Probing the Polish-Jewish past to understand the new Holocaust bill

MIRAH LANGER

This is according to Jakub Nowakowski, director of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland. He spoke about Polish-Jewish relations at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre last week.

“If you want to know if I think that the Polish government is anti-Semitic, I would say no.”

Nowakowski cites the close relationship that the current government enjoys with Israel, as well as its ongoing sponsorship of many Jewish cultural programmes, as proof of this.

Instead, he suggests, the government’s motivation behind the bill, signed by Poland’s President Andrzej Duda last month, is possibly a political play – conceptualised with sheer insensitivity.

“The current Polish government is a right wing government, which won the elections thanks also to the support of the far right. Now, in a way, the Polish government is paying the debt to the far right wing part of society.”

For them, the law, which criminalises any attribution of Nazi German crimes to Poland, is formulated to ensure that Poles are not wrongly blamed for the wrongdoings of others.

On the one hand, Nowakowski says, this sector of society is “not necessarily anti-Semitic…There is a part of the society that doesn’t really care about the Jewish past. They want to be proud.”

Their concern remains with promoting nationalism and recouping a positive narrative of aspects of Poland’s past. 

However, on the other hand, Nowakowski notes, he had never seen a public display by a right wing group in Poland until he witnessed a small group marching last year.

So, while the government might not have directly anti-Semitic intentions, “on the ground, we see things that are disturbing us. We see a force that is squeezing in…”

The bill, in this case, had become an enabler. “It fuelled all stereotypes that were hidden… It gave them a floor to express their beliefs.”

Another flaw of the bill, which punishes anyone who contravenes it with fines or a prison sentence of up to three years, has been its unclear terms of reference, suggests Nowakowski.

“The problem is that the law is very vague; it doesn’t describe what it means exactly to accuse.”

For example, ponders Nowakowski, does the bill mean that the mention of historically factual incidents – in which Poles had independently chosen to massacre Jews during the war – is now a criminal offence? “We don’t know because the law doesn’t say.”

Ultimately, the bill has deep roots, ones that tangle not just through wartime Poland, but that also have tendrils stretching back centuries.

“There is no history of Poland without the history of the Jews,” asserts Nowakowski.

He offers a fascinating foray into this history, revealing interesting facts. For instance, the first coins produced in Poland during the 11th century had Hebrew lettering on them because the Polish manufacturers were Jewish.

In the Middle Ages, the region had been a key destination for Jews fleeing the Crusades. By the 18th century, 75% of world Jewry lived in Poland. Economic difficulties in the 1920s and ’30s resulted in a wave of anti-Semitism. 

However, no matter the previous ups and downs between Poles and Jews, World War II broke them apart in a way never experienced before, says Nowakowski: “Jews were to be hunted down and executed – all of them. Poles were to be used as slaves or to be executed – but not all of them. Not all the Poles were to be killed. Not all the Poles were to be sent to death camps.”

Instead, as Jews faced a death sentence, Poles were put in the position of witnesses. “In Poland everything was happening in broad daylight: Poles couldn’t avoid seeing what was happening.”

And between the choice of those who tried to save Jews and those who actively killed or sought to have them killed lay the position of those who simply watched.

For some, this decision to remain inactive was a tacit agreement with the Germans. For others, it stemmed from fear or the pain of their own suffering under the regime.

No matter what the motivation, Nowakowski says, “what is shaping Polish-Jewish relations today is this position of the witness”.

For Jews, “there was no betrayal with the Germans – they were the enemy”.

“What was so painful was the acts of your neighbours,” he adds, referring to those who did not answer their doors when Jewish compatriots knocked, begging for help. “Those doors dividing them became a border between life and death.”

In the aftermath of the war, most Jews left Poland because of ongoing anti-Semitism. Of those who did stay, “the last thing they wanted to do was admit to being Jewish”.

Furthermore, the communist regime that took power “erased” the Jewish aspect of history in public spaces, he says, recounting that for 50 years after the war, Poland lived in a state of “mass amnesia… the Polish version of the war was the only one being told”.

“We lived in a post-Jewish space, in the shadow of a synagogue which had been in the town for centuries and now was empty or taken over by the state, and turned into a cinema or a police station.”

However, over the past few decades, important work has been done to honour not just the Jewish past, but also open up possibilities for a different present for Polish Jews.

“I think Poland, for the past 20 years, had been a quite positive place [for Jewish life].”

There has been a soaring interest in Jewish museums, a Jewish kindergarten has just opened and various Jewish cultural festivals are being held – often organised by non-Jews, for non-Jews, as a means of commemorating and taking responsibility for the past.

Yet, says Nowakowski, the bill indicates that the concerns of the past continue to crack through. “I think that this bill comes out of a lack of sensitivity, out of a lack of understanding of other narratives.”

Perhaps, he adds, it shows that “we still need to educate and there are still things that we need to do”.

Nowakowski concluded his talk by explaining how, as a non-Jew, he has come to live a life dedicated to upholding the Jewish legacy of his homeland.

The 34-year-old Pole detailed how, as a child, he had looked around his village and begun pondering the palimpsests of the past.

He saw old synagogues and houses with mezuzot, “but no visible Jews”. Nowakowski came to realise that he was “growing up in a land of ghosts…”

“That was troubling for me. It made me ask questions.”

He has never stopped seeking the complex, sometimes painful, answers to them.