May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

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577 Moshe Zimmerman, “Land der Täter und Verräter: Junge Israelis identifizieren Polen mit den Nazi-Verbrechen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 3, 2007. Zimmeman recorded the following comments by an Israeli student who joined a March of the Living trip to Poland: “Poles were the main culprits, and the Germans only supplied the wagons.”

578 Irek Kusmierczyk, “A Polish-Canadian Calls For Healing Between Poles and Jews,” August 10, 2009, Internet: .

579 Stewart Stevens, The Poles (London: Collins/Harvill, 1982), 317.

580 A belated retraction of sorts came from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, during his state visit to Poland to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. On April 20, 1993, while in Warsaw, Rabin stated: “I do not like to comment on statements made in Israel from abroad, but I would have preferred that this statement had not been made.” See “Gore Congratulates Poland on Its Democracy,” The New York Times, April 21, 1993. Rabin was also reported to have said later at Auschwitz: “In the first place—and it is always necessary to remember this—Auschwitz was a German death camp, built by German criminals on Polish soil. Whoever cannot make a distinction between these two things and links the camp at Auschwitz with Poland, commits a cardinal error.” When a delegation of the Polish Seym (Parliament), headed by its Marshall Józef Oleksy, visited Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Institute on December 7, 1994, Avner Shalev, the director of the Institute, stated: “We do not accuse Poles in any way of taking part in the Holocaust of the Jews. We do not concur with the views which are sometimes expressed that Poles were responsible for the death camps that were built on Polish soil. That does not mean that there weren’t individuals and small groups who collaborated with the Germans.” See “Oleksy: Polacy nie byli winni,” Gazeta (Toronto), December 8, 1994.

581 “Bobker Replies: More On ‘The Polish Question,’” B’nai B’rith Messenger (Los Angeles), June 7, 1991.

582 “War of words heats up over Auschwitz ceremonies,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), January 24, 1995.

583 Yoram Sheftel, The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial (London: Victor Gollancz, 1994), 290.

584 Abraham I. Katsh, ed., Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (New York: Macmillan; and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), 19–21. Kaplan peppered his wartime diary with anti-Christian remarks directed at Poles. Ibid., 47, 133.

585 Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939–1942 (Northvale, New Jersey and Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 2000), 294.

586 Published in the The Jewish Press (Brooklyn), August 13, 1993. Rabbi Lau also explained why Poland—“the land of the death camps”—and the Poles are a “cursed” nation: “There are people who are suitable for a particular country and not for another, and there are lands than can absorb one type of people and not another. A case in point is the Land of Israel. … It is suitable for the Jewish People. … This proves there is a bond between the people and the land – to each land its nation. … The land flourishes only when we dwell here.” Adapted from a Dvar Torah on Arutz 7, cited in The Jewish Press, Brooklyn, December 22, 1995.

587 Rabbi Sholom Klass, “Polish Anti-Semitism Raises Its Ugly Head Again,” The Jewish Press (Brooklyn), June 30, 1995.

588 Dan Mangan, “Hell on earth: ‘You never believe it, you can survive,’” The Advocate (Stamford, Connecticut), April 10, 1995.

589 Yair Weinstock, Holiday Tales for the Soul (Brooklyn, New York: Mesorah Publications, 2002), 127.

590 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Jewish high schoolers picket Polish consulate in NY to protest ‘Holocaust whitewash’,” May 5, 2016. Fortunately, Rabbi Friedman’s fanaticism met with a response from the Jewish side. Jonny Daniels, the British-Israeli founder of From the Depths, an organization that honors Holocaust rescuers, challenged the protesters, saying he “cannot agree with inflammatory speech filled with falsehoods against the Polish government, which is reminiscent of the way Israel is singled out for criticism in some circles.”

591 It is informative to trace the reactions of Jewish students who take part in the March of the Living and how it has evolved, or rather, for the most part, failed to evolve, over the years. Writing in Tikkun (“The Future of Auschwitz,” November/December 1992), Professor James E. Young, a member of the International Auschwitz Council, described the painful experiences of a Polish camp guide who related how she had been verbally abused by angry Jewish youth groups visiting at Auschwitz. “We tried to explain to [the guide],” writes Young, “that for many of the Jewish visitors, the nearest objects of rage and frustration were too often their guides, the surrounding Polish population, and the country itself.” The same was true for visits to other camps. When a group of rowdy Jewish students arrived at Majdanek (often misspelled as Maidanek), one of them scaled the chimney of a crematorium and hung an Israeli flag on it, laughing at the museum staff who asked him to take the flag down. When a female Israeli student set fire to a carpet in her hotel room, her teacher was quick to justify the student’s behaviour to the alarmed hotel staff: “That person [i.e., staff member] shouldn’t be angry. Before they burned us, and now we’re just burning a few of their things.” See Henryk Pająk, Żydowskie oblężenie Oświęcimia (Lublin: Retro, 1999), 206.

There is abundant evidence, however, that there is nothing spontaneous about this misdirected rage. Reporting on young marchers from Florida, a 1990 Jerusalem Post article noted the dichotomy the participants were deliberately encouraged to see between their stay in Poland and Israel. Leaving Poland for Israel was for one girl like going “from Hell to Heaven, from despair to joy.” “Everything in Poland was Hell,” said a male participant. “We couldn’t find anything good there.” See Greer Fay Cashman, “The March of the Living,” Jerusalem Post, May 15, 1990. Professor Young alluded to part of the real problem when he wrote, “We also resolved to improve the preparation of Jewish groups to make sure they knew enough of the Polish narrative to distinguish between Nazi killers and Polish victims.” (“The Future of Auschwitz,” Tikkun, November/December 1992.) Around that time (1992), Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin, of Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago, made the following pointed observations in an interview published in the Warsaw Catholic monthly Więź (“Dialog to wysiłek tłumaczenia symboli,” no. 7 [1992]: 8–9):

Americans always need an enemy, something or someone with whom they can be at odds. American Jews have a typically American mentality in that regard. We need to find anti-Semites … Poland is that natural enemy because of longstanding stereotypes which I already mentioned. Israelis have a similar point of view, but for completely different reasons—essentially because of their Zionist ideology. The foundation of that ideology is the belief that the life of a Jew outside Israel is intolerable. For them the fate of the Jews in Poland and the Holocaust are proof of the validity of Zionist ideology that in the diaspora, outside Israel, there are only two roads open for Jews: death or assimilation. Jews from Israel who think along those lines thus have a stake in fostering a negative image of Poland. A year ago at a symposium at the Academy of Catholic Theology [in Warsaw] on the theology of the Holocaust, I referred to a statement by a woman from Yad Vashem who led a tour of Israeli teenagers to Poland. She told them that they travelled there for three reasons: one, to see where and how Jews perished; two, to understand why the State of Israel is a necessity; and three, to see how Poles participated in the murder of Jews.
More recently, Rabbi Sherwin again spelled out the implications of this approach: “The students were hearing a chronicle that one could hear in Israel or in America, a chronicle that makes any rapprochement between Jews and Poles impossible, that obfuscates the spiritual achievements of Polish Jewry.” See Byron L. Sherwin, Sparks Amidst the Ashes: The Spiritual Legacy of Polish Jewry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 82. The following passage from Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), illustrates the same phenomenon in practice, even on those rare occasions when some haphazard corrective measures were attempted:
I had visited Yaakov Barmor, at his home. “Jew hatred is as natural in Poland as blue is to the sky,” the former diplomat told me; he had said something similar to his son’s students. Shalmi Barmor knew all there was to know about Polish anti-Semitism. He tried to explain its background to his students. He did it the hard way, presenting his students with copies of a recent Haaretz article by Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion’s autobiographer … “The Polish nation,” Teveth wrote, “is the victor in the end, and it has despoiled Jewish property and inherited its suffering and its Holocaust; it has made them into a commercial venture.” The students read the article and agreed. Many of them clearly identified the Holocaust with Poland. … Shalmi tried to explain to the students that the Poles were not guilty of the murder of the Jews. Indeed, the Poles had been defeated in the war—they had traded the Nazi conquest for a Soviet occupation. Anti-Semitism in Poland should not be ignored, Barmor told his students, but he emphasized that the Poles considered the mass murder of the Jews as part of their Polish national tragedy. The students argued with him. “Someone, after all, has to be guilty of the Holocaust,” one of them said. “We have to hate someone, and we’ve already made up with the Germans.” (Ibid., 491–92.)
Another strong critic of the March of the Living is Peter Novick, whose book The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), was reviewed by Eva Hoffman in The New York Review of Books (“The Uses of Hell,” March 9, 2000). According to Hoffman’s account of that important study (see p.160),
While in Poland, the students are accompanied by armed guards and told they are in constant danger from the surrounding population and that the Maidanek gas chambers could within a few hours be put into operation once again.

Novick is particularly offended by the blatant propaganda implicit in the sequence of the tour, “from Holocaust to Redemption.” But representatives of the Jewish community in Poland, no less than non-Jewish Poles, have been distressed by the paranoid atmosphere created by the marches, by the hostility of the young visitors to the local population, and by the reductive account of the Polish-Jewish past. Indeed, the marches have been perceived as part of a highly ironic phenomenon: the exportation of the “Americanized” version of the Holocaust back to Europe.

The recognition that Jewish groups visiting former German camps in Poland are on the whole not properly prepared for the experience appears to have surfaced some time ago. Yet one has to wonder what, if anything, has been done about ensuring that Jewish groups, especially impressionable young students, receive adequate preparation before their trips. First of all, it is not at all clear why the March of the Living starts in Auschwitz, rather than in Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, or Berlin, where Kristallnacht was unleashed. Further, what has or can be done about false or misleading perceptions of Poles nurtured over the years by a great deal of tendentious writing and narrating about the Holocaust, so much so that these perceptions have become, in the words of one Jewish community leader, “ingrained”? Writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail (“Poland striving to shake off an anti-Semitic past,” May 29, 1992), Steve Paiken, at the time a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) anchor-reporter, commented with some optimism: “The signs of change are even prompting some to challenge the long-held view that Poles are just about as guilty as the Germans for the Holocaust. That view is ‘ingrained,’ says Nathan Leipciger, chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress Holocaust 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.’” Has much really changed since those encouraging words were written in 1992? The notion that Poles continued to live “next door” to the concentration and death camps, and sat by idly while atrocities happened in their own “backyards,” was a constant theme reiterated by March of the Living organizers and repeated by Jewish teenagers. A 16-year-old female participant made the following comments on a radio show aired on the CBC on May 18, 1990, after visiting Auschwitz and Majdanek: “At the risk of sounding prejudiced … if it was not for the Polish people, the Holocaust would not have happened.” “You can’t plead ignorance when you’re living one mile from the camp,” said a 15-year-old in a Jerusalem Post story. See Jessica Kreimerman, “Israel Is Now Part of Us,” Jerusalem Post, May 15, 1990.

Auschwitz, it should be noted, was built and run by the German invaders of Poland. It started operation in June 1940 as a concentration camp intended for Polish political prisoners (i.e., primarily Christian Poles). Of the main camp’s more than 400,000 inmates, approximately 140,000–150,000 were Poles, about half of whom perished. It was not until mid-1942 that Jews began to arrive in any significant number at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Even during the war, the more informed (educated) Jews in occupied Poland recognized this reality. Franciska Rubinlicht, of Warsaw, wrote in a letter, dated March 21, 1943, to her family in the United States: “There is another place, in Auschwitz, where the condemned are burned. There, many of our relatives and friends, and Jews in general, have been murdered. However, it is mainly a mass-execution place for Poles.” See Howard Roiter, Voices from the Holocaust (New York: William-Frederick Press, 1975), 117. For the most part, Jews were directed to the newly built death camp in nearby Birkenau. It is now believed that almost one million Jews perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau, of at least 1.1 million sent there. After Christian Poles, the next largest groups were 23,000 Gypsies, of whom 21,000 perished, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, almost all of whom perished, and 25,000 prisoners of other nationalities, of whom 10,000–15,000 perished. See Auschwitz museum historian Franciszek Piper’s essay “Auschwitz Concentration Camp: How It Was Used in the Nazi System of Terror and Genocide and in the Economy of the Third Reich,” in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 371–86; Franciszek Piper and Teresa Świebocka, eds., Auschwitz: A Death Camp (The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, 1996), 189–95. It is also worth noting that between July 1940 and the early part of 1941, the Polish population was evicted from several villages surrounding the Auschwitz camp complex, covering an area of twenty square miles (forty square kilometres) which was recognized as coming under the camp’s jurisdiction. See Józef Garliński, Fighting Auschwitz: The Resistance Movement in the Concentration Camp (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Crest, 1975), 34; Piper and Świebocka, Auschwitz: Nazi Death Camp, 25–27.

There is something terribly askew when, after visiting a camp like Majdanek, which was not originally built for Jews and where thousands of Christian Poles also perished, and about whose existence the Polish underground and government-in-exile earnestly informed an unresponsive Western world, young Jewish students who participate in these marches come back with impressions such as these: “The camp of Maidanek (sic) was like nothing I had seen before … I had very negative feelings toward the Polish people. I saw them as mean, almost inhuman, wondering how they could ever let this happen;” “Where were your [Polish] parents, I thought, your grandparents, 50 years ago? … Safe in this house while the prisoners were taken to the gas chambers? Did they sing while 6,000,000 of my people were burning? Had they told someone what was happening, could lives have been saved?” (The Canadian Jewish News, September 24, 1992.) Two years later, the same views were being instilled into Jewish students preparing for their trip to Poland: “You look at the ovens, you look at the mound of human ash at Majdanek and the homes next door, you know there were people living in those homes who did nothing as Jews were being killed and you cry.” (Gazette, Montreal, April 5, 1994; Spectator, Hamilton, April 5, 1994). “I needed to understand how a whole country and millions world-wide could be involved in an attempt to destroy an entire nation, why we were so hated. … We must not only look to the past but at the present and the future—because the vandals in Warsaw are the Nazis of today and tomorrow.” (Gazette, Montreal, April 8, 1994.) In May 2005, an American Jewish group leader spoke about the houses surrounding Majdanek and their “vile” Polish occupants: “Look at this, he said, disgusted, “these people were just sitting in their backyards barbecuing while this mass murder was taking place!” See Carolyn Slutsky, “March of the Living: Confronting Anti-Polish Stereotypes,” in Robert Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, eds. Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future (Landham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 195. Sidney Zoltak, a Holocaust survivor who frequently speaks to students about his experiences, writes in a similar vein in 2013: “The Christian community living in Lublin claims ignorance. However, the camp is only a few kilometres from the centre of town, and it’s obvious they were able to see the smoke of the crematoria and smell the burning flesh.” See Sidney J. Zoltak, My Silent Pledge: A Journey of Struggle, Survival and Remembrance (Toronto: MiroLand, 2013), 235. In 201, Hugh Pollack writes: “in the death camps of Majdanek disturbingly situated with prewar homes and parks all around it as if it was just any business, in full visibility of the town’s population which could never claim innocence [sic] of not knowing what was going on, a camp which could easily in days be up running again churning out its acrid smoke from burned bodies.” Further: “Our guide at Auschwitz was a young Polish woman who like her husband is a regular guide there. … She and her husband feel passionately about confronting the reality of their [sic] past in hopes for a very different future, one in which such atrocities could never happen again.” See Hugh Pollack, “Death and Life in Poland Today,” December 26, 2014, Friends of JCC Krakow, Internet: