Polish Writing on Rescue Activities Related to Jews During WWII, 1945-2011
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Borderlands of Discourse: Polish Writing on Rescue Activities Related to Jews during WWII, 1945-2011 Master’s Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Department of History Joanna B. Michlic, Advisor Antony Polonsky, Advisor In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Master’s Degree by Tomasz Frydel May 2011 Copyright by Tomasz Frydel © 2011 Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the unrelenting support, attention, and care of my advisors Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic Who have been instrumental in the development of this thesis and my own growth as a fledgling historian More generally, I would like to acknowledge the influence of a number of faculty members at Brandeis, whose wisdom, warmth, and rapport contributed to a rich learning environment: Paul Jankowski, Mark Hulliung, Alice Kelikian, and Ellen Kellman Kudos to my wife, Daítza, for tolerating all of my moods in graduate school and for the combined love and sustenance of friends and family Finally, I would like to thank the Kościuszko Foundation for their Tuition Scholarship, which allowed for a greater degree of financial freedom in pursuing my graduate studies I dedicate this work to the memory of those Who, with the help of their Neighbors, met a squalid Death And so could not dignify The white Pages of the Nation’s History ABSTRACT Borderlands of Discourse: Polish Writing on Rescue Activities Related to Jews during WWII, 1945-2011 A thesis presented to the Department of History Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts By Tomasz Frydel This thesis examines the dominant approaches taken by historians to the subject of Polish rescue activities related to Jews during the Second World War. I ask how the “negative” spectrum of behavior toward Jews during the war (blackmail, denunciation, and murder) was displaced by the “positive” spectrum of successful rescue activities driven by noble intentions. This study is an in-depth examination of various themes, motifs, stylizations, and omissions of the Polish historiography from 1945-2011. I examine popular historical writing and contrast it with contradictory information found in personal documents of the wartime period (testimonies, memoirs, studies). As part of the continuum of these patterns, I also discuss artistic representations found in feature films. I conclude that these approaches functioned to deflect negative phenomena in order to sustain a narrative of Polish behavior that reflected positively on Polish-Jewish relations during and after the war. Thus, the historiography was part of a larger pattern to rehabilitate “the good name of Poland” in relation to the Holocaust. iv Table of Contents I. Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 1 General Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Organization ..................................................................................................................................... 5 The Bowdlerization of History? ................................................................................................ 6 Toward a Comprehensive Depiction of Rescue .................................................................. 9 Methodology & Sources ............................................................................................................ 11 Historians & Survivor Testimonies ...................................................................................... 12 Historical Background ............................................................................................................... 16 II. Polish Scholarship, 1945-1989: Pulling at the Threads ................................................... 19 The Presentation of the Evidence ......................................................................................... 19 The Disappearance of Anti-Semitism under German Occupation ............................... 25 The Reception of Rescuers after the War ............................................................................. 28 Rural Rescue vis-à-vis Urban Rescue ..................................................................................... 29 The Prevalence of Altruistic Help............................................................................................ 34 Four Your Freedom and Ours: The Home Army and the Jews ....................................... 39 Poland and the Death Penalty ................................................................................................. 41 III. Turning the Tide: Poland’s New Historians, 2000-2011 ............................................... 44 IPN ..................................................................................................................................................... 44 New Approaches .......................................................................................................................... 45 Polish-Polish War for Jews ........................................................................................................ 47 Paid Help: The New Paradigm of Rescue ............................................................................. 47 v IV. A Case Study: Radomyśl Wielki in County Mielec and Its Environs ......................... 49 A Brief History of Radomyśl Wielki ..................................................................................... 49 The Righteous of Radomyśl Wielki ...................................................................................... 54 Outside of Memory: Blackmail, Denunciation, and Murder........................................ 58 V. Depictions of Rescue Activities in Film .................................................................................. 73 Overview ......................................................................................................................................... 73 Samson: The Universal Victim of Communist Ideology ................................................ 75 Bitter Harvest: Toward a Realism of Rescue ..................................................................... 82 Decalogue 8: Rescue as Ethical and Existentialist Hell ................................................. 88 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 91 VI. Final Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 93 Bibliography........................................................................................................................................... 95 vi List of Illustrations FIGURE 1. SCENE STILL FROM OPENING OF HOLY WEEK (WIELKI TYDZIEŃ) .......... 80 FIGURE 2. SCENE STILL FROM FILM, BIRTHPLACE (MIEJSCE URODZENIA) ............... 87 FIGURE 3. SCENE STILL OF OPENING SCENE OF DECALOGUE, PART 8 ........................ 89 FIGURE 4. SCENE STILL OF ELŻBIETA LORANC IN LECTURE HALL FROM DECALOGUE, PART 8. .................................................................................................. 91 vii We, Polish Jews, growing wild in forests, feeding our terrified children on roots and grass; we crawling, crouching, bedraggled and unkempt, armed with an antique shotgun obtained by some miraculous feat of begging and bribing. – Julian Tuwim, We Polish Jews The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate. – E.H. Carr, What is History? viii I. Introduction General Introduction In his magisterial study of postwar Europe, the late Tony Judt wrote that recognition of the Holocaust is “contemporary Europe’s entry ticket” to the modern world.1 Since the collapse of Soviet Communism, the question of the Holocaust’s “bystanders” has taken on new proportions as European societies grapple for a changing identity. In particular, Europe’s rescuers of Jews, the “Righteous among Nations,” have played an integral role in this process. In post-Communist countries, the subject of the rescue of Jews has begun to take on political and ideological significance. The historian Joanna B. Michlic writes how this growing interest “takes on a universal and transnational form in which the rescuers serve as models for contemporary young Europeans,” as well as on local form.2 In the case of contemporary Poland, she sees rescue as a complicated historiographical process treated in various ways: 1) as part of “the new European project on democratic citizenship education and the new investigation embedded in critical history writings” and 2) as a reflection of “patterns of thinking about and manipulating 1 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005). 803. 2 Joanna B. Michlic, ""I will never forget what you did for me during the war:” Representations of Rescuers and Relationships Between Rescuers and Jewish Survivors in the Light of Correspondence to the Central Committee of Polish Jews and the Joint, 1945-1949," Yad Vashem Studies (2011): 1- 2.This paper will appear in the forthcoming volume of Yad Vashem Studies, Fall 2011. All quotes are cited with the author’s permission. 1 rescuers for political,