For decades Poles held on to an interpretation of the past in which they were generally courageous victims of Germans and Soviets. The story was true enough to give comfort during 45 years of communist rule. But now, with Poland a secure member of Nato and one of the EU's most successful economies, the old black-and-white version of history is giving way to a more nuanced grey in which Poles were not always on the side of right. Other countries with difficult histories have undergone the same process: a wealthy and democratic Spain has allowed itself to examine the painful period of the 1936-39 civil war, while, in the Czech Republic, topics such as the expulsion of its ethnic German population after the war or a concentration camp for gypsies staffed by Czech guards are now discussed.
Massacre haunts Polish history
By Jan Cienski in Jedwabne
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b3582054-4042-11e2-8e04-00144feabdc0.html
Standing on the edge of the village of Jedwabne, a stone pillar dusted with early winter snow commemorates an event that many Poles would prefer to forget. In 1941, local people, at the instigation of their German occupiers, drove more than 300 of their Jewish neighbours into a barn and set it on fire, killing them all.
That dreadful crime is the inspiration for “Aftermath”, a new film by director Wladyslaw Pasikowski, which looks at a similar tale set in a fictional Polish village. The movie has set off a furious national debate over how to deal with the darker episodes in Poland's history.
For decades Poles held on to an interpretation of the past in which they were generally courageous victims of Germans and Soviets. The story was true enough to give comfort during 45 years of communist rule.
But now, with Poland a secure member of Nato and one of the EU's most successful economies, the old black-and-white version of history is giving way to a more nuanced grey in which Poles were not always on the side of right.
Other countries with difficult histories have undergone the same process: a wealthy and democratic Spain has allowed itself to examine the painful period of the 1936-39 civil war, while, in the Czech Republic, topics such as the expulsion of its ethnic German population after the war or a concentration camp for gypsies staffed by Czech guards are now discussed.
“The longer that Poland is independent, the more it has to change for the better,” Mr Pasikowski writes in an email exchange with the Financial Times. “There is no choice because retreat to communist times is no alternative. Dealing with one’s own imperfect past is better than burying one’s head in the sand.”
Mr Pasikowski’s film, which won a film festival award and is now showing across the country, has again torn open the wound left by Jedwabne. In the film, two brothers start to delve into the history of their village and discover that the local Jews were murdered by their Polish neighbours and that one of the ringleaders was their father.
Many on the right have condemned the film for painting Poles as collaborators, omitting to mention that Poles faced the death penalty for helping Jews, and for not stressing the role played by Germans in pogroms in towns such as Jedwabne. “Instead of tackling a difficult history, it is a historical anti-Polish libel,” writes Jan Pospieszalski, a conservative television host.
Their worry is that Poland is being unfairly picked upon. Anti-Semitism is a European problem and not a purely Polish taint. During the Holocaust most Poles were largely indifferent to the fate of the Jews, a few actively helped the Germans, while another small group took enormous risks to save their fellow citizens – statistics that are shamefully repeated across Europe.
But the impact in Poland is larger than elsewhere because Poland had Europe's largest prewar Jewish community – 3m people in 1939 – while now there are only about 20,000. Traces of the Jewish past are everywhere, in the ex-Jewish houses in which thousands of Poles now live and even in the Jewish gravestones converted into building materials in years past.
A card buried in the snow at the foot of the Jedwabne monument shows just how complicated the past really is. Showing photographs of his prewar family, it was left there by Ichak Lewin, who travels here from Israel every year to commemorate his two grandmothers and two uncles who were burnt to death in the barn.
“They say it was the Germans who did it, but I know it was the Poles – there were very few Germans in these villages,” Mr Lewin says by telephone from Israel.
He then starts talking of the massacre of Jews in the neighbouring village of Radzilow, where as many as a thousand Jews were killed, probably by Poles, in a crime that is still being investigated by Polish prosecutors.
“Terrible things happened there. They cut a girl's head off and played football with it,” he says. Then the line to the suburbs of Tel Aviv goes silent and Mr Lewin, 83, begins to cry.
But Mr Lewin also visits Poland every year to stop by the Polish family that sheltered him, his sister and his parents, at the risk of being murdered by the Germans.
“The rest of my family is dead and they are my family now,” he says in Hebrew-accented Polish. “I love coming to Poland. I don't have to tell you what the Poles did in Jedwabne, but I don't focus on that. I feel Poles saved me. I come to Poland now and it is a different country – I have never seen anti-Semitism during my visits.”
Jedwabne itself is a poor village in north-eastern Poland that has been largely bypassed by the economic boom experienced by central and western Poland over the past two decades. The village is only known for the 1941 massacre, an event that brings a steady stream of Jewish pilgrims to the monument lying behind the village.
“They don't say anything to us and we don't say anything to them,” says a middle-aged woman in a dark coat and black beret shopping for flowers in the town square.
“The whole thing is really unfair. A lot of other towns also killed their Jews – I don't know why they picked on us. Now the whole world thinks that the people of Jedwabne are devils.”
|
