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PARTISAN REVIEW
Slavenka Drakulic:
I don't raise the political solution because I don't
know what the ideal political solution is. I'm not a politician mysel£ I see
my task as a writer who asks the questions, not one who gives the an–
swers. If you understood me to say that it would be the best thing to di–
vide Bosnia between Croats and Serbs and give Muslims the enclave, I
didn't say that; I mentioned it, but it's not what I favor. I would put
Bosnia temporarily under some kind of protectorate.
Istvan Deak:
In your beautiful reading something disturbs me: your
analogy abou the situation of the Poles, the Jews, and the Germans. I
would see it differently. The Poles, in my opinion, are presented and
shown in a very prejudiced way in Claude Lanzmann's documentary film,
Shoah.
Lanzmann was hunting for examples to show Polish anti-Semitism,
and he questioned the least intelligent Polish peasants to prove that the
Poles were anti-Semitic. Secondly, the Poles were totally unarmed,
except for the resistance movement. The resistance movement itself was
hunted down and ended up in concentration camps. The picture is not
simply that there were Poles outside and Jews inside, because if the
peasant Poles had not worked next to Auschwitz, there would have been
Poles and not only Jews inside Auschwitz. There were hundreds of
thousands ofPoles in Nazi concentration camps who died.
So I would say that the analogy that you make with today's situation
perhaps is not quite right, because today's situation is absolutely insane, in
that the United States and others could intervene. It's not that the Poles
could have sacrificed themselves for the ghetto Jews but chose not to be–
cause they would have been killed. What makes the situation so difficult
for us to understand and what makes us so exasperated is that it would be
very easy for the Western powers to deal with Serbian aggression, and
they are not doing it. And when you observe that United States interven–
tion never has a positive outcome, I would say that it depends on what
period you are talking about. It ended up quite successfully in World War
Two, after it defeated Nazism. So that's why I wish you would either find
another analogy, or explain to us why you think the situation is the same
as with the Jews in Poland, that is, a world that is indifferent. The world's
indifference today is far worse than the indifference of the Polish peasants.
Slavenka Drakulic:
Well, I wasn't especially attacking Polish peasants. I
was talking about particular things in
Shoah,
simply because I think that
the metaphor of the Jews is a very good one for every similar situation. It
is a very good metaphor now for the Muslims, because they are losing
territory and they are virtually exterminated in some parts . There are
refugees, and what we'll see next is going to be a wave of Muslim
