Poland’s nationalists are burying their antisemitic past – this is dangerous. By Przemyslaw Wielgosz
What is at stake in the row over links to
the Holocaust is not Poland’s reputation, but Polish nationalist rightwing
tradition
A war is being fought over collective memory in Poland. In the absence of a convincing vision of the future, the ability to control definitions of the past has become one of the most important sources of legitimacy in Polish politics. But if the historicisation of policy is a game played by all sides, the conservative, nationalist right is the most consistent and effective player. Its strategy is well illustrated by the current conflict over the act that enshrines the legal status of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).
The government
presented the bill as a way to eliminate a discourse about “Polish death camps”
during the Holocaust. The government says this discussion falsely accuses Poles
of complicity in the murder of 3 million Polish Jews under Nazi occupation and
is spreading throughout the world. The majority of the opposition
either abstained or supported the government, with the main objection coming
from liberal media where the law was criticised for provisions that introduced
historical censorship.
Under the guise of
defending the good name of “The Polish Nation” the bill opens the way to
criminalising anyone who seeks to reveal dark chapters of Polish history, such
as antisemitic pogroms before, during and after the war. But this is a veneer.
What is truly at stake is not Poland’s reputation, but Polish nationalist
rightwing tradition. The ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) makes no secret of
the fact that it is part of this tradition. The language and ideas of PiS
leaders, as well as their policies towards refugees, minorities and political
opposition, draw directly from the rhetoric and strategy of Polish nationalism
in the first half of the 20th century.
Before the second
world war the Polish nationalist movement was furiously antisemitic.
Organisations including ONR-Falanga, the Camp of Great Poland, the National
party and the Camp of National Unity had between them hundreds of thousands of
members organised on the model of Italian and German fascists. They organised a
boycott of Jewish shops and companies, as well as militias that physically
attacked representatives of the Jewish community. Between 1935 and 1937 a wave
of antisemitic pogroms passed through Poland. The most important
centres of antisemitic violence were universities and university cities, which
were controlled by the nationalist right. At universities, with the support of
their authorities, the “ghetto benches” (special pews for Jews) were
introduced, and the number of Jewish students reduced. Those who remained were
regularly harassed and beaten. Antisemitic violence
spread from cities to the provinces. Areas in which the nationalists’ influence
was strong in the 1930s became the most dangerous for Jews during the war and
occupation. Marches and boycotts gave way to more deadly attacks. In some
places – Jedwabne, Radziłów, Wąsosz, Szczuczyn – thousands of Jews were
murdered by Poles in the summer of 1941. The last phase of the Holocaust (1943-44)
saw Jewish “runaways” escaping ghettos hunted and denounced.
Polish antisemitism
still has a very specific political face. It is the work and the tool of the
nationalist right. This is PiS’s history and presents a problem for the
party... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/06/poland-antisemitism-nationalism-holocaustan important comment beneath the above article (by 'Hospital Wing')
The Holocaust was conceived and carried out
by Nazi Germany and took place on occupied Polish soil. Without Hitler's
maniacal hatred of Jews, the Holocaust would never have happened. It would
never have sprung from any Polish mind. The Polish state ceased to exist in
September 1939 and had no responsibility for what happened in its former
territory after its dissolution.
There was a history of anti-Semitism in
Poland and across central and eastern Europe before the war and it continued
after the war. A vicious pogrom occurred in Kielce north of Auschwitz in 1946
and the Polish Communist party purged Jews in 1968. In the 1980s when I lived
in Warsaw, Polish Jews hid their religion in public.
The charge of anti-Semitism is undeniable.
Some Poles betrayed Jews during the war. But to accuse THE Poles, all of them,
of complicity with the Holocaust, which is getting close to accusing them of
co-responsibility for it, is the bone that sticks in Polish throats when more
than 5 million of them died during the German occupation. Poles were as much
victims of the Nazis as any other peoples crushed by the German war machine.
Jews themselves were forced to cooperate in the Holocaust as ghetto police and
as servants at the gas chambers and ovens.
There is a deeply unpleasant scene in
Lansmann's Shoah in which, through an interpreter, he badgers an elderly Polish
peasant farming outside Treblinka to admit that he knew what the transports
were and was guilty by association because he did nothing about it. The
bewildered and inarticulate farmer would have been a much younger man during
the war but what was he supposed to have done against German occupiers who were
as brutal to Poles as anyone else. Slavs were untermeschen according to the
Nazis, remember?
The further away we get in time from an
event in history, the more it becomes encapsulated in a soundbite that with
repetition becomes an unquestioned truth. Obama's reference to "Polish
camps" is an example of the way history can be gradually and irrevocably
deformed in the popular mind. The Polish government's law is ill-conceived but
when even the president of the United States equates Poles with Nazi, it's not
surprising that they react defensively and with anger.
see also
