Failed Ceremony


It Wasn't a "Gaffe"

Video screenshot





When one writes this way, one hears much about the Polish history of anti-semitism. Polish anti-semitism is of course a very real thing. But boycotts, insults, and street-fights are not genocide. And alongside Polish anti-semitism has to be set the other history, the history that explains why Jews migrated to Poland in such huge numbers during the Middle Ages, and stayed there for so long. When my own grandfather emigrated from Poland to Canada in 1929, he was leaving a land where his ancestors had likely lived for at least 400 years, and very possibly 600. 

There's a tragic bias in the Jewish remembrance of Poland. The Jews who suffered discrimination and poverty in the newly independent Poland of the 1920s, and who—like my grandfather—succeeded in emigrating have left descendants. We carry in our memories their stories of discrimination and harassment. But the much larger number of Jews who found conditions tolerable—the many who flourished in business, the professions, and the arts—the many who regarded Poland as their home and carried arms for her in war—those Jews stayed. They were murdered. And they left no descendants to remember their version of the story.

Few organizations have been more vocal against the "Polish death camp" slur than the Anti-Defamation League. Its president, Abe Foxman, was born in what was then Poland. His story exemplifies the complexities of the Polish-Jewish relationship. When Foxman's parents were deported to a ghetto, they entrusted him to his nanny. She raised him—not only saving his life, but risking her own, for the Nazis killed Poles who sheltered Jews. But she interpreted "raising" to mean raising him as a Catholic, and after the war—which Foxman's parents amazingly survived—she refused to give him up until after some nasty custody battles. (By then, the border had shifted, which is why many biographies of Foxman describe him as born in the Soviet Union.)

What North American Jews who originate in Poland need to learn from Foxman and those who have stories like his to tell is that Poland was not only a place where Jews were murdered, but also a place where Jews lived—and at every level of society. The Foxmans had a nanny! Other Polish Jews owned factories, shops, and country houses. There were Jewish chaplains in the Polish Army. (The head chaplain was murdered by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest, alongside his brother officers.) That story needs to be rediscovered too, and since 1989, it has been.

I took my family on a long visit to Poland two summers ago. And yes, we toured the camps. We also stayed in a beautiful hotel in the historic center of Krakow, whose lobby was filled every day with the sounds of Hebrew: visitors from Israel who had come not only to see the sites of Auschwitz and Belzec, but also to see the Schindler museum in Oskar Schindler's one-time factory, the preserved Jewish quarter, and the rebuilt grand synagogue. The state of Israel has had few better allies in Europe than democratic Poland. That's part of the story too.

The honor to Jan Karski was intended to memorialize all this. Instead, an ignorant error by somebody who could not be troubled to understand the story he or she was telling has offended Poles and thrown discredit on Karski's own memory. It's not a big story in the United States, but it won't soon be forgotten in Poland.
