Polish-Jewish Relations since 1984. Reflections of a Participant ebook

Antony PolonskyPolish-Jewish Relations since 1984: Reflections of a Participant.

© Copyright by Antony Polonsky

© Copyright for the polish edition: Wydawnictwo Austeria

Przekład: Małgorzata Ornat

Konsultacja: Maciej Tomal

Redakcja: Joanna Gromek-Illg

Korekta: Jessica Taylor-Kucia

Projekt, opracowanie graficzne i konwersja do formatu epub: Maria Gromek

Kraków • Budapeszt 2011

ISBN: 978-83-61978-58-9

Wydawnictwo Austeria Klezmerhojs sp. z o.o. 31-053 Kraków, ul. Szeroka 6 tel. (12) 411 12 45 [email protected]

Polish-Jewish Relations since 1984: Reflections of a Participant

Since the Second World War the interaction between Poles and Jews has taken place in a number of different arenas. In the first place, a fairly substantial Jewish community did emerge in post-war Poland, numbering at its height nearly 300,000. It proved very difficult to maintain its viability given the memory of the Holocaust, the persistence of anti-Semitism and the impact of communist politics. As a result it suffered constant hemorrhaging with waves of emigration intensifying particularly after the Kielce pogrom in July 1946, in 1956–1957, and in the aftermath of the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign of 1968. The end of communism has led to a revival of Jewish life in Poland and today there are perhaps some 30,000 people connected in some way with Jewish life. Throughout the post-war period Jews from Poland have played an important role both in the investigation of the Polish-Jewish past and in the evolution of Polish-Jewish relations.

Polish Jews were an important element in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine) from the beginnings of modern Zionism, and their numbers increased after the Second World War and the establishment of the state. Many had played an important role both in Jewish politics and in Jewish scholarship in Poland, and they continued to do so in Israel. The Second World War saw the emergence of the United States as the centre of the largest Jewish community of the Diaspora, a community in which Jews from the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were a very significant element. The country was also the home of a very large Polonia (ethnic Polish immigrant community). The United States thus became an important area for Polish-Jewish interaction, as did Canada, where many of the same conditions had developed. The exiled Polish communities in England and France, whose members remained in the West after 1945, also played an important role in the evolution of both Polish politics and Polish-Jewish relations.

If one is to understand the evolution of Polish-Jewish relations in the post-war period, developments in all these areas and the interaction between them have to be taken into account. After 1945 Poles and Jews (insofar as these are mutually exclusive categories) have been divided, above all, by their diametrically opposed and incompatible views of a shared but divisive past. The experiences of the war and the imposition on Poland of an unpopular and unrepresentative communist dictatorship gave a new lease of life to the ‘romantic’ view of Polish history which saw Poland as the ‘Christ of nations,’ a country of heroes and martyrs which had unstintingly sacrificed itself for Western values and whose efforts had never been appreciated or understood by the materialistic West. In this history, Jews figured in a largely negative way. Pre-partition Poland-Lithuania had been a ‘land without stakes’, a country committed to religious toleration which had given the Jews shelter when they had been persecuted elsewhere. The Jews had not appreciated this hospitality – they had always remained a people apart, with their own language and culture and little sense of loyalty to Poland. For the most part they had been better off than most Poles and had always been ready to profit at the expense of the latter. In the modern period this was exemplified by the way they had prevented the formation of a ‘native’ middle class and by their refusal to support Polish aspirations in the East at the end of the First World War. They had sought foreign intervention to guarantee them special protection in the interwar period and had been a key element in the anti-national communist movement.