Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener

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СКАЧАТЬ and mistreated AK prisoners. The population fought against the authorities, even by terror, and simultaneously cooperated with the state. The strategy of the authorities depended on the eradication of all existing and potential centers of organized opposition. Society’s strategy, which rested upon millions of individual positions, depended on the defense of cultural values in conditions limited by reality.¹⁰

      The “reality” of the immediate postwar era was grim on every level and gave rise to the paradoxical situation that Kersten describes. Exacerbating the political chaos and oppression were enormous economic and social problems. Nearly 20 percent of the population was lost in the war, depriving Polish society of the energy and talent of youth crucial to the rebuilding effort. Poland’s demographic upheaval was also the result of massive population movements, for the Yalta and Potsdam agreements shifted the country’s borders to the west, compensating Poland for losses in the east with territory at Germany’s expense. This resulted in the flight or expulsion of 3.5 million Germans from Poland. Two million Poles returning from slave labor or camps, as well as refugees expelled from formerly Polish territory annexed to the Soviet Union, replaced them.¹¹ Ironically, one goal of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Polish nationalists became a reality: by 1947 Poland was a homogenous and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country. The Germans and their accomplices killed nearly 3 million Polish Jews; the Soviets took the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belorussians for their own; and the Poles expelled the Germans: the sum of these actions was an irreplaceable cultural loss for the postwar generation.

      Population loss, economic deprivation, and political chaos had, of course, devastating psychological effects, not the least of which was a wartime legacy that appeared to be the result of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. France and Britain had declared war against Germany in defense of Poland’s independence; Poland, although defeated at home, continued to fight around the world alongside the victorious Allies, only to be abandoned to the Soviet Union as a recalcitrant member of its new postwar consortium of client states. For this, there seemed to be few clear moral explanations. The Soviet Union’s tremendous wartime sacrifice resulted in the defeat of Nazism and a new super-power status. Britain and the United States could be assured that their dead had fallen in defense of freedom and democracy. Even the Germans could blame their wartime devastation on leaders who had led them astray. In Poland, none of these arguments applied or offered any consolation. Poles fought the war, opposed the Nazis on all fronts, and emerged, in a sense, victorious, but they could not reap the rewards that their honor seemed due.¹² This sense of irreparable, unjust, and, for many, inexplicable loss helps to explain the insistent and omnipresent commemoration of Poland’s fallen in the early postwar years. To what end the sacrifice? The emerging culture of martyrology could ameliorate the pain of this question, if only in small measure and even if it failed to provide a satisfactory answer.

      In mourning the nation’s losses, Poland’s commemorative culture also had to come to terms with the loss of millions of Jews on Polish lands. In the aftermath of the war, relations between Poles and their Jewish fellow citizens were strained at best. At worst, a residual and reawakened anti-Semitism resulted in pogroms and murder, and it stands as one of the tragic ironies of the Polish situation that anti-Semitism would take this form in the country that suffered most under Nazi regime.

      Of the few Jews remaining in Poland or returning after the war,¹³ a sizable percentage attempted to reorganize themselves as a legitimate national minority with religious, educational, and cultural institutions. Many of these Jews, believing they would be secure under a socialist or communist government, were even optimistic about the future.¹⁴ Conditions in Poland, however, were not as accommodating as they had perhaps anticipated, for a wave of attacks against Jews swept across the country in the years 1945–47. In 1945 alone, 355 Jews were killed in Poland, and in the July 1946 Kielce pogrom, 41 Jews were killed and 59 wounded.¹⁵ By summer 1947 nearly 1,500 Jews had died as the result of violent attacks, although it is unclear what percentage of them were murdered because they were Jews.¹⁶ Not surprisingly, many surviving Jews emigrated to western Europe, the United States, or Palestine.

      Part—but only part—of the explanation for the violence lies in a history of anti-Semitism in Polish culture and society that reached its apex in the years just prior to the war. In the words of one contemporary commentator, the national tradition of anti-Semitism “continues in Poland as a residual attitude, as a habit, and as a reflex.”¹⁷ Moreover, the prevailing stereotype of the żydokomuna, or Jewish-inspired communist conspiracy, fueled anti-Semitism and incited violence. In Poland, as in most other European countries, many associated the communist movement with Jewish conspiracy. In addition, popular perceptions alleged that Jews had enthusiastically welcomed and served in the administration of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939,¹⁸ suggesting not only pro-communist sympathies, but also a traitorous anti-Polish attitude. Because of these assumptions and stereotypes, many in early post-war Poland identified Jews with the unpopular Soviet-installed provisional government and especially its security forces.¹⁹ As Władysław Bartoszewski, a member of the wartime Council for Aid to the Jews, or “Żegota,” explained:

      After the Second World War, the stereotype of the communist Jew—advanced by the pre-war parties and right-wing political groups, and also to a certain extent by Church circles—was unexpectedly and spectacularly reinforced by the public activity of those Jewish communists who played an important role in the security and propaganda apparatus, at a time when the majority of Polish society was inclined to see this activity as pursued in the direct interests of the USSR. There was a dangerous, and morally absolutely unacceptable tendency to blame the Jews in Poland en masse for the complete suppression of human rights by the new authorities and for the misfortune of the nation which felt it had lost its independence, despite nominally winning the war against Germany as one of the Allies. It should be added that similar generalisations regarding members of the security apparatus who were not Jewish were notable for their absence.²⁰

      To immediately link a helpless Jew to the communist takeover in Poland was, of course, absurd, but many supported this view with the common assumption that a disproportionately large percentage of the new governmental elite in Warsaw was of Jewish origin, as were many prewar Polish communists and socialists.²¹ In the words of Michael Steinlauf, the notion of the żydokomuna was “[t]he product of labyrinthine interaction between systems of myth and stereotype on one hand and historical experience on the other.”²²

      There were also more immediate and material causes for renewed discrimination against Jews. According to several scholars, the reclamation of former Jewish property was central to the problem.²³ After the war thousands of Jews returned to their homes from refuge in the Soviet Union or from the camps. Much of their property and even many of their synagogues had been appropriated by Gentile Poles who assumed that they would never return. In his journalistic memoir, S. L. Shneiderman rather melodramatically described the dilemma faced when Jews began to return from the camps and abroad:

      They were now returning to look for what was left of their homes or their relatives. But when a Polish peddler hands a Jew a loaf of bread or a bowl of soup, he wonders whence this Jew has come. He was persuaded that he would never again see a Jew. Many of these street peddlers have furnished their homes with the belongings of murdered Jews; some are living in Jewish apartments; others have inherited the workshops of Jewish tailors or shoemakers. Looking at the returning Jews, they wonder whether among their number there is not some relative of the Jews whose goods they had appropriated. In the smaller towns, where the inhabitants do not feel the hand of authority as directly as do those who live in the capital, such newly returned Jews have often been murdered.²⁴

      Postwar anti-Semitism was also rooted in a factor unique to the Polish situation: unlike the situation in other countries under German rule, where anti-Semitism was generally identified with fascist quisling governments, anti-Semitism in Poland was not wholly discredited by the experience of the occupation. Writing in the journal Odrodzenie, Kazimierz Wyka observed in 1945:

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