by Jonah Kruvant.
Somehow I couldn’t imagine it happening in America. Eleven Jews on Shabbat praying in synagogue gunned down by an AR15.
The Tree of Life Synagogue shooting was not just a Jewish tragedy, or an American tragedy, but a human tragedy. It forced me, a New Jersey Jew who grew up far from the in-your-face anti-Semitism of Europe, to question things I hadn’t before about my country and my culture. How can these hate crimes and mass shootings be happening in the US? How can we process it all?
For months, I have been researching anti-Semitism here in the US and our knowledge of the Holocaust with shocking results. 2% of Americans still believe that the Holocaust is a myth. 40% of Millennials do not even know that 6.5 million Jews were slaughtered (“killed” is too light a word) during the Holocaust. Last year, the largest number of hate crimes in New York City was against Jews. I grew up believing that the flurry of emails from my relatives about anti-Semitism were redundant and overstated. Yet now I see it all differently for the first time.
My new perception on anti-Semitism continued to transform when I traveled to Poland. The complex question of anti-Semitism in Poland and its involvement in the Holocaust came to the forefront with a law passed by President Andrzej Duda and the Polish government in February, 2018. Anyone who accuses Poland of complicity in the Holocaust, the law stated, could serve up to three years in prison. After criticism of the law from Israel, the US, and Europe, Poland changed the punishment in June to a fine.
Generalizations are never the whole story. A grouping of people, whether it be a nation, religion, or race, is complete with individuals with entirely different beliefs and motivations. At the same time, I had to uncover the truth while in Poland, however messy or controversial, of the question of collaboration of the Polish people with the Nazis. I had to do it with an open mind even if I had family who survived the Holocaust. I had to separate fact and fiction. I had to learn all there was to know about Poland and the lost tribe of Europe.
The Center of the Jewish Universe
Throughout history, Poland has been at the center of European Jewry. Though Jews began coming to Poland in the 900s, it was the passage of laws by Boleslaw The Pious in 1264 and then Casimir the Great that gave Jews unprecedented legal rights in Europe. Whether their intentions were pure or economic (or because Casimir had a Jewish mistress named Esther) is up to interpretation.
From then on, Jews flocked to Poland. Many of the greatest rabbis, Jewish leaders, and writers, from Moses Remuh to David Ben Gurion to Isaac Bashevis Singer, came from Poland. If you live in Israel or New York, you know what it’s like to be at the center of the Jewish universe; Israel and the US make up 83.5% of the world’s approximately 14.5 million Jews (Jewish Data Bank). Yet this has been the case for less than 100 years. Poland had the highest population of Jews for over 550 years. This culminated with over 3.3 million before the start of World War II.
Prior to the war, anti-Semitism in Poland had been growing. Several measures were taken, including a bill passed by the government in 1937 on limiting kosher slaughtering. A paragraph in the Polish Medical Association charter and an official state action by the Polish Bar Association were adopted to exclude Jews from these professions. In 1938, the “Citizenship Law” was passed, revoking citizenship of Jews living abroad and resulting in 15,000 refugees.
Pogroms, as defined in Merriam Webster as “organized massacres of helpless people, specifically, the Jews,” had forced my great-grandparents and their cousins to flee Eastern Europe to the US and Israel. My family began moving away in 1905 after the publication of the influential Protocols of the Elders of Zion, most likely written by members of the Russian Police to place blame on the Jews for the Russian Revolution, describing them as rulers of the world.
To this day, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the most widely distributed anti-Semitic publication, with 23 editions produced by the Nazi party, an American version published in Henry Ford’s newspaper, an edition authorized by the Syrian Ministry of Information claiming the Jews coordinated the September 11th attacks, and, most recently, in Mexico, suggesting the Holocaust was orchestrated in exchange for the founding of Israel.
As a New Yorker with its one million Jews, I don’t feel anti-Semitism the way Jews might in other areas of the diaspora (Jews living outside Israel). The Pittsburgh tragedy came as a shock to me. By immersing myself in Jewish history while in Poland, I was reminded of the prevalence of anti-Semitism, an important reminder, even though it is a painful one. I had to feel-even embrace-the pain from my people’s past. How else would I give honor to my ancestor’s memories? How else could I emphasize the importance of fighting against prejudice of all kinds?
The Only Answer I Could Find
Pogroms also occurred in Poland. This included the Jedwabne Pogrom in 1941, where at least 340 Jews were burned alive in a barn. Though controlled by Germany at the time, local townsman carried out the massacre, along with Jedwabne’s mayor and town council, while Germans snapped photographs. Another particularly horrifying pogrom was in the town of Kielce, because it occurred in 1946, after the Holocaust. To Jews, this pogrom confirmed that Poland was not a safe place to return to after the war.
To point only to pogroms is to not paint a complete picture of the situation in Poland during the Holocaust. Poland was, in fact, the only country where hiding Jews was punishable by death for the entire household. The Polish did not oversee concentration camps nor did they work with the SS.
Poland also developed an organization to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Home Army, or the Polish resistance movement, established the Zegota (“Zegota” is translated as “The Council to Aid Jews”), a movement by Jewish and non-Jewish Poles, started by Catholic activists and funded by the exiled Polish government. The Zegota helped Jews go into hiding and provided them false identity documents, medical care, food, and money. It was the only organization of its kind in Europe.
It should also be noted that over 20% of the Polish population was killed in World War II. As historian Jan Gross describes, “While the experience of the Second World War has to a large extent shaped the political makeup and destinies of all European societies in the second half of the twentieth century Poland has been singularly affected.”The city of Warsaw was completely razed. Its Jewish population, one third of the city’s population before the war (the same percentage of the country’s entire urban population), was crammed into the Warsaw Ghetto. It is difficult to comprehend how overcrowded and oppressive this place was with an average 7.2 people per room, 1,125 calories consumed per person per day, and 83,000 total deaths from starvation and disease.
I saw portions of the ghetto wall tucked away in courtyards, along the Jewish cemetery, between apartment buildings. Warsaw rebuilt itself , though remnants of the ghetto still remain.
I did learn a difficult fact that has to be noted. Before going to Poland, I went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. It states unequivocally that the Jews were not only subject to persecution by the Germans, but their survival also depended on the nation they lived in and the willingness of that country’s government and citizens to enforce the Judenrein, Hitler’s plan to cleanse Europe of the Jews. Some countries were more complicit in the Holocaust than others, and this includes their citizens. Although it may be easier on the conscience to think this was a genocide carried out by one evil man and his legion of psychopaths, it’s not as simple as that. Denmark, for example, was controlled by Germany, but secretly helped Jews escape to Sweden by fishing boat, rowboat, and kayak. They were the lucky ones.
In this piece, my intention is to share what I’ve learned. Every country has its own story, and Poland’s is no less complex or controversial. The more time I spent in Poland, the more I realized that there were no easy answers. In fact, that was the only answer I could find. Every question opened up the door to another question.
The Stories
Just as nations have stories, so do individuals. I saw their graves at the Warsaw Ghetto Cemetery. I learned the tragic story of Janusz Karczak, the educator who ran an orphanage and chose to go with the children to the concentration camp; I envisioned the tenacity of Marek Edelman, one of the organizers of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who stayed in Poland after the war to fight for its continued existence; I saw the letters of Emanuel Ringleblum, who, along with others, documented the Holocaust every Shabbat (Oneg Shabbat), a sight all Jews ought to see; and Irena Sendler, the Polish Catholic nurse who saved over 2000 Jews, twice as many as Oskar Schindler, and mostly children, an unsung heroine to this day.
These are the stories that have to be kept alive. These stories went through my head as I packed up my suitcase to head to Warsaw Chopin Airport for the last time. As I boarded the plane, I thought about Birthright, and how every Jew should go to Poland. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t gone sooner.
Today, I think about the eleven Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue, seven of whom lived through World War II, and realize just how close to home things have come. The notion that anti-Semitism is a thing of the past or somewhere else is a mirage. While we have to carry on from these tragedies, we cannot deny that hate against minorities turns into violence. When leaders do not speak out against hatred, like Andrzej Duda refusing to apologize for the Polish part in the Holocaust, and Donald Trump, when he blamed both sides in Charlottesville—an offensive moral equivalency—hate groups are incited. The unfortunate evidence is here. There is no justification for what they have done.
Poland Today
In 2016, during an anti-immigration demonstration organized by the extreme right wing National Radical Camp, a man set fire to a Jewish effigy. In 2017, marchers chanted “Pure Poland, White Poland” and told reporters they wanted to “remove Jewry from power.”
Yet Kazimierz, the Jewish Quarter in Krakow where I was staying, has had a revival of Jewish culture as of late. Klezmer music fills the air on Szeroka Street, where synagogues from the Renaissance still remain, tourists flock to cafes serving “Jewish food,” and Jewish stars and Hebrew can be seen everywhere. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what was happening when I arrived there though. Were there Jews still living in Poland?
On the one hand, it was great to hear Klezmer music and taste my grandmother’s cooking, but I couldn’t help feeling that something was off…no, very wrong. And I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
The vibrant Jewish culture that once was is being turned into a tourist attraction, I realized, and I wasn’t completely comfortable about it, but that wasn’t it exactly. I understand that people need work. No. It was more than that. Something more disturbing.
My tour guide described the feeling as “plastic” but that wasn’t precisely it either. We met three college students wearing necklaces with stars of David and Hebrew letters. We stopped to ask them if they were Jewish and no, they weren’t, but they were looking for jobs as tour guides. One of them said he wanted to give tours of Auschwitz. I asked him why. “It’s my hometown,” he replied.
It wasn’t until I got home and gained perspective when it hit me: Ashkenazi Jews are like the Native Americans to the Polish. And that was it. The most disturbing thing of all. I am a member of the lost tribe of Europe. My grandparents once walked the cobblestone streets of Kazimierz. How does that affect my psyche? What does it mean that we come from a place where we no longer exist?
Bibliography
Gross, Jan T. (2001) Neighbors. New York, NY Penguin Books
https://www.hmh.org/la_holocaust_terms.shtml
http://www2.humboldt.edu/rescuers/book/Makuch/conditionsp.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/30/is-poland-retreating-from-democracy
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/27/623865367/poland-backtracks-on-a-controversial-holocaust-speech-law
http://www.info.kalisz.pl/statut/index.html
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Total/PolishAntisemitism.htm
Wall Text, Permanent Exhibit, Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow, Poland
Wall Text, Permanent Exhibit, Polin Museum, Warsaw, Poland