Torn memory

“The Poles are old enough to look into their sometimes blurred mirror of their historical past,” said Jan Zaryn, renowned historian at the National Memory Institute in Warsaw. On the portal www.wiara.pl recently issued his critical appraisal of the book by Jan T. Gross, now translated into Polish, but published in the U.S. in 2006 with the title “Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation”.Two compared studies. “For some time – the historian remarked – a lively debate has been unleashed in the media on the difficult post-war period of Communist rule in Poland. Among the various issues relating to the years 1944-47 however, Jan T. Gross’s prevails over the rest”. Zaryn compared this book to another issued in the United States in 2003: After the Holocaust, by Marek J. Chodakiewicz: “both books, addressing Polish-Jewish relations in the post-war period – he explained -, were written by historians of Polish origin, Modern history Professors who have been living in the US for many years. Both books were previously published in America before reaching Polish bookshops”. However, similarities end here, since Zaryn maintains that the two books “despite tackling the same topic, differ in methodology and narrative approach, as well as in their conclusions. Gross, employing sources at his own discretion, supports the validity of questionable theories which don’t respond to the truth. Chodakiewicz, abiding to the rules of the ancient empirical school, presents a general articulated thesis or reaches the conclusion that he cannot speak in general terms, given the variety of elements which compose the overall picture”. To be a hero. “Some readers claim that Gross exasperates his thesis, while others hold that he drags the Poles in the mud and therefore he is intentionally attacking their sensitivity over a very important issue: collective memory and identity. In other terms, he uses history only as the necessary tool to attack contemporary society.” Zaryn claims that according to Gross, “in order to heal society from the germ of anti-Semitism, what’s most important isn’t complying to the truth but being effective”. “In Gross’ book there are no historical sources differing from preconceived theses, nor are events described from different angles in the framework of a historical context”. As an example Zaryn mentions the diaries of Dr. Klukowski (doctor Zygmunt Klukowski described the massacres committed in the region of Zamosc during the war and until 1959) evoked by Gross only with reference to the violence undergone by Jews, avoiding to mention those episodes where, under Nazi persecution, they were defended by Poles also at the cost of their own lives. “In a categorical way Gross claims the Poles should have acted as heroes”, and according to Zaryn this claim is made without considering the historical context where “the Nazi invader, having overturned society’s system of values, placed the Poles before a fiendish choice: to save the life another (Jew) to the risk of his own life, or allow him to die”. Accusations against the Church. Gross’ most serious accusation consists in “a shameful defamation of the Catholic Church (in particular of Cardinals Sapieha and Hlond and of bishops Wyszynski, Bieniek and Kaczmarek), of the entire clergy and of the faithful accused of promoting anti-Semitic behavior”. This is a lie, Zaryn claimed, however admitting that before World War Two, during and after the conflict, there were Polish environments marked by feelings of contempt against people of Jewish origin and their own culture. To accuse members of the Catholic Church of being co-responsible of the Holocaust or the pogrom of Kielce (where 37 Jews were massacred on July 4 1946), to affirm that during and after the war they “educated” Poles to anti-Semitism is a sign of a phobia by the author of Fear“. Zaryn mentions cases of priests and nuns who during the war saved a large number of Jews, and names of Polish families exterminated by the Nazis for the help the gave to persecuted people. “The Catholic doctrine and the Ten Commandments enabled may Poles to make the right choice in critical moments” he concluded, referring to historical surveys claiming that Polish Nationalism in the period between the two World Wars didn’t take on pathological forms (Racial Law was never implemented in Poland) “precisely because their was an adhesion to the Decalogue and to a system of values based on the commandment to love one’s neighbor”.