mizzmarymary
28.01.07, 01:20
January 27, 2007
Globalist
In Poland as in Iraq, History?s Web Is Tangled
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune
KRAKOW, Poland
President George W. Bush was in sober mood on Iraq in his State of the Union speech. "This is not the
fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in," he said.
Wars are like that: easier to start than to finish, morphing from one kind of struggle to another, self-
sustaining rather than self-containing, more malleable to the logic of death than the possibility of
life. There's nothing neat about war.
Poles, being squeezed between two big powers in Europe's middle, know all about it. World War II,
whose toll on Poland was particularly savage, ended 62 years ago, but the Poles are still sifting
through the debris to find out exactly which war they were in.
The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 to erase the country from the map, a fate it had already known
between 1795 and 1918, and to annihilate its large Jewish community. There was an overall objective
and an ancillary one.
This double German purpose caused immense suffering and subsequent historical tension. The Nazi
extermination camps - Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and the rest - were established in Poland. It
has been too easy to elide that fact in the postwar years and speak of "Polish camps." They were not.
The Nazi slaughter took the lives of Polish Jews and Catholic Poles in roughly equal measure, about
three million of each. This has given rise to a competitive victims' culture. How, some Poles ask, can
we be accused of killing Jews when we ourselves suffered so much?
History is like justice: It is not helped by delay. The postwar Communist authorities, who conducted
their own little pogroms on surviving Jews, were more interested in a history that served their ends
than one that served truth. A clear picture of Polish wartime mayhem had to await the arrival of
freedom.
One result was that Jan Gross's book "Neighbors," a history of events in the small Polish town of
Jedwabne, caused outrage when published six years ago. What happened in Jedwabne, once half-
Jewish and half-gentile like many provincial towns, is that Polish gentiles, incited but unaided by
Nazis, killed about 1,600 Polish Jews - their neighbors - in a single day.
Another result is that forgotten Jewish graves still turn up from time to time in the fields near those
towns and villages, the last traces of lives blotted out and then blotted from memory.
Eastern and southeastern Poland, part of which once lay in the Austro- Hungarian province of Galicia,
is a kind of Jewish necropolis.
A third result is that in the months leading up to Saturday's 62nd anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz, there has been a struggle over Poland's push to rename the camp, a Unesco world
heritage site, as the "Former Nazi German Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz-
Birkenau."
The objective of the added words - Unesco had referred simply to "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" -
is historical truth and the elimination of the offensive "Polish camp" shorthand sometimes used in the
German press.
So it goes when wars within wars are fought and history postponed. Unraveling the knots takes time.
Memory is political, whether in Poland or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran. It is a living thing and, as
such, fought over. "Memory is life," wrote Pierre Nora, the French historian.
David Peleg, Israel's ambassador to Poland, spends a lot of his time sifting through this past. He feels
he represents not only Israel "but the millions of Jews who once lived here." Sorting out who did what
to whom helps Israeli-Polish relations: Some 30,000 Israeli schoolchildren visit the camps annually.
"The Polish story is a complicated mix," Peleg said. "They suffered a lot, so it hurts when they're
accused of killing Jews. They still need more courage to look fully at their history."
I met Peleg at a ceremony that was uncomplicated, honoring the act of a simple man, a Polish gentile
who saved a Jewish child during the war. The man acted but did not agonize, although the risks to
his life were high. He knew what was right.
The Pole's name is Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk. He's now 81 and stands ramrod straight. More than 60
years after the war, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel
honored him for his deed as "Righteous Among the Nations." He joins over 6,000 Poles so honored;
fewer than 450 Germans have earned that recognition.
The ceremony took place at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of
Krakow. There were once 45,000 Jews here; today a couple of hundred gather for High Holy Days.
Interest in how all those lost Jews once lived has revived. Poland now wants to know more about its
vanished Jewishness.
Anne Hall, the U.S. consul general, thanked Kasprzyk on "behalf of all the American people." Her
words and presence were a reminder of American decency and the ways in which America has for
myriad people represented deliverance from tyranny.
My interest in Kasprzyk is personal. I first wrote about him on the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz's
liberation. The Jewish girl he saved, Amalia Gelband, later became a Brazilian citizen. She is the
mother of my wife.
Amalia was on her own because a Pole had denounced her mother, Frimeta, as a Jew while she was
on a Krakow bus. And so Frimeta went to the German gas. Poles as killers, Poles as saviors: history's
web is tangled.
But it is not impenetrable by light. If my interest in Kasprzyk's act is personal, the act itself is
universal. "He who saves one life is regarded as if he had saved the whole world," says the Talmud.
Kasprzyk did not do the easy or popular thing. That's worth recalling. In Iraq, where Polish soldiers
are present and 18 have died, the freedom whose value Poles know in their blood is being fought for
at a terrible price. "Yet," Bush said of the fight we are in, "it would not be like us to leave our
promises unkept, our friends abandoned."