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rating relationship since the end of the nineteenth century there had been,
among Poles and Jews , a close attachment stemming from countless
commeFcial and neighborly ties. And this is why the Nazis could not murder
the Polish Jews without at the same time murdering something that belonged
intimately to the Polish nation. Unfortunately, until very recently that
annihilation that constituted a moral offense against the conscience of Polish
culture has not been properly understood.
There are many reasons why it happened that way. The Poles were
themselves decimated. As a nation they did not collaborate with the Nazis;
on the contrary, their resistance was heroic. As Israel Gutman, Director of
Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, stated, "This feeling of identification of
Poles from all social spheres and their anti-German solidarity is a previously
unheard-of historical achievement and one of Europe's greatest under Nazi
occupation ... all accusations against the Poles that they were responsible for
what is referred to as the 'Final Solution' are not even worth mentioning."
The feeling of defeat caused by the era of Communist domination dis–
couraged the Poles from looking at their past, to confront morally poignant
issues. The resurgence of anti-Semitism after the war testified to the fact that
the Poles put the moral issue of the Holocaust beyond the pale of discussion.
Another domination caused them to muster all the sources of national
tradition, bad and good ones, for defense. Anti-Semitism belonged to the
former.
The great Polish-Jewish culture is dead and cannot, of course, ever re–
turn. This state of affairs has made some fear that it would prove impossible
to integrate Polish-Jewish history into Polish history. But with the advent of
the Solidarity movement, a reawakening has come. It is impossible to
understand the recent discussions about Polish-Jewish relations without
putting them in the much larger context of the discovery of the other Polish
past, without an awareness of the desperate attempts to find in the Polish
tradition some guidance in coping with the sense of despair about the state of
contemporary Poland. In this sense, corning to terms with the Polish-Jewish
past is an exercise in freedom, an education toward freedom. The
liberalization after 1980 made it possible to advance a new conception of
Polish history where the contributions of minorities could
be
integrated.
The reexamination of the national past has had to include the recogni–
tion that the Jewish civilization which existed in Poland for centuries is now
completely gone. There is curiosity about the Jewish past but combined with
the problematic nature of that past. The Jews have not simply vanished.
They are absent in a peculiar way. They have been present in private
conversations among the older generation, in a truncated way in Polish
history books. They have not been present as a legitimate and natural part
of Polish history, but rather as an emotional part despite all the disclaimers to
the contrary: through denials, omissions, or bargaining about right and
