Last summer, three Nobel laureates met at Wilno1 to speak about memory. Of all that was said, it is Günter Grass’s intervention that I remember best.
Günter Grass spoke about the strange itineraries of German memory. Alluding to the recent public debates in his homeland (Ernst Nolte and the so-called Historikerstreit of the 1980s, the Walser-Bubis debate of 1998-99), Grass evoked the rituals of collective memory — a memory that causes embarrassment, particularly for the older generation of his compatriots. The Germans would not be themselves had they not invented the neologism “memory work” (which Grass moreover mocks — memory, he says, is involuntary, or else it is not memory at all). This memory work is demanded of the Germans “so that they will acknowledge their guilt.” “Either one rejects the insinuations that this memory work induces, or one cultivates it assiduously, because for decades now, ever since history reached us once again, it has been taken up by successive, younger generations who one might imagine to be free of the burden of the past. It is as though the children and grandchildren had to remember in place of their silent fathers and grandfathers.” What is more, “it is as though the crimes took on all the greater importance the further one moves away from them in time.”
The seriousness of historians
This grim epigraph from the Nobel laureate makes a good introduction to the remarks I wish to add to the debate that has grown up around Jan Tomasz Gross’s book on Jedwabne. I follow this debate from Germany. It seems to me that without this external perspective, and without a weakening of my self-censorship under foreign influence, it would have been impossible for me to see certain aspects of the discussion. And I cannot help supposing that Gross would not have written his book had he not been working outside Poland.
I am not speaking here of scientific censorship or of the censorship imposed by one’s milieu. I am speaking of a kind of optical phenomenon. From up close, and above all from the inside, one fails to see certain things. One fails to see the Polish obsession with innocence. One fails to see the rules that govern Polish debate, public or private, controlled as it is by this obligation of innocence. Above all, one fails to see that what Thomas Merton called “the regrettable refusal to look into the depths of oneself” is visible to everyone except ourselves. It seems that one sees only what one already knows.
How does what Poles know about themselves and about the genocide square with Polish innocence? The question “what do the Poles know?” is addressed first of all to the historians. Rightly so, since it is the historians who draw up the school curricula. Wrongly so, because, as the German example shows, even an indubitable knowledge of historical reality is transposed only with resistance, and indirectly, into a sense of national guilt.
As for whatever ignorance the Poles may have of the genocide, the responsibility for it would have to be laid at the door of the Polish historians, for they have sinned by omission, through an excess of that prudence proper to historians which steers them away from certain subjects — if indeed it is a sin. When one is a young, aspiring historian, one knows above all the price that a “premature” publication exacts in Poland. Need I here invoke the name of Michal Cichy and recall the historians’ letter written in response to his article2? The historian, like any scientist, wants above all to be “serious.” “Serious” in Poland means “uncontested.” The “uncontested” Polish historian rubs his hands and looks with indulgence upon those who are in a hurry.
One hardly knows what to make of this lack of haste on the part of historians in a country where the last witnesses of the war and the genocide are dying. The prospect was sketched out by Günter Grass, already quoted: it seems that Polish children and grandchildren will have to remember in place of their silent fathers and grandfathers. These witnesses will carry to the grave, untroubled by the historians, all that might still be recounted about the szmalcowniks3 and the policja granatowa4, about the Baudienst formation in which Polish youth was employed, about the Warsaw pogrom at Easter 1940, about the denunciation of Jews by priests after confession (Marek Edelman spoke of this in an interview published in Anka Grupinska’s book Po kole. Rozmowy z zolnierzami getta warszawskiego [After the gathering. Conversations with the soldiers of the Warsaw ghetto]), about Jedwabne and Radzilow, about the innocent custom of “burning Judas” during the war (fieldwork in the Archives of the Chair of Ethnology of the University of Warsaw), about the glasses of water sold for gold coins to the Jews packed into the “death trains.” And also about the “train action” carried out in 1945, in the course of which members of the Narodowe Sily Zbrojne [National Armed Forces] pulled 200 repatriated Jews, returning from the East, off the trains and shot them (cf. the entry “pogrom” in the book Histoire et culture des Juifs polonais (History and Culture of the Polish Jews) by A. Cala, H. Wegrzynek and G. Zalewska), about the murders of Jews returning home from exile after the war, about the pogroms of Kielce and of Cracow, and about the hundreds of other unidentified accounts of the reality of the war and the postwar years.
This will inevitably come to pass — unless, abandoning the historians to their own seriousness, we do as Jan Tomasz Gross has done and begin, all the same, to speak of it.
What can the genocide tell us?
In the book Nowoczesnosc i zaglada, Zygmunt Bauman5 wrote that the sociology of today, in its current form, has less to say about genocide than genocide can say about sociology. I do not know whether Bauman’s provocation had any influence on Jan Tomasz Gross’s writing; it seems, however, that those who criticize Gross reproach him precisely with having, consciously or not, gone out to meet it.
What repels the historian, what even led Jacek Zochowski6 to summon up the ghost of postmodernism, is what is for me the most important thing in Gross’s book. It is that famous and scandalous “new relation to the sources.” Gross speaks of it in these terms: “Our initial attitude toward every testimony coming from the quasi-victims of the Holocaust ought to shift from doubt to certainty.” It does not matter to me whether this sentence will serve anyone in the verification of sources. Leaving aside the verification of sources, I would simply like to say that what is at issue here is something far more important.
So as not to rush things, I shall tell two stories. On Chlodna Street, in Warsaw, there has long stood a tearoom that I frequent with my family. The view down Chlodna Street, seen from the windows of this tearoom and crowned by the silhouette of the Church of Saint Charles Borromeo, has always struck me as strangely familiar. What is more, this street has even kept its cobblestones — probably the last in Warsaw — with the traces of the tramway rails. It was only when I saw Wajda’s film Korczak that I became aware of my own ignorance. I understood that it was precisely above Chlodna Street that the famous wooden bridge had stood, the one that linked the two parts of the ghetto, the large ghetto and the small. I understood that this was why the tour buses gathered at that very spot. From the tearoom one sees young foreigners in skullcaps stand stock-still in the street, in the rain, listening to a guide. Probably they are also praying.
One day, work was begun in the neglected square of Chlodna Street. A cross appeared there, along with the inscription “Father Jerzy Popieluszko Square.” I do not think that those who named the square on Chlodna Street after a Polish martyred priest had bad intentions, or harbored resentments (it was certainly Father Jerzy’s apartment, on Chlodna Street, that furnished the reason). But there are many squares in Warsaw, and there was only one bridge over Chlodna Street. Neither I nor the municipal officials, no one remembers that bridge. Our memory is a place where there are no Jews.
Jan Tomasz Gross’s idea constitutes, in a way, a remedy for this situation. All of us are in need of a “new relation to the sources.”
If, at this stage, someone still did not understand why we need a “new relation to the sources,” I shall tell him another true story. A few years ago, the students of my faculty of ethnography organized an expedition to Yakutia. Among the Yakuts they found no particularly interesting shamanism, but they did find a specific local memory concerning recent history. Their settlement had been built on permafrost, on the exact spot where a Gulag camp had once stood. Now, it was impossible to live upon these graves, above the crevasses into which human remains had been piled. The children there were dying in great numbers. So the Yakuts asked the ethnographers to cease being ethnographers for a moment and to recite the Catholic prayer for the dead. The point, surely, was also to calm the conscience of the natives who, for the capture of an escaped camp prisoner (it was enough to bring back his white, characteristic palm), had received more than one reward.
This story is at once naïve and full of instruction. It is sad, for it bears witness to the decline of the local culture (the shamans’ prayers no longer have any effect). It is at the same time comforting, for it bears witness to the reality of the spiritual world — among the Yakuts, evidently.
The bark beetle of memory, the mole of conscience
The “new relation to the sources” proposed by Gross suffers from one defect. It can convince exclusively someone already long convinced. Stanislaw Vincenz7 once maintained, under the influence of Plato and Socrates, that what testifies to a man’s worth is his capacity to let himself be convinced. This point of view has long been out of fashion. Times have changed: someone who lets himself be easily persuaded is today considered not a philosopher or a saint but, alas, a fool. How men can change their minds today is, generally speaking, an enigma.
Whoever subscribes to Gross’s postulate of a “new relation to the sources” is probably the man through whose voice Czeslaw Milosz once spoke of the guardian-mole, fitted with a red headlamp; the man to whom Nicola Chiaromonte wrote of the bark beetle of memory; the man to whom Jan Blonski addressed the book Les Pauvres Polonais regardent le ghetto (The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto); the same man toward whom Tadeusz Mazowiecki turned in “The antisemitism of quiet, good people,” or Jan Jozef Lipski in Deux Pologne, deux patriotismes (Two Polands, Two Patriotisms). These are all memorable texts, for the most part forgotten8. We read little and badly; we remember still worse.
“We cannot command memory,” says Martin Walser, the initiator of the German debate on the subject. One must then ask why, in causes so — seemingly — just and morally incontestable, our memory throws its tantrums and stubbornly refuses to obey.
Collective memory cares nothing for facts and exhortations. The facts may be of the most obvious kind for historians; they create no obligation whatsoever for human memory. Here again Germany can serve as an example. One must respect that society for the labor it undertook upon itself after the war. And yet it is enough to observe the reaction of the crowds at certain moments of German history to doubt the results of that gigantic self-resocialization, carried on for more than fifty years. When, in 1998, in the Church of Saint Paul in Frankfurt, Martin Walser ended his speech by protesting against the masochistic practices “of the incessant presentation of German shame,” against “the instrumentalization of the memory of Auschwitz,” those present — among them the entire local political and intellectual elite — honored the speaker with a long ovation. Yet those present knew the facts perfectly well. It was against these facts that they were protesting, demanding the right to catch their breath, “to look away.” The only person who did not rise and applaud Walser was old Ignatz Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Confession of other people’s sins
My discipline, ethnography, concerns itself not with facts, but with what men say about facts. What men say about facts is “nonsense” for historians; it is no wonder, then, that the historian most often remains powerless before the chimera of collective memory. Thanks be to Gross, for in his book on Jedwabne and in his other works he concerns himself not only with facts, but also with this discourse of men about facts.
When a discussion of Polish-Jewish relations in the context of the genocide gets under way, people endlessly repeat the same thing. At first, when the historians intone their sacramental “it is too early,” the discussion has difficulty getting started. Then it reaches a qualitative maturity, passing — in the formula of Stanczyk in Noce9 — into the “confession of other people’s sins.” Examples of this “confession of other people’s sins” are supplied by the letters that arrive in abundance at the Paris review Kultura10, at the Tygodnik Powszechny11 or at Gazeta Wyborcza12 after they have published texts that chip away at the dogma of Polish innocence toward the Jews.
[…]
The true Polish discourse on antisemitism comprises a series of recurrent themes, of specifically Polish tableaux vivants. The word “genocide” automatically triggers their projection. Anyone who thinks he will find in these images the horror of the extermination would be mistaken. The projection begins with a few old ecclesiastical clichés such as “Let his blood be upon our heads and upon those of our sons” or “Let us pray for the unfaithful Jews.” It is hardly surprising that these clichés lasted so long, since they were recalled every year during the Good Friday prayers.
Next there is projected the image of the prewar Jew, clad in his gabardine, settling himself in the Saski Garden near the fountain as though he were already preparing to fulfil the prediction “Wasze beda ulice, nasze beda kamienice” (Yours will be the streets, ours will be the buildings). Then file past the images of other Jews in gabardine welcoming with bread and salt first the Russians, then the Germans, then the Russians again. Then the Polonophagous Jews, brought in by the Soviets, flaunting their communism and their Jewishness after the war in the UB [Urzad Bezpieczenstwa = Office of Security]. Then the Jews, this time camouflaged behind Polish names, sucking the blood of the Poland of Gomulka and of Gierek. And, after 1989, come the images of the Jews who occupy, with their characteristic hucpa13, the highest posts of the financial mafias.
This “confession of other people’s sins” in Poland must end with a contrition — that of others, of course. The penitent is enjoined not to utter nonsense about the so-called Polish antisemitism. Kultura’s correspondent Aleksander Grobicki asked in 1957: “Your editorial board knows how much harm Polish antisemitism has done to the Polish cause abroad. By artificially stirring it up anew, do you imagine you are repairing that harm?”14. This question recurs to this day in many declarations of Poles in Poland and abroad; need one recall the latest New Year’s message of Edward Moskal, president of the Polish American Congress?
The problem is that this postulate, which demanded silence about Polish antisemitism — supposedly to defend Poland’s image in the world — does not manifest itself solely in the remarks of antisemites. Jan Tomasz Gross devoted a large part of his essay entitled Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej… ale go nie lubie [He is from my homeland… but I do not like him]15 to this question. In it Gross analyzes a few historical situations remote from one another but in which the analysis of Polish antisemitism was censored for the sake of one or another “reason of state.” Well-known intellectuals, whom one could hardly suspect of antisemitism, played here the role of censors.
To Gross’s reflection one can add yet another ambivalent example. “Dear colleagues!” exclaimed Pawel Jasienica16 in 1968 at a plenary meeting of the Writers’ Union, “someone is trying, for reasons known only to himself, to draw upon our nation the stigma of antisemitism. Nothing can do us more harm today than to create in world opinion the conviction that we are a people of antisemites.” “In the hall, the applause and the cries of enthusiasm lasted a long time” — we read further on in the minutes of the meeting.
I quote the minutes of this meeting of the Writers’ Union from Konstanty Jelenski17. Jelenski recalls that Jasienica began his speech with the condemnation of an antisemitic leaflet that was circulating in March [1968] in Warsaw. In spite of this (and perhaps because of it), he advances the following comment: “I know that Jasienica condemns antisemitism. But I regret that, instead of reflecting seriously on the origin of the evil, he decrees: a) that there is no antisemitism in Poland, b) that it is a matter of a mysterious plot whose aim is to compromise the nation, c) that it is precisely this compromise in the eyes of world opinion that constitutes the greatest evil (it cannot be antisemitism, since there is none).” If one had to transform Jelenski’s irony (and in doing so one does the original an injury) into a strict moral rhetoric, one might naïvely ask which is worse: an unconfessed sin or a destroyed reputation. Many defenders of the nation obstinately ignore this dilemma. “Righteous anger” acts as an anesthetic.
A psychoanalysis of Polish antisemitism
Maria Janion18 once claimed that there is no other remedy for the “accursed problems” of Poland than a solid psychoanalysis. Konstanty Jelenski upheld the same thesis with respect to the Polish-Jewish problems. He had noticed that every time the problem of antisemitism was raised in the review Kultura (of Paris), letters poured into the editorial office protesting the honor of the Poles. In 1957, Kultura questioned its readers through a new survey on this subject; the first point was provocatively entitled “A psychoanalysis of Polish antisemitism.” There were few replies. But those that did arrive were characteristic enough for Jelenski to reach a conclusion in the form of a question: “Might Rafal Malczewski not be right when he asserts that Polish antisemitism is a collective psychosis? For the symptoms of individual psychoses are hardly any different — flight from the problem, denial of the very fact of the psychosis, self-flagellation from the moment one recognizes it.”
Those whom the Jelenski-Malczewski diagnosis convinces will find without difficulty, in Polish private and public discourse on antisemitism — and notably in the current debate on Jedwabne — all the signs of this malady. For what indeed, if not a flight from the problem and its denial, is that stubborn reaction of attributing the pogroms to the underworld (what is the proportion of the underworld to the non-underworld in a society where, in Lesser Poland alone, the lists of the AK19 contained some 60,000 szmalcowniks? — as Jacek Myczka writes in a letter to Gazeta). What can the wrongs be — let us reason empathically — that the Laudanski brothers20, the most active in the pogrom, may have suffered at the hands of the Jews; how is one to feel the atmosphere of Jedwabne at the time (“a little town, perhaps mad with pain,” in which before the war “no Aryan shop could survive”); how is one to assess how difficult it was to oppose the murderous instincts of one’s fellow citizens, of those very ones who decided to murder their neighbors? And since we are speaking of empathy, why not extend it to the Jews of Jedwabne (Gross does so, which is precisely what Tomasz Szarota21 and Jacek Zakowski22 reproach him with)? Why does one see their faces so poorly? Why should we not, at bottom, listen to these men speak their “language of misfortune,” as Zakowski put it? In struggling against this language, are we not in fact defending our “right to look away”?
The innocence of the expelled
Psychoanalysis is in Poland something suspect, unpopular, and costly. Fortunately, Poland is also a country of illogical people who praise some authors while reading others. Another Polish trait comes to the rescue of psychoanalysis: the father complex. This complex makes Poles capable of accepting anything from certain persons, even the bitter pill of the [analyst’s] couch. One of these persons is the Trappist Thomas Merton23. The second is more unexpected, for he declares himself an avowed adversary of psychoanalysis: it is Father Jozef Tischner24.
In Merton’s “Writings of a Guilty Bystander” there is a passage extraordinarily well suited both to the question of Polish antisemitism and to a still vaster problem, that of its supposed absence. The parallel is encoded, for at first glance Merton speaks only of the whites of the American South. Until the Civil War, life in the South was meant to be paradisiacal — peaceable Blacks sang on the plantation, noble Whites concerned themselves with their well-being. The war annihilated that paradise. Merton writes: “From the Civil War on, it is already the whole nation that took part in the sin; the sin became inevitable. The settler’s child as well as the planter’s child was cruelly torn from his sleep. Suddenly, this child had to see in himself a cruelty whose existence he had not suspected, and baseness, injustice, greed, hypocrisy, inhumanity. He suddenly knows that his brow bears a mark, and he is afraid to recognize it — it might turn out to be the mark of Cain.”
The Southerners, stubborn men, would not accept having been driven out of paradise. They came to terms with the uncomfortable knowledge, casting it back “justly and scientifically” onto the Blacks. “The white racist accepts his hatred of the Black only, and only then, if it is presented to him as a hatred of the Black toward the White.” Having made the fault slide off onto the Black, the white man of the South can affirm with complete serenity that he “considers himself to be the same as he has always been: peaceable, good, just, noble, courteous, and all the while simple.”
Does not this Polish antisemitism — merciless and complex-ridden, the antisemitism of men who are nonetheless good and peaceable, but who close the theme of the genocide before it has even been opened, who inflate every unjust Jewish remark [about the Poles], who fall silent over every just word — does it not arise from a similarly traumatic experience? Seen from the angle of older Poles, is the genocide not quite simply a perfidious Judeo-German piece of filth, which forever forbids the return to Soplicow25, that paradise where Jankiel, under the eye of Gerwazy, played upon the cymbalom, like a lion beside a lamb?
The paradisiacal myth of Soplicow played a fundamental role in the period when Poland was recovering its independence. But ever since we have been at home again, this myth has turned into a dangerous illusion. Merton writes: “When a myth becomes a waking dream, one must look at it under a magnifying glass, observe that it is inoperative, and set it aside. To keep it by force, when it has lost all creative function, is to condemn oneself to mental disorder.”
The imprint of innocence
In Jozef Tischner’s little book Comment vivre (How to Live), Jacek Zakowski found a soothing quotation on the limits of human responsibility: “The responsibility of man does not extend beyond the possibilities of effective action.” Behind this “Tischner dike,” as he calls it, Zakowski feels safe. Wrongly so, in my view. I do not think that this is what Father Tischner had in mind. Tischner was not, it is true, a radical in the style of Elias Canetti (“Only he who torments himself takes himself seriously”), but he knew the human conscience better than anyone. Tischner defended the supremacy of conscience even when it brought him into conflict with the voice of the ecclesiastical authorities. He knew that one could in no way force either the individual conscience or the collective memory already invoked — with which the individual conscience has much in common. The latter listens only to its own understanding. “Be not afraid”: Tischner speaks only to those who have the courage of that understanding, to those who, in general, want to have a conscience. “The man who comes to know the truth, even if it should prove cruel, thereby acquires his dignity. He draws pride from the fact of having been able to accept the truth. The truth does not kill him. On the contrary, it says to him: you are homo sapiens.” These words the innocent do not need.
Tischner also knew the traps of conscience. Given man’s innate tendencies toward idolatry, he warned against the danger that its voice, often compared to that of God, might be confused with other voices. “The nation, or some other collective, then becomes an absolute.” Is this not precisely the religious problem of many Polish patriots? The most frequent way of deceiving oneself about oneself, Tischner always said, consists in exonerating oneself and accusing others. In the nature of conscience, however, lies a paradox — if it is true that conscience is that moral authority which calls upon us to preserve our innocence, it is also the voice of religion, which teaches something entirely opposed: “The greatest saint feels himself to be the greatest sinner.”
And, finally, the conclusion: “If the Poles were authentically religious, they would not try to convince others by force, and to convince themselves, that they are innocent.”
Amen.
Text translated by Charles Szurek
Notes
Also written Vilna, Vilne, Vilnius.↩︎
The journalist-historian Michal Cichy had provoked an outcry of protest in the Polish press because he had evoked, in an article in the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, the crimes against the Jews committed by certain detachments of the Home Army (AK) during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944; cf. Michal Cichy, “Polacy-Zydzi. The black pages of the Uprising,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 29 January 1994.↩︎
Szmalcowniks = blackmailers who hunted down Jews, often at the exits of the ghettos, in railway stations, in public places.↩︎
Policja granatowa = the police in the service of the Nazi occupier, made up of Poles.↩︎
Zygmunt Bauman was professor of sociology at the University of Warsaw until 1968. He then left Poland, in the context of the antisemitic and anti-intellectual wave that swept the country, settling in England. He notably published Modernity and the Holocaust, Polity Press, 1989, whose Polish version bears the title Nowoczesnosc i zaglada (Modernity and the Extermination), Warsaw, 1992.↩︎
Jacek Zochowski is one of the most important Polish journalists.↩︎
Stanislaw Vincenz: Polish writer of the interwar period, philosemite, specialist in Jewish ethnography.↩︎
All these texts address the Jewish past of Poland and have in common a certain hauntedness by that past. Czeslaw Milosz’s poem is found in the afterword to Adam Czerniakow’s Carnets du ghetto de Varsovie (Warsaw Ghetto Diary), éd. La Découverte, 1996. It was translated by Jacques Burko. A French version of the Polish intellectual Jan Blonski’s article “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” appeared in no. 516 of Les Temps Modernes, July 1989.↩︎
Noce: an emblematic play by the Polish dramatist Stanislas Wyspianski (1869-1907), revived a few years ago for the cinema by Andrzej Wajda; Stanczyk is a prophetic character in this drama.↩︎
Kultura, the principal review of the Polish emigration in Paris during the communist period.↩︎
A weekly of the Catholic intelligentsia, the only weekly to have been tolerated under communism.↩︎
The principal daily in the East, founded in 1989. Its editor-in-chief is Adam Michnik.↩︎
Chutzpah.↩︎
An allusion to a series of articles that appeared in Kultura in 1957 devoted to antisemitism in Poland.↩︎
A reference to the work by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewin, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej (He is from my homeland), published in Poland in 1969, which set out cases and testimonies of solidarity toward the Jews on the part of Poles.↩︎
Polish writer.↩︎
Polish writer residing in Paris, active in the aid to the struggle against the communist regime.↩︎
Professor of Polish literature.↩︎
AK = Armia Krajowa (Home Army), the principal resistance formation, obeying the legal Polish government in London.↩︎
Chief perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre, still living today in Jedwabne.↩︎
Polish historian.↩︎
Polish journalist.↩︎
American sociologist.↩︎
Father Jozef Tischner was one of the spiritual companions of the Solidarity trade union.↩︎
Soplicow: an imaginary locality that serves as the setting for Mickiewicz’s great verse epic Pan Tadeusz; Gerwazy is a good-natured character in this work, and Jankiel embodies in it a patriotic and wise Jew, respected by his Polish neighbors.↩︎