May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

There is a pervasive sense here, in America, and in the Jewish community in particular, that the Poles were murderers, and that the whole of the Jewish experience in Poland can more or less be reduced to Treblinka and Auschwitz and the Miłosz poem about the merry-go-round outside the Warsaw ghetto. We do not have to waste time thinking about Poland, because it was a country inhabited by these morally idiotic people who were complicit in the worst crime in human history.⁵⁵⁹
This image has been created, in no small measure, by Jewish Holocaust survivors, whom, in the words of New Republic editor in chief Leon Wieseltier: “Once American Jews decided to make the Holocaust a part of their civic religion, survivors became the American Jewish equivalent of saints and relics.”⁵⁶⁰ According to one researcher, whose findings are consistent with those of others, “Those who lived through the conflagration were even more hostile, on the whole, toward Poles [than Germans], often comparing them unfavorably to Germans.”⁵⁶¹ That bizarre (and rather diabolical) prism is matched by the equally prevalent notion that Poles are anti-Semitic by nature, or as a former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir put it, Poles “suck in anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk.” That sentiment is widespread among diaspora Jews. Adam Michnik reported a conversation with the leader of the Jewish community in Australia who assured him that every Pole had sucked anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk.⁵⁶² Dr. Jack Felman, a descendant of Jewish survivors in Australia stated candidly:
An intense hatred of Poles and Germans was more than evident in our home. When my wife and I visited Poland in 1975 I can still vividly remember the intense hatred I felt for the 8 days I had to endure in this country. … As a doctor, I have had to counsel a number of these people who were traumatized after going back to Poland. In my own case, my parents shuddered at the prospect of hoing back, even when I told them that my wife and I were going to visit Poland.⁵⁶³
Milder versions of that same phenomenon can even be found in journals that are otherwise above reproach in striving for objectivity. A case in point is Shelley Salamensky’s New York Review of Books blog article “Poland’s Jews: Under a New Roof” (December 6, 2014), which goes out of its way to portray Poles as primitive, anti-modern, and xenophobic bigots. The article smears all Poles on the basis of rather flimsy grounds. If Salamensky took the same approach to racist comments made by powerful American Jews that she does to those made by some “backward” Poles, she could build quite a case against the former. Some well-publicized recent examples include the racist insinuations about President Obama made by Hollywood bigwigs Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin, both of whom are identified as Jewish in their Wikipedia entries, and the racist remarks made by Bruce Levenson, controlling owner of the Atlanta Hawks, and Donald Sterling, the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. These people are no less representative of the Jewish community (and in some ways, more so) than the small group of middle-aged Poles Salamensky conversed with in a café in Sanok.

The sad reality of Polish-Jewish relations in North America is that all-too-many members of the Jewish community continue to attack Poles, in public forums, at every turn, while alleged Polish “hostility” toward Jews is by and large simply a reaction to those relentless attacks. A recent survey of Jewish history textbooks used to educate young Jews in North America confirms that the stereotype of the crude Polish peasant was a staple of that genre: Jewish textbooks relentlessly portrayed the Poles in a negative light and depicted Polish history in lurid colours. Christian peasants—that much maligned “Other”—were “dehumanized,” often described as bestial, employing epithets like “refuse,” “pestilence,” “wild animals,” “ruthless,” “bloody,” and “cruel savage.” After the Second World War the situation was compounded as frequent charges of collaboration and collusion in the Holocaust became commonplace. From the outset Poles were conspicuously omitted from any specific accounts of “righteous Gentiles” who saved Jews during the war, even though they represented the largest group of rescuers.⁵⁶⁴ Many, but certainly not all, Holocaust memoirs are replete with anti-Polish stereotypes, dispelling the notion that suffering ennobles or makes people shed their bigotry, even when relating to inmates of the most notorious German concentration camp.

In some Holocaust memoir Polish … peasants are described with contempt; this contempt jibes with the attitudes in Polak jokes; expressions of contempt like it have been found for centuries in Jewish writing. German Nazis, on the other hand, are described as ‘civilized’ or ‘elegant’. Fania Fénelon’s Playing for Time (1977) is a case in point. Fénelon was a French Jew who was imprisoned in Auschwitz and was allowed to survive because she played music for the Nazis in the camp orchestra. Her contempt for the stereotypical, Bieganski-style Poles she describes is evident throughout her memoir. Poles are ‘ineffectual’, ‘brick faced’, ‘monstrous’, and ‘servile’. One is a ‘female mountain’; others are ‘bitches’, ‘pests’, and ‘a real cow’. When Polish remain ‘frozen at attention’ in the presence of a German Nazi, Fénelon reported that ‘it was an agreeable experience to see them locked in that respectful pose’. A Polish woman ‘has piercing little black eyes like two glinting gems of anthracite set in a block of lard; she was shapeless and gelatinous’; this woman does not speak Polish, rather, ‘she shrieked something in Polish’. A Polish woman ‘was big and fat and as strong as a man—a monster! One would have been hard put to find any human traits in her at all.’ Poles are possessed of a ‘particularly disturbing’ ‘bestiality’; they are ‘monsters’, ‘pigs’. …

In stark contrast to Fénelon’s descriptions of her peasant Polish fellow inmates are her descriptions of German Nazis. One is ‘very beautiful, tall, slender, and impeccable in her uniform … the SS walked ahead with long, flowing strides; she must have waltzed divinely’. On another occasion, ‘there was a holiday bustle; the SS were looking particularly dapper, whips tucked under their arms, boots gleaming’. Another elegant Nazi was none other than the most notorious sadist and war criminal of the twentieth century, Josef Mengele. He was ‘handsome. Goodness, he was handsome. … Under the gaze of this man one felt oneself become a woman again. …’ Fénelon expressed an urge for revenge against her fellow Polish inmates that she never expressed against German Nazis. ‘If I ever get out of here, I’ll kill a Polish woman. And I’ll see to it that all the rest die; that shall be my aim in life’, she recorded herself as vowing.

In another Holocaust memoir, An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust, Bernat Rosner reported that, as a child, he sang folk ditties that characterized east European peasants as low-class, violent drunks. In another portion of his book Rosner offered his [flattering] description of his encounter with Adolf Eichmann …

German Nazis also associated themselves, and their anti-Semitism, with elegance and power, and east Europeans and peasants, and any anti-Semitism they might express, with an animal brutality and criminality.⁵⁶⁵

Needless to add, many committed Nazis were more charitable in their description of Poles than Jews of Fénelon’s ilk.

Hollywood, where Jewish and pro-Communist influences were strong and often intertwined, also played a significant part in casting Poland—unlike other wartime Allies—uniformily in a negative light in numerous movies produced in the 1930s and 1940s.⁵⁶⁶ This tradition of contempt reemerged in the 1970s when the Holocaust began to be featured in Hollywood films such as QB VII, Holocaust, Sophie’s Choice, in which a fictitious Fascist professor at the Jagellonian University in Kraków (Zbigniew Biegański) is credited with writing a pamphlet advocating the extermination of the Jews that insprired the Final Solution, Schindler’s List, Uprising, and others.⁵⁶⁷ The cumulative portrayal that emerges from these films has been aptly described as follows:

The Polish army collapsed after a few days of insignificant resistance in 1939. Thereafter the Germans occupied Poland and treated the Jews very harshly. How they treated the Poles is unknown, but many Poles actively aided the Germans. Conveniently for the Nazis, the Poles had enacted legislation removing any legal protections for the Jewish population and herded them into ghettos during the interwar period, this providing the preparatory work for the Holocaust. Indeed, the Poles had elaborate plans to exterminate the Jews before 1939. The Polish underground, like Poles in general, did nothing to aid Jews because it was blinded by anti-Semitic prejudice. The Polish church was utterly without sympathy for the Jews and its behavior was the epitome of hypocrisy. Poles eager to betray the Jews to the Nazis were everywhere. The Germans feared the Jewish efforts at resistance would shame the passive Poles into activity. Survival in Warsaw under occupation was a miraculous accident and did not reflect any Polish efforts. Whereas there occasionally were decent Germans, all Poles, from the primitive peasantry to the most sophisticated intellectuals, were wicked.⁵⁶⁸
What is remarkable is that the deepest anti-Polish biases are held and disseminated by Jewish academics, especially non-historians, but also those in Holocaust-related fields.⁵⁶⁹ Journalists of Jewish origin, who are both numerous and influential, generally disseminate this same negative picture of Poles in the North American media. Michael Coren, a Canadian journalist and broadcaster, repeats matter-of-factly what has become a staple of Jewish folklore (even though there is no basis in fact for this claim), in the February 21, 2004 issue of the Toronto Sun:
Easter was always a dangerous time for my great grandparents. Drunk on cheap vodka and on the tales of Christ’s suffering, local mobs would raid Jewish villages in Poland … and kill as many Jews as they could.
A similar message was reinforced by Anna Morgan, a Jewish columnist for the Toronto Sar, who conveyed her pride about the lesson and family “wisdom” she handed down from her father to her 11-year-old daughter: “My father used to quip that Jewish children in his hometown couldn’t celebrate the same holidays as their non-Jewish neighbours. They were too busy hiding in cellars.”⁵⁷⁰

It is telling that non-Jewish, mainstream “liberal” media repeatedly lends a forum to such blatant displays of bigotry and hatred. Writing in the Times of London in July 2008, columnist Giles Coren, referring to Poles as “Polacks,” claimed that they “used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it.” He also urged Polish immigrants to “clear off” if they felt “that England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to be.”⁵⁷¹ When Polish readers protested this abuse, Coren’s response, as told to The Jewish Chronicle, was: “Fuck the Poles.”⁵⁷² Writing in broken English reminiscent of comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Kazakhstani character Borat,⁵⁷³ in an article published in the Times in February 2013, Cohen stated: “In Poland man who not like Jews simple throw them down well with pitchfork still alive, drink vodka, big laugh ha ha, then is fill in concrete and dance on grave.”⁵⁷⁴ The reaction of decent Britons—so different from the sensibilities that apparently prevail among the Times’ editors—was to call the article “an affront to the many good, hard-working and honest people in the Polish community who today call the UK home, but also to the countless Britons who call Poles their friends.”⁵⁷⁵

The same hateful attitude is evident among Israelis. Jerome Ostrov, mentioned earlier, has stated that “Israelis, as true of myself, viewed Poland as evil incarnate, even more so than Germany.”⁵⁷⁶ Confirming that impression, Israeli historian Moshe Zimmerman, writing in Süddeutsche Zeitung, remarked with bewilderment that young Israelis are increasingly blaming Poles for the Holocaust:
The most common term for Poland you hear from travellers from the ‘Holy Land’ is ‘accursed, impure land,’ because it’s ‘the biggest Jewish cemetery in the world’ and where the concentration camps are located. This relationship to the Polish territory leads to an over-simplified attitude to ‘the’ Pole, and to a lack of distinction between past and present. Now we hear that the Polish army capitulated without a fight, while the Jews fought back against the Nazis. What else should an Israeli soldier imagine, if there’s no mention of the Polish Uprising of autumn 1944 in the short history of Warsaw that’s been prepared for his benefit?⁵⁷⁷
The same message is even heard in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., an institution supposedly dedicated to promoting tolerance and understanding:
Our tour guide, a truly lovely elderly Jewish woman, whisked us by the displays showing the execution of Poles and Polish priests at the hands of the German Nazis, while slowing down by the other ‘regular’ displays long enough to tell us that Poles were just as murderous of Jews as the Germans, and that the Nazis were Christian. I was numb.

At the end of our two hour tour through history, we gathered in a conference room to discuss what we had seen. A bright, young law student, not an undergraduate student mind you, but an advanced law student, raised his hand and said, “Okay, we know that Poles welcomed Hitler with open arms when he crossed into their country…”.⁵⁷⁸

Unfortunately, among the most harmful purveyors of malicious anti-Polish biases and stereotypes in recent years have been Israeli statesmen and rabbis. Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, interviewed on Dutch television in 1979, proclaimed:
What concerns the Jews, the Poles were collaborating with the Germans. Of the thirty-five million of Poles [actually, there were only about 24 million ethnic Poles at that time—M.P.], only at most one hundred people have been helping Jews. Between ten and twenty thousand Polish priests did not save even one Jewish life. All these death camps were (therefore) established on Polish soil.
Exceptionally, Stewart Stevens, himself a British Jew, described this outburst as “a disgraceful statement in which Begin disgraced himself and dishonored his own people.”⁵⁷⁹ The Western media—which is ever so vigilant about any alleged Polish anti-Semitism—remain characteristically silent about such ethnic and religious slurs and few Jews share Stewart’s indignation or take those who make such statements to task.

Similar sentiments were echoed by another (former) Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who stated that Poles “suck in anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.” Shamir’s statement, made during the height of the controversy over the Carmelite convent in Auschwitz in August 1989, unlike Begin’s earlier remark, did receive almost immediate critical reaction from some embarrassed Jewish circles.⁵⁸⁰ However, Shamir’s outburst also struck a responsive chord, particularly popular in North America. Jewish-American journalist Joe Bobker, for example, writes:

The Polish remnants of survivors whether they are in Sydney or in New York or in South America or in Israel are unanimous in their instinctive feelings toward Poles and Poland. … They agree with Shamir’s statement that each Pole imbibes Jew hatred with his mother’s milk. ... They come from the School of Thought that says each Pole is an anti-Semite until proven otherwise.”⁵⁸¹
In a similar vein, using as a pretext the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a camp built originally for Poles (about half of the 150,000 Poles interned there perished), German Jewish spokesman Michel Friedman unleashed a vehement attack on Poles: “I have to wonder if the Christians in Auschwitz were the murderers or the victims.”⁵⁸² Yoram Sheftel, one of Israel’s most prominent lawyers, lashed out at Poles and Catholic teaching in an all-too-typical tone in his memoir of the Demjanjuk trial: “It was not for nothing that the Nazis built their death camps in Poland. They did it because there is no other nation so riddled with anti-Semitism as the Poles. Only your church’s hatred of the Jews can compete with the people’s.”⁵⁸³

Rabbinical pronouncements vilifying Poles are legion and harken back to those voiced already at the beginning of the German occupation. In his diary Chaim Kaplan, a rabbi, educator and author from Warsaw, who had opposed Polish acculturation, wrote on September 1, 1939:

This war will indeed bring destruction upon human civilization. But this is a civilization which merits annihilation and destruction. … now the Poles themselves will receive our revenge through the hands of our cruel enemy. …

My brain is full of the chatterings of the radio from both sides. The German broadcast in the Polish language prates propaganda. Each side accuses the other of every abominable act in the world. Each side considers itself to be righteous and the other murderous, destructive, and bent on plunder. This time, as an exception to the general rule, both speak the truth. Verily it is so—both sides are murderers, destroyers, and plunderers, ready to commit any abomination in the world.⁵⁸⁴

A similar attitude was demonstrated by Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, a prominent Hasidic leader, who explained the Jewish suffering he witnessed in the Warsaw ghetto thus: “The Jewish people have often had to endure calamities whose sole purpose was the destruction of wicked Gentiles. At such times, Jews are imperiled through no fault of their own.”⁵⁸⁵ The enormous suffering endured by Polish Christians are not worthy of note.

In the adaptation of a Dvar Torah on Arutz 7, Yisrael Meir Lau, the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel from 1993 to 2003, wrote:

… a great many Poles cooperated with the Nazis in the annihilation … of the Jewish people. The six largest extermination camps were located on Polish territory. They knew that with the loss of the Jews they would suffer dearly. But it did not deter them …⁵⁸⁶
Interestingly, in November 2008, the Israeli government appointed Rabbi Lau Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council. Not to be outdone, Rabbi Sholom Klass used the editorial page of The Jewish Press, one of the largest circulation Jewish newspapers in the United States, to remind his readers: “three million Polish Jews died under the hands of the Nazis with the active or silent help of many Poles, including Catholic priests.”⁵⁸⁷

In a tone reminiscent of Rabbi Lau, Rabbi Ely Rosenzweig, spiritual leader of a prominent synagogue in Stamford, Connecticut, commenting on the experiences of a Christian Pole who survived over three years in Auschwitz, stated:

there is no doubt, and all authentic records of history support this, that anti-Semitism was rife in Poland in World War II, and it explains … why so many death camps and crematoria were established in the heartland of Poland.⁵⁸⁸
Similar sentiments have also found a welcome home in contemporary Jewish mythology, as exemplified by novelist Yair Weinstock’s Holiday Tales for the Soul:
The Poles would ferret Jews out of their hiding places and hand them over to the Nazi S.S., beaming with pleasure when the Jews were carted off to the death camps. The words “yemach shemam” (“may their names be erased!”) were frequently on Meyer’s lips—referring as much to the Poles as the Nazis themselves.

“There is no forgiveness,” he would declare. “The Poles are the lowest and most despicable race on the face of the earth. …”⁵⁸⁹

On May 5, 2016, Holocaust Memorial Day, Rabbi Zev Friedman, the dean of Rambam Mesivta High School on Long Island, organized a rally of some 200 students in front of the Polish consulate in New York City in support of Jan Gross to protest what they termed “attempts to deny Polish war crimes during the Holocaust.” The group’s flyer alleged Poles were complicit in the murder of three million Jews. Rabbi Friedman’s pep talk made his position more explicit. All the major concentration camps, he railed, were built in Poland. Incited by his remarks, the students chanted repeatedly: “Your land is drenched in blood, your land is drenched in blood, your land is drenched in blood.” Rabbi Friedman then proclaimed that the camps were built in close proximity to Polish towns, that the Poles let this happen, and that the Nazis built their camps in Poland because it was fertile ground. The students again burst out in a chant, saying over and over: “You let it happen, you let it happen, you let it happen.” Rabbi Friedman then added that the average person (Pole) on the street perpetrated crimes against Jews and handed over Jews. He recalled, with approval, the words of Israeli politicians (former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and others) who claimed that Poles sucked in anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.⁵⁹⁰

The March of the Living, which brings Jewish students from around the world to visit Nazi German death camps located in Poland, but not to Germany, demonstrates two competing tendencies among Jews. One is to turn the trips into an exercise in hostile chauvinism directed against Poles.⁵⁹¹ The other is to decry the trips because they expose Jews to evil Poles. The former is the dominant approach—the one that is endorsed by organized World Jewry and the State of Israel who organize the trips in which tens of thousands of students take part. The March of the Living received an incisive expose by Professor Jackie Feldman of Ben Gurion University, in an article titled “Marking the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective Through the Poland ‘Experience’.”⁵⁹² Feldman argues that the trips to Poland, which have become a “central rite” in Israel’s “civil religion,” are used by the organizers to erect and maintain the wall an enclave society requires and desires to erect between themselves and the outside world, a world they never cease to revile. Each aspect of the trip is manipulated by the organizers to increase the Jews’ “wall of virtue”. Outside the wall is the world of Poles they never cease to revile. Israeli youth visiting Poland equate Poland with uncleanness and unclean body excretions and the violation of body orifices. Outside of their “bubble” of contact with fellow Jews, the world around them, that is, Poland, is “a place of hostile, strange surroundings, wandering, and the inevitable end.” In the handbook for participants, youth are told, “We remind the Poles of this dark chapter in our history and theirs … the Poles are forced to confront their past anew, and their role in the tragedy of the Jewish people.” Feldman quotes British anthropologist Mary Douglas, “To vilify the outsider is a way of justifying” the enclave’s disdain for the outsider. “The lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ reflect widely held Israeli positions (e.g., that Poles are anti-Semites).” Any event that suggests otherwise—that suggests that maybe, just maybe, some Poles are not anti-Semites, is “neutralized through scheduling and rhetorical devices.”

And this is where traditional Jewish religious beliefs are carefully employed to cement the desired goal and message:

• 
  Guides encourage visitors “not to give the Poles a penny more than necessary.” On one occasion, visitors admitted to shoplifting in Poland. Their Orthodox group leader “dismissed it as a sin that results from a good deed (averah haba’ah b’mitzvah)—in other words, depriving Poles of income.”
  
• 
  Polish students “are considered the enemy”. Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriah wrote that “it is a sacred obligation to remember the deeds of the Polish people who are imbued with a venomous hatred towards all Jews … these are the very people who helped carry out mass murder, and whose children also slaughtered many … Remember our murdered and remember our murderers.”
  
• 
  Feldman cites a commentator who notes the de-emphasizing of universal standards of morality by “many rabbinical leaders.” Hostility to Poles is justified by the Talmudic proverb, “Esau hates Jacob.” Poles are Esau; Jews are Jacob. Since, in this formulation, all Poles hate all Jews, it is appropriate for Jews to hate Poles in return. In Genesis, Esau is the rough, outdoorsy, impetuous, less favored brother. Jacob is the patriarch who takes the name “Israel.” Assigning Poles the Esau identity has a long tradition.
  
• 
  Feldman comments on how even the presence of a “righteous Gentile,” that is a Pole who saved Jews, is handled in such a manner as to reinforce the “us vs. them” paradigm. Audiences are encouraged to conclude that “righteous Gentiles” are not like other Poles, are, rather, completely unconnected to their Polish milieu. In fact Feldman says, through the use of a poem, Poland is equated with Sodom. The atypical Pole who helped Jews did so because he is the one righteous man in Sodom.
  
• 
  Jews who lived in Poland before the Holocaust are depicted as Orthodox, rather than assimilated to Polish culture (which some were). This emphasizes the “us vs. them” paradigm. Pre-war Polish Jews are “alien in the Kingdom of Amalek.” Amalek, of course, is the condemned nation against whom Old Testament Jews conducted a genocidal war. One can see that the Bible is used to define Poland as utterly cursed and other: as Esau, as Sodom, as Amalek.
  

The minority approach is, as mentioned, to decry the concept of the March of the Living itself because it exposes Jews to the evil that is Poland and the Poles. Writing in The Canadian Jewish News, Rabbi Reuven P. Bulka of Ottawa, a reluctant March of the Living student chaperon, asked rhetorically: “… how can one go to Poland, to the country so steeped in anti-Semitism that it eagerly cooperated with the Nazis in the cold-blooded murder of the Jews?”⁵⁹³ Similar charges were renewed by Rabbi Andrew Baker, the American Jewish Committee’s Director of International Jewish Affairs, in the New York Post on the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, who rebuked Poles for pretending to be “victims with no role” in the extermination of the Jews.⁵⁹⁴

More recently such views have been voiced by prominent Zionist rabbis in Israel railing against educational school trips to the Nazi death camps in Poland. According to a report in YNetNews.com of February 23, 2009 regarding Rabbi Shlomo Aviner,

Answering a reader’s question on the subject in the religious “Ma’ayaney Hayeshua” journal, Aviner stated that trips to Poland were “not good” due to the halachic ban on leaving Eretz Israel, and because they “provide livelihood to murderers.” …

Aviner also said that the trips have not been proven to have an “educational value.” …

Another argument against visiting the camps, according to the rabbi, was the fact that the Polish people “collaborated with the Nazis” and were now making a living off of these visits. …

According to Aviner, it was not accidental that the Nazis chose to erect the extermination camps in Poland. “They knew that the people would do nothing. One person was enough to blow up the railroad tracks. Why wasn’t this done? Because they all said, ‘good,’ smiled and waited for what needed to be done to be done by the Nazis.”⁵⁹⁵

Rabbi Aviner does not turn his mind to the question—if, as he says, one person is all it would taken to blow up the railroad tracks—why did not one of Poland’s three-and-a half million Jews run the risk of performing that deed. Why couldn’t a group of Jews have undertaken that task as early as 1941, before the Holocaust got underway, when Auschwitz still contained primarily Polish Catholic prisoners? Nonetheless, he reiterated and expanded on his views after the March of the Living trip in April 2009:
We also should not provide financial gains to the extremely wicked Polish, … who allowed the establishment of concentration camps in their territory.

They knew that the Germans were annihilating Jews and they looked upon this with joy. They were of one heart with the Nazis; it was therefore not by happenstance that the concentration camps were established precisely there. The Polish fulfilled the verse [from the Book of Kings]: ‘Will you murder and also inherit.’ We do not want to give them money.⁵⁹⁶

According to a report in YNetNews.com of April 21, 2009, prominent Zionist-religious figure Rabbi Zalman Melamed was in agreement with Rabbi Aviner, stating that Poland is an “impure country riddled with anti-Semitism” and that Jews should refrain from visiting Poland. Interestingly, Rabbi Boaz Pash of Kraków did not condemn these outbursts as such, but was only concerned about how they might “strengthen anti-Semitic trends” in Poland, where they are met with “high sensitivity” and “put us in a very difficult spot.”⁵⁹⁷

Such views and remarks have a long and, seemingly, undying tradition. Rabbi Bernard Rekas of St. Paul, Minnesota, in his capacity as member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, in 1981 urged the following unsavoury connection: “One might also philosophically reflect as to why it was that the Germans selected Poland as the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death complex.”⁵⁹⁸ Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote in a similar vein in his article, “I Can’t Go to Warsaw,” published in The New York Times on April 9, 1983. Rabbi Zev K. Nelson wrote in the Boston Jewish Advocate on November 4, 1982: “The Poles were ready and willing to join the Nazis in the annihilation of three million Jews in their land.” The Jerusalem Post reported the following statement made by Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the Ateret Yerushalayim Yeshiva and rabbi of Beit El, on June 30, 2008: “The Polish people are anti-Semites. That is why the Nazis chose them as collaborators.”⁵⁹⁹ Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg indicates that he was a prisoner at Pawiak, in Nazi German-occupied Poland, where, according to his amazing statement, “all the prisoners were Jews, command of the prison was given to Polish killers.”⁶⁰⁰ As every knowledgeable person knows, the notorious Pawiak prison held mostly Polish Christian prisoners, and they usually died horrible deaths there—at the hands of the Germans. What would compel a highly educated person to spread such malicious information? Even anti-Zionist Orthodox rabbis, such as Reb Moshe Shonfeld, have been very outspoken on these matters:

The Jews in Poland had an expression: if a Pole meets me on the wayside and doesn’t kill me, it is only from laziness. … The Poles … were all fanatical Catholics, and all had unsatiable [sic] appetites for Jewish blood. Those cruel pythons, the Polish clergy, instigated—after the fall of the Nazis—pogroms of those Jews who’d miraculously survived.⁶⁰¹
Rabbi Isaac Suna, an educator at the Yeshiva University High School in New York City, who survived several German slave labour and concentration camps, summed up his feelings thus: “I feel greater animosity toward Poles than to the German people.”⁶⁰² In a similar vein, one survivor concluded her account, in which she presented many instances of Poles’ help, by saying “Now you see why we hate the Polacks.” There was no word about hating the Germans.⁶⁰³ Historian Shimon Redlich describes his experiences in this regard:
The Wanderers were among the luckiest Jewish families in town. Both parents and the girls survived the war. They were hidden successively by several Polish families. After the war, the Wanderers emigrated to America. I sent the Wanderer sisters information about the Regulas, one of the Polish families in whose house on the outskirts of Brzeżany they had hid after the Judenrein roundup. I hoped that they would start the procedure of granting them the Righteous Gentiles award, but nothing came of it. …

When I called Rena, the older one, and asked whether a young Polish historian, a colleague of mine who was doing research in New York, could interview her for my project on Brzeżany, her reaction was curt and clear: “I hate all Polacks.” … Rena advised me not to present the Poles in too favorable a way “for the sake of our martyrs.”⁶⁰⁴

That legacy was passed down to the next generation. Erin Einhorn, an American whose mother was rescued by Poles, admits candidly:
Now, headed for Poland, I could no longer escape the fact that I was moving to a country I had been taught to hate. … I’d only ever heard one thing about Poles: that they hated me, that they hated all Jews, that they always had, that they’d collaborated with the Nazis, aided in our demise, and that by 1945 they’d rejoiced in having what they had always wanted: a country free of Jews.

… people like my grandparents, the survivor generation, emerged from the war with a blazing hatred for the Poles … And they passed that hatred on to their children. It was why, I suspected, Art Spiegelman, the son of a survivor from Sosnowiec, the town next to the one where my mother was born, drew the Poles as pigs in his holocaust comic book, Maus, and the Germans as comparatively pleasant cats.⁶⁰⁵ The implication from our parents and grandparents was that the Germans, while evil and calculating in the war, were basically intelligent people who were swept catastrophically into nationalistic frenzy, while the Poles were anti-Semitic pigs. There was a reason—I had been told many times with a wink—that the Germans located the death camps in Poland, that the German people never would have stood for such horror on their own land. Poles, I was told, had welcomed the camps. They’d embraced the chance to see Jews die around them. Even my mother, who was saved by a Polish family, told me the family only did it for the money.

The reasonable part of me didn’t believe this. People don’t risk their lives for money alone, and such horrible, sweeping statements couldn’t possibly apply to an entire population without benefit of nuance or exception. But these perceptions were there, coloring my expectations. …

I think I knew that 75 percent of Dutch Jews had been murdered. But when I thought about the Netherlands, I’d thought about other, more pleasant things—windmills, tulips, open fields. I’d never thought to hate the Dutch for what they did to Anne Frank. And yet I’d always blamed the Poles for Auschwitz.⁶⁰⁶

On arriving in North America, survivors from Poland were expected to conform to certain preconceived stereotypes about Poles in their accounts of their wartime experiences. As one candid survivor describes,
They expected from me accounts of a certain kind. What horrible things the Germans had done, how mean the Poles were toward the Jews, how beautiful Jewish culture was, and what a shame that all that was destroyed by the vile Germans and horrible Poles.

I didn’t want to adopt that tone; I rebelled against it inwardly. Earlier, it would not have occurred to me to defend the Poles, but now when I saw that the American Jews wanted me to join in creating a stereotype, to prove American-Jewish superiority on cue, I refused to do it. So I said: “There were all kinds of Poles. Some are like this, others like that. It’s difficult to generalize.” They were very disappointed.⁶⁰⁷

It is not surprising, therefore, that a scholarly survey of Jewish Holocaust survivors indicates that Poles have been particularly tarred and that Polish Jews have a particular, but not exclusive, penchant for anti-Polish and anti-Catholic sentiments. Among Polish Jews the perception that anti-Semitism in the surrounding society was a “very important” factor in the execution of the Holocaust was shared by many more respondents than was the case among non-Polish Jews, even though the role of many other nations, such as the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, not to mention the Balts, the Ukrainians, and the Romanians, in implementing the Holocaust has been demonstrably proven. Similarly, among Polish Jews, the perception that non-Jews “cooperated and supported” the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people was much more characteristic (frequent) than among their non-Polish counterparts. (Characteristically, almost all of the survivors identified the Catholic Church as the religious denomination most hostile to Jews, even though the Catholic clergy provided far more assistance to the Jews than did the Protestant clergy, and the largest share of survivor respondents—34 percent—appeared to agree with the John Cornwell assessment—that Pope Pius XII was personally anti-Semitic and not really opposed to Nazi policies toward Jews.) When asked to give reasons why assistance may not have been given to Jews by non-Jews during the Holocaust, most Polish survivors attributed it to anti-Semitism, even though Poland was the only country where the Germans routinely and systematically executed anyone suspected of providing any form of assistance to Jews. Among non-Polish survivors, that opinion was much less common, with a larger balance of more benign motives attributed to Gentiles such as “indifference,” “fear of the Nazis,” and “lack of information.”⁶⁰⁸

Most alarmingly, and irrationally, Polish Jews appear to assign more blame to the Poles than the Germans, as illustrated by their ranking Poles as the most anti-Semitic of nations in the context of the Holocaust, ahead of the Germans and (often dramatically ahead of) various other nationalities who played a significant role in the annihilation of the Jewish population: Ukrainians, Austrians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Croatians, Dutch, and Norwegians. In fact, Polish Jews were almost twice as likely to attribute anti-Semitic attitudes to Poles as to Germans. Among Jewish respondents from Poland, 72 percent characterized prevalent public opinion in that country as cooperative with and supportive of the Nazi Final Solution policy; 25 percent viewed prevalent Polish opinion as passively accepting of the Final Solution.⁶⁰⁹

This is not a new phenomenon. Associating Poland with pogroms has become de rigueur in most Jewish circles. Salo Baron is one of those historians who frowns upon what may be called the cult of Jews-as-victims that existed even before the Nazi era. It got to point that pogroms have become dogmas. Referring to himself, he writes:
Time and time again he has also had the perhaps tragic-comic experience of finding the Jewish public sort of enamored with the tales of ancient and modern persecutions. Denying, for example, that any large-scale pogroms had taken place in the territories of ethnographic Poland before 1936 evoked an instantaneous storm of protests not against the alleged perpetrators of such massacres, but against himself for venturing to deny them. Quite evidently, this lachrymose view of Jewish history has served as an eminent means of social control from the days of the ancient rabbis, and its repudiation might help further to weaken the authority of Jewish communal leadership.⁶¹⁰
Not surprisingly, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a historian and former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, used the occasion of the imminent historic visit of the Pope John Paul II to Israel to assail the Pontiff in a speech to an international gathering of Jewish World War II military veterans by dragging up the traditional bogeyman of the wicked Catholic Pole. He urged Israelis not to celebrate the Pope’s visit “until he clarifies what he was doing as a priest in Poland during the Second World War, when the Jewish community there was massacred.”⁶¹¹

Little wonder that Jerzy Kosinki’s autobiographical hoax, The Painted Bird, which presented Poles as cruel and primitive, was embraced wholeheartedly by Jewish-American elites and educators as fact, and Jan T. Gross’s pseudo-scholarly book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation, was greeted with superlative accolades in leading North American newspapers by Jewish-American “authorities” with no expertise in the subject matter who spared no opportunity to hurl derisive comments at the Poles.⁶¹²

With statements like these being made incessantly in the face of little, if any, peer criticism, and given the near universal lack of introspection within the Jewish community about their own attitudes toward Poles, the prospect for the future is not encouraging. Is it little wonder that Ann Landers (née Esther “Eppie” Lederer), the world’s most widely syndicated advice columnist, who often stressed her Jewish roots, called the Pope a “Polack” in a 1995 interview? Or that the November 14, 2007 episode of the Steven Levitan, Fox TV sitcom “Back to You” contained a “joke” accusing Poles of collaborating with the Nazis: “Bowling is in your Polish blood, like kielbasa, and collaborating with the Nazis.” Could anyone imagine that a senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, would use a Republican State Committee luncheon, at the influential Commonwealth Club in New York, on December 12, 2008, as an opportunity to spew offensive Polish jokes? This list of offenders, which includes prominent members of the Jewish community but rarely members of other communities, can be multiplied. Given how frequently, and casually, such remarks are made there is every indication that we are dealing with a deeply imbedded pathology—one that is, unfortunately, widespread and tolerated. As a result, the spill-over into popular behaviour is almost inevitable. When Israeli spectators derided Polish tennis players Agnieszka and Urszula Radwańska, calling them “Catholics sluts,” during the Fed Cup competition in Israel on February 8, 2013, the Israeli and international media remained silent about this outrageous behaviour and at least one report (Agence-France Presse) spinned this incident into the bald claim that “sections of the Israeli crowd made noisy allegations about anti-Semitism in Poland.”⁶¹³ As Jewish-American sociologist explains, the real culprit here is not alleged Polish anti-Semitism but Jewish elitism:
These points about Jewish eliteness become quite apparent if we take the example of the Poles and the current rash of Polish jokes that has infested the nation. The Polish joke is based upon the fact that the Pole is inferior, is at the bottom of the heap, and belongs to a group that is the very antithesis of an elite group. From this perspective, the Pole who has attained elite status is conflicted about his identity. Even if he accepts his identity as a Pole, he suffers under the burden of being an exception. He has achieved elite status despite the inferiority of this group. Jews experience something quite different—namely, the feeling that one may have achieved eliteness precisely because of one's Jewishness.⁶¹⁴ (pp. 32-33).
Fortunately, from time to time, we hear the voices of righteous Jews, among them rabbis, who go out of their way to remember not only the bad deeds, but also the good deeds, though often small, that would otherwise be forgotten. Rabbi Abraham Feffer, who grew up in a household that shunned traditional Jewish views of their Christian neighbours, recollects his experiences (the correlation between the former and latter is both significant and remarkable):
Yet many fortunate survivors from my own shtetl, remember well and with great fondness and admiration the help of the brave Christian farmers who lived in nearby villages where we worked on cold winter days. (In Poland, hiding a Jew, or feeding him was punishable by death, usually hanging). We remember how these men and women, at great peril, opened their poor “chatkis” [a chatka is a peasant cottage] to share with us warm soup, bread and potatoes.⁶¹⁵
And another moving example from a person of humble origin:
We must remined [sic] all those people, not Jews, who gave their hand to save many of our town when they escaped from the Nazi murderers. … The villagers who disperse pieces of bread and turnip on the ways, for the caravans of hungry people, who went under the watching of the S.S. The villagers who gave their shoes to barefooted and weak. How can we forget the villagers who refused to give food [to] the watchers of the women-caravans who were transported from work-camp.⁶¹⁶
A perceptive survivor painted the following complex picture of a wartime Polish anti-Semite:
In all respects I was well off in Zakopane. My employer was a really good, obliging woman while my landlady, Mrs. Zosia, one of the kindest and most pleasant creatures I have know. I took to her very much indeed. Her one grave fault was that she hated Jews and would talk about them at every opportunity. She would constantly mock Jewish expressions, ridiculing Jewish customs and practices. In my opinion she had an unhealthy obsession with the subject. Since I was unable to have a heart-to-heart talk with her, I could never understand where this ill-will towards the Jews came from, and what its real cause was. Being a kind-hearted woman she would always speak with sympathy about the deaths of her Jewish acquaintances. She was of the opinion that killing people was too brutal and cruel a means of getting rid of them, yet she was glad that even by these inhuman methods, the Jewish question in Poland was settled once and for all.

To this day I cannot understand how a person who in all other respects was so aware, kind and gentle could be so wrong. Notwithstanding this she would never actually harm Jews. Several people from warsaw settled in our villa and among them was the widow of a doctor with her daughter. Mrs. Zosia suspected that they were Jewish, which I did too, though I did not admit it. Landlady and tenant often quarrelled about the use of kitchen and money and Mrs. Zosia bitterly complained about ‘the Jewesses’. When somebody suggested giving them notice, however, Mrs. Zosia to my surprise replied: ‘God be with them. Be it as it may, I would not wish to make their lives more difficult.’ And as a matter of fact she tried hard to make their lives easier.⁶¹⁷

The efforts of those Jews who are prepared to look critically at the manner in which Polish-Jewish relations are usually presented are worth noting. Writing in The Globe and Mail, Steve Paiken made the following important points:
And many Jews around the world blame the Poles nearly as much as the Germans for the Holocaust. They say it wasn’t coincidental that the majority of the death camps were on Polish soil—that anti-Semitism in Poland made Hitler’s Final Solution in Poland achievable. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once summed up that view by saying that Poles drink anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk. … The signs of change are even prompting some to challenge the long-held view that Poles were just about as guilty as the Germans for the Holocaust. That view is “ingrained,” says Nathan Leipciger, chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress Holocaust Remembrance Committee, and a survivor of Auschwitz. “How can you say that? I was in camps where 90 per cent of the inmates were Poles. … Most of this [anti-Polish] feeling is just based on myth.”⁶¹⁸
A contemporary rabbi who has been outspoken in espousing fairness for the treatment of Poles is David Lincoln, a senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. His inspiring article “Poland As Victim, Not Victimizer,” which appeared in the New York Jewish Week (June 17, 2005), applauded long overdue changes to the March of the Living youth trips to Poland.

The candid admissions of some Jews rescued by Poles are particularly illuminating. When pressed on this point, some Jews have stated that they are not sure that they would risk their own lives to save Poles, and are quite certain that they would not endanger their children.⁶¹⁹ Yet this is the standard by which Poles, and only Poles—several thousand of whom lost their lives helping Jews,⁶²⁰ are judged. Historian Szymon Datner recorded the following statement by a Jewish woman whom he values highly for her honesty and courage: “I am not at all sure that I would give a bowl of food to a Pole if it could mean death for me and my daughter.”⁶²¹ Janka Altman, a survivor of the Janowska concentration camp in Lwów who was sheltered, among other places, in an orphanage in Poronin near Zakopane, together with other Jewish children, wrote in 1978:

Today with the perspective of time, I am full of admiration for the courage and dedication … of all those Poles who in those times, day in, day out, put their lives on the line. I do not know if we Jews, in the face of the tragedy of another nation, would be equally capable of this kind of sacrifice.⁶²²
Hanna Wehr, who survived in Warsaw with the help of Poles, wrote:
Everyone who states the view that helping Jews was during those times a reality, a duty and nothing more should think long and hard how he himself would behave in that situation. I admit that that I am not sure that I could summon up enough courage in the conditions of raging Nazi terror.⁶²³
A Polish Jew who often asked this question of Jewish survivors recalled: “The answer was always the same and it is mine too. I do not know if I would have endangered my life to save a Christian.”⁶²⁴ These replies should not come as a surprise. Heroes are few and far between and no people should be condemned for not producing them in great abundance. Moreover, as Eva Hoffman succinctly points out, “Before the war, most Poles and Jews did not include each other within the sphere of mutual and natural obligations.”⁶²⁵

But we should be equally mindful of an intense current going the other way. One of its outspoken representatives, Mark Smith, an American journalist based in Scotland, recently wrote after visiting Treblinka, a Nazi death camp in which the Germans murdered some 800,000 Jews:

It was difficult to fight the rising hatred I suddenly felt for these peasants. My sense of justice wanted to reject such feelings, because it dishonoured those Poles who found ways to resist the Nazi tyranny and assist the persecuted—but the courageous were too few, and Poland’s guilt is that of a nation that could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, in spite of the Germans, but did not.⁶²⁶
With views like these—which show a shocking contempt for Poles and the value of Polish lives—being publicized incessantly in mainstream North American, Western European and Israeli media, hope for mutual understanding is rather elusive. Another point to bear in mind is that the frequent dissemination of such views not only desensitizes audiences but also is contagious. Publisher Paul Gottfried has offered the following valuable insight about this growing phenomenon in the so-called “liberal” media:
Allow me to conclude this gloomy account of ethnic hostility by noting two other features of recent anti-Polish outbursts. First, not all of those who propagate these truncated histories are Polish Jews, and the publishers and editors of those Canadian newspapers that have put out the worst slanders have identifiably WASP names. Why such people would take sides in an unseemly war between the first and second most victimized groups of the Nazi era may seem at first blush a bit baffling, but the explanation may be that like most WASPs of my acquaintance, these particular journalists have a desperate desire to be p.c. [politically correct]. Confessing to anti-Semitic crimes that one has not committed has become a litmus test of who is or is not a right-thinking goy, and for a bien-pensant WASP, the most convenient way to perform this penance is to call attention to insensitive ethnic Catholics. That way two birds are killed at the same time, engaging in liberal self-flagellation and sticking it to a group whom WASPs have always disliked far more than Jews. Thus publishers and reviewers, not all of them Jewish, praised the veracity of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, a pseudo-autobiography by a bogus holocaust survivor, which first caused a stir in the 1960’s. The vivid accounts of Polish peasant atrocities against Jews hiding from the Germans were here invented out of whole cloth. The real Kosinski and his family had been protected by Polish Catholic neighbors … and had supported the Soviets when they occupied their town in 1944. Last Easter the Toronto Star demonstrated my thesis of WASP atonement by warning Christians not to be too pleased about the Resurrection of their Savior. “The message of the Resurrection,” explained the editorial, had led to massacres of Jews in the past, as had been the case in Catholic Poland. The best documented refutations of these charges against the Poles that I have seen did not get published in the Star’s letter section. They might have interfered with the p.c. penance being performed at the expense of those despised by liberal Protestants.⁶²⁷

1 A belated recognition by a Jewish American scholar pays lip service to this fact, but he does not explain how it impacted day-to-day relations between these two groups. In fact, the tenor of the memoir he wrote the introduction to, represents the very antithesis of this recognition.
At the same time, the views which the two groups held of each other were marked by deeply entrenched prejudices. The peasants and the Gentile populations of these smaller towns despised the Jews for their lack of connection to the land, and distrusted them as cunning and trustworthy trading partners, although their business skills were sometimes admired. The attitude of the Jews toward their Christian neighbours was equally contemptuous. This contempt was mitigated by a feeling of pity resulting from their awareness that the peasants were even poorer than they were themselves.

The religious divide reinforced the wide gap between the two groups. The peasants saw the Jews as adherents of a religion which was not only false but deicidal, and found Jewish religious practices bizarre and incomprehensible. To the Jews, Christianity was both idolatrous and hypocritical, since in their eyes it combines a call to “turn the other cheek” with encouragement of violent anti-Semitism.

See Antony Polonsky, “Introduction,” in Rubin Katz, Gone to Pitchipoï: A Boy’s Desperate Fight for Survival in Wartime (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), xvi. Two examples of the author’s numerous false and thoroughly discredited claims follow: General Komorowski, the head of the Home Army at the time, “ordered” his men in 1943 “to kill Jews sheltering in the forests”; the Irgun, which perpetrated the infamous 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, “didn’t target civilians.” Ibid., 194, 303. Polonsky expressed no qualms about such blatant fabrications in his introduction.

2 This focus is rather surprising given what well-regarded Jewish writers have said about the Jews themselves. Maurice Samuel (1895–1972), widely celebrated in Jewish circles in his time, referred to the Jews as “the most clannish of peoples.” He stressed the vast divide that separates the Jews from the Gentiles and emphasized that the difference between them is primal and irreconcilable. Furthermore, Jewish ways and Gentile ways are offensive to each other. Samuel went on to say: “We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which is not in your nature to build.” See Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1924), 9, 12, 21, 23, 23, 92, 110, 155. Although Samuel states that neither side is superior to the other, at other times, Samuel makes it clear that, if his analysis of Jewish thinking is accurate, the Jews do in fact consider themselves above the goyim, as shown in the following paragraphs. In common with many other authors, Samuel exalts the Jewish belief in social justice (p. 34), but also goes a step further. He suggests that the embrace of social justice is genuine in Jews, but something that is forced in gentiles (pp. 151–53). The theme of the brutish goy, as contrasted with the ethically superior Jew, comes up in Samuel’s characterization of the Jew. When the goy is bad, he is relatively innocent, because he is doing something that is consistent with his base instincts. When the Jew is bad, he is doing something contrary to his higher nature, and this makes the bad Jew really bad. Thus, Samuel writes, “The vulgar type of gentile is not repellent: There is in him an animal grossness which shocks and braces, but does not horrify: He carries it off by virtue of a natural brutality and brutishness which provides a mitigating consistency to his character. But the lowest type of Jew is extraordinarily revolting. There is in him a suggestion of deliquescent putrefaction. The Jew corrupts into vulgarity—he has not a gift for it.” (Pp. 181–82.) Samuel stresses the anti-military mindset of the Jews (pp. 51, 50). Moreover, he sees no real distinction between Jewish cosmopolitanism and Jewish particularism, as neither causes the Jew to loose his innate identity (pp. 122, 150, 152). Thus, in effect, Samuel questions the Jews’ ability to assimilate into another society, something that non-Jewish nationalists also held. Based on the foregoing, Jan Peckis draws the following implications for Polish-Jewish relations:
To the extent that Maurice Samuel’s characterization of the Jewish mindset is accurate, it adds stark clarity to much of the Jewish aloofness and hostility to Poles and Poland, and the resulting Polish anti-Semitism that it had provoked.

Samuel’s analysis of Jewish cosmopolitanism sheds unmentioned light on the Jewish coolness to Polish efforts to regain independence during the time that Poland was under foreign rule after the Partitions (1795–1918). Since, to a Jew, all gentiles are quite alike, it really did not matter to the local Jew (except in matters of self-interest) whether Poland was ruled by Poles, or by Prussians, Russians, Austrians, or any other nationality. To the international Jew, it mattered still less whether or not there was a Polish state.

The logic was elementary. Why should a Jew die in an insurrection, or devote his life to an independentist effort that, if successful, would merely replace one gentile rule with another gentile rule? Why participate in, much less celebrate, acts of military and patriotic heroism when these are foreign to Jewish thinking in the first place?

The Jewish attitude towards the military helps explain other things. For instance, for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews were commonly seen, if not exactly as cowards, as not particularly compatible with military service.

During the 1930’s, Endeks complained that even assimilated Jewish writers in Poland write in an insensitive or derogatory way about things which were noble and heroic in Poland’s past. [More recently, we have seen attacks, by Jewish writers, on the onetime idea of Poland as the “Jesus Christ of Nations.”] Samuel’s insights into Jewish anti-militarism and anti-heroism make this very clear.

Nowadays, the Endeks are excoriated for believing that an unbridgeable chasm existed between the Jewish soul and the Polish soul, and that mass assimilation and conversion of Poland’s Jews, were it to take place, would not (usually) transform Jews into Poles. As is true of some of their counterparts today, some National Democrats and traditionalist Catholics expressed concern over the “infiltration” of Polish society and the Catholic Church by Polish-acting Jews. Clearly, this attitude was nothing more than a mirror image of the attitudes of many Jewish thinkers, including Maurice Samuel, “Repudiation of the Jewish religion or even of Jewish racial affiliation does not alter the Jew. Some of us Jews may delude ourselves as some of you gentiles do.” (P. 137.)

3 The jump—itself often unwarranted—from viewing “others” simply as “enemies” is frequently found in scholarship dealing with the Poles’ attitudes toward Jews, but not the converse, even though theoretically that approach should be equally valid for all inter-group relations. See, for example, Katherine R. Jolluck, “Gender and Antisemitism in Wartime Soviet Exile,” in Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 210–32, where Jolluck suggests that any unfavourable description of Jewish conduct by Poles is imbued with antisemitism, and even attributes to Polish anti-Semitism (sic) the frequently encountered critical statements about Poles made by Jews. It goes without saying—though this is scarcely noticed by those who dwell on conditions in Poland—that similar attitudes prevailed in Western Europe and North America as well. A Dutch rescuer from Amsterdam, a Lutheran, recalled that Catholic and Lutheran children generally played apart, that there was animosity between Catholics and Protestants (his grandmother “detested” Catholics), that Calvinists (even schoolteachers) belittled Lutherans, and that Lutherans harboured resentments toward Calvinists. He also had ill feelings toward Jews and Gypsies. See Pearl M. Oliner, Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 104. A Jewish survivor who settled in Canada after the Second World War recalled: “It was also there in rural Ontario, that I came face to face with the dislike, or to be more precise, the hatred that existed between Protestants and Catholics, and how deep rooted it was. [The Protestant population was of British stock and the Catholics were usually Irish. Ed.] Yet they were neighbors who came together at harvest time to help one another, or to cut wood for winter. How polite and superficial they were to one another at that time. Yet when they were alone with us, they expressed their innermost feelings towards one another with no inhibition. Bluestein and I could not understand why those two Christian groups could hate each other so much, and we were wondering how much more each of these groups must hate us Jews.” See Moishe Kantorowitz, My Mother’s Bequest: From Shershev to Auschwitz to Newfoundland (2004), 576, Internet: