign was a classical 'campaign of hatred' idenctical to those organized by the communist earlier against the Polish landlords (ziemianie) which hit my family, or members of Polish underground army Armia Krajowa, which hit my family as well. The same methods, the same scenario. The 1968 campaigne was preceded by a purge in the communist Polish army with almost all officers of Jewish origin being expelled form the military. This purge was done by a Polish communist and a traitor of Poland - general Wojciech Jaruzelski. These action in Poland was an echoe of a great anti-Jewish action which took place in the Soviet Union and totally destroyed Jewish life there.
All this backround does not take off the guilt from those individual Poles who approved or even took personal satisfaction out of the fact that Polish Jews were fired from their jobs and as a result left Poland. It does not take the guilt off those who perhaps helped the process of putting the Polish Jews off lPoland. But putting the blame on Poles as a group is a huge and unfair exaggeration. Which I don't understand the reasons for especially when said by patriotic Poles. The Germans are not guilty for the Jewish Holocaust or Polish forgotten Holocaust, only 'the Nazi' are to blame, even if Germans as a nation supported Hitler and his Nazi party to the last days of war and many are proud of the guy till today. The Russians are not guilty for the 50 millions deaths, only 'the Soviets' are to blame. Even if they supported Stalin, and were proud of their country till the last days of communism. Stalin being a hero in Russia till today. So there we are - only the Poles are to blame as a nation?? Even if Poles as a group have never ever wanted or supported communist rule in Poland??? I decline such reasoning and I will certainly never join the self-flagellation party....
|
|
livia
Just born
Posts: 121
|
Post by livia on Mar 12, 2008 10:04:14 GMT 1
In the presented pics the banners are made in one style and font. Do you think individual people did them spontaneously?
The people in the pics (year 1968) look well-fed and well-dressed. I would imagine they had their share from the injustice of communism as a members of communist party. The normal people looked differently then.
In some other pics not presented here I have also seen 'crowds' consisting of characteristically dresses men. Wearing specific coats and hats. They were the members of secret police dressed in civlians yet company outfits.
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Mar 12, 2008 15:35:10 GMT 1
In the presented pics the banners are made in one style and font. Do you think individual people did them spontaneously? No, they were made by arts and crafts professional decorators in factories. Yet, thousands (if not millions) people went to rallies and hundreds carried banners. It is not a matter that we can overlook so easily and absolve the participants for nothing. No, I don`t think they all look so well-dressed. Are all women wearing fur coats?? Are all men wearing suits? No. Most of them look quite plain. Yes, secret police. But in other pictures which can`t be downloaded into the forum, I have seen workers in overalls. They certainly weren`t members of communist party. They were average Poles. The fact that they attended the rallies, listened to speeches, shouted slogans is a disgrace. Now, imagine that people in Hitler`s Germany go to such an anti-Polish rally. How would you feel seeing them with racist banners?? Would you try to excuse and absolve them, just like you tend to absolve Poles? |
|
livia
Just born
Posts: 121
|
Post by livia on Mar 12, 2008 18:25:00 GMT 1
I don't absolve the Poles as the Poles - as a national entity, don't need an absolution. For they have commited no crime or sin. On the other hand I don't intend to defend those of my compatriots who were evil, or stupid, or carieer-seeking and took part in the purges of 1968. The overwhelming majority of them were already the members of a communist party and as such have proved their low moral quality. (Some of communist party members however used the lesson of 1968 for their benefit - and left the party, and sometimes, sometimes even became members of the opposition!)
The direct comparison between the PZPR party rallies in Poland '68 and the NSDAP party rallies in Germany from 1933 on doesn't make much sense to me. I propose we always take the proportions into account. The rallies in Poland resulted in Poles of Jewish origin leaving Poland, as a side-effect of intenal brawl in the communist party. What was the reuslt of the party rallies in Hitlerian Germany - I don't need to say, do I.
Having said so - I must say that I don't blame all the German's (i.e. German nation) for the support of Hitler, only those who actually supported him. This is a vast majority of THEN living German population. Same goes to Poles in 1968 or in other 'years of trial' Poland went through until independace was achieved.
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Mar 12, 2008 19:22:46 GMT 1
What is often lost today is the fact that 'March 1968' is most of all a history of the protest against communism by the students and patriotic (not 'so called' patriotic) intelligentsia, and a history of communist governement retalliations to the protests. Yes. Yes. Hmm, may be. Yes. Yes. We will come back to him in proper time. Good. Hmm, of course, not all Poles were to blame. Some individuals refused to join the antisemitic campaign. However, in a democracy, it is the majority that rules. What about the majority in 1968? Did they behave gallantly or cowardly?  A very important statement. You are quite forgiving. I am less. Most Germans greeted Hitler and his victories with enthusiasm. It is true they didn`t know all the details, yet most of them participated in war as soldiers or militarised helpers, and also they helped the Nazi to carry out Holocaust, e.g., German civilian engineers invented and later produced Ziklone gas to kill Jews en masse. Again you are quite merciful. But, being proud of Stalin and Soviet "achievements" made at the cost of millions of lives is a very straightforward act of approving communist crimes and consequently, accepting the blame on oneself. Now, do you understand my point? If I am bitterly critical about Poles, it is a result of my general attitude to such heavy issues. It is a controvercial issue which should be developed in a seperate thread. So far I had time to start the thread about Polish resistance to communism. One day, though, we will discuss Polish eager cooperation with the system. I am not in the party. I just tend to be more critical, probably because I am a man, and children have to behave themselves in order to deserve my love. Your love is unconditional because that is your motherly nature of a typical woman. |
|
livia
Just born
Posts: 121
|
Post by livia on Mar 13, 2008 9:13:50 GMT 1
Pawian I am trying to be neither forgiving nor unforgiving. I am trying to make the practice of a very simple rule. Not to judge people too easily. But I am still very far from perfection. However in this discussion something went wrong and we misunderstood each other. I think my way of explaining myself is not perfect as is your way of taking each sentence seperately. And Aristotle said - the whole is more than the sum of its parts. ;D ;D ;D
>>>But putting the blame on Poles as a group is a huge and unfair exaggeration. Which I don't understand the reasons for especially when said by patriotic Poles. The Germans are not guilty for the Jewish Holocaust or Polish forgotten Holocaust, only 'the Nazi' are to blame, even if Germans as a nation supported Hitler and his Nazi party to the last days of war and many are proud of the guy till today. The Russians are not guilty for the 50 millions deaths, only 'the Soviets' are to blame. Even if they supported Stalin, and were proud of their country till the last days of communism. Stalin being a hero in Russia till today. So there we are - only the Poles are to blame as a nation?? Even if Poles as a group have never ever wanted or supported communist rule in Poland??? <<<
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Apr 16, 2008 19:42:11 GMT 1
Simon Peres, the President of Israel, is visiting Poland to take part in the 65 anniversary of Ghetto Rising. Today the Polish President made a speech in which he admitted to acts of antisemitism in Poland in the past but rejected all accusations of genocide perpetrated on Jews by Poles. www.tvn24.pl/12690,1546297,0,1,wiadomosc.html He said: there were brutal criminal acts, murders and so on. I do not try to negate it. But none Polish government has ever taken an official action to deprive Jewish citizens of their life. Yesterday both Presidents made speeches at the official celebration of the Ghetto Rising.  www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24128904/ Cantor Joseph Malovany from New York sings a prayer in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes monument during ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the ghetto uprising in Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Apr 25, 2008 22:44:48 GMT 1
Israeli youth who visit Poland to learn about their ancestors` sad history definitely have a problem with proper attitude. Their disrespectful behaviour during the recent celebration of 65 anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was bitterly criticized by an Israeli reporter. www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3535313,00.html
Bad manners at Warsaw Ghetto
Israeli youths in Poland ceremony score failing grade with disrespectful behavior
Attila Somfalvi
Published: 04.24.08, 10:36 / Israel Opinion
It’s been a while since I felt both so proud and so embarrassed to be Israeli at the same time, as I felt during my visit to Poland.
On the one hand, I was overwhelmed by powerful patriotic feelings, nationalistic even, when I stood under the blue-and-white flags proudly carried by Israeli students in the cold winds of Auschwitz and Majdanek. On the other hand, I was red with shame in the face of the behavior of Israeli youths during events that required a little respect and restraint.
For example, the impressive and dignified ceremony organized by the Poles to mark 65 years to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that was attended, in addition to Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Israeli President Shimon Peres, by the French foreign minister, representatives of the German and US governments, Polish senators, Holocaust survivors, war veterans, senior Polish army officers – and also hundreds of Israeli teenagers from across the nation who were just finishing an intensive journey through the death camps.
It is difficult to describe the huge Polish investment in the event. It is also difficult to describe the reverence shown by the hundreds of non-Israeli invitees to the speeches delivered by the two presidents, the singing of the El Maleh Rachamim memorial prayer, the Israeli national anthem, the Hebrew prayers, and the entire ceremony. It appeared that everyone was doing above and beyond in order to honor the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto heroes.
Yet at the same time, a few meters away, the jungle was going wild. On the Israeli side where the youth delegation members were concentrated, everyone behaved as though they were in the middle of some feast on a Tel Aviv traffic island. Only the barbeques were missing, but we had snacks, soft drinks, loud giggling, and screaming. Some students were lying on the grass while listening to their iPods. We also had group gatherings, a mini-festival of storytellers and jokers, short naps, smoking, whispers, the occasional game of “catch” accompanied by cheerful calls, nuts and seeds, and childish, embarrassing, and exaggerated panic upon hearing the gun salute. It was all there.
Teenagers have not learned a thing
Indifferent teachers were also there, busy searching for a comfortable spot to lean on. We also had Education Ministry representatives with hands in their pockets who observed what was going on without doing a thing – overall, what we had there was a great shame. With the exception of several dozen youths who bothered to follow the ceremony and hold up flags, the Mideastern party continued according to plan and with no connection to the memory of the Jews who fought the Nazis.
One of the teachers explained to me that the Education Ministry is at fault because it did not bothered to organize chairs for the Israelis and the ceremony was long. Another teacher said the students had trouble following the speeches in Polish, and therefore lost interest in what was happening around them. This explanation could have been valid had I not seen with my own eyes the lack of interest and zero respect displayed by most students to the symbols of the State of Israel during President Shimon Peres’ speech – delivered in clear and fluent Hebrew. I will make no mention of the students’ attitude to the Polish national anthem and other speakers for obvious reasons of shame.
At the heart of Warsaw, a few meters away from the Rapaport Warsaw Ghetto monument, after eight days, three concentration camps, two ghettos, and dozens of stories – the Israeli teenagers proved on the last day of their journey that they have not learned a thing.
Perhaps they know more about the Holocaust, but in all matters related to manners, culture, education, and respect to others – they scored a humiliating failing grade. And with this grade they returned home, to Israel, to their parents and education system that have indeed put them on a plane to Poland – but sent them there without any moral baggage.
What a shame.... Here is a comment from Jew living in Krakow: I'm glad that finally someone had not only noticed but marked the problem. For a Jew living in Poland, it is particularly shameful to observe such behaviour on almost every occasion - let it be March of the Living or a Ghetto liquidation ceremony. You can imagine what comments do I get from my Polish friends. You can also imagine how do they behave in shops, in hotels, on the streets etc and what oppinion do have Israelis in Poland after more than a decade of similar misbehaviour of Israeli youth... |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jul 18, 2008 20:00:26 GMT 1
American Congress urged Poland to repay for the private property seized by Germans during WW2, mostly from Jewish people, and acquired by communist government after the war finished.
I agree Poland has to pay. As it is said in the article, it doesn`t have to be 100% or even 50% of the properties worth about 20 billion$. Jews were citizens of the country and they should enjoy the same rights as Poles.
However, I don`t imagine paying this money to Jewish organizations because it would create an unbelievable mess. There were cases when one organization claimed to be the only and right one and demanded all compensation while another organization urged Polish politicians not to deal with those guys because they are impostors.
If there are any descendants of the Jewish people who perished in the Holocaust, they should regain either the property or receive compensation.
US Again Pressing Poland on Property Restitution
Marcin Bosacki
Gazeta Wyborcza
2008-07-17
A resolution urging Poland to 'immediately enact' legislation on the restitution of property confiscated by the Germans during the war and by the communists afterwards was endorsed yesterday by the US House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs.
The committee wants the restitution process to be 'unbureaucratic, simple, transparent, and timely' so that it 'results in a real benefit' for the former owners, many of whom 'well into their 80s or older'.
The resolutions mentions also Lithuania, but it criticises Poland as 'virtually alone among post-communist countries' in having failed to enact restitution legislation.
The Donald Tusk administration has been drawing up a bill on the restitution of property confiscated by the communists after WWII. The bill is to be ready by September, and by October is should be submitted to parliament.
'We'll adopt solutions that are both acceptable for the budget and do justice, partly at least', Mr Tusk said Monday.
Asked whether in such a case the resolution wasn't unnecessary, the adviser of one of the congressmen on the committee told Gazeta, 'The consecutive Polish cabinets told us not to rush them. And so we've been waiting for almost twenty years. We took a lot of pressure from our voters to remind the Polish government about this issue. And let me assure you that this resolution could have been much firmer'.
The resolution, a fourth one on the issue that can be adopted by the whole Congress, was lobbied through by American Jewish organisations.
Asked whether he realised what burden the restitution would create for the Polish budget, the congressman' s adviser said, 'If you had done it ten years ago, the cost would have been much lower. Besides, no one is expecting you to pay 100 or even 50 percent of the property value. The point is that Poland has done nothing for almost twenty years'.
The Senate's foreign affairs committee is to vote on a similar resolution shortly. If it's passed, the two resolutions will likely be merged into one to become the US Congress's official position.
However the resolution will be but an appeal and will not result in any more decisive steps towards Poland.
During the same session, and unanimously too, the House committee passed a resolution commemorating Irena Sendler, who died in May this year, a 'woman whose courage and heroic efforts helped to save over 2,500 Jewish children from the Holocaust'. The resolution mentions that Ms Sendlerowa worked for the 'underground group ¯egota', but says nothing of the fact that ¯egota was an official organisation of the Polish Underground State.
|
|
|
|
Post by tufta on Jul 19, 2008 14:16:22 GMT 1
USA congress could give Poland a good example first and immediately enact legislation on the restitution of property confiscated from the native Americans. When such legislation is implemented I would read US congress resolutions of these kind with much greater interest than I do know. Especially that the US congress would probably covene on the boat at the shores of Manhattan.
|
|
gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
|
Post by gigi on Jul 19, 2008 16:24:24 GMT 1
USA congress could give Poland a good example first and immediately enact legislation on the restitution of property confiscated from the native Americans. When such legislation is implemented I would read US congress resolutions of these kind with much greater interest than I do know. Especially that the US congress would probably covene on the boat at the shores of Manhattan. It would be impossible to right all of the wrongs done in the past. In some cases attempts are made, but even then there are inconsistencies. How do we decide who gets restitution? As for your example of Native Americans, it frustrates many Americans to be accused of stealing Native American land. Many of our families were still in Europe when most of the land was taken. There is a similar reaction when Americans of African descent talk about slavery. Again, some of our families were not even here and many of those who were fought as Union soldiers to free those enslaved. I know that your comment is an example, but in case you are curious some Native Americans run very profitable gambling casinos in the Midwest. Here is an excerpt from the Star Tribune: Casino profits fuel new push to reclaim stolen tribal commons. White Americans’ lust for money cost Native Americans their land in the 19th Century, as pioneers hungry to make their fortunes out West continually pressured the federal government to open up Indian territory for settlement through illegal occupation and unfair treaties. In an ironic twist of history, white Americans’ continuing lust for money is allowing Indians to regain some of their lost tribal commons. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that profits from Indian-owned casinos are being used by tribes to buy back substantial tracts of ancestral lands—not just in Minnesota but also California, New York and other states. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jul 19, 2008 21:53:11 GMT 1
USA congress could give Poland a good example first and immediately enact legislation on the restitution of property confiscated from the native Americans. When such legislation is implemented I would read US congress resolutions of these kind with much greater interest than I do know. Especially that the US congress would probably covene on the boat at the shores of Manhattan. Of course, I don`t give a damn what American Congress say. As a typically unruly Pole, I hold all congresses, parliaments, governments and presidents in very low esteem. Mam ich w dupie, simply speaking. ;D ;D ;D DUPA. DUPA. DUPA. 1,2,3, próba cenzora forum. ;D Compensation or return of property to heirs, however distant they are, will be an act of historical justice. Look at this if you haven`t yet: polandsite.proboards104.com/index.cgi?board=polishhistory&action=display&thread=69&page=1#327 |
|
|
|
Post by tufta on Jul 21, 2008 16:40:46 GMT 1
Gigi, of course you are right. The situation is complicated and Americans do what they think is right to do today to diminish the wrongs of the past. It is the same in Poland, the situation is even more complicated (you have my word for it) but we're trying to do what can be done. The relevant legislation is underway- and ALL people who can be compensated will be in some, albeit modest way compensated. Including Jews, but not just Jews.
What do you think Polish people now think about American Congress now, and this particular resolution specifically?
What would you think about Poland's Sejm would it issue a resolution on any internal matter of USA?
|
|
|
|
Post by tufta on Jul 21, 2008 16:42:02 GMT 1
Thanks. BTW - the censor is monoligual  |
|
gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
|
Post by gigi on Jul 21, 2008 17:35:50 GMT 1
Gigi, of course you are right. The situation is complicated and Americans do what they think is right to do today to diminish the wrongs of the past. It is the same in Poland, the situation is even more complicated (you have my word for it) but we're trying to do what can be done. The relevant legislation is underway- and ALL people who can be compensated will be in some, albeit modest way compensated. Including Jews, but not just Jews. I would think that the 'ALL people who can be compensated' will be a big factor in how this is implemented. Given the American push for this legislation, what is the true motivation of the U.S. House of Representatives? Is it out of concern for all victims, or those who are now U.S. citizens? Will they also push for restitution for the Jewish people who fled to other countries? I would expect the reactions to be mixed. Some will resent U.S. involvement and feel that Poland should make its own decision on the matter. Others may/may not feel some resentment about U.S. involvement but will be supportive of the restitution efforts regardless of how they come about. Probably not. There are those in the U.S. who relish the self-appointed role of bossy big brother too much... Tufta, I am proud to be an American. But I am not proud of everything that America does. |
|
|
|
Post by tufta on Jul 21, 2008 20:07:41 GMT 1
The thread is (traditionally) interesting and instructive. But compensation to heirs, no matter how distant is tricky. So is compensation as historical justice. How far back to go. One can end compansating for a cave stolen from a neighbouring tribe |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Aug 3, 2008 20:12:04 GMT 1
The thread is (traditionally) interesting and instructive. But compensation to heirs, no matter how distant is tricky. So is compensation as historical justice. How far back to go. One can end compansating for a cave stolen from a neighbouring tribe No cavemen live today. But there are still people who lived through the war. They lost their relatives and property. A legal act decreed by the Polish parliament would signify that everything that happened to them during the war or afterwards was unjust. And it doesn` t have to be billions of $. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Aug 6, 2008 23:58:31 GMT 1
Poland's 'hidden Jews' reflect on their new lives
Jackie Len
THE JERUSALEM POST
Aug. 2, 2008
Poland's latest generation of Jewish youth face a multitude of
questions, choices and challenges as they address their past and
plan their futures.
Twenty-two of those young people are participating in a three-week
Jewish learning seminar in Jerusalem organized by Shavei Israel, a
nonprofit organization that aims to strengthen ties between Israel
and the descendants of Jews around the world.
"My Judaism started about six or seven years ago," said Shimon, 28,
from Lodz, a city with a Jewish community of approximately 300. "I
didn't know why, I just felt something pushing me in that
direction."
Shimon grew up in a secular household and had no Jewish education
when he decided to become religious. He joined a Jewish choir and
began attending synagogue after a friend invited him to a Shabbat
dinner.
One evening during choir practice Shimon came across an article in a
Jewish newspaper with an image of a Leliwa, a Polish coat of arms
used by hundreds of families when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
existed. The symbol bears a six pointed start at its center.
"I remembered that my father told me that our family has this sign,
like a noble family," Shimon recalled. "It was like a green light
for me. I thought: 'Okay, you are on a good path.'
"It took around four or five years, but I finished my conversion on
June 24. If you don't have papers and you want to be a halachic Jew,
you have to make the conversion," explained Shimon. "Four or five
years is normal."
David Gurfinkiel, 20, also from Lodz, was raised by a Jewish father
and Christian mother.
"Every Friday I went to synagogue for Shabbat and each winter we had
a Christmas tree," he said with a chuckle. "I grew up in two
cultures, so I know what I chose, and I know that it is good for
me."
Gurfinkiel also recently converted and now leads an Orthodox
lifestyle.
"We have a special problem in Poland that doesn't exist here [in
Israel]. When you live here you have [access to] everything kosher,
but in Lodz it is different. We have to fight for everything: for
kosher food, for any Jewish thing. So if you want to really be
Jewish you must be a religious Jew.
In Poland, there is just one way to be a Jew," he explained.
Basia Wieczorek, 23, a student from Warsaw, grew up with a Jewish
mother, but did not become observant until high school.
"It's the Polish story, no one comes from religious families," said
Wieczorek. "Because of World War II, because of the Shoah, because
of what happened in '68 [an anti-Zionist campaign that resulted in a
major exodus of Jews from Poland], the Jews who stayed in Poland
decided that they would rather be Polish than Jewish."
Wieczorek's mother chose not to speak with her about her about their
Jewish roots, and even encouraged her not to discuss her religion
openly as a child.
"We don't have a second generation of Jews in Poland, it just
doesn't exist," said Wieczorek. "We just have the [elderly] people
that decided to raise their grandchildren going to Jewish summer
camps. So in the [synagogues] in Poland you don't find any people
between the ages of 40 and 50, it is just the [elderly] and the
young."
While the Polish Jewish youth of today live a different reality from
their parent's generation of Communism and blatant anti-Semitism,
they still do not feel free to share their identities without
restraint.
"In Poland I cannot have regular payot [sidecurls], " Shimon said,
pointing to his trimmed sideburns. "I mean I can, but I would feel
uncomfortable. "
When outside of his home Shimon wears his kippa under a hat and
keeps his tzitzit tucked into his pants.
"My rabbi says that if you feel [revealing you are a Jew] might
bring danger to you, you can hide it," Shimon said with a shrug. "My
close friends know that I am Jewish, but there are some people that
I wouldn't like to find out. You need to separate who you can trust
and who you cannot trust."
When asked if he thinks the next generation of Polish youth will be
more tolerant due to awareness programs in schools and a more
liberal society, Shimon responded, "Maybe they will have a different
point of view, but you never know because bad things are always
[taught] from the top - from grandfathers, fathers, and mothers. But
hopefully they will."
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Aug 24, 2008 22:49:33 GMT 1
Unacceptable prejudice
Don't be beastly to the Poles
Aug 14th 2008
Economist.com
IT IS a fair bet that no British newspaper would print a column that
referred to chinks, coons, dagos, kikes, niggers, spics, wogs, wops
or yids. Indeed, a writer who tried using these words would probably find himself looking for a new job before the day was out. Yet Giles Coren, a leading light of the Times, last month referred to "Polack " in a piece about his great-uncle' s funeral, and seems entirely unrepentant about it.
Nobody would deny that the history of Jews in Poland is tragic. But
to assert, as Mr Coren did, that it is a place where people
celebrate Easter by locking Jews into a synagogue and setting fire
to it is a preposterous smear.
The article has provoked a furore in Poland, and many letters of
protest to the Times. But Mr Coren returned to the fray a week
later, saying that this just proved his case. He was condemning
Poland for denying its responsibility for the Holocaust, and here
was the Polish ambassador to London, he claimed, doing just that.
Arguments based on facts and reason may beat plain ignorance, but they are not necessarily the best weapons against attacks based on prejudice. Mr Coren seems truly to dislike Poles; an ancestor fled from there a century ago, and his family memories, etched and perhaps amplified by the passing decades, are of misery and persecution.
One could ask him why he thinks more Poles are honoured at Yad
Vashem than gentiles from any other country. One could also point
out that Poland was under foreign occupation during the Holocaust,
and that Poles, unlike some other places occupied by the Nazis
(Norway, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark or the British
Channel Islands, for example), proved extremely unwilling to
collaborate with Hitler's war machine. One could note that the
allies won the second world war thanks in part to Polish bravery and brilliance in smuggling out the Germans' Enigma cipher machine.
But that would probably be pointless. For many people, ethnic
prejudices are unshiftable. Sometimes they are harmless (Scots who will applaud any country that beats England in a sporting contest). Sometimes they are loathsome or even lethal. The real issue is why the Times, a respectable mainstream newspaper, permitted the slur to be published; and why, once it had been printed, nobody felt the need to apologise.
The answer is that anti-Polish prejudice is still socially
acceptable, in a way that anti-Jewish prejudice, say, is not. That
is partly a legacy of Soviet propaganda, which liked to portray all
east European countries as benighted reactionary hotbeds that had
been civilised by proletarian internationalism. It is partly a knee-
jerk reaction of people who dislike the Roman Catholic Church, and
particularly the last pope (described contemptuously by a leading
British scientist as "an elderly Pole", as if that disqualified him
from having an opinion). It is mostly because being rude about Poles carries no risk.
That won't change quickly. But before Poles feel too aggrieved about this, they should realise that they are in good company. British
journalists (and, it must be said, some Polish ones) feel no shame
in using anachronistic Nazi allusions when writing about Germany.
English football fans disconcert (they think) German teams by
humming, en masse, the theme from "The Dambusters", a British war film.
Germans may even be called "Huns" in headlines; the French are
sometimes "Frogs". That is rude and tiresome. But the best reaction
to such insults is a mixture of patient pity in public, and
ostracism in private, for those silly enough to resort to them.
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Aug 24, 2008 23:16:46 GMT 1
Polish Investigators Tie Partisans to Massacre
By Marissa Brostoff
Forward, NY
Thu. Aug 07, 2008
HERO?: Daniel Craig stars in a forthcoming film about Polish partisan Tuvia Bielski.
INSIGHT: Coming to Theaters: The subject of a new movie, Tuvia Bielski, left, is pictured here before the war in Poland.
As Paramount Pictures gears up its ad campaign for a new movie about a band of Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis, some in Poland are suggesting that the partisans in question may also have been murderers.
In anticipation of the December release of "Defiance," — starring Daniel Craig, the actor best-known as the latest incarnation of James Bond — the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza ran an article headlined, "A Hollywood Movie About Heroes or Murderers?" The article contrasts the film's portrayal of Tuvia Bielski as a Moses figure leading frightened women and children through the forest with a recently released report from a Polish government investigative body. The government report suggests that Bielski and his followers may have participated in a massacre of civilians in the eastern Polish town of Naliboki.
The tarnishing of the Bielski partisans has infuriated a number of people close to the memory of the group. Some of those people have also been involved with the production of the movie, directed by Ed Zwick ("Legends of the Fall," "The Last Samurai"). Nechama Tec, who wrote the historical account of the Bielski partisans on which the film is based, told the Forward that allegations connecting the partisans to the massacre were "total lies."
Those allegations "underline the antisemitic tendencies of the writers and the distortion of history," Tec said.
The controversy comes on the heels of a Lithuanian government investigation into allegations that Jewish partisans committed war crimes during World War II. That investigation has been met with dismay on the part of Jewish communal leaders inside and outside Lithuania, who note that only three Lithuanians have ever been prosecuted for wartime crimes against Jews.
The reinvestigation — or, as some former partisans and historians claim, the revision — of what happened in the town of Naliboki in May 1943 began in 2001, when the massacre was first being studied by the Institute of National Remembrance, a Polish government agency known as IPN, that is devoted to prosecuting "crimes against the Polish nation." The agency's report, which has thus far been limited to a short brief released this year, claims that on the morning of March 8, 1943, Soviet partisans shot 128 civilians outside their homes.
About two-thirds of the way in, the report brings up the Jewish partisans affiliated with Bielski and his three brothers, noting that though some accounts by witnesses and historians place the group at the scene of the attack, these accounts have not been verified.
"Therefore the fact of participation of partisan soldiers of the Bielski Unit in the attack on Naliboki village is merely one of the versions of the investigated case," the report concludes.
Robert Bielski, Tuvia Bielski's son, said that his problem with the IPN report and the subsequent Gazeta Wyborcza article was twofold.
"The Bielskis were not in Naliboki in May of '43," he said, echoing historians who believe that the partisans did not arrive in the area until August of that year.
"But," he added, "even if it were true, which I know it's not, the 128 people are in no way close to the millions of people that the Polish people herded towards the Germans so they could be extinguished. I believe it's just a consistent Polish antisemitism and the Poles are sloughing off their own crimes of being an enemy of the Jews during World War II."
The IPN declined to comment on the controversy, citing the ongoing nature of the investigation. But Piotr Gluchowski, the Gazeta Wyborcza reporter who co-wrote the article on the IPN report — as well as a longer feature story about the Bielski brothers, published several days later — was more forthcoming. Gluchowski wrote in an e-mail that he was sure the Bielski partisans were not involved in the massacre, but that, on the other hand, the IPN "are no amateurs. This is a government organization, very serious thing."
Gluchowski and his co-writer, Marcin Kowalski, are authoring a book about the Bielski partisans. Gluchowski said it will be published in December to coincide with the release of the film. (A publicist representing the film said she had no knowledge of the book project.)
"The Bielskis… are completely unknown in Poland," Gluchowski said in the email. "But — I think — it will be hot in December, when `Defiance' goes to the theaters."
According to both Gluchowski and the detractors who found his article unsympathetic, the Bielskis are known in Poland only to the extent that some Polish nationalists have seized upon the idea that a Jewish partisan group collaborated with the Soviets to kill Polish civilians. The IPN itself is currently dominated by members of Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, a rightist party, Gluchowski said.
Whether the debate over the Bielski partisans will seep into the reception of "Defiance" remains to be seen. The Variety story appeared briefly on the magazine's Web site, is no longer accessible because, according to the publication' s editor, Dana Harris, it had not been properly edited.
As for the movie itself, shooting was completed last year, before the IPN released its report. Judging from the film's trailer, there was no question in the minds of the filmmakers that Tuvia Bielski and his followers deserve to be celebrated.
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Sept 22, 2008 12:21:55 GMT 1
There were three kinds of attitude shown by Poles to the Holocaust which was taking place in Poland under German occupation. 1. Most Poles didn`t take any action because they either felt indifferent to the Jewish plight or feared the consequences - helping Jews was punished with death of the helper and his/her family. 2. Certain heroic individuals saved Jews. 3. Some Polish lowlifes tracked down hiding Jews and robbed them of their money or gave them away to Germans. Let`s talk about those noblest ones first: www.polishculture-nyc.org/opdyke_more.htm
Irena Gut Opdyke (May 15, 1918 – May 17, 2003) was born Irena Gut into a Catholic family in the town of Kozienice in Central Poland, and studied nursing. During the German occupation of western Poland and the Russian occupation in the east (both armies invaded in September 1939), Irena joined a Polish underground unit. She was spotted by Russian troops, beaten, raped, and forced to work in a Russian medical unit. She escaped, only to be captured later by the Germans and forced to work in a munitions plant. An elderly SS officer Eduard Rugemer arranged her transfer to lighter duties in an army mess hall, which happened to afford her both a direct view into a Jewish ghetto, and a chance to slip food under its fence. When Rugemer was re-assigned to Lvov and then Tarnopol (in what is now Ukraine), he requisitioned Irena as his housekeeper. There she supervised a laundry staffed by Jews, and when she heard that they were to be transported to a death camp, she undertook to hide 12 of them in Rugemer’s own villa and provide them with food and clothing. Upon discovering them, Rugemer hesitated to report them, perhaps in part for fear of being implicated himself – but on the condition that Irena become his mistress.
At a displaced persons camp after the war, Irena Gut met her future husband, a U.N. staffer named William Opdyke. They settled in southern California, where she became an interior decorator. She did not talk about the war until she got a phone call as part of a survey on how many people doubted that the Holocaust ever happened. She began telling her story in schools, and in 1982 Irena Gut Opdyke was named by the Israeli Holocaust Commission as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a title given to gentiles who risked their lives by aiding and saving Jews during the Holocaust, and was presented with the Israel Medal of Honor, Israel's highest tribute, in a ceremony at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. The Vatican has given her a special commendation, and her story is part of a permanent exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post wrote of "the clarity and conviction of a woman to whom acts of heroism and courage are simply natural human responses to inhumanity." Though less widely known than legendary figures like Jan Karski and Irena Sendler, Irena Gut Opdyke exemplifies the ingenuity and courage of many individual Poles who, often under even more perilous conditions, similarly risked even more than their own lives.  Left: A portrait of Irena Gut Opdyke, taken when she was a nursing student studying in Poland. Right: Irena is shown reunited with six of the people she helped save, in Krakow in 1945 The last picture taken of Irena (second from right) with her sisters Marysia, Bronia, Janina and Wladzia in Poland in 2001 Today, a play based on her life is being staged and the audience`s initial response assures it will be a success. www.chelseanow.com/cn_91/broadwayproducer.html |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Oct 7, 2008 20:32:58 GMT 1
A wise, balanced article www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shtetl/reflections/ Gone now are those little towns where the shoemaker was a poet, The watchmaker a philosopher, the barber a troubadour. Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined Biblical songs with Polish tunes and Slavic rue, Where old Jews in orchards in the shade of cherry trees Lamented for the holy walls of Jerusalem. Gone now are those little towns, though the poetic mists, The moons, winds, ponds, and stars above them Have recorded in the blood of centuries the tragic tales, The histories of the two saddest nations on earth. --Antoni Sionimski, "Elegy for the Jewish Villages" What remains of the Jews of Poland? Mostly traces, echoes, and a few monuments; and also sorrow, rage, guilt, and denial. There are a few thousand Jews left in Poland today, but the communities they inhabited, their characteristic culture and society, were all destroyed during World War II. Because the extent of the loss was so great--so total--the act of remembering the vanished world has become fraught with painful and still acute emotions. The destruction was nowhere more complete than in the numberless Polish shtetls, those villages and small towns that dotted the Polish landscape and that were sometimes partly, sometimes preponderantly, Jewish. The villages are still there, many of them lovely enough to justify geographic longing; the towns can be found, often transformed into bleakness by postwar poverty and socialist architecture. A few synagogues still stand, some of them crumbling from neglect and disuse, others preserved and restored to their former dignity. Occasionally, outside the borders of a village, there is a small Jewish cemetery, with weeds and vegetation climbing up the crooked headstones. A Polish farmer will point out a copse where the Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and shot; in a few places, modest monuments have been erected to those who perished. Relics, scattered and enigmatic, as of a lost ancient civilization. But the pulsing Jewish world that was here, the small shops and stalls, the bustle of people, carts, horses, the sounds of Yiddish and Hebrew--these are no more. The Jews, a Polish poet wrote, "were captured in the hot act of life." That life can almost be intuited beyond the curtain of abrupt absence. We think we can almost cross the curtain; but we cannot. In post-Holocaust memory, Poland holds an exceptional place: that was where most of the world's Jewish population lived before the war, and that was where the extermination of European Jewry took place. At the beginning of the war, there were three million Jews in Poland; at the end, between 240,000 and 300,000 remained. Most of the Nazi concentration camps were built in Poland, and it is often said that the Nazis counted on the collusion of the Poles in their project of extermination. Such an explanation has been repeatedly and convincingly refuted. It is much more likely that the camps were placed in Poland for logistical reasons: Poland was where most of the people targeted for extermination were located. Fifty years after the cataclysmic events, there is perhaps no past as powerfully contested as that of the Polish Jews. The Holocaust in Poland, and all of Polish-Jewish history, continues to be the embattled terrain of three different and sometimes bitterly competing sets of collective memory: Jewish memory, Polish memory, and the memory of the West. In postwar Jewish memory, in the minds of many Holocaust survivors and their descendants, Poland has come to figure as the very heart of darkness, the central symbol of the inferno. Our psyches are associative: because the Holocaust happened there, because so many people were tortured and murdered on its soil, Poland became scorched earth, contaminated ground. What is remembered most vividly is the suffering; what remains lodged most sharply in the heart are the shards of rejection and betrayal. On the individual level, the accounts of Polish indifference or criminality are rarely an exaggeration in a realm where, in a sense, no exaggeration is possible. But taken collectively, the linking of Poland with the genocide involves a form of partial memory, which has enormously increased Polish defensiveness and rancor. Unfortunately, the Polish response to the Holocaust in the aftermath of the war only added to the Jewish survivors' anger and hurt. There were horrible episodes of violence and murder. But there was also--after a brief initial period of commemoration and documentation--the wider pathology of silence. During the postwar decades, the specific history of the Holocaust, the Jewish aspects of prewar Polish culture, even the Jews themselves, became untouchable, and gradually forgotten, subjects. The amnesia was undoubtedly caused in part by the extremely disturbing nature of what needed to be remembered, by incomprehension, psychological numbing, and guilt. But the repression of memory was greatly aided and abetted by the falsifications of Communist history and by the fact that under its aegis, discussion of many politically charged issues was stifled. The fate of the Jews during the war, as well as the Polish role in witnessing and sometimes participating in their destruction, were among those issues. So, incidentally, was the role of the non-Communist Polish resistance in opposing the Nazis. The reasons for such distortions varied but were always part of a larger Communist agenda, and it suited that agenda to subsume Jewish victims of the Holocaust under the national categories of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and so on. It is no accident that these repressed themes began to be examined publicly again once the Iron Curtain was lifted in 1989. In Poland, painful and still halting discussions of anti-Semitism have begun. But the previous deletions and denials immensely augmented Jewish frustration at what was in effect an erasure of their tragedy from their former countrymen's consciousness. The Western perspective added more layers of grievance and misunderstanding. In the West, knowledge of what happened in Poland during World War II was simplified to begin with, and clouded by Communist propaganda to boot. Moreover, instead of being modified by time and change, the bleak images of Poland were calcified by the Cold War. The Iron Curtain was a force of and for reductiveness. The countries behind that divide became relegated, even more strongly than before, to a category of Otherness, a realm of leaden, monolithic oppression. While the Western public was aware of the revisions of mood and opinion in West Germany, for example, Poland as a real entity was supplanted by static abstractions. West Germany, with its new democracy and economic prosperity, came to be seen as one of "us," while Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe grew more alien, and therefore susceptible to Western projections. And so, while it became increasingly unfashionable to talk about "German anti-Semitism" as if it were a national trait, or to confuse the German nation with the Nazi phenomenon, it remained quite possible to speak about Polish anti-Semitism, as if that attitude were an essential and unchangeable feature of Polish character. This in turn increased Polish resentment of the exaggerated charges and at the world's forgetfulness of Poland's own struggle for survival during the war, and its immense losses. The incompatible interpretations have deepened the ruts of prejudice and hostility. It might be said that my argument in the following pages stands in a kind of counterpoint to Daniel Goldhagen's thesis in his hotly debated work, Hitler's Willing Executioners, although my book is in no way intended as a riposte to his. In trying to demonstrate that Nazi anti-Semitism had deep roots in a history of German anti-Semitism, Mr. Goldhagen was, in effect, revising what had become the received liberal opinion: that Nazism had nothing to do with the German mentality and that ordinary Germans should in no way be held accountable for the Holocaust, which had arisen from specifically political policies. This book is an effort to counter what I see as the reverse distortion: the notion that ordinary Poles were naturally inclined, by virtue of their congenital anti-Semitism, to participate in the genocide, and that Poles even today must be viewed with extreme suspicion or condemned as guilty for the fate of the Jews in their country. My aim is not to absolve any more than it is to condemn, but it is, at the very least, to complicate and historicize this picture. Family knowledge can be useful in making abstract history concrete, and from the stories of my own family, I know just how terribly tangled things could become in the untenable conditions created by the war. My parents lived through that period in a region of the Ukraine that belonged to Poland before the war and became Soviet immediately thereafter. On several occasions they had to escape hostile local peasants who might have given them away to the Nazi authorities. But my parents were also repeatedly helped by people who gave them food and temporary shelter, and by a peasant who hid them for nearly two years, with the full knowledge that he was thereby risking death for himself and his sons. The other awful aspect of my family story was that two relatives died because of an act of betrayal committed by a fellow Jew--a man who, in the hope of ensuring his own survival, led the Germans to a hiding place. The only reason to record such wrenching facts is because I believe that if we are to understand what happened in Poland during the war, we must begin by acknowledging, from within each memory, the terrible complexity of everyone's circumstances and behavior. The instances of Polish complicity in Nazi murderousness cannot be excused or explained away, and yet it would be an unjust distortion not to see even these most distressing phenomena as part of a more complete picture. In the maelstrom of war, Poland was probably the zone of highest pressure and of almost unbearable tensions. At the outset, the country found itself invaded by two powers, Germany and the Soviet Union. For six years, Poles were engaged in massive resistance against both invaders. The Soviet conquest created new enmities between Poles and Jews, as the latter often welcomed, for their own entirely comprehensible reasons, the armies of Poland's traditional enemy. The Nazi occupation of the country was, even by the brutal standards of the time, exceptionally ruthless. The Poles, in the Nazi hierarchy, were next only to Jews and Gypsies in the order of inferior races-- slated for complete subjugation and, in the more visionary Nazi plans, for eventual extermination. The Poles, then, were fighting against just about hopeless odds, while the Jews in their midst were being exterminated with no odds on their side at all. It is undeniable that during that time a portion of the Polish population were willing to turn a blind eye to the horrors perpetrated on their far more vulnerable countrymen. There were Poles who watched the roundups of their Jewish neighbors with indifference or even gratification; there were those who informed or gave Jews away to the Nazi authorities. But every Polish Jew who survived in occupied Poland (rather than in the Soviet Union) did so with the help of individual Poles and of organizations set up for the purpose of aiding Jews. This was help offered at enormous risk, since sheltering Jews carried with it the penalty of death. Under the immense. fearful stresses of the time, both cowardice and courage were magnified; both meanness and mercy reached new proportions. The shadow of the Holocaust is long, and it extends backward as well as forward. Our readings of the prewar Polish Jewish past have been burdened retroactively by our knowledge of what came at the end. For some descendants of Eastern European Jews, the lost world of their parents and grandparents has become idealized, sequestered in the imagination as a quaint realm of "before." For others, the whole Polish past is seen in darkened hues, as nothing but a prelude and a prefiguring of the catastrophe. The retroactive revisions are understandable: the meaning of every story is crucially affected by its conclusion, and the story of Polish Jews has become shaped in our minds by what was, for so many, the final act. And yet history isn't exactly like story; it isn't shaped by an author who is leading up to a preconceived finale from the outset, or who can at least invent an appropriate ending to fit the narrative's shape. History doesn't unfold that logically or purposefully, and the history of Polish Jews wasn't a tale that led inevitably to its tragic denouement. Before the destruction, there was multifarious, vibrant life. There had been several centuries of collective existence and coexistence, periods of greater and lesser prosperity, episodes of violent hostility and inspiring cooperation, intervals of turmoil and peace. If we denude this past of its variety, we deprive ourselves of a wonderfully interesting heritage and a rich lode of knowledge and self-knowledge. After all, for about six hundred years Poland was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the world. The Jews first started settling there as early as the eleventh century, and they started arriving in larger numbers in the fourteenth. By the late seventeenth century, nearly three quarters of the world's Jewry lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the eighteenth century, before the partitions, Jews constituted about 10 percent of Poland's population, which made them that country's largest minority. Before World War II, they may have grown to as much as 13 percent. Polish Jews created impressive religious institutions, political movements, a secular literature, and a distinctive way of life. In modern times, Polish Jewry gave rise to Yiddish and Hebrew culture, which crucially influenced Diaspora cultures in Europe and the United States. All of this meant that throughout much of Poland's history, Jews were a highly visible and socially significant presence-- a constituency that had to be reckoned with and one that could even pose challenges to the Poles themselves. In this respect, the nature of the Polish-Jewish relationship is exceptional. In contrast with Western European countries, where Jews were usually a tiny minority (below 2 percent of the population in modern Germany) and where, therefore, they were a mostly imaginary Other, in Poland, the Jewish community comprised a genuine ethnic minority, with its own rights, problems, and powers. We have become skilled nowadays in analyzing the imagery of Otherness, that unconscious stratum of preconceptions, fantasies, and projections we bring to our perceptions of strangers. Such subliminal assumptions and archetypes can and do have a very real impact on how we see and treat each other. But in inter group relations that were as extended in time and as complex as those between Poles and Jews, the material realities of economic competition and practical loyalties, of policy and political alignments, also played a vital role. Indeed, it might be possible to see the story of Polish-Jewish coexistence as a long experiment in multiculturalism avant la lettre. In the imagination of the West, it has been consistently assumed that Western Europe has been the norm and standard in the light of which Eastern Europe has often been judged as backward, or at least less advanced. And it is true that Eastern Europe has often lagged behind the West in economic development and in sheer political power. But criteria of historical judgment can change sharply as values change in the present. Progress is usually seen as that which precedes us, and from the perspective of today, aspects of Eastern European history are beginning to look presciently relevant, and to foreshadow some of the dilemmas with which advanced contemporary societies are struggling. This is particularly true of the problems of pluralism and ethnic coexistence. Poland especially has interesting precedents to offer in this respect, since during several periods of its history, it was a truly multicultural society. At the height of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth century, Poland had substantial German, Italian, Scots, Armenian, and other minorities; at some intervals, less than half the population was ethnically Polish. However, the Jewish minority was usually the largest, and the most important. Over several centuries, the Polish-Jewish experiment went through different phases of trial and error. In the premodern period, Polish attitudes toward religious minorities were surprisingly liberal, even by our own postmodern standards. While the young Jewish communities in Poland suffered their share of religious and folk prejudice, they were also to a large extent protected by laws and special privileges. There were times, particularly during the Renaissance, when Jews saw Poland as a refuge from other, more hostile places, and when they believed that the word "Poland" was the same as the Hebrew "polin," which means "here thou shalt lodge" in exile--that Poland, in other words, was a kind of promised land. This happy state wasn't always sustained. As Poland's economic and political fortunes declined, from the middle of the seventeenth century onward, relations between Poles and Jews deteriorated into suspiciousness and economic competition. In the twentieth century, the period between the two world wars saw both an amazing efflorescence of Jewish political and literary culture and eruptions of ideological, and sometimes virulent, anti-Semitism. The question of the proper relationship between the two peoples was a matter of ongoing debate throughout Polish history, and the proposed answers varied on both sides of the ethnic divide. There were Polish and Jewish thinkers who felt that the two groups were ineradicably different in spirit and outlook, and that the best they could achieve was respectful separateness. There were assimilationists, again on both sides, who proposed cultural blending, or even conversion, as the only solution to the tensions between the two groups. But there were also Enlightenment thinkers who wanted to combine a degree of Jewish integration into Polish society with spiritual autonomy for everyone. There were Jewish patriots who fought for Poland and Polish romantics who thought that the Jewish legacy was an integral and enriching part of the national identity. A mixed story, then. The multicultural experiment was rarely completely "correct" or completely successful, but it can hardly be judged a complete failure, especially when we have more recent experience to show us how difficult such experiments remain today. And in light of that experience, it might be possible to understand some of the conflicts that arose between Poles and Jews in terms of majority-minority relations rather than exclusively under the category of anti-Semitism. frontline | wgbh educational foundation | www.wgbh.orgweb site copyright 1995-2005 wgbh educational foundation |
|
|
|
Post by tufta on Oct 8, 2008 20:41:24 GMT 1
Bo, but that's Eva Hoffman! No wonder it is balanced and wise. She is one of those Polish Jews, now American, who looks at the Polish-Jewish troubled neighbourhood, as you say, in a balanced way. Unfortunately it is not very common among American Jewry. The article you have indeed wisely chosen to present is a part of this book - I have read it. czytelnia.onet.pl/0,644,0,1,nowosci.html I don't always totally agree with Eva Hoffman, but she's certainly in majority of what she writes very sensible and she is most of all aware Polish - Jewish neighourhood was not really troubled through the ages of history. The problems started after the partitions when the third parties got their voice on our internal matters. And only since then the real 'sins' started to appear... from both sides. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Oct 14, 2008 20:17:06 GMT 1
www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/coleT2.htmlSecret City. The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945 Author Gunnar S. Paulsson (Secret City) gspaulsson@sympatico.ca
In the popular imagination, the geographical complexity of the Holocaust has been reduced to two Polish towns, Oswiecim and Warsaw. The death camp sited in the former has emerged as not only the definitive death camp and representative of the state-sponsored factory-like mass killings of the Holocaust, but also as a synonym for evil. In contrast, the latter has emerged as both the definitive ghetto and site of heroic resistance, which in Israeli narratives of the Holocaust in particular, offers a degree of redemption from this terrible past. However, as the three books under review suggest, the historical complexity of Jewish experiences of the Warsaw ghetto is not easily reducible to resistance alone. In Paulsson’s ground-breaking study Secret City, it is evasion rather than resistance that takes centre-stage. In Janusz Korczak’s Ghetto Diary – published in paperback for the first time – the reflections of the paediatrician are on his own personal past and future, as well as the present day-to-day concerns of running an orphanage relocated into the ghetto. In Michal Grynberg’s edited collection of diary and memoir accounts, newly translated into English by Philip Boehm, the breadth of Jewish experiences, ranging from collaboration through resistance, are revealed. Taken together, the three books uncover something of the variety of Jewish experiences of living in Nazi occupied Warsaw, over the course of six years of changing Nazi actions and Jewish responses.
The rapidly shifting chronology of the wartime years forms the rough framework for Paulsson’s carefully-researched study, which examines Jewish responses to the setting up of the Warsaw ghetto in 1940, the commencement of mass deportations in 1942, the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 and the city-wide Warsaw uprising in 1944. Whilst the main story in Warsaw during this period is one of mass destruction – 98 per cent of the city’s Jewish population and 25 per cent of the city’s non-Jewish Polish population were killed during World War Two – Paulsson’s important contribution is to draw our attention to a less well-known story, that of Jewish concealment on the Aryan side. Although the numbers in hiding were relatively small in comparison to those deported from the city to the death camp at Treblinka, Paulsson’s estimate of 28,000 Warsaw Jews in hiding at one point or another during the war represents a sizeable minority. Certainly the numbers who decided to escape to the Aryan side (in particular in 1942 and 1943) were far greater than those who chose the route of armed uprising in April 1943, and Paulsson suggests that there was a relatively high success rate. Of the 28,000 Jews who went into hiding, he estimates that some 11,500 survived the war, leading Paulsson to conclude that, ‘of all the options that seemed to be available to the Jews, including armed resistance, flight unquestionably offered in practice the best chance of survival, and, contrary to the prevailing belief, it did take place on a massive scale’.(p. 13)
The significance of Paulsson’s book is not simply that it is the first full-length study of the nature and extent of Jewish hiding on the Aryan side in wartime Warsaw, but also that it offers a model of studying the relatively neglected topic of evasion during the Holocaust. Drawing on diary and memoir accounts, Paulsson points to the use of pre-existing networks with non-Jewish friends and colleagues, as well as the multitude of ways across the porous ghetto wall. Escapes took place over, under and through the wall itself, as well as through the ghetto gates, which could be breached in vehicles, with passes and through a combination of bribing and distracting the guards. Not only were Jewish and Polish policemen stationed there open to bribery, but so were a number of (ordinary) German gendarmes. Once outside the ghetto, Jews were vulnerable to blackmail and extortion, but they were also helped by a network of Poles, a factor that questions monolithic accounts of pre-war Polish antisemitism. The scale not only of the dangers facing Jews living in hiding, but also the help offered to Jews can be seen in Paulsson’s conclusion, drawn from a reading of the longer memoirs, that the average Warsaw Jew hid in over seven different hiding places on the Aryan side. Whilst the 28,000 Jews in hiding faced the threat of some 3000-4000 extortionists and blackmailers, Paulsson estimates that they received help from 70,000-90,000 Poles (one twelfth of the city’s population). All of these individuals made up what Paulsson claims amounted to a ‘secret city’ within occupied Warsaw. 
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Nov 11, 2008 22:33:13 GMT 1
Pulling Poland's Hidden Jews from the Closet
08 November 08 06:09
by Baruch Gordon
(IsraelNN.com) Rabbi Pinchas Zarcynsky has been appointed as the third emissary of the Shavei Israel organization in Poland to seek out "hidden Jews" and pull them out of the closet. He will be serving in Warsaw alongside the existing two Rabbis in Poland: Rabbi Boaz Pash, who serves as Chief Rabbi of Krakow, and Rabbi Yitzhak Rapaport, who serves as Chief Rabbi of Wroclaw.
The "hidden Jews" is a phenomenon that has gained in strength in Poland in recent years, with many Jews slowly returning to Judaism and the Jewish people. Many of these Jews lost all contact with Judaism due to the extreme anti-Semitism that they encountered after the Holocaust, and some of them even converted. Others concealed their Judaism from the Communist authorities and now feel free to resume their true identity.
A group of Poland's "Hidden Jews" on a Shavei Israel seminar
Another phenomenon pertains to Jewish young people who were adopted by Catholic families and institutions during the Holocaust. They were told nothing of their Jewish identity, and only in recent years have they gradually begun to discover it.
Today around 4,000 Jews are registered as living in Poland, but according to various estimates, there are tens of thousands of others who have concealed their true identity, or are simply unaware of it.
Shavei Israel's rabbis convene seminars and symposiums in Poland and Israel for the "hidden Jews" of Poland; publish newsletters and other Polish-language print publications on Jewish subjects and distribute them among various Polish communities; and provide assistance with the aliyah, conversion and absorption process for those members of the community in Poland who choose to immigrate to Israel.
Rabbi Zarcynsky, 27, will arrive in Poland from Jerusalem with his wife and new baby. He speaks Hebrew, Polish and English, and holds degrees in Architecture and Engineering from ORT College and in Jewish Studies from the Machon Meir Institute in Jerusalem. He graduated from the Straus-Amiel Institute for Training Rabbis and Educators for the Diaspora.
"Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, more and more young Poles are rediscovering their Jewish roots and expressing a desire to become closer to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. We cannot turn our backs on this challenge, which is historical and exciting like no other," noted Michael Freund, Shavei Israel Chairman.
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Nov 11, 2008 22:33:18 GMT 1
Pulling Poland's Hidden Jews from the Closet
08 November 08 06:09
by Baruch Gordon
(IsraelNN.com) Rabbi Pinchas Zarcynsky has been appointed as the third emissary of the Shavei Israel organization in Poland to seek out "hidden Jews" and pull them out of the closet. He will be serving in Warsaw alongside the existing two Rabbis in Poland: Rabbi Boaz Pash, who serves as Chief Rabbi of Krakow, and Rabbi Yitzhak Rapaport, who serves as Chief Rabbi of Wroclaw.
The "hidden Jews" is a phenomenon that has gained in strength in Poland in recent years, with many Jews slowly returning to Judaism and the Jewish people. Many of these Jews lost all contact with Judaism due to the extreme anti-Semitism that they encountered after the Holocaust, and some of them even converted. Others concealed their Judaism from the Communist authorities and now feel free to resume their true identity.
A group of Poland's "Hidden Jews" on a Shavei Israel seminar
Another phenomenon pertains to Jewish young people who were adopted by Catholic families and institutions during the Holocaust. They were told nothing of their Jewish identity, and only in recent years have they gradually begun to discover it.
Today around 4,000 Jews are registered as living in Poland, but according to various estimates, there are tens of thousands of others who have concealed their true identity, or are simply unaware of it.
Shavei Israel's rabbis convene seminars and symposiums in Poland and Israel for the "hidden Jews" of Poland; publish newsletters and other Polish-language print publications on Jewish subjects and distribute them among various Polish communities; and provide assistance with the aliyah, conversion and absorption process for those members of the community in Poland who choose to immigrate to Israel.
Rabbi Zarcynsky, 27, will arrive in Poland from Jerusalem with his wife and new baby. He speaks Hebrew, Polish and English, and holds degrees in Architecture and Engineering from ORT College and in Jewish Studies from the Machon Meir Institute in Jerusalem. He graduated from the Straus-Amiel Institute for Training Rabbis and Educators for the Diaspora.
"Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, more and more young Poles are rediscovering their Jewish roots and expressing a desire to become closer to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. We cannot turn our backs on this challenge, which is historical and exciting like no other," noted Michael Freund, Shavei Israel Chairman.
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Nov 25, 2008 0:30:15 GMT 1
Warsaw marks borders of former ghetto11/19/08
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish officials have marked the border of the former Warsaw Ghetto with plaques and lines of metal set in concrete to preserve the memory of the tragic World War II-era Jewish quarter.
The markers were inaugurated Wednesday in a ceremony attended by Holocaust survivors, Roman Catholic clergy, Poland's chief rabbi and the Warsaw mayor.
The Warsaw Ghetto was set up by Nazi Germany when it occupied Poland during the war. About half a million Jews were imprisoned there. It served as a holding place before most were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.
Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz- Waltz says preserving the memory of the
ghetto is important because "it's a picture of the history —
unfortunately the dramatic history — of the city."
|
|
