May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

. Yet, Eva Galler, who hails from the small town of Oleszyce, where she wasn’t afraid to venture out of her home, maintains that the problems occurred in the “bigger cities” but not in her town. See the account of Eva Galler, Louisiana Holocaust Survivors, The Southern Institute for Education and Research, posted online at .

According to one historian, bonds between Poles and Jews were strongest in small villages where Jews lived among Poles and not in isolation:
Among other things, Jews here forsook the strict Orthodoxy—impractical in rural life—of those in town. … Less hindered by the social control in town, Jews and Christians in a village were guided by a sense of belonging to it, and by their own needs and those of their local compatriots.

The non-Jewish peasants valued their Jewish equals as good, hard-working people not unlike them; it was only natural that the Jew and non-Jew in Cieszyna would hitch horses and plough their respective fields together. … Andrzej Burda described the attitude of the peasants to the Jews from the village of Rzeszotary near Kraków as friendly and says that “in the countryside, good will was something quite natural in the common lives of people bound by the land.” …

See Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, “Maintaining Borders, Crossing Borders: Social Relationships in the Shtetl,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 17 (2004): 171–95, at 189.

138 Wołkonowski, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w Wilnie i na Wileńszczyźnie 1919–1939, 198–200.

139 Leon Berk, Destined to Live: Memoirs of a Doctor with the Russian Partisans (Melbourne: Paragon Press, 1992), 3–4.

140 Norman Salsitz and Amalie Petranker Salsitz, Against All Odds: A Tale of Two Survivors (New York: Holocaust Library, 1990), 249–50.

141 Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, 241–45.

142 Ibid., 260.

143 Millie Werber and Eve Keller, Two Rings: A Story of Love and War (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 23.

144 Byron L. Sherwin, Sparks Amidst the Ashes: The Spiritual Legacy of Polish Jewry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 131.

145 Ibid., 18. This is not a new phenomenon. Ralph Slovenko, who was active in Polish-Jewish dialogue in the 1980s, reported: “When I would make a trip to Poland, my Jewish friends in the United States would say, ‘Why do you go to that anti-Semitic country? That is the land of the Holocaust.’ Little or nothing would be said when I would go to Germany, Austria or the Ukraine, though anti-Semitism in … Poland pales in comparison to that in those places. … In comparison to the talk about Polish anti-Semitism, no one talks about German, Austrian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, or Latvian anti-Semitism. … Though I am a Jew, I have a Ukrainian name and I believe that it has made me privy to attitudes, when at times I would raise the discussion about Jewry, that I would not otherwise have heard.” See Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, 162.

146 Naomi Rosh White, From Darkness to Light: Surviving the Holocaust (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1988), 67.

147 Ibid., 80–81.

148 Walter Tausk, Breslauer Tagebuch, 1933–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg Verlag. 1977), entry for May 15, 1936.

149 Robert Michael, A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008), 160, 249.

150 Introduction to Lichter, In the Eye of the Storm, 9.

151 Mark Raphael Baker, The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory (Sydney: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1997), 39.

152 Anne Roiphe, A Season for Healing: Reflections on the Holocaust (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 117.

153 Thomas S. Gladsky, Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 207. Surprisingly, the stereotype of the “stupid” Pole even surfaced when Poles put their lives at risk to shelter Jews during the war. As could be expected, living in close quarters could lead to occasional to flare-ups between the charges and rescuers. Teresa Prekerowa, who was active in the Żegota organization, recalls: “It was often that Jews told Poles, ‘We are more intelligent than you,’ and it made the Poles crazy. It was a very difficult situation.” See Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana (Chapel Hill, North Carolina and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 261.

154 Thomas Gladsky presents an excellent survey of the mean-spirited and often crude stereotypes of Poles that permeate many of the works of fiction of well-known and popular Jewish-American authors such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Leon Uris. Such books doubtless have had a huge impact on how Polish-Jewish relations are perceived in North America. See Gladsky, Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves, 163–220. There exists no parallel phenomenon in Polish literature.

155 Zvi Gitelman, “Collective Memory and Contemporary Polish-Jewish Relations,” in Joshua D. Zimmerman, ed., Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 274–75. Gitelman also states: “Of course, the stereotype of Polish antisemitism—which like all stereotypes has truth in it except that it becomes overgeneralized and attributed to each Polish person—itself breeds resentments against Jews.” Ibid., 285. Gitleman thus concedes that Polish stereotypes concerning Jews are not without foundation in fact.

156 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 107.

157 Testimony of Alina Fiszgrund, March–August 2005 (from Łódź), and testimony of Salomea Gemrot (from a village near Rzeszów), February 2005, Internet: