The return of fear in Poland

Nearly thirty years after the fall of the communist regime, almost fifteen years after its accession to the E.U., and after it had largely taken part in the construction of a “European memory of the Shoah” — it was the first post-communist country to recognize the crimes committed by Poles against Jews during the Occupation, and the third in Europe after Germany and France — Poland is undergoing an unheard-of regression. Not on the economic plane: its situation is flourishing, thanks notably to subsidies from Brussels. But on the political plane: the lucky rise to power of the nationalist party “Law and Justice” — its candidate had outpolled the outgoing liberal president (long the favorite in the polls) by only 148,032 votes in the first round of the presidential election, a gap of 1% — has resulted, three years later, in an unprecedented attack on the democratic gains of the post-1989 era.

Despite the fierce opposition of entire segments of civil society, the judiciary has been brought to heel, as have the public media, to the benefit of the dominant party — not to mention other beleaguered sectors (such as the already minimal right to abortion). One need only watch the news broadcasts of Poland’s main television channel to see the extent to which a solid wooden language, artificially dramatic in tone and devoid of humor, floods the screens as it did in the 1980s. It is a situation that clearly recalls certain dark moments of the communist regime.

Among the founders and partisans of the rule of law, the historic militants of Solidarność — even though some militants of the former union are also in the opposing camp — anger and fear intermingle in the face of the expansion of a nationalist cult of the homeland that fosters the emergence of an ever more present far right. Supported by the most conservative wing of the Church, in particular the notorious Radio Maryja, the regime ceaselessly promotes radical symbols. Did not the Polish prime minister, Tadeusz Morawiecki, during an official stay in Munich in February 2018, lay a wreath of flowers on the graves of the Holy Cross Brigade, an openly antisemitic anti-communist resistance unit that, during the war, had collaborated with the Nazis?

Precisely with regard to the Jews of Poland, who have known a particularly dynamic cultural and religious renewal for more than twenty years, the law promulgated by the Polish authorities on 1 March 2018 — leading to the punishment, by up to three years in prison, of anyone who “attributes to the Republic of Poland and to the Polish Nation, publicly and contrary to the reality of the facts, responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes perpetrated by the German Third Reich” — struck like a thunderclap.

This law denies the historical gains of the past twenty years. The pioneering work of the historian Jan Gross had opened the way for a school of Polish social-science specialists (chiefly historians, literary scholars, psychologists, anthropologists) who, drawing on new sources, examine in depth the Judeo-Polish relations under the German Occupation. This school, gathered around the journal Zagłada Żydów (Extermination of the Jews), has greatly contributed to shattering the myth of an innocent nation. The book Juifs et Polonais 1939-2008 (Jews and Poles 1939-2008)¹ presented, for the French public, the first research conducted in Poland on “the Polish witness.” It was the culmination of an international colloquium, organized by Annette Wieviorka and myself, attended by Simone Veil, Marek Edelman, Władysław Bartoszewski (a Polish deportee at Auschwitz, former president of the International Auschwitz Council) — all of whom have since passed away. Since then, numerous works by the researchers of this school have been published not only in Poland, but also in the United States, in Israel, in France².

It is they whom the law targets first. It is meant to intimidate them, to hamper their work. What young researcher would want to venture onto such mined fields? The regime claimed that it intended above all to protest the widespread use of the expression “Polish death camps” in the international public sphere, arguing, rightly, that it harmed Poland’s renown and historical truth. It is indeed distressing that a growing number of journalists around the world use, as a linguistic shorthand, this expression to designate the Nazi camps³, but no Polish historian would make such a confusion, and the notion of “Polish death camps” does not even appear in the law.

This law in fact led to the calling into question of the gains of Polish researchers. It is significant that, from the very advent of the new regime, the Minister of Education cast doubt on Polish responsibility in the Jedwabne massacre, and that ever more numerous governmental voices are demanding a new inquiry into that event. Through these manifestations of denial and revisionism, the regime intends to instill fear in all the active bearers of a memory of the Shoah, in Poland and in the world (for the law sought to reach foreign journalists and academics as well). And it has succeeded, or at least it has succeeded in putting pressure on teachers, journalists, and Jewish associations. For many Polish Jews, it is a return of the all-too-familiar fear…

As a result, the prestige of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, “Polin” — the largest European Jewish museum, opened in 2013 on the site of the Warsaw ghetto, which in a sense sealed, almost triumphantly, the “rediscovered” friendship between Jews and Poles — now appears much tarnished. The authorities ceaselessly create museums of the Righteous and other patriotic institutions. The Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, one of the most imaginative museums devoted to that period according to the historian Timothy Snyder, has been remodeled, having been deemed too far removed from national history. The term of the chairwoman of the International Council of the Auschwitz museum, Barbara Engelking — also director of the Center for Research on the Extermination of the Jews — was not renewed, and threats hang over the museum’s director, Piotr Cywiński.

In short, the Jews must keep to their place.

Faced with international pressure, emanating chiefly from the American and Israeli governments — rightly regarded as essential allies of the Polish regime — the latter revised the law: the Warsaw parliament repealed the penal portion of the law on 27 June 2018. But it did not repeal the other component of the law, namely the possibility of suing researchers in civil court. The government accordingly presented this modification as a victory. An unexpected ally supported it: Netanyahu’s government. Indeed, on the same day, a strange joint declaration signed by the two prime ministers, the Polish and the Israeli, appeared simultaneously in the international press (Le Figaro, The Guardian, The New York Times, etc.), paid for — this was stated by the Israeli side — by the Polish government. It is worth recalling certain aspects of this declaration, so astonishing are they. It is a declaration about history, placing at its center the relations between Jews and Poles. Two or three passages indeed drew attention.

“We support free speech about history and scientific research concerning all aspects of the Holocaust,” the declaration says, “so that it may be conducted without the slightest apprehension related to legal obstacles, whether by students, teachers, researchers, journalists or, obviously, by survivors and their families.” This sentence is an absolute untruth, since research can be attacked in civil proceedings.

“Both governments vehemently condemn all forms of antisemitism and express their commitment to opposing the slightest manifestation of it. Both governments also express their rejection of anti-Polonism and of other offensive national stereotypes.” This passage is singular. For a long time, the defenders of Polish national honor have promoted the notion of anti-Polonism, placing it on an equal footing with antisemitism. This absurd expression, quite difficult to define and to point to in reality, here finds, thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu, a manifest legitimacy and respectability. While there exist thousands of works on antisemitism, one would be hard-pressed to find any on anti-Polonism.

“Poland has always expressed the highest understanding of the importance of the Shoah as the most tragic chapter of Jewish national history.” Another strange sentence, signed by the Israeli leader. Poland? Which Poland? In the aftermath of the war, it was above all Polish martyrdom that was put forward, both by the communist authorities of Warsaw and by the Polish émigré community. The death of the Jews was the object of an organized forgetting, as could be observed in the message displayed at the Auschwitz museum and, in 1967-1968, during a particularly virulent antisemitic campaign. As already noted, the leaders of Law and Justice, the party currently in power, have never ceased to deny, to minimize, the crimes committed by Poles against Jews (notably the pogroms of Jedwabne and Kielce). Such is “the highest understanding of the Shoah” in this country. “Jewish national history” and not Polish national history? Yehuda Bauer, the eminent historian of Yad Vashem, sharply criticized the Israeli prime minister for having validated this nationalist discourse that erases Polish participation in the Shoah. Yad Vashem, in a communiqué, also denounced this declaration and took a stand to that effect: “The attempt to amplify the aid that had been granted to Jews, its description as a widespread phenomenon, and the minimizing of the Poles’ role in the persecutions of the Jews constitute an insult to historical truth, but also to the memory of the heroism of the Righteous Among the Nations.”

This is not the first time that right-wing Zionism has forged an alliance with the authoritarian Polish right: such had already been the case before the war between the forces of Jabotinsky and the Polish government of the time, in order to encourage the emigration of the Jews. Today, this alliance ratifies the mutual interests of the two rights. It also has the consequence of weakening the Polish researchers who work on the Shoah: one researcher has been dismissed, another is explicitly threatened, one team has seen its funding considerably cut. To be recognized scientifically the world over is one thing, but the reality on the ground is another. The rallying of the Israeli authorities to the Polish raison d’État, as well as the compromising attitudes of a certain number of Jewish institutions in the world — the CRIF, for example, invited the Polish ambassador to the commemoration of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 2018 — have the effect of depriving Polish academics of the support they had expected.

The Jews of Poland thus have good reason to feel anxious.

Notes