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25.03.01, 15:16
p.Adamie gratuluje spanialego artykulu w NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/17/arts/17POLA.html?
ex=985869379&ei=1&en=3dd3c3cbd444825c
March 17, 2001
Poles and the Jews: How Deep the Guilt?
By ADAM MICHNIK
n July 10, 1941, 1,600 Jews, nearly the entire Jewish population of the Polish
village of Jedwabne, were murdered by their Polish neighbors. Some were hunted
down and killed with clubs, axes and knives; most were herded into a barn and
then burned alive. Although the slaughter was not a secret, publicly the Nazi
occupiers were blamed. A monument in Jedwabne (pronounced yed-VAHB-nay)
declared: "Place of martyrdom of the Jewish people. Hitler's Gestapo and
gendarmerie burned 1,600 people alive, July 10, 1941." But last May, Jan T.
Gross, a historian at New York University, published "Neighbors: The
Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne" in Poland. The book, which
will be issued in the United States in April, documents the massacre by Polish
villagers in gruesome detail. In a country whose people think of themselves as
wartime victims, not villains, it set off a storm of debate in corner shops,
cafes and classrooms, and among the country's political and church leaders.
Some Poles have continued to deny Polish responsibility; most have tried to
wrestle with the country's history of anti-Semitism and questions of collective
guilt. Jozef Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic Primate, and President
Aleksander Kwasniewski have publicly asked for forgiveness, and on Thursday the
Jedwabne memorial was removed. Adam Michnik is a dissident and historian who
spent six years in prison under the postwar Communist regime, served as an
adviser to the Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and is now editor-in-chief of
Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's largest daily newspaper. He wrote this article for
The New York Times, and it was translated from the Polish by Ewa Zadrzynska.
Do Poles, along with Germans, bear guilt for the Holocaust? It is hard to
imagine a more absurd claim.
Not a single Polish family was spared by Hitler and Stalin. The two
totalitarian dictatorships obliterated three million Poles and three million
Polish citizens classified as Jews by the Nazis.
Poland was the first country to oppose Hitler's demands and the first to stand
against his aggression. Poland never had a Quisling. No Polish regiment fought
on behalf of the Third Reich. Betrayed by the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, Poles
fought alongside the anti-Nazi forces from the first day until the last. And
inside Poland armed resistance to the German occupation was widespread.
The British prime minister paid homage to the Poles for their role in the
Battle of Britain and the president of the United States called Poles
an "inspiration" to the world. Yet that didn't stop them from delivering Poland
into Stalin's clutches at Yalta. Heroes of the Polish resistance — enemies of
Stalin's Communism — ended up in Soviet gulags and Polish Communist prisons.
All of these truths contribute to Poland's image of itself as an innocent and
noble victim of foreign violence and intrigue. After the war, while the West
was able to reflect on what had happened, Stalinist terror stymied public
discussion in Poland about the war, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.
At the same time, anti-Semitic traditions were deeply rooted in Poland. In the
19th century, when the Polish state didn't exist, the modern nation that was to
emerge was shaped by ethnic and religious ties and by opposing antagonistic
neighbors often hostile to the dream of Polish independence. Anti-S
