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seems to reflect some deeper psychological processes. On the one hand, it
may be a sentimental reaction against the grayness of the present in favor of
a colorful and glorious past - with symbolic significance accorded to the inde–
pendent Polish Republic of 1918 to 1939 - in which Jews turn out unex–
pectedly and paradoxically to be a
differentia specifica.
On the other hand, it
is also an effort to understand the most complex events of the past with an
awareness that only such understanding can make Polish society modern and
free.
Lech Walesa's remarks, reported in
The New York Times,
at the April
18, 1988 commemoration of the forty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising, affirmed Poland's recognition of its tradition of anti-Semitism
in history as something to be accepted and atoned for and the simultaneous
incorporation ofJewish history as a legitimate part of Polish history:
"As
a
son of this land I ask today that we remember our troubled nation's common
history and ask that everything that later poisoned it, especially the painful
excesses of anti-Semitism, be forgiven us." Paying tribute to the Jewish
resistance, he added, "We commemorate this struggle today in a special way,
because in this land of so many uprisings, the uprising of the Jewish fighters
was perhaps the most Polish ofall uprisings."
Earlier at Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, several thousand Poles and Jews
gathered to unveil a monument to prewar Jewish Bund leaders W. Alter and
H. Erlich, who were executed in 1941 by Stalin after they (among other
things) denounced the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland in 1939. Dr. Marek
Edelman, who was Deputy Commander of the Ghetto uprising, said that the
monument was "a symbol of the shame of inhuman totalitarianism all over
the world ." That commemoration is symbolic in another way.
It
not only
recognizes the common fate and history of the Polish Jews and Poles before
the war, but it also shows that the Polish Republic, despite all its shortcomings,
especially the irresponsible anti-Semitic policies of Polish nationalists after
1935, was a common, free homeland, destroyed by two totalitarian powers.
The whole discussion, now being conducted
in
a free Poland, is a painful
but necessary testimony to what happened between the Poles and Jews in
modern Polish history, especially in the inferno of the German occupation.
It
constitutes a token atonement that the Poles owe to Polish Jews and to their
memory.
It
is the beginning of the collective acceptance of a simple, unspoken
truth: that the Poles owe the Polish Jews, not enough mourned and wept
over, a moral atonement at long last. Measured against the enormity of the
Holocaust, this may not be enough, yet it is all that can be done at this late
hour.
