Andrzej Bryk
POLAND AND THE MEMORY OF
THE HOLOCAUST
Henry Grynberg, that patient guardian of the murdered Polish
Jews and a Polish-Jewish intellectual, wrote once:
We, Poles and Jews, have been brought together by the harm which
was done to us. Not the losses, since those were borne separately and
are incomparable. But what was done to the Jews before Polish eyes is
an injury not only for the victims, but also for the witnesses . . . If the
Poles are a nation traumatized by all the calamities of history, it is
easy to imagine how traumatized is the Jewish nation.
It
would seem
that the Poles, better than anyone else, understand the Jews and
manifest that understanding before world opinion. Why do they not
show it?
The intensity and honesty of the recent debate in Poland about the
Holocaust is unparalleled by anything that has happened between the Poles
and the Jews during the last half of the century. It is also a fulfillment of
Grynberg's hope.
The Holocaust has always been a problem in Polish postwar con–
sciousness. The real issue is not the question of Polish complicity with the
Germans during the war or of whether the Poles did all they could to help
save the Jews. The question of complicity is is a problem for the collective
national conscience of the Austrians, Ukrainians, Latvians, French, or Slo–
vaks. And in Poland, under the most severe German occupation, the question
of complicity with the Germans was a relatively marginal phenomenon and
should never be discussed without at the same time citing the Polish rescue
efforts, the only case in Europe where the punishment for such efforts was
the death penalty. The real issue in Polish culture is that of moral indifference
and silence after the Holocaust.
The German annihilation of the Jews was a tragedy for Polish collec–
tive consciousness, since it ended nearly a millennium ofcoexistence between
the Poles and Jews at a most poignant and inflamed moment. It resulted in an
amputation of an integral part of Polish society, which meant that Poland -
in
the words of a Polish writer - was "deprived of a chance to play to its end
that many-centuries old coexistence in diversity and to play it to its end in a
civilized way, a way which would enrich both partners." Polish Jews, in 1939
one third of the world's, created a unique J ewish-Yiddish civilization living
In
a
mainly unassimilated way next to the Polish population. Despite a deterio-
Editor's Note:
A
longer version of this essay will appear in
Gal Ed,
ajournal
published in Jerusalem.
