A Chosen Few (3 page)

While France still struggles with its history of Nazi collaboration, the majority of both Jews and non-Jews there were born since the Liberation. More than half of French Jews are either from North Africa or related to North African Jews who did not directly experience the Holocaust. Today French Jews feel secure enough to do what Jews do, fight among themselves—angry arguments over such subjects as the future of Israel.

While the large French Jewish population debates endlessly, the tiny surviving Polish Jewish population remains a topic of
endless debate—the Jewish question, which, in reality, is the Polish question.

Almost six decades after the Holocaust, in which three million Polish Jews were murdered, mostly on Polish soil, Poles continue to see themselves as a heroic and suffering people who have fought for freedom and endured the brutality of their neighbors—in other words, they are the victims. The Poles are undeterred by the fact that virtually no one outside of Poland sees them that way.

It is true that three million non-Jewish Poles also died in the war. The Polish three million was ten percent of the population. The Jewish three million was more than ninety percent. According to the Polish version of history, the Jews were murdered by the Germans not by the Poles and when Poles participated they were forced at gunpoint. Poles, when not victims, were bystanders, never perpetrators. This does not explain why Jews were massacred in Poland before the Germans came or after they left, nor why anti-Semitism has remained part of Polish life.

Curiously, the difference in viewpoint inside and outside Poland has created an important rift between the Jews of Poland and the Jews of America. Poles both Jewish and Christian resent the American Jewish tendency to indulge in hatred of Poles. After all, the few Jews who have remained have done so because they feel that Poland is their home and non-Jewish Poles are their friends and colleagues.

It is interesting to compare the attitude of world Jewry toward the Netherlands and Poland. Both countries were occupied by the Nazis. Both countries had organized resistance but a general population that cooperated in the removal of more than ninety percent of its Jewish population. One difference was that in Holland the Nazis could count on the help of a home-grown Nazi movement whereas there was no such movement in Poland.

And yet the few remaining Jews in Holland do not have to constantly justify their existence in their own country. Holland is not filled with Jewish tourists openly displaying contempt for the Dutch. Dutch Jewry do not have to be on a constant vigil to keep their art treasures from being removed by the world Jewish community. But the Jews of Poland must explain why they are living in their native country. The Jews of Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in central Europe must constantly fight American and Israeli Jews wishing to take their art treasures to Israel.

Poland suffers from the chronic outbreak of history. In one
sense, these debates are healthy. They were never allowed until the late 1980s, when the Communist regime was losing its control of the national dialogue. In 1987, the first such national debate erupted when the Catholic press suggested that the Jews were owed some sort of compensation by the Poles for the Polish role as bystanders in the German Holocaust. Since then, at least nine other crises have occurred, including fights over the operation of Auschwitz as a historic site, and the memory of the post-war Kielce pogrom. The most recent such battle began in May 2000 when the Polish press reported that Jan Gross, a Polish Jew who had emigrated during the 1968 wave of anti-Semitism, was about to publish a book in Polish on Jedwabne.

Jedwabne was one of those pieces of Polish history that Jews knew about but of which Poles somehow had no memory. The entire Jewish community of this town, some 1,600 Jews according to Gross, were locked in a barn and massacred, not by Germans but by the local townspeople. There were not even Germans present giving orders. What happened was completely on the initiative of Poles—Poles as perpetrators.

This came as no shock to Polish Jews. Jedwabne was one of several such Polish massacres. Another took place in the nearby schtetl of Radzilow. And there may have been ten or more similar incidents, all in the same area. No one, including Jews, knows of this happening anywhere else in Poland. This was an infamously anti-Semitic area. Before the war it was the only rural stronghold of the Jew-hating National Democratic Party.

The Jews and non-Jews of Poland are well aware that there were Poles who saved Jews and resisted Nazis. There was an armed resistance, the first prisoners sent to Auschwitz were anti-Nazi Poles. Several hundred Poles were executed by the Germans for trying to help Jews. Even in Jedwabne, one of the local women, Antonina Wyrzykowska, saved seven Jews by hiding them. Rather than becoming a national hero, she was so abused that she immigrated to the U.S. She is still hated in the town because not only is she a witness to what they did but she is proof that individuals could have done something to stop it.

Poles through the debates of the 1980s and 1990s have come to accept that not all Poles were heroes. Many were bystanders. Some turned Jews in and cooperated in other ways with the German plan of genocide. But, by the year 2000, most Poles were still not ready to accept the fact that Poles had actively participated in the Holocaust, that they had been perpetrators. Dariusz Stola,
searching through only what he regarded as the major dailies and weeklies of Poland, counted 270 articles on Jedwabne during the twelve months following the first news of the Gross book.

Gross’s book was greeted by disturbing defenses. It was only a few hundred Jews, some said. Gross is a Jew who wrote the book at the behest of the American Jewish community that hates Poland, said others. Or why should Poles apologize for the killing of Jews when the Jews don’t apologize for the killing of Poles.

Some who gave testimony for the book have been driven out of town. These witnesses said they have been waiting all these years to tell someone but no one ever asked. Konstanty Gebert, now a well-known journalist, went to the town and reported, “It is a village seething with hatred.”

After more than a year of debate, on July 10, 2001, Aleksander Kwasniewski, the Polish President, went to Jedwabne and in a ceremony that was broadcast on national television, apologized for the way Poles had acted there. He said, “It was justified by nothing. The victims were helpless and defenseless.” He asked forgiveness “in my own name and in the name of the Polish people whose consciences are shocked by this crime.”

Unfortunately he was not apologizing for the majority of Poles. Many were angered by his apology and an earlier poll had shown that only thirty-two percent of Poles were in favor of an apology. But Polish Jews see progress in their chosen homeland. Even ten years ago, it would have been unlikey to have gotten thirty-two percent in favor of an apology. “That’s a third, that’s huge!” said Konstanty Gebert.

At the time
A Chosen Few
was being researched, Gebert had taken to wearing a yarmulke when at home in his central Warsaw apartment. In those days he would not wear it on the street. Now he does. Occasionally Poles come up to him, not to abuse him, but to say how pleased they are that today a Jew is free to wear a yarmulke on the streets of Poland.

Polish Jewish writer Julian Stryjkowski in a recent speech described how when growing up in Galicia he spoke only Yiddish. When he was sent off to school he was told to say when he heard his name,
jestem
, a Polish word meaning literally “I am.” It was the Polish way of saying “here.” This being the only Polish he knew, he would answer any question on any subject, “
jestem
.” The other children would laugh. Today there are some four million Jews in Europe, not quite a third of the 1935 population but a million more than in 1945. They do not always want to be symbols. Not
all of them even want to live Jewish lives. But they all wish to live their lives, in what they see as their own countries, just like other Europeans. Yet they must constantly assert,
jestem
—here.

Breaking my own rule about making predictions, I suspect that there will always be Jews in Europe.

New York, November 2001

In the final days of the Soviet empire, when there was little left but humor, a story circulated about two men who on a cold winter’s day put up a sign, “Fish for Sale.” Immediately a huge line formed. The two fish vendors, realizing that there were far more customers than fish, angrily marched outside and shouted, “There will be no fish for Jews. All Jews go home.”

After the Jews left, the line was only a little smaller. The two men had to think of something else. The customers were stamping their feet to stay warm, but they were keeping their places. The two sheepishly emerged from their storefront forty minutes later. “I’m sorry, but we only have enough fish for party members. Everyone else go home.”

This time about two thirds of the line left. The rest continued to stand with their hats pulled down and their collars tugged up. When after another hour the fish vendors saw that no one had given up, they came out again and said, “Sorry but there will be fish only for recipients of the Order of Lenin.”

There were two Order of Lenin winners in the line. Everyone else left. The two stood there in the cold for another hour, wondering when they would get their fish. Finally the fish vendors came out and said, “I’m sorry, we really don’t have any fish at all.”

The one frozen Order of Lenin winner turned to the other
frozen Order of Lenin winner and said, “You see—the Jews always get the best deal.”

For all its unbelievably destructive wars, its weaponry, and its genocide—to use a word invented in this century—the end of the twentieth century is bearing some remarkable similarities to its beginning. At the turn of the century, just as stability and prosperity seemed to be within Europe’s grasp, the future was menaced by the crumbling of the Russian empire and the emerging nationalism of small Balkan states. Through unification, Germany, the economic giant of Europe, had created an affluent internal market far larger than that of its neighbors.

So striking are the similarities that German chancellor Helmut Kohl angrily declared to his country’s neighbors, who were nervous in the face of a newly reunited Germany, “We are in the year 1992, not 1902.”

Another similarity is that the world’s Jewish population will finish the century at about the same size as it began. In the 1930s Hitler promised that after the next war, there would be no Jews in Europe. He came extraordinarily close to achieving his goal. Before the Holocaust, Judaism was predominantly a European culture. The character of Jewish culture had become essentially European, and Jews were a significant part of Europe. This all changed with the Final Solution.

A half century later, the global Jewish population is still some three million fewer than the eighteen million Jews in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. What was once a population of almost nine million European Jews—half of world Jewry—is today four million, little more than a quarter of world Jewry. But at last it can be said with some confidence that European Jewry will continue, that the remaining Jews of Europe will not all move to the United States or Israel, as had often been suggested. There are only one million more Jews in Europe today than there were when the camps were liberated, but Paris has become a major Jewish center, traditional Jewish life is thriving in Antwerp, and Budapest has the makings of a large and diverse Jewish center. Communites in Berlin, Prague, and Amsterdam are struggling, but there are reasons for optimism. Poland, on the other hand, which started the century with one out of every five Jews in the world, seems today almost devoid of Jewish life—an historical reversal of Jewish demography comparable only to the Spanish expulsion in 1492 and the final Roman conquest of Judaea in
A.D
. 135.

I grew up in immigrant America. The Poles, Italians, and Irish
had relatives in “the old country,” but Jews did not. No Jew I knew did. I certainly didn’t. All the relatives I knew of had either left or been killed. No one really gave much thought to the fact that American Jews lacked European relatives. It was just one of those things that made Jews different, like Saturday instead of Sunday. Jews are accustomed to the idea of being different. But while no one said it, it was generally understood that Jews did not have relatives in Europe because there were no longer Jews in Europe. People seeing my name would ask me if I had relatives in Poland. “No, I’m Jewish,” I would say as an unemotional and readily understood explanation.

But even in Poland, a few Jews are trying to breathe life into the remnants of Jewry. The question arises—is often rudely asked—why a Jew would want to live in Poland. More than three million Jews were massacred there, the survivors were subjected to pogroms and attacked on trains, and finally a new regime that had promised to end racism unleashed its “anti-Zionist” campaigns. Not only in Poland but everywhere in Europe Jews are faced with the question, often from Jewish visitors, “Why are you still here?”