Confronting Polish Jewry’s Tragic Past

The more I faced the reality, the more unimaginable it was to me.

Encountering Auschwitz: Blue and white banners, depicting Israel’s state colors and evoking the striped uniforms prisoners wore here, on the eve of the March of the Living event.

No one knows how many Jews live in Poland today.

But most of us know how many Jews died there during the Holocaust.

Half of the 6 million Jewish victims were Polish Jews. And of the 1.1 million people who died in Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, 1 million were Jews. As many as 85 percent of the Jews transported there in airless freight cars went to the gas chambers within hours of arrival.

You hear a lot of statistics – horrific and numbing – when you visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, as my wife and I did several weeks ago. You see samples on display of the pile of 88 pounds of eyeglasses, 110,000 shoes and a ton of human hair. And beyond what you learn from the knowledgeable guide and see with your own eyes, it’s what you imagine – thinking about what it must have been like to exist in this hell on earth for even a day – that is the most haunting. Overwhelming. 

I have long had mixed feelings about visiting Poland and confronting the reality of Auschwitz. Though I felt a sense of responsibility to witness the vastness of the tragedy that took place there only a few years before I was born, I dreaded the idea of making a trip to a country where 90 percent of its Jewish population – 3.3 million people in 1939 – was murdered.

But an opportunity presented itself when friends of ours, a couple already planning to visit and attend the April 19th event commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, invited us to join them. So we said yes, and are glad we did because, despite moments of inexpressible pain, we came away with a deeper, more emotional understanding of what led to the Holocaust and the strained relations between Israel and Poland ever since.  

We also had the opportunity to meet with several of the leading communal and religious figures engaged in an inspiring effort to rekindle Jewish life in a country that has had a Jewish presence – sometimes beneficent and more often tragic – for a thousand years.

As Michael Schudrich, the transplanted New York native who has served as the Chief Rabbi of Poland for two decades, explained his work with young people discovering and exploring their Jewish roots: “We can’t change the number of Jews who were killed, but we can change the number of Jews who were lost.”  

Competing Views of ‘March of the Living’

During the seven days we spent in Poland, in addition to Auschwitz, we visited Krakow, a beautiful city spared from Nazi bombings because Hitler wanted to make it a capital of the region, and Warsaw, where we attended several events marking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising anniversary and prayed in the only one of the city’s hundreds of synagogues still standing at the end of World War II.

Our private visit coincided with the busiest week of the year for Jewish tours, most notably the March of the Living, the annual international Holocaust education and remembrance program that “explores the remnants of the Holocaust,” according to its literature. This year it claimed more than 9,000 participants, primarily Jewish high school students, marching silently several miles from the barracks of Auschwitz to Birkenau, with its four crematoriums. The visit is timed to take place soon after Passover and culminate with flights to Israel to mark Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day).

It offers a powerful emotional and bonding experience, one that each of our children took part in through March of the Living or a similar Israel-based trip to Poland during high school or their gap year in Israel.

The symbolism of the journey is clear: to witness the results of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe and emerge from the depths by celebrating the rebirth of the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland. 

But some critics, including Konstanty Gebert, a prominent Polish Jewish historian, author and public intellectual, insist the message is too narrow and simplistic. “There’s a bit of historical manipulation in these tours that portray the galut (diaspora) as leading to death for Jews. The kids should know that this is one point of view, but the reality is far more complex.”

Historian and gadfly: Konstanty Gebert says “there were many more traitors than good guys” among Poles during World War II, though most Poles were “too busy trying to survive” to care about the fate of the Jews.

Indeed, as Gebert, an active member of the Warsaw Jewish community, amplified during an interview, recent disputes between the governments of Israel and Poland over Jewish youth trips to concentration camps, and historians holding Poland responsible for Holocaust crimes, are part of a larger, ongoing and highly emotional, political and ideological rift regarding Poland’s treatment of Jews during and in years after World War II.

Last year Israel suspended its participation in sending thousands of high school students to Holocaust sites in Poland. The move was partly in response to a law passed by Warsaw’s right-wing government in 2018 that made it illegal to accuse Poland of Holocaust war crimes, and a 2021 law that prevents heirs from making restitution claims for lost property as a result of the Holocaust. 

A few weeks ago, Israel and Poland resolved their differences over the Israeli student trips, which will resume.

But in recent days, a new dispute erupted over statements made on Polish TV by Barbara Engelking, director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, in which she charged that Poles did not do enough to help Jews during World War II. Several Polish officials threatened to cut off funds for the TV station and the center Engelking directs. In response, more than 600 Holocaust scholars and other academics came to Engelking’s defense, signing a statement that said she was the victim of a “political attack” for making an historically accurate remark.

Such dust-ups are not unusual and reflect a deep and basic difference of Jewish and Polish perceptions of the events of World War II.

Poland was at the center of the tragedy, and many Jews, particularly survivors, perceive Poles as enthusiastic enablers of the Nazis in the pursuit of Jewish during the war. A recent book, “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland,” consists of eight essays edited by Engelking and historian Jan Grabowski and makes the case that the German efforts to exterminate Jews were aided greatly by Polish collaborators. 

Poles vigorously object to such views. They point out that they were the victims of German aggression when their country was invaded in 1939, that 3 million Poles were killed in the war and millions more were subjected to slave labor, starvation and other forms of suffering. Moreover, 7,000 Poles have been honored as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem – the most of any country – for risking death for themselves and their families in rescuing or otherwise saving Jewish lives.

In recent years, the Polish government has insisted that Polish heroism in saving Jews during the war has been under-reported and that Poles were blamed unfairly for Holocaust crimes committed by Germany. There is resentment that March of the Living and similar trips reinforce the image of Poles participating in the German effort to exterminate Poland’s Jews rather than suffering themselves. 

Most historians assert that, indeed, some Poles saved Jews at great risk, but probably more Poles killed or turned Jews over to the Germans, and most lived in fear for their own lives and avoided attention.

In The Shadow Of The Ghetto

Honoring the fallen: the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes at the April 19 program.

On April 19, the presidents of Germany, Israel and Poland attended and addressed the 80th anniversary program marking the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings. The event came at a time when relations between Jerusalem and Warsaw have been strained, and close attention was paid to the leaders’ remarks. Perhaps not surprisingly, they were notably similar as they each invoked the diaries of Holocaust survivors describing the deportations that took place on the spot where we were gathered;  compared the ghetto fighters to the valiant Jewish heroes of the past, like the Maccabees and the defenders of Masada; and pledged to honor the brave souls who died in the Ghetto uprising by preserving their memory and vigorously opposing violations of human rights. 

The Polish and German leaders called for support for Ukraine as it seeks to fend off Putin’s deadly aggression;

German Federation President Walter Steinmeier accepted responsibility for his country’s initiating a war that cost 15 million lives. “I am filled with shame,” he said as the first German president to attend the memorial event, noting that “Germany meticulously carried out” the war “with cruelty and inhumanity for which we have no words.”

Polish President Andrzej Duda said the world must never forget “our common heroes,” the Jews and Poles who fought “not for life but for dignity and freedom.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog observed how unimaginable it would have been at war’s end to think that “the presidents of Israel, Germany and Poland would stand here together to pay tribute” 80 years later to those who fell in the ghetto uprising. He added that “the heroism of the rebels and the imperative to remember that terrible chapter of history… offer a platform for important dialogue between Poland and Israel and for the advancement of friendship between our peoples.

“As president of Israel,” he declared in closing, “Am Yisrael Chai.” 

A feeling of pride and sadness ran through me as I heard those words and took in the vast scene: the very plaza where 300,000 Jews were deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka over a two-month period, beginning July 22, 1943.

Facing us on this chilly, rainy day was the iconic Nathan Rapaport sculpture, Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, with the images of seven brave fighters. Piles of colorful wreaths of flowers were at its base. Behind us was the gleaming Polin Jewish Museum, which opened 10 years ago, with its state-of-the-art exhibits and hundreds of informational displays depicting the 1,000-year history of Polish Jews. 

I felt as if I was sitting between the tragic past and an uncertain future for Polish Jewry.

The somber two-hour program had begun with a two-minute siren blast as the hundreds of dignitaries, survivors and their families and other guests stood in silence. It ended with a cantor’s mournful chanting of the “Kael Maleh” memorial prayer and a public recitation of the Kaddish.

At least for this day, Warsaw, which in 1900 had the largest Jewish population of any city in the world, was recalling the magnitude of what was lost in the Holocaust. That memory motivates those in the local Jewish community today who insist that Poland is more than a Jewish graveyard and who are seeking to write a new chapter in the long-closed book of Polish Jewry. 

I’ll report on those efforts in my next post.