A FALSE IMPUTATION
Richard West argues that
Poland is not as anti-semitic as some suppose
Lublin AS IF Poland did not have troubles enough of her own, she has brought in those of the Near East as well. Among the guests at my hotel were two gentlemen said to be arms buyers, from .both Iran, and Iraq. They encountered each other one night, ex- changing insults in English, mostly the word `motherf---er'. Just down the road is some kind of military installation, with pieces of light artillery and rockets, the Stalin's Organs, pointing directly at the hotel. It is said that the Libyans and Palestinians, also staying at this hotel, have been receiving military training there, but I did not try to confirm this; it is not a good idea to ask about military matters abroad. Many Arabs come to' Poland for women, especially to such small towns as Torun, where there is now a high VD rate, and where you are rung in your hotel to be asked, 'Do you need a woman for the night?' Into this Lublin nest of warring Iranian and Iraqis, of Libyan and Palestinian ter- rorists, there has descended over the last few weeks a host of visitors from the arch-eneMy Israel, invited by Poland to show their respect for the dead of the Warsaw Ghetto, and all the millions of Jews who perished under the Nazis. There are Jews from all over the world, but this year, for the first time, the Polish govern- ment has made a gesture of friendship to Israel, with whom she broke off diplomatic relations after the Six Day War in 1967. Lublin, with Warsaw itself and Krakow, is one of the three main. places of pilgrimage, if that is the right word, because it is close to the Majdanek extermination camp.
Most of the Israeli visitors over the laSt few weeks have been students, the grand- children of those who were in Majdanek. The memory of my own visit, twenty years
ago, is still so vivid and painful that I did not return. I dreaded to think how Maj- danek might seem to young and impress- ionable Israelis. When I mentioned this to a couple of Englishmen staying for some weeks in this hotel, they laughed grimly. They said that the groups of young Israelis were horrible brats who kept the place awake, late at night. On my second even- ing, I came back to the hotel to find a party of 120 Israelis, mostly of English origin, with British passports. They were, I regret to say, the most ill-mannered crowd I have seen for yearS, pushing people physically aside, yelling across the room, and issuing orders to the hotel staff without a please or thank you. The hotel staff reciprocated. A porter referred to the young Israelis as what might be translated as `yidlets'. The barmanka, or barman-ess, refused to serve them and locked the doors because, she complained, they stole the bottles, for which she had to pay. Another member of the hotel staff said the Israelis always made off with the pillows. A pleasant Bavarian brewer, here to improve the local beer, was watching the confrontation with fas- cination and horror. He saw the incongrui- ty of such behaviour next to Majdanek, a scene of abomination. He said that his generation of. Germans, born during or after the war, had no feelings of guilt about Nazi crimes but that his own children were anxious to know what happened. He said he was shocked by some of the anti-Israeli or anti-semitic remarks. from Poles. About one o'clock in the morning, as I was vainly trying to sleep against the noise of the young Israelis, the brewer appeared in the corridor and told them in German that he had work to do in the morning and would they please show a little consideration. When this had no effect, he summoned his small knowledge of English and bellowed:
'Gentlemen, finish now!'
The last time I encountered Israelis was six years ago, in the Lebanon, in the unusual circumstance of war, but from what we have seen in recent weeks of their treatment of Arabs it does appear that they are now a different breed from the charm- ing, gentle Jews of Europe or the United States. Friends who know Israel blame the kibbutz system for breaking the old Jewish family sense. This theory was reinforced by a recent BBC documentary film which said the kibbutz system came closer than any- thing else in the world to paradise and the two ideals of equality and socialism. Whose paradise and ideals, BBC? It is noteworthy that Polish Jews who have emigrated in recent years do not feel happy in Israel, or anywhere in the West. Also in this hotel, I met the poet Aleksander Rosenberg, who left Poland seven years ago, spending four years in Israel. 'The Israelis do not like the Poles,' he told me. 'In Israel and in the West, I never had interesting conversations. Poland is always interesting.' About a year ago, he returned to live in Poland, an economically desper- ate country. Lublin is at the very heart of East European Jewry, Fiddler on the Roof country. Many Polish Jews, like Roman Polanski the film director, have emigrated but keep returning here. They feel more at home than in Israel.
The fact that Hitler's 'Final Solution' took place largely here in Poland has helped to create the common idea that the Poles supported or even took part in the atrocity, as full of hatred for Jews as the Nazis. In Saki's story, The Unrest Cure, the practical joker Clovis tells a dull clergyman that his rectory has been chosen by the bishop for a massacre of the local Jews. 'But this will be a blot on the twentieth century,' the vicar protests. 'Yes', Clovis replies, 'and your rectory will be the blotting paper.' What once seemed a pleasantry (though not all that pleasant, since Saki knew Eastern Europe and all about pogroms) is now grotesque horror, for Poland became in effect the blotting paper for what was the worst crime in recorded history.
The long documentary film Shoah ('Annihilation') suggested to most people who saw it that Poles supported the 'Final Solution'. There were interviews with country Poles who said that the Jews killed Christ. An American university withdrew a job from the British scholar Norman Davies, because they said his Oxford his- tory, God's Playground did not condemn the behaviour of the Poles in the second world war. An Anglican clergyman recent- ly said on the BBC that the Poles had 'enthusiastically' supported the Nazi mas- sacre of the Jews.
The present convention in Warsaw, Lub- lin and Krakow is Poland's attempt to put right a false imputation on national hon- our. The Poles insist, and I think rightly, that although there were anti-Semites as in every country subjugated by Hitler, only in Poland did they refuse to collaborate with the Nazis in killing the Jews, or in anything else. Even the pre-war, anti-semitic fascist party joined the resistance against the Germans. More than 200,000 Polish Jews survived the war, protected by Christian Poles, although in Poland, unlike any- where else in Nazi-occupied Europe, sheltering Jews carried an automatic death penalty. The Max Ophuls documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitie showed that millions of French people not only got on well with the Germans but went to see the repulsive film Jew Suss, whose climax is a hanging. In other countries of East Europe, like the Ukraine and Croatia, local people not only collaborated with Nazis but helped in their work of killing the Jews.
An American Jewish friend blames the Poles for not having joined the Jews in the Ghetto uprising of April 1943. In fact, some members of the Polish resistance did try to shoot their way into the Ghetto, but failed. The Christian Poles were them- selves short of guns and ammunition. The Red Army was hundreds of miles away, so that any revolt had no chance of success or saving the lives of Jews. The Christian Poles did send food into the Ghetto and smuggled Jews out, risking their own lives. When the Christian Poles themselves rose in revolt in August 1944, with the Red Army camped the other side of the Vistula, the Germans put down their challenge, destroying Warsaw and at least 200,000 people.
The false idea that Poles are more anti-semitic than other people, and almost as bad as the Nazis, arises from things that happened after the war. At Kielce, in 1947, a lynch mob murdered some forty Jews accused of killing a Christian baby. This extraordinary throwback to mediaeval su- perstition, like the 'little Hugh' of Lincoln, mentioned in Chaucer, understandably drove out many Polish Jews who had survived the war. The majority went to the embryo state of Israel. There were no more incidents such as Kielce, and most Jews did well in Poland, often assuming good posts in the Communist Party. Then, in 1967, the Party itself turned on the Jews, with a nasty anti-semitic campaign. They drove out most of the remaining Jews. A Polish diplomat friend of mine, who was a genuine pre-war communist and not a Jew, was thrown out of the Party and his job because he refused to join a meeting attacking Israel. Of course, this being Poland, the anti-semitic campaign by the communists made the Jews popular. The Church, which had its anti-semitic side before the war, is free of this perversity. One would not hear in Poland the kind of unpleasant anti-semitic remarks that I heard in Archbishop Tutu's Cathedral in Cape Town. The Pope, who here in Poland has an authority greater than any Tsar or First Secretary, has blessed the friendship of Jewish and Christian Pole in one of his most magnificent homilies, given at Au- schwitz.
There is a postcript to this article, written in Warsaw. On Sunday, I went to an 'unofficial', the codeword for anti- communist, demonstration in front of the shrines of the Jewish Ghetto. The crowd carried Solidarity banners. They honoured the Polish Jews murdered by Russians in 1941. The next day, the Europejski Hotel, where I stay, was under a kind of siege. The café was closed. I had to prove my identity to the guards at the door. The Israelis have their office on the first floor and the Government fears an attack from perhaps the Palestinians. It is quite a reflection on mankind that Jewish survi- vors of Hitler still live in fear of their lives 45 years after the massacre that took place only a few hundred yards away.
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