Triumph and joy
Richard West
Warsaw On Sunday morning I noticed a Polish army officer weeping profusely as he listened on his transistor radio to the enthronement of Pope John Paul II. This has indeed been a week of triumph and joy for a country that has in the past had little of either, and yet, over the centuries è rimasta fedele', has kept the faith, to use the phrase of the Mass held in Rome.
The religious emotion of Poland can sometimes be almost alarming in its intensity. When I first came to Warsaw in late 1959, a miracle had just been reported: a woman had seen the Virgin appear over the spire of a drab, nineteenth-century church by the former ghetto area of the city. The next evening a crowd gathered and then on succeeding nights an immense host, perhaps in hundreds of thousands, came to kneel and pray in the cold and the rain. Extra police and even troops had to be brought to prevent any outbreak.
Some ten years later I went to the celebrations at Czestochowa, whose church has the country's most prized relic, the smokestained representation known as the 'Black Virgin', which had brought victory in an ancient war against Sweden. This was the year of Poland's millennium, a time of special celebration, and all the bishops in purple proceeded to mass for a vast congregation in a field below the city walls. They roared out the solemn and beautiful hymn praising 'Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Poland'. A nation that truly believes itself to be ruled by the Virgin Mary is not to be lightly treated: and this is why so many generations of Poles have been killed defending their country against her persistent enemies.
The Polish Church has been accused in the past of being both anti-Russian and anti-semitic but these are at most only half-truths. The Church before the war did not support the Polish imitations of German, Spanish or Italian fascism; it did not corn promise with the Nazi invaders as did most of the hierarchies in, for instance, Slovakia, Croatia and Germany herself. It is said that the choice of the new Pope was promoted by Archbishop Koenig of Warw. as a part of a plan to 'bring Poland back inloVestern Europe'; but the Poles, whatever they feel about Russian influence on their country, do not want to `go back into Western Europe' if that means coming under the influence of West Germany or Austria, the country that gave the world Adolf Hitler as well as Archbishop Koenig.
As to the Jews, it must be said that many Polish Catholics remain anti-semitic and may not have done all they could to hide the intended victims of Hitler's 'final solution'; although let it be said that we who never knew the Gestapo, might not have behaved more courageously under the same state terror. However it should be said that the Poles did not themselves do this crime, and their Church insisted, then as today that to murder people, of any race, is the worst sin, for which one will go to Hell.
The renewed manifestations of Jewbaiting in Poland since the war have not been encouraged by clerics such as the new Pope; indeed they have been done by some of his enemies. In particular there have been anti-semitic utterances from Pax, the pseudo-religious group set up by the Russians in 1945 under the leadership of a very nasty former Fascist and Jew-baiter called Boleslaw Piasecki. I have myself heard disgustingly anti-semitic remarks from one of Piasecki's well-paid henchmen.
The anti-Semites have also enjoyed support from certain elements in the police and army, particularly before the fall from power of Moczar, the former Minister of the Interior. These fascist-minded Poles who include some actual 'former' fascists such as Piasecki, have beaten up and possibly even murdered not only Jews but the very Catholic students who, in Krakow particularly, have spoken out for the principles of the new Pope. There is a further paradox, in this nation of paradox, that the genuine principled Communists, not just those who are Jews, are also inclined to sympathise with the Church as a protection against the brutal authority of the state, from which Poland suffered so harshly before 1956. The Polish Church, unlike so many in Western Europe and Latin America, and unlike the Orthodox Church in the east, has always remained apart from the state of whatever political colouring. For this reason I think that the new Polish Pope may cleanse the name of the whole Catholic Church from that taint of complicity in that gigantic crime committed against the Jews during the second world war, very largely on Polish soil. The Italian Pope of that time did not exactly risk martyrdom in his opposition to Hitler; he did not call on German Catholics to show whole-hearted resistance to what was done by their countrymen. Let us hope that John Paul II will somehow expiate the atrocity whose recollection makes Poland a sombre place for the visitor even today. In a travel agency here, I heard an American ask the clerk how long it would take `to drive to Majdanek, you know, the camp'. He had wanted to go to Auschwitz but it was too far away, and he wanted to get back that evening. When he was told that Majdanek was only an hour from Warsaw, he asked the clerk and me 'if there is anything to be seen at Majdanek, you know, the barracks and so on'.
Yes, I said, there were things to be seen at Majdanek, although they are not a thing one wants to talk about with a stranger. One can see the gas-chambers, still with the finger-nail marks of the victims; also a room filled with thousands of pairs of children's shoes. The visit I made several years ago was all the more nightmarish because, actually in the room with the children's shoes, I fell into savage argument with my guide, a middle-aged Communist Jewess who had herself survived Auschwitz. Contemplating the shoes, she said to me: 'You in the West knew about these camps but you did not protest because of sympathy for Hitler against the Soviet Union'.
I pointed out that Britain and France had actually gone to war on behalf of Poland when Hitler and Stalin were allies, and that the Russians too had run death camps; maybe still did. Even though true, this was a shameful thing to have said in such a place, to such a person.
I did not see the TV Holocaust films and do not wish to join in the subsequent argu ment in the spectator, but I am sure there would have been no such argument, if instead of showing a soap opera, the BBC had shown a documentary on the death camps. There could then have been no suggestion that the suffering of the Jews was being exploited for money, or worse still, to gloss over horrors committed on other nations or social classes, notably in the Soviet Union. Few tourists, I fancy, visit the Gulag Archipelago.
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