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PARTISAN REVIEW
We . . . should acknowledge our moral ... responsibility .. . Full
responsibility? Also a shared responsibility for the genocide? I can al–
ready hear . . . loud protests: "For God's sake, we did not take part in
the genocide." "Yes, that is true," I shall reply. "Nobody can rea–
sonably claim that the Poles as a nation took part in the genocide of
the Jews . .. So why talk of . .. shared responsibility?" My answer is
this: "Participation and shared responsibility are not the same
things." Our responsibility is for insufficient effort to resist. Who of us
could claim that there was sufficient resistance in Poland? ... Yet
more significant is the fact that if in the past we had behaved only
more humanely, genocide would perhaps have been less imaginable..
. . more difficult to carry out, and almost certainly would not have met
with the indifference and moral turpitude of the society in whose full
view it took place.
Blonski dismissed accusations of complicity as groundless, yet he
challenged the common Polish myth that to be a Pole is to be in solidarity
with the persecuted. His article immediately became one of the most hotly
debated pieces ofjournalism in postwar Poland. Turowicz, flooded with
letters, stated that despite the denials, the reactions confirmed that anti–
Semitism in Poland - practically without Jews - still existed.
The most serious attack on Blonski's article came from Wladyslaw Sila–
Nowicki, a lawyer, defender of political prisoners in postwar Poland, a mem–
ber of the anti-Nazi underground and of the anticommunist underground after
the war, for which he spent six years in jail. For him, "Blonski's article could
be ... understood . .. as an endorsement of the incessant anti-Polish propa–
ganda, which had been conducted ... by the enemies, not simply of
government, or the system ... but of the Polish nation." Sila-Nowicki argued
that anti-Semitism before the war was limited, that the conflict between Jews
and Poles was basically economic, and that Jews had refused to assimilate.
During the war, stated Sila-Nowicki, the behavior of the Poles was
exemplary. The Jews' own passivity before the Germans made impossible
any effective assistance from Poles.
In
contrast to Blonski's and Sila-Nowicki's articles, which represented
the extremes of the discussion, Teresa Prekerowa, a historian, provided a
calmer voice: "In the face of German plans to . . . annihilate the Jews, Poles
were helpless as a society. Only individual rescue attempts had any chance
of success. And those attempts could have been much more extensive."
Prekerowa also challenged the assertion about the passivity of the Jews.
Kazimierz Dziewanowski rejected Sila-Nowicki's complacency:
Ifin our country, in our presence several million innocent people were
murdered and we could not prevent that and save them, then this is ..
