The Jedwabne Debate: Reshaping Polish National Mythology

Joanna Michlic The Jedwabne Debate: Reshaping Polish National Mythology In recent decades, the subject of collective memory has become a compelling pre- occupation of academics of various disciplines as well as non-academics. French historian Henry Rousso has pointed to memory as a “value reflecting the spirit of our time.”¹ One aspect of the study of collective memory is that of the “dark past” of nations in their relations with their ethnic and national minorities, the ways in which nations recollect and rework the memory of such a past, and how this memory impacts on each of their collective identities. Various new studies reveal that as with other uncomfortable memories haunting Europe, the Holocaust was repressed and excluded from public debate for a relatively long period of time.² The development of public debate on the subject was dependent on a political stability that permitted public reckoning, as well as the acceptance of self-criticism within a particular collective culture.³ One can argue that in many former Baltic and East European communist states, such as Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, and the Ukraine, that such debates have yet to take place. Between 2000 and 2002, Poland was the foremost national community under- going such a prominent and profound public discussion, triggered by the publi- cation of Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross, which describes the collective murder of the Jewish community of Jedwabne in northeastern Poland by its ethnic Polish neighbors on July 10, 1941. Rather than reviewing the historical events, or pro- viding a critique of Gross’s book, I shall focus on the dominant Polish canon of remembering the Holocaust and wartime Polish-Jewish relations in the postwar collective memory and I will look at the extent to which the debate over Neighbors led to a critical reevaluation and rejection of that canon. 1 Henry Rousso, La hantise du passé: entretien avec Phillipe Petit (Paris, 1998), 14. 2 See studies on the collective memory of the Holocaust in Germany, such as Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, Ind., 1986); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), and Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory. The Nazi Past And German National Identity (Westport, Conn., 2001). On memory of the Holocaust in France, see, for example, Richard J. Golsan, ed., Memory, the Holocaust and French Justice: The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs (Dartmouth, 1996); and in Europe, see Judith Miller, One by One, by One Facing the Holocaust (New York, 1990). 3 The importance of self-criticism in the process of reckoning is raised by Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994. DOI 10.1515/9783110288216.67, ©2017 Joanna Michlic, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. 68 Joanna Michlic Neighbors represents what French historian Pierre Nora has termed a clear counter-memory to the accepted canon.⁴ No other previous work succeeded in triggering the endorsement of counter-memory by a considerable number of reli- gious and political leaders, intellectuals, and a segment of the general public. Furthermore, other issues of Polish history and identity began to be reassessed, such as the attitude of the Polish state toward “others,” its policies of inclusion and exclusion, and patterns of social and cultural reconstruction. Among various right-wing ethno-national political and social groups, Neighbors set off a strongly defensive reinforcement of the dominant accepted canon of remembering the Holocaust and wartime Polish-Jewish relations. This canon, discussed in more detail below, is made up of various narratives which are both intellectually and morally disturbing. Thus the debate over Gross’s book can be viewed as a battle over memory and over regaining a more historically truthful image of Polish-Jew- ish relations of the wartime period, and a more objective self-image of Polish society. I use the term, the “Polish dark past,” to refer to that aspect of Polish relations with its Jewish minority which reflects negatively on the ethnic Polish majority group as a witness to the Nazi genocide of Jews. Within this aspect I include anti-Jewish perceptions, beliefs and sentiments, and anti-Jewish acts carried out by individuals, or military and civilian groups. The massacre of the Jews of Jed- wabne and other similar wartime massacres can be classified as coming from the most extreme spectrum of wrongdoing committed by members of the Polish majority against members of the Jewish minority. Of course, one should bear in mind that available wartime records, both Jewish and Polish show the collective massacres of Jews to be a much less frequent occurrence than the other manifes- tations of the dark past. At this point I must stress that I reject the notion that ethnic Poles were accom- plices to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Nevertheless, the dark past has been a key component of the history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust. This is a past that has refused to go away despite having been repressed and rejected from the social history of Poland for nearly sixty years. I also view this past as an interesting illustration of a general problem—the treatment of unwanted ethnic minorities in multi-ethnic societies during conditions of war and occupation. 4 For reflections on history, memory, and counter memory, see Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (in English) ed. Laurence D. Kritzman, vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions (New York, 1997). The article first appeared in English translation as “Between Memory and history; Les Lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 13–25. The Jedwabne Debate: Reshaping Polish National Mythology 69 Public Memory of the Holocaust in communist Poland During the postwar communist era, the memory of the Holocaust and of Pol- ish-Jewish relations was subjected to a massive process of reworking and manip- ulation in the service of various political, ideological, and social needs. As a result, a particular representation of the Holocaust was constructed, and this was the accepted canon of remembering the event in Polish collective memory. It was expressed and cultivated at cultural events and commemorative sites, and in official governmental speeches and historical narratives after 1945. The process of reworking the memory of the Holocaust had already begun during the Stalinist period (1948–1953), at a time when the event was not per- ceived as a convenient subject for the newly-imposed Communist regime either in Poland or other East European communist states, such as East Germany. The genocide of Jews hardly fits into the Soviet-made narratives of the “anti-fascist working class front,” nor the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of the Second World War. Other factors, such as the awareness of the postwar Soviet treatment of Jewish matters, and the underlying issue of national unity also played a role in the official evaluation and presentation of the Holocaust in Poland. Thus, the memory of the event, as historian Michael Steinlauf put it, became marginalized and repressed from public memory.⁵ A good illustration was the fate of sites of Holocaust commemoration, such as the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Fight- ers designed by Nathan Rappaport, erected in the city in 1948.⁶ Commemorations staged there were careful to de-emphasize its Jewish character and meaning, and it can be argued that from the very beginning, it functioned, ironically, more as a place of ritual forgetfulness that was to become its chief marker right up to the 1980s. The conviction that “one should not emphasize Jewish matters” was also reflected in the regime’s position on any discussion of the Polish past. To raise questions about Polish wartime attitudes and actions toward Jews was no longer permitted under the Stalinist regime. The first postwar debate of 1945–1947 in relation to the Jewish minority, carried out by a small group of Polish intellec- 5 Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead. Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (New York, 1997), 63–74. 6 See, for example, Marcin Zaremba, “Urząd zapomnienia,” Polityka, no. 41 (13 October 2001): 72. 70 Joanna Michlic tuals of mostly left-wing orientation, was abruptly silenced in 1948.⁷ The regime also silenced any discussion on the issue of the emotional and moral distance of Polish society from the Holocaust—“witnessing the Jewish genocide without real witnessing,”—that had been raised in literary and non-literary works by a group of Polish intellectuals during the war and early postwar period. The most crucial reworking of the memory of the genocide of Polish Jews was conducted later, during the second half of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s, in the era of Władysław Gomułka. During this period a gradual process of the ethno-nationalization of communism took place, and the “Jewish question” resur- faced within the Party itself.⁸ Characteristically, the Polish Communist narrative became increasingly acceptable to the general public. In a pioneering study on the memory of the Holocaust in postwar Poland, Michael Steinlauf provides a convincing explanation for this phenomenon. This acceptance was possible, he argued, because “the official way of dealing with the memory of the Holocaust reflected, after all, a popular need.”⁹ As the 1950s progressed, the Holocaust continued to be repressed through the process of “internationalization of its victims.” This was nowhere more visible than in the commemorative rituals at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site, where the term “Jew” was hardly mentioned: the Jewishness of the victims was subsumed under the nationalities of the countries from which they came. Simul- taneously, the Holocaust was gradually reworked within a specifically Polish national framework with the genocide of Polish Jews frequently presented as simply a part of the (ethnic) Polish tragedy—expressed as “six million Poles died during the war.” This polonized version nurtured and strengthened the popular belief that the Poles had suffered more than any other nation during the war.

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