By Rabbi Joseph Polak
Boston Globe July 28, 2007
A DUTCH child survivor of the Holocaust, I recently visited Poland, where 30 members of my family had been murdered, including 10 cousins younger than 14. None of these relatives has a grave; their ashes dot the countryside or blow in the winds. I found Poland lifting a long silence about its Jews -- those who lived there and those, like my family, who were brought there to be murdered.
Poles are finally beginning to deal with these ghosts in their midst. The more thoughtfully they continue to do so, the more truthful -- and perhaps the more consoling -- the memories of the Jewish experience of Poland are likely to be.
Everyone knew that Poland had turned a corner when in 2001 then-President Aleksander Kwasniewski spoke at the village of Jedwabne. There, on behalf of his country, Kwasniewski apologized for the 1941 massacre of Jedwabne's Jews, who were burned alive by their neighbors with little help from the Germans. In the past, when Poland had spoken of the Holocaust, it saw itself as a victim among victims, and when it spoke about its almost 2 million citizens murdered by the Nazis, it was not referring to its Jews, 3.5 million of whom were also murdered by the Germans.
For 60 years Poland was silent when it came to its slaughtered Jews, echoing, if that is the word, the silence of their absence. The Kwasniewski speech finally brought the silence to an official end.
Last month, the door that had been pried open by Kwasniewski swung wide with the groundbreaking for a Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to be erected on the grounds of the former Warsaw Ghetto. When the museum opens in 2011, Poles will find themselves with much to talk about: the Jews' considerable contribution to the Polish economy and military, the profound Jewish impact on Polish culture, and the very mixed bag of Poland's treatment of the Jews, from offering them a safe, welcoming, and dignified haven from the Crusades to their subsequent efforts, centuries long, of preserving the Jews' otherness.
The museum, in trying to tell the story of Poland's Jews through multimedia technologies and three-dimensional scale models, will of historical necessity have to put a positive spin on its presentations. Yet I imagine that the better the museum makes the Jews look, the more massive the collision with reality will be at the end. A people who lived and thrived here for 1,000 years, younger Poles will wonder, are gone?
It is not their murder in the Holocaust that will be overwhelming, but the encounter with their absence. The harder the museum tries to be faithful to its story, the harder will it collide with this absence.
Omnipresent in Poland is a loss so massive that its proportions are not manageable -- almost not imaginable. Not just the numbers, but the humanity gone -- the mothers, the children, the schools, the clubs, the communities; hundreds, perhaps thousands of villages, emptied. Poland, for the most part, was not the murderer, yet death oozes everywhere from its pores. A mass grave of children here, a death camp there; the wind, blowing through decapitated, wearied frames of synagogues; bathhouses for family purity and bath houses that were gas chambers; the wind howling, through abandoned cemeteries and leveled ghettos, of an all-embracing sadness that will not subside and for which there is no consolation.
Visitors will come to the museum, appreciate its energy and intentions and displays, and then ask -- so where are these Jews? Does anybody here miss them?
This silence, this great absence into which the visitor leaving the museum will surely be slammed, will undo the museum's messages, will sabotage its best intentions, will ask: Who here weeps for the Jews besides the Jews? Indeed, unless it can make Poland itself cry for its murdered Jews, the museum will represent a dry nostalgia, an exercise in historical anthropology, with the Jews as Poland's Mayas.
While Poland boasts the largest number of righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, it has still not fully embraced the moral challenge of why it did so little to save so many others. The museum must not let visitors leave with the impression that the murder of Poland's Jews will always speak louder than their millennium of accomplishment there. The Forum for Dialogue among Nations, a group created by a former member of the Polish parliament, Andrzej Folwarczny, in conjunction with the American Jewish Committee, has gone a long way in exploring such issues, especially with young people. The museum would do well to ally itself with these efforts.
What is particularly encouraging in all this is the extent to which the museum is a communal effort. At the groundbreaking, Poland's new president, Lech Kaczynski, spoke with great pleasure in describing his own energetic efforts toward creating this museum while he was still the mayor of Warsaw, and of Poland's need to embrace its present through its past. The museum is thus supported by the city of Warsaw, by Poland, by Germany, as well as by substantial private contributions from all over the world.
The story of Poland's Jews has long waited to be told properly. Perhaps the time has finally come when this can happen.
Rabbi Joseph Polak is director of the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University.
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