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Annamaria Orla-Bukowska lentin.qxd 8/9/03 6:58 pm Page 179 CHAPTER TEN RE-PRESENTING THE SHOAH IN POLAND AND POLAND IN THE SHOAH Annamaria Orla-Bukowska It would be impossible to speak of representing the Shoah in the twenty- first century without speaking of Poland. In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, Poland’s estimated 3.5 million Jews comprised the largest Jewish community in Europe (second only to that in the U.S.). Furthermore, the territories reigned by Poland in the interwar years constituted the very heart of Ashkenaz – the closest thing to a nation–state that the Jews in Europe had ever experienced. The bitter irony was that it would be eco- nomically and demographically facile for Germany to establish its ghettos and death camps on that same land. Although Poland’s Jewish citizens constituted roughly ten percent of her prewar population, they were fifty percent of her six million wartime dead. Occupied Polish territory was also to be the burial ground for millions of Jewish citizens of other coun- tries. In Poland, the postwar motto has been not never forget – a country which had experienced every World War II horror could never forget. The slogan here has always been never again. Nevertheless, one could consider the title of this paper and question whether there ever was in the first place a ‘presenting’ of the Shoah in Poland during most of the twentieth-century’s postwar years. It was, in fact, hardly presented at all. Heightened wartime writing, fiction and non–fiction, as well as some legal attempts – trials and executions – to con- front the horrors of the Holocaust continued above ground into the first half–decade before Stalinism ultimately closed all doors. Prose writers, including Tadeusz Borowski, and poets, including Czeslaw Milosz, did, indeed, write about the Shoah during and immediately after the war. Early postwar cinema also communicated the Jewish experience in the death camps. Trials were held, not only in cases of wartime conflagrations such as Jedwabne, but also in relation to postwar aftershocks such as Kielce.1 lentin.qxd 8/9/03 6:58 pm Page 180 180 | Annamaria Orla Bukowska By 1950, however, the subject seemed to evaporate. Adorno and others have spoken of stunned silence as the only appropriate reply, and for roughly two decades speechless amnesia was a universal reaction to the Shoah.2 In the former eastern bloc, however, there were, in addition to similar psychological reasons, very different political ones for the mute suppression, and for its longer duration. The Shoah was one of the bleached out biale plamy – literally ‘white stains’, or blank pages of history, an idiosyncrasy taken for granted in this region. On the one hand, the offi- cial thinking was that what goes unmentioned would be considered insignificant or nonexistent; on the other, the unofficial reasoning was that key information was missing: what was absent would become extremely present. There were, too, specifically Polish motives for under– or non–presentation of the Shoah. The path to breaking through this silence continues to be a trying and testing process, often involving agonising introspection. It is a very fearful and dangerous venture into the depths of Polish identity, as created and depicted with regards to ‘the War’, and then leading to its deconstruction and reconstruction anew with regards to the Shoah. The Shoah in Poland: Hidden Firstly, and not without concrete justification, the Holocaust would rarely be noted as a unique event, separate from the overall war experience. Between 1939 and 1945, Poland lost one-sixth of its population – the high- est loss per 1000 inhabitants of all the countries involved – and by the end of the war, pain and sorrow had visited each family. As Saul Friedländer has pointed out (1994: 252), ‘Anyone who survived WWII is a survivor of a traumatic event, not just the Holocaust survivors, but any and all sur- vivors’. This would be all the more true of Poles. Thus, when it was men- . tioned, the Zaglada zydowska – ‘the Jewish genocide’ – was seen as but one of the numerous tragedies of the Second World War, involving one of the several categories of humans who had perished, and one of the many means of death. Secondly, individualised, diverse accounts could not coexist in postwar Poland, which had been handed over to the USSR’s sphere of influence. A Sovietised society was assumed to be composed of able-bodied, fully employed workers with matching needs and desires, requiring identical resolution. The new socialist regime strove to eradicate all differences. Controlled at best, or banned at worst, minority groups – including Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. – were most often ignored or hid- den from sight. So, too, would be their distinct histories. Hence, though post-World War II Poland could boast a Jewish Historical Institute, Europe’s only national Yiddish Theatre, a Yiddish– Polish newspaper, several functioning synagogues and Yiddish–language lentin.qxd 8/9/03 6:58 pm Page 181 Re-presenting the Shoah in Poland | 181 schools, as well as the Socio–Cultural Association of Jews in Poland with headquarters in each major city, all of these agencies of Jewishness were under the financial, social, and political control of the state. Such was the case with all legal organisations; freedom of assembly existed in name only, and the expression of ‘otherness’ was kept under a watchful eye. Concurrently, the general public was led to believe that such cultural insti- tutions were simply folkloric curiosities. In fact, the postwar expulsion of Germans, the Akcja Wisla campaign, which forced the dispersion of the Ukrainian and Lemko population from their traditional homelands in the southeast to the depopulated western and north eastern territories, the repatriation of Polish citizens from east of the Bug River into the country’s new borders, and the shifts of Lithuanians, Byelorussians, and Ukrainians into their respective Soviet Socialist Republics, not to mention the later emigrations of Jews in the aftermath of the July 1946 Kielce pogrom, the 1956 communist party purge, and the 1968 anti-Zionist campaign, all made Poland more mono- cultural than it had ever been in its history. Step by step, ethnic Poles became convinced that all ‘others’ had actually gone. With the erasure of sociocultural variations, so, too, did the different experiences of the Second World War vanish: even if there were once other stories, theoreti- cally there was no one left to tell, or hear them. Thus, belying the many physical reminders of Jewish history and cul- ture, and especially of the Shoah, the absence of a human presence has skewed nearly all representations towards the majority perspective. As James Young (1994: 224) observes, ‘[Holocaust] monuments lead a curious double life in Poland: one in the consciousness of the local community and another in that of Jewish visitors. On the one hand, they continue to serve as essential commemorative sites for the visitors. But …, it was inevitable that Jewish memory would also be collected and expressed in particularly Polish ways. It could not be otherwise. For once the state reassembles the fragments, it necessarily recalls even the most disparate events in ways that unify them nationally’. Thirdly, throughout the socialist bloc, the World War II enemy was por- trayed solely as (West) Germany and anti-communist fascism, theoretical- ly representing the final moral decline of capitalist imperialism. Geoffrey Hartman (1994: 4) is not alone in noting that the Jewish identity of the vic- tims was suppressed on monuments and memorial sites built in the east- ern bloc countries out of an ‘ignorant or deliberate and expedient falsifi- cation, abetted by prejudicial stereotypes and ethnic or national myths’. Ideological mythology was a strong factor, too, denying mention to all obviously non-communist victims, such as Catholic and other clergy. This portrayal was particularly true in Poland: to root the new ‘alliance’ with the Soviet Union, only one of her two wartime foes could be named officially. Over subsequent decades, all sites of death in the struggle with Nazi Germany were catalogued and marked by the symbol of the two lentin.qxd 8/9/03 6:58 pm Page 182 182 | Annamaria Orla Bukowska Grunwald swords – referring to a 1410 unpredicted Polish victory against the German Teutonic Knights – while struggles against, or deaths caused by the Red Army, were disregarded or denied. Publicly, only the efforts of Soviet-sanctioned resistance forces were recognised; censured Armia Krajowa (AK or ‘Home Army’) fighters were tortured, jailed, or con- demned to death. The quintessential bearer of the dominant socialist bloc message have been the exhibits at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, speaking to nearly every Pole since 1947, and increasingly, to the world. The museum’s over- arching theme, as well as that of the separate national expositions, was not the portrayal of the systematic persecution and murder of the Jews of Europe, but an international crusade against fascism, won by the Soviet army in conjunction with forces in all the countries (including Austria and East Germany) whose ‘transnationalised’ and ‘de-ethnicised’ citizens had perished in the camps. The narrated commentary in the Soviet-made, staged ‘liberation’ film, still on view by visitors to the museum, does not refer to the victims’ ethnicity. But there was also a Polish socialist message. Along these lines, as Iwona Irwin-Zarecka observed (cited in Dwork and van Pelt, 1994: 241): ‘Auschwitz … is not, for Poles, a symbol of Jewish suffering. Rather, it is a general symbol of “man’s inhumanity to man” and a symbol of the Polish tragedy at the hands of the Nazis. It is a powerful reminder of the evil of racism, and not a singular reminder of the deadliness of antisemitism’.
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