Jan Gross, Poland's Jewish conscience

Poland, the country where Ashkenazi Judaism knew its greatest expansion before the Shoah (do we know that there were more than three hundred synagogues in Warsaw in 1939 and that only one remains today, undestroyed because the Germans had turned it into a stable?), never ceases to bend over its Jewish past.

After Sąsiedzi (Neighbors)¹ (2000), it is a second notable work that the American historian Jan Gross² has signed, Strach (Fear)³ (2008), published at the beginning of 2008—a work that immediately provoked a polemic no less virulent than the previous one.

On the plane of historical knowledge, the work, by the author’s own admission, brings no new facts—fewer than Neighbors, which had posed the question of the Polish population’s participation in the murder of the Jews through the massacre of the Jewish population of the small town of Jedwabne (eastern Poland). The book Neighbors posed at least two new, linked questions. The first was the one that the accounts of surviving Jews, deposited at Yad Vashem or in Warsaw, allowed one to glimpse, namely the participation of Poles in the Nazi enterprise, but on a non-ideological basis. For the first time, this question was raised in so ample a fashion, provoking a calling into question of an essential Polish myth, that of a martyred and resisting country (which it indeed was in other respects). The second question, more epistemological, tended to underscore that the role of the surviving Jew’s testimony, however imperfect, ought to occupy a preponderant place in historical reasoning.

With Strach, Gross embarked less on a demonstration than on an interpretation of antisemitism during and after the war in Poland. He posits as a hypothesis that the antisemitism developed in Poland under the Occupation—and mentioned notably in the reports to the Polish government from various emissaries, among them Jan Karski, the famous ghetto “courier” (present in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah), or in the messages from the chief of staff of the AK (Home Army, the principal military formation of the clandestine Polish State), Stefan Rowecki—had “worked on” Polish society. He is intrigued by those “small facts” of the Occupation that certain historians sometimes shrink from positing as objects of study and that constitute, for him, grounds for questioning. He thus wonders why the heroic gest of the Polish Resistance of the AK—so present, for example, in the very recent Warsaw Uprising Museum and particularly embodied in the numerous stories or deeds of resistance, or in the songs created during the war—never concerns the Righteous, never the act of saving the Jews, nor of hiding them. Another element likewise drew his attention, reported in numerous testimonies of Jewish survivors: how to explain the fact that, after the war, the people who saved or hid Jews shrank from coming to testify before the historical Commissions, uneasy that their name might be invoked in the public sphere. Why should these acts have to be passed over in silence?

“He is of my homeland but I do not love it”—such is the title of a text by Gross that appeared in 1998 and is less known to the public.⁴ This title referred to a work by Władysław Bartoszewski, one of the founders of Żegota (the network of aid to Jews) who, at the end of the 1960s, gathered hundreds of testimonies of Polish Righteous. “If the Poles had aided the Jews with the same impetus with which they practiced clandestine activity, the risk of aiding them would have been considerably reduced,” writes Gross.⁵

Strach (Fear), though taking as its object the antisemitic acts of the postwar period (notably the Kielce pogrom), brings new illumination to Judeo-Polish relations under the Occupation. Questioning the ease with which anti-Jewish crimes were perpetrated between 1944 and 1947—several pogroms in the immediate postwar period, including that of Kielce, unique of its kind and without equivalent, even in comparison with the interwar years—Gross formulates the hypothesis that this permissiveness would rest both on a social consensus and on the evolution of Judeo-Polish relations during the war. Principally on the fact that Jewish property (houses, shops, etc.) had been seized by Polish fellow citizens—the figure is estimated at 500,000—and that the latter had no intention whatsoever of restoring it. This would explain the self-interested participation of Polish citizens in the crimes committed by the Germans, the murder of Jews by Poles during the Occupation and, after the war, a kind of ethnic cleansing reinforced by the generalization of the anti-Jewish postures prevailing during the conflict. In 1945, the lives of Jews are all the less valued in that an important part of the Polish political elites persists in wishing to apply political programs that contest their having any legitimate place in Poland. Let us recall, for example, this famous remark by a militant of the principal postwar political party, the Polish People’s Party (PSL), a million members strong, who declared in 1946: “We had three questions to settle: agrarian reform; the Polonization of our cities; the industrialization of our country. Agrarian reform and the Polonization of the cities have already been partly accomplished.”⁶

There would thus be, with regard to the Jewish drama, a connivance among the principal Polish actors. The satisfaction of one part of the political forces at seeing the problem settled by the German occupier; the satisfaction of one part of the popular strata at having brought about a rapid social mobility. The German license to kill would have been generalized in the postwar period, which would explain the unheard-of violence of the Kielce pogrom. And it is this, according to Gross, that would explain the unease of the Righteous. For there was, in public opinion, a correlation between those who hid Jews and their possibility of enriching themselves. Whether the person who hides a Jew does so out of moral conviction or in order to draw an income from it, or for both reasons, there was always, for those around them, this association of “the Jews and money.” It is an interlocking of correlations that allows one to explain the behaviors of the Righteous after the war: to reveal oneself can lead others to believe that one has enriched oneself; conversely, any display of economic ease can arouse the suspicion that one has hidden Jews, that one is perhaps oneself a Jew, and that one may, in any case, be threatened with exaction. The armed protection with which certain of the Righteous surround the Jews they saved in 1945 shows that they are conscious of being a prey to a veritable “political economy of war.”⁷ From then on, one better understands this remark by Irena Sendler, one of the most important members of Żegota, who saved thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto: “One must remember that, of all the forms of clandestine activity, the question of aid to the Jews was among the most difficult and the most dangerous.”⁸ The Righteous, Gross concludes on this point, can only be hated by their fellow citizens, for they break the pact of tacit conducts adopted toward the Jews during the war. Obviously, how is one to evaluate a “tacit conduct”?

Strach proposes an interpretation of antisemitism during and after the Occupation. The author was violently taken to task by historians who reproach him with his tone, his eagerness to do battle—notably with the Church—his overexposure of the Jewish fact, out of context, in their view. An object, they think, apprehended more from the angle of the essay than of scientific demonstration. But their reading of the facts is only another interpretation. We are in the domain of the plausible, and it matters to summon explanations that cling as closely as possible to the human behaviors most difficult to discern at a distance of sixty years.

Among the critiques, I will retain that of the historian Paweł Machcewicz, co-editor, with Krzysztof Persak, of Around Jedwabne,⁹ for whom Gross’s explanation sins by its monocausality. It would be reductive, he writes, “to adopt the perspective of the author of Strach, according to which Polish society participated in the Holocaust during the war and subsequently, after the departure of the Germans, completed the radical ethnic purification that the latter had initiated.”¹⁰ One must add, he indicates, other factors: Christian anti-Judaism, economic antisemitism, Nazi policy, the stereotype of the Żydokomuna [Judeo-communism]. Who would not subscribe to it? But these “factors” nonetheless remain equally too general.¹¹ Were there not, among the Righteous, people little favorable to the Jews, beginning with the principal leader of Żegota, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka? In the order of generalist and plausible explanations, there also exists that of one of the principal Polish intellectuals, Maria Janion. Drawing on Daniel Goldhagen, Maria Janion too questions the articulation of the different forms of antisemitism in Poland. For her, there is a link between the “antisemitism of deportation” widespread in pre-war Polish opinion and the “antisemitism of elimination” embodied by the Jedwabne massacre. “The reception of Goldhagen’s book in Poland,” says Maria Janion, “compels us to know whether ‘the antisemitism of deportation’ is equivalent to ‘the antisemitism of elimination.’”¹²

Jan Gross’s intuition rests on a concrete link between the facts and their interpretation. It is the high degree of plausibility more than his accusatory tone—Gross is nothing of a Goldhagen, he announces no prophetic news—that renders convincing his attempt at explanation (an essay in historical interpretation, as he writes himself). It nonetheless remains that the examination of the facts, to which he invites us, deserves to be developed. This is what a new generation of present-day Polish historians is applying itself to, multiplying their investigations into the black pages of Poland.

Notes