Why Should We Teach
About the Holocaust?
Why Should We Teach
About the Holocaust?
Edited by
Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs
Leszek Hoñdo
Translated by
Michael Jacobs
Second Edition, expanded
The Jagiellonian University
Institute of European Studies
Cracow 2005
First published in 2003 under the title Dlaczego nale¿y uczyæ o Holokaucie? by the
Department of Judaic Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow
First English edition published in 2004 by the Judaica Foundation Center for Jewish
Culture in Cracow, with funding from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human
Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Warsaw Office
Second Polish edition published in 2005 by the Institute of European Studies of the
Jagiellonian University in Cracow, with funding from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe,
Warsaw Office
This second English edition is published with funding from the Office for Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe,
Warsaw Office.
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors, and do not necessarily
reflect the policies or views of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights
and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Publication coordinator
Anna Motyczka
Cover design
Dorota Ogonowska
Layout
Jan Szczurek
Printing
Drukarnia Leyko, Cracow
Copyright by the Jagiellonian University
ISBN 83-918835-3-1
Foreword to the English Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Jerzy Tomaszewski
Why . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Zdzis³aw Mach
The Memory of the Holocaust and Education for Europe . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Ireneusz Krzemiñski
In Light of Later History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Bohdan Michalski
Lets Teach All of It from the Start . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Stanis³aw Krajewski
Teach Everywhere, and Especially in Poland! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Stanis³aw Obirek SJ
The Long Shadow of Be³¿ec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Tanna Jakubowicz-Mount
In a Spirit of Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Stefan Wilkanowicz
Lets Try to Understand! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Robert Szuchta
Against Silence and Indifference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Sergiusz Kowalski
Its Obvious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz
The Holocaust and the Folk Stereotype of the Jew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska
General Francos Daughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Hanna Wêgrzynek
Every Third One of Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Leszek Hoñdo
And the Sun Shone and Was Not Ashamed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
S³awomir Kapralski
Why Teach About the Romani Holocaust? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Andrzej Mirga
For a Worthy Place Among the Victims
The Holocaust and the Extermination of Roma During World War II . . 93
Natalia Aleksiun
The History and Memory of the Holocaust
The Central Jewish Historical Commission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs
Attitudes of Polish Youth Toward the Holocaust
Research from 19972000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Holocaust-Related Topics on the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Foreword to the English Edition
These essays and supplementary material were first published in Polish.
This English version of the work is published and distributed thanks to
funding from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of
the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
The editors are grateful for this OSCE support, and hope that this
edition will bring new insights to the European discussion of Holocaust
education. The book is also intended to demonstrate the range of interest
in the subject in Poland. Knowing, writing, talking and teaching about the
Holocaust are integral to the work of people in fields as diverse as classroom teaching, religious ministry, psychotherapy, the media, and a host of
academic professions here. It could not be otherwise, since that tragic chapter is integral to our history. The reasons our contributors give for the need
to teach about the Holocaust should serve as pointers to the spheres of
national life in which the subject requires greater exposure. The larger
context of the task, and the larger imperative, are implied by the fact of
OSCE sponsorship of this publication.
7
Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs
Introduction
This collection of essays, supplemented by a section describing institutions
that have educational tools at their disposal, was compiled for readers for
whom the teaching/learning process is an open one, not necessarily limited
to fixed teacher-student roles. The book is addressed to people who are not
indifferent to the fact of the murder of ten percent of the citizens of prewar
Poland, and also to people who may not have realized this yet.
Authorities in public life and specialists in various academic fields
were invited to contribute the essays published here. Among them are
a philosopher, anthropologist, literary historian, psychologist, journalist,
ethnographer, theologian, cultural historian, political scientist, high school
teacher, sociologists and historians. Many of the authors refer to their own
memories, their experiences from the places where they were born, which
are connected with Jewish and Romani life and with the Holocaust (Be³¿ec,
Tarnów, Czarna Góra, Warsaw). They recall encounters with people whose
wise and sympathetic attitudes are etched in memory (Rabbi Jules Harlow,
Rabbi Jacob Baker). Not all the authors have ready answers about how to
perpetuate that memory. All are deeply aware of the need for education
about the Holocaust, for the sake of reconciliation between nations,
democracy and peace.1
Holocaust originally meant a burnt offering. Presently the term is most often used
in reference to the Nazi mass murder of Jews during World War II. Among Jews, Shoah is
often the preferred term. After all, burnt offerings were sacrifices made to God in biblical
times, and the massacre of innocents cannot be compared to a form of worship of the Lord.
1
9
Teaching about the Holocaust is not only a matter of teaching facts,
although reliable knowledge, the lack of which often leads to arrogance
and prejudice, is of great importance. It is important to comprehend the
meaning of those facts, to cultivate empathy and sensitivity. That is why
many of the essay writers refer to personal experiences and reflections on
the place where they live.
No set criterion was applied to the choice of authors. Thus, the names
of many eminent experts on the period and specialists on the Holocaust
are missing. The selection was guided by the editors personal acquaintance with the authors. We know that they engage with Holocaust subjects and that their involvement translates to specific educational
activities (creating new units at educational institutions and within
NGOs, international pilot programs, teaching, writing for the general
public, therapeutic work).
Jerzy Tomaszewski retrieves pages of the shared Polish-Jewish past
in order to show that the Jewish Holocaust meant not only the loss of
Polish citizens but the impoverishment of our cultural identity. Zdzis³aw
Mach stresses that for the younger generation the issue of the Holocaust
and Polish-Jewish relations is critical to the shaping of a new historical
identity. Invoking his own memories of 1968, Ireneusz Krzemiñski speaks
of how organized hatred acts within a person, and what havoc it wreaks in
society.2 Bohdan Michalski wishes to demythologize Polish knowledge
of the Holocaust. Stanis³aw Krajewski ends his essay by saying that everywhere there is a need to teach how the sowing of contempt can lead to
killing. For Reverend Stanis³aw Obirek, the memory of the murdered citizens of Tomaszów Lubelski and Narol should be incorporated into the
collective memory of his native region. Tanna Jakubowicz-Mount focuses
2
1968 was the year of the March events, a Communist Party-led anti-Semitic
campaign in which many Jews were removed from their government and professional
posts, and Jews were pressured to leave the country.
10
her attention on the identity crisis and on the mechanisms leading to violence here and now, illustrating her point with a description of stages of
self-exploration. She outlines the phases of a program to teach about the
Shoah. Stefan Wilkanowicz emphasizes that the methods of fanning hatred and aggression are similar in every tragedy (Auschwitz, Kolyma,
Sarajevo, Cambodia, Rwanda), although each calamity has its particular,
unique features. For the evil not to be repeated, he advises us to take advantage of the potential in young people who want to oppose evil, because
they can be teachers to their peers. In his reflections as a teacher, Robert
Szuchta discusses in detail the situation in the Polish school system, NGO
projects, how to teach about the Holocaust, and the difficulties that are
faced. For Sergiusz Kowalski the goal is to purge history of falsehood,
particularly since the methodologies of classroom teaching and catechesis
are not keeping up with public discussion about reconstructing the collective memory. Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz demonstrates that folk art replicating the stereotype of the Jew does not incorporate the problem of the
Holocaust in any way. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska shares her experiences from teaching practice, quoting statements from college students
whose high school education had taught them little of the life, history,
culture and tragedy of the Jewish people. This finding is seconded by
Hanna Wêgrzynek, who says that she did not learn about the Holocaust of
Warsaws prewar citizens until her university studies. Leszek Hoñdo points
to the moral dimension and the universal experience of what happened to
the Jews, stressing that the continued use of the word Jew as an expletive argues for the need to teach about the Holocaust. In his essay,
S³awomir Kapralski says that it is worthwhile and necessary to teach about
the Holocaust of the Roma because we owe it to them; besides meeting
the ethical need for discussion of the moral implications of recognizing
Roma as victims of Nazi persecution, it also provides an opportunity to
reflect on how memory functions in the process of creating and maintain-
11
ing group identity. Andrzej Mirga reminds us that in the Nuremberg trials
the question of the Romani Holocaust was addressed marginally. He shows
how the memory of the genocide against Roma is gradually becoming a
part of the institutionalized memory of the Holocaust, and stresses that it is
absent from the school curricula and, in turn, from the historical memory of
postwar generations. For Natalia Aleksiun, a member of the younger
generation of researchers, the efforts by Jews, even as they faced their imminent fate, to preserve the memory of their plight under German occupation, constitutes a moral challenge to convey this truth. For all the authors,
the memory of the atrocities, and the form of that memory, is important for
current and future generations, if we are to be able to oppose prejudice and
discrimination here and now, and to prevent their recurrence.
New ways of conveying knowledge of the Holocaust are needed so
that succeeding generations of Poles will not have the same attitude to the
Holocaust that they do to the Napoleonic Wars. Our authors remind us
that racism, xenophobia and genocide occur amidst us, and the memory of
the Holocaust should serve as a warning against the repetition of crimes
against humanity.
In addition to the scholars, editors, teachers and organizers of various
educational projects who wrote articles for this book, Jagiellonian University students also contributed by preparing a practical guide to Internet
sites devoted to teaching about the Holocaust, for readers who wish to
learn how others (mainly academic institutions and NGOs) approach the
task in different parts of the world such as Western Europe, the United
States and Poland.
If not for the particular pursuits of Jagiellonian University students,
this book would not have appeared. These members of the third generation undertook studies connected with the history and culture of Polish
Jews, usually without knowing why, unable to explain their interest rationally. They pursued these studies as part of course work in the Jagiellonian
12
Universitys Research Center on the History and Culture of the Jews in
Poland or else outside the framework of that interdisciplinary research
unit.3
With time, students have increasingly taken up subjects related to the
Holocaust and to the attitudes of Poles to Jews before, during and after the
war, topics which for almost half a century were taboo in academia and in
public life. No one forced these difficult and painful subjects on the students. Coming from different parts of Poland to study in Cracow, often it
was here that they learned about the Jewish minority which the war years
eliminated from Polands social landscape. Few schoolteachers were able
to say anything about the Holocaust, the pogroms, or Jewish emigration
from Poland after 1946 or after 1968.4
Teachers also contributed to this work. Teachers interested in the
methodology of teaching about the Holocaust took part in several conferences at the Center for Jewish Culture in the Kazimierz district of Cracow,
organized by the Spiro Institute of London jointly with Polish institutions.
The number of teachers wanting to attend the Kazimierz conferences exceeded the number of places available. They were faced with a lack of
teaching materials. Piotr Trojañski and Robert Szuchta published the first
Holocaust curriculum for Polish secondary schools in 2000, and the first
textbook in 2003.5 Some of the Internet sites we describe can provide
other materials.
With increasing knowledge about the Holocaust victims and the consequent depolonization of the associated memorial sites, fewer young
3
The Center, created by Professor Józef A. Gierowski, is now the Department of
Judaic Studies. On October 2, 2001, Polands first such major program was inaugurated in
the Department.
4
1946 was the year of the Kielce pogrom in which 41 Jews were killed.
5
R. Szuchta, P. Trojañski, Holocaust. Program nauczania o historii i zag³adzie
¯ydów na lekcjach przedmiotów humanistyczny w szko³ach ponadpodstawowych, Warsaw
2000; R. Szuchta, P. Trojañski, Holokaust. Zrozumieæ dlaczego, Warsaw 2003.
13
people have been visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.6 Is it
possible that we were interested exclusively in sites of national martyrdom? Do the numbers or numerical proportions reduce the significance of
the genocidal crimes? Does the fact that only 75,000 Poles perished in
Auschwitz, and almost a million Jews, lessen what Auschwitz means to
Poles? Auschwitz is a place and symbol of genocide important to all humanity, and particularly to Poles because it was Polish soil that the Nazis
selected to be a site of the Holocaust. The genocide took place amidst us,
before our eyes. That is why it should be taught, in the knowledge that if
we pass over those difficult and painful events in silence, our children and
grandchildren may ask us about them. It should be taught if only because
88 percent of a national sample of 1,002 surveyed 16-year-olds declared
that knowledge of the crimes perpetrated at Auschwitz and other concentration camps should be conveyed to the next generations as a lesson for
all mankind.7
Professor Feliks Tych of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw
gives the information that 95 percent of the Poles survived the German
occupation, while 98 percent of the Polish Jews were murdered during it.8
This difference in the fates of Poles and Jews should also be taught, because Polish youth are not fully aware of it, as demonstrated by the survey
referred to here, conducted ten years after the collapse of a system that
6
This information came from Alicja Bia³ecka, a staff member at the Museum, during the Education for Reconciliation workshop held at the Grodzka Gate NN Theater Center in Lublin on May 1618, 2001, organized by the Carnegie Council of New York and
the Jagiellonian Universitys Department of Judaic Studies. After 2000, the number of
visits began to increase gradually. Demographic and economic factors, and the reform of
the school system, have also affected the dynamic of visits to the Auschwitz Museum; see:
M. Kucia, Visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Pro Memoria, January
2004, no. 20, pp. 3943.
7
Research findings on attitudes toward the Holocaust are presented in the last article
in this book.
8
F. Tych, Shoah pamiêæ zagro¿ona, Znak 2000, no. 6, pp. 5562.
14
falsified the historical truth: 24.5 percent of the 1,002 students agreed with
the statement that the Jews suffered the most during the war, 20 percent
disagreed, and the majority, 55.5 percent, answered hard to say. Many
respondents chose evasive answers to the questions about attitudes to the
Holocaust. This could be the result of a lack of information, but in some
cases, particularly with the difficult questions such as those about the help
extended to Jews, it could represent an attempt to reduce the tension associated with uncertainty about how ones own family members acted. To
avoid topics, questions and problems is not to resolve them, but only to
push them aside, to make them taboo. No one is to blame for this. It is
a phenomenon characteristic of victims who do not want to return to their
trauma. However, there comes a time when the inner need is to confront
the past, and this can apply to individuals, societies, nations, states. In
recent years this need has increased and has expressed itself in different
forms: research on subjects missing from or else falsified in the history
textbooks of many countries, efforts related to compensation claims, and
voices demanding justice, if only symbolic justice in the form of official
apologies. It is a global process involving many issues: the lack of compensation for slavery in the United States, discrimination against aboriginal people in Australia, corporate profits from forced labor during the
occupation, and banks silence about frozen accounts in countries traditionally considered neutral. Poland should not be outside this process of
confronting a difficult past, if only because we need deep reconciliation
with other peoples and states, just as we need a deep, not a superficial
democracy, a democracy cognizant of the need to address the marginalized
as well as the obvious issues of history and society.9
9
Deep democracy is a term used by the process-oriented psychologist Arnold
Mindell; see: A. Mindell, Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Transformation Using Conflict
and Diversity, Portland, Oregon, 1997.
15
Jerzy Tomaszewski
Why...
1
In the Commonwealth of Two Nations in the 18th century, about 80 percent
of all the worlds Jews lived, worked, and participated in the life of the
whole country.10 In the Republic of Poland in 1939, almost 3.5 million Jews
lived, worked, and took part in the life of the nation and local communities.
Jewish settlement on our soil dates back to nearly the beginnings of
the Polish state. Along with other new arrivals invited by Polish monarchs, Jews played a vital role in the development of cities, trade, crafts
and various arts in the Middle Ages; on the first coins of the Polish kings,
the name of King Mieszko was stamped in Hebrew letters. When the Commonwealth experienced its golden age, Jews benefitted as well, though
there was no lack of instances of persecution, absurd accusations, and
above all contempt and suspicion toward Jews as the faithless ones who
had inherited the blame for Christs crucifixion. In the period of the
Commonwealths decline, the Jews suffered as well, and often at times of
danger they defended the cities together with the other townspeople.
In the 18th and 19th centuries they played an outstanding role in the
development of the countrys modern economy, and frequently joined in
with their countrymen in the fight for freedom and independence: in uprisings under the command of Tadeusz Kociuszki, in the 1863 insurrec10
The Commonwealth of Two Nations included large areas of present-day Eastern
Europe, including Poland and Lithuania.
17
tion, and in Józef Pi³sudskis Legions. They lost their lives in the ranks of
Polish units on every front of World War II.
2
The Jews who settled on the lands of the Polish state brought with them
traditional forms of religious community organization, the rich traditions
contained in the Old Testament, and an original culture which they developed further in the new homeland. It was here that in the 19th century the
Jewish folk language evolved and assumed its finished form Yiddish,
graced with the Nobel Prize awarded to Polish-born Isaac Bashevis Singer,
whose works are dominated by themes drawn from the shared JewishPolish tradition. In the first half of the 20th century, Jewish literature developed in the Polish language as well, and a teacher from the UkrainianPolish-Jewish town of Drohobycz, the writer and artist Bruno Schulz, became world-renowned. He was murdered by a Nazi on the streets of his
home town.
It is hard to overestimate the mutual influence of Polish and Jewish
cultures. The Bible, born in Jewish Palestine, has influenced Polish culture since earliest times. In the 19th and 20th centuries the works of Jewish authors writing in Polish had a significant influence, and Polands most
eminent poets and prose writers include the names of Poles from Jewish
families. There are Jewish motifs in the most celebrated works of Polish
literature, including Master Thaddeus by Adam Mickiewicz. In turn, Polish
motifs run through many works of Jewish literature; for Shalom Ash the
waters of the Vistula murmured in Yiddish. Similar links can be seen in
other works of art.
3
We observe many Polish-Jewish ties in the world of politics, beginning
from the institution of the Council of Four Lands (Vaad arba aratzot),
18
modeled after the unmistakable design of the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm in
the Commonwealth of Two Nations.11
The so-called emancipation of the Jews in the 19th century, that is,
their achievement of equal civil rights (though with certain exceptions,
especially under Russian rule), created the conditions for Jews to participate in political life on an equal footing with other residents of the partitioned Polish lands. They served in local and regional government bodies
wherever they were formed. In November 1918, Józef Pi³sudski as head
of state invited representatives of the largest Jewish parties for consultations on forming the Republics government. Jewish deputies and senators were part of the sovereign states legislature, shared in making laws,
and took part in the debates. They also bore the consequences of this; one
of them, Warsaw University professor Rabbi Moj¿esz Schorr, was placed
in a Soviet camp in the autumn of 1939, where he died. The experiences of
those years influenced the shaping of some of the State of Israels legal
and political institutions in 1948; one of the members of its first Provisional Council of State was Yitzhak Gruenbaum, previously a deputy to
the Republic of Polands Sejm.
4
Probably not quite ten percent of the Jews who lived in Poland survived
the Second World War, mostly outside Polands borders. The losses among
the other people living on Polish soil losses resulting from warfare, the
conditions in Nazi and Soviet camps, and murders committed in other
circumstances probably amounted to about ten percent.
The Jewish Holocaust was planned and decided in Berlin, and carried out by institutions and functionaries of the Third Reich. Polish soci11
Council of Four Lands: the central institution of Jewish community self-government in Poland in the 16th to 18th centuries.
19
ety, subjected to a brutal occupation regime, had no part in those decisions
and no influence on their implementation. The majority, living under the
threat of the occupiers terror, remained passive witnesses, often feeling
concern but powerless to act. Some, unfortunately too few, did assist the
persecuted, either in organized ways through the Council for Aid to Jews
or else on their own.12 They saved the honor of the Poles. There were
those, however, who betrayed hidden Jews and their protectors to the occupier, and even committed murder themselves. We still know little about
those dismal pages of the Holocaust.
5
After 1945, some of the few Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust tried
to rebuild the Jewish community in Poland. Others undertook to leave
Poland, to enter Palestine in order to join in building the Jewish state or
else to avoid repeating the experience of the communist system they had
known in the Soviet Union. Soon it became clear that in the system created by the communists there was no chance to reconstruct independent
Jewish life; what is more, the internationalist sloganeering did not preclude anti-Semitism. The number of Jews remaining in Poland decreased
as repeated waves of anti-Jewish feeling were stirred up by infighting
within the ruling party in 1957 and 1968. Today only a few thousand Jews
remain in Poland; despite their tragic experiences they continue to cultivate their traditions, which are tightly bound up with Polish traditions.
Likewise, Polish culture, and not only its literature, preserves ineradicable
traces of Jewish influences, and the memory of centuries of shared destinies and shared existence on the same land.
12
¯egota, the Council for Aid to Jews, was a clandestine organization in occupied
Poland, under the auspices of the Polish government in exile.
20
6
The history of Poland cannot be presented without the history of the Polish Jews, as it cannot be presented without the history of the other religious and ethnic communities inhabiting a common state whose territory
has changed through the millennium. Polish culture cannot be understood
without at least a rough knowledge of Polish-Jewish relations. The Jewish
Holocaust during the occupation was the most tragic fragment of the shared
past. We lost not only fellow citizens but also an important element of our
cultural identity.
To learn and understand the causes of the catastrophe, and how PolishJewish relations were shaped in those years, is not only a moral obligation
to our murdered neighbors. It is also a duty to Polish culture and tradition,
to our future. The Holocaust came from the outside, but whether and how
society was prepared for this test of attitudes and conscience remain open
questions. In the Christian Bible, part of which is also the Jewish Torah,
the question is asked, Where is Abel thy brother? We must not repeat
the reply, Am I my brothers keeper? It is a question facing the other
communities of Europe as well.
7
The murder of the Jewish people was a tragedy on a scale unknown in the
20th century. It would be naive to delude ourselves that a similar catastrophe cannot be repeated in one or another region of our continent, or outside Europe. Learning and understanding the sources of the Holocaust
may give us a chance to avert a similar tragedy in the future.
21
Zdzis³aw Mach
The Memory of the Holocaust
and Education for Europe
History and consciousness are dimensions of Polands political transformation. Poles are experiencing a serious identity crisis. They must rethink
and debate questions connected with their place in the history of Europe,
and their relations with their neighbors and with the peoples who were
significant partners in their history. Mythologized history has been an instrument for creating national identity, and an inexhaustible source of the
symbols with which the image of the social world is constructed. History
was subordinated to ideology particularly in the 19th century, and in
Poland between the world wars and through the whole period from 1945
to 1989. In the process of building a democratic civil society, Poland
now must above all deal with historical moments that in the recent past
were taboo topics or were particularly distorted by political and historical
ideology.
The search for a new interpretation of our history involves the need
to purge it of ideology, to reconsider it, and to find in it a new meaning
better suited to a democratic civil society. Of great importance in this are
the processes of globalization and European integration Polands incorporation into supranational structures and along with this the imperative
to find a broader perspective, one no longer dominated by the notions of
the nation and the nation state. Whatever role the nation state plays in
a future Europe, in peoples consciousness it will coexist with other forms
22
of collective identity, and the construction of supranational identities will
entail linking the meaning of national histories to broader, universal values,
and to the history of Europe and the world.
Teaching history in a rapidly changing world will demand rethinking
the meaning of not only the most important social processes but also events
that hold particular symbolism. The Holocaust is one such event which
defines the contemporary culture of Europe and exerts a huge influence
on the image of the social world.
The Holocaust is often and rightly described as the most tragic moment in Europes history, the culmination of what is worst in European
civilization: intolerance, hatred of strangers, genocide. This event touches
Poland and the Poles in a particular way. The Holocaust unfolded largely
on Polish soil and in the presence of Poles. The nature of that presence
continues to be a much-discussed and very controversial matter. Some
speak of the Poles co-responsibility or co-guilt, and it is by no means
only moral responsibility that they have in mind. Others state that the
Poles share of blame lies basically in indifference, silent assent motivated by estrangement from the Jews or else by outright anti-Semitism.
Still others wonder whether Poles could have done more to aid the Jews
who were being murdered, and why they did not. In every case the position taken and the answer given require very serious consideration of many
aspects of the question. The background is Polish society in the past, composed of Jews as well as Poles, the Catholic and the Jewish religions, and
the moral and social values of European culture. For the young generation, dealing with the problem of responsibility for the Holocaust and the
role of Poles, whatever it was, is a precondition for rebuilding their own
historical identity. It is not only a matter of establishing the facts, or even
of doing justice to those who died rescuing Jews, those who looked on
indifferently, or those who often directly or indirectly derived benefits
from the Holocaust. Equally important is to reconsider the history of
23
Polish-Jewish relations, which arrived at their tragic finale in the Holocaust. Of course the point here is not collective responsibility but rather
knowledge and understanding of ones history and relations with other
nations and groups, and from this point of view Polish-Jewish relations
are of special significance.
To teach about the Holocaust means first of all to convey the truth
about the events, and to give them an interpretation that incorporates on
the one hand the state of peoples consciousness at that point in history,
and on the other hand our moral and social views today. Secondly, teaching about the Holocaust means shaping the collective historical memory.
In the past, many things were erased from this memory, and many things
distorted. In communist postwar Poland the imperative was to mold a uniform group consciousness and identity for the Poles, one congruent with
a socialist and nationalist vision of the world. Tolerance and cultural
pluralism were not among the values the rulers wanted to support. Polands
history was presented in a way that could promote the ideal of a monocultural society, ethnically pure, uniform in every regard. Traces of other
cultures were eliminated from social consciousness, from curricula, and
from the official images of cities and regions. Jewish cemeteries, synagogues and other preserved relicts were marginalized and forgotten. The
Holocaust itself was subordinated to the official state ideology, which was
dominated by anti-Semitism after 1968. Now, in building a pluralistic
society and developing openness and tolerance, we must restore these
relicts to their rightful place, and above all speak of the Jews contribution
to Polish culture and of the presence of an extraordinarily rich Jewish
culture in Polish society. Thirdly, then, to teach about the Holocaust means
to recall the role of Jews in Poland and in Polish culture, and to make clear
the irreparable loss that the Holocaust inflicted on Polish society, eliminating three million citizens and their achievements. Fourthly, to teach
about the Holocaust means to warn of a danger. Intolerance, xenophobia
24
and anti-Semitism have not died out in Europe. Often they are said to be
intensifying. They are present in Poland as well. To show the Holocaust in
all its dimensions is to give a warning.
To sum up: to teach about the Holocaust is to inculcate the idea of
a pluralistic society, to show what intolerance and an ideology of racial
purity can lead to, and to forge attitudes that encourage the building of
a new, shared, pluralistic, open and tolerant Europe, and within it a Poland
capable of dealing with its legacy.
25
Ireneusz Krzemiñski
In Light of Later History
The year was 1967. Warsaw, the start of winter, early evening, the corridor in the universitys Philosophy Department building at the corner of
Krakowskie Przedmiecie and Traugutta Streets. A colleague, Andrzej S.,
was launching into an explanation of how naive it was to believe what my
friends Irena and Helena said.
After all, theyre Jews! he said forcefully, looking at me with an ironic
smile.
So what? I protested. It was all new to me, and made no sense.
What, dont you know? You cant ever trust the Jews, because theyve
always got something in mind different from what theyre saying their
own interests, which we have no idea of!
What are you talking about? I hear what they say. Weve been having
discussions for months, so why shouldnt I believe it?
You shouldnt trust them. Youre naive to want to be friends with them.
Youll see, he said, and handed me an envelope.
In it I found a packet of pages explaining the evil of Jewish Zionism and
spelling out the plainest anti-Semitic accusations. A few months later he
was in the Communist Party avant-garde, opposing the protesting student
body.
If I attempt the device of recalling that conversation, it is because it
struck me with a sense of astonishment that persists to this day. What
sprang from my interlocutor was, at the least, animosity personal ani-
26
mosity toward our fellow students! The discussions referred to were taking place at the university in a series of student forums. Long before the
premiere of Dziady and the subsequent March protest, the atmosphere at
school had been full of social and political ferment, and fiery discussion.13
Generally it was about the scope of freedom in public life, freedom of
expression and association, and whether it was acceptable to restrict them.
Two different positions clearly emerged, which in the language of those
days can be expressed this way: the first favored democratization or, as
it was put, liberalization, continuation of October 56; the second maintained that it was necessary to unite with the Party and to be mindful of the
national interest, which was a novelty in socialist rhetoric. We eighteenyear-olds, entering adult life though it was still student life, had these
discussions on our minds. They were extraordinarily important to us.
I have remembered that conversation my whole life. The memory
has flooded in many times, to serve as an illustration of an attitude of
hatred, the attitude of organized hatred. Because here some abstract outlook, a social outlook, it would seem, a social stereotype, had completely
determined how particular living people were seen. The categorization,
the label theyre Jews! had completely decided my colleagues personal
attitude to our companions, real people, who differed from each other.
More than that: for at least one of them, as for me too, the term Jew
meant little. And yet, the identification attached to her determined the
entire way in which everything that occurred between her and my hating
colleague was interpreted. It was a disinterested attitude, in which the hatred was wholly independent of the actual, concrete acts and views of the
hated person. The moral judgement was ascribed to her as a representative
of a social category.
13
The student protests that preceded the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 came after
the authorities closed down a staging of Adam Mickiewiczs dramatic poem Dziady.
27
Later on, the conversation I have quoted found its much broader, one
can say sociopolitical, extension in the form of an organized anti-Semitic
campaign by the Party and the state, emerging officially under the slogan
of anti-Zionism. Zionism was seen as an almost mystical threat to the
nation and to socialism! This has determined my outlook on life, for my
whole life, basically. It has directed me to seek, in sociological knowledge
and sociological research, an ally against the thing my conversation with
my colleague S. made me aware of, and horrified me with. For scientific
knowledge cannot foster hatred, cannot aid in organizing peoples thinking and actions against other people. Knowledge must not only allow the
psychological mechanisms of hatred to be elucidated, but must also encourage a view of the world that will permit us to make judgements not
through the prism of preconceived, socially sanctioned prejudices and
ideological simplifications.
Knowledge of the Second World War, including the singular slaughter of the Jews, was an essential article for my whole generation. Werent
we brought up on war films, and on hate-filled indictments of Nazi Germany and fascism for all the worlds evil from which socialism was
supposed to bring salvation, of course. These were ever-present in propaganda and in history lessons. As early as primary school days I belonged
to the History Club, and recent history interested me the most. One of the
things on the wall of my room was a map of Poland with the concentration
camps and death camps marked on it. But it was the experience of March
1968 that added a new dimension, as it were, to the school learning of
those days. It showed that this ideologically organized hatred was not only
the reality of fascist Germany.
The Holocaust can be seen as a kind of culmination of such organized
hatred: hatred organized around national feeling, but also around a plan for
a better world, justified on nationalist and racist grounds. There is no doubt
that the Holocaust was the culmination of ideological hatred for Jews, the
28
culmination of the ideological anti-Semitism that had penetrated European
life since the French Revolution, and which reinforced in the modern language of politics the old Christian anti-Semitic heritage. In this sense,
then, teaching about the Holocaust means demonstrating the historical consequences of a phenomenon present in different forms in the traditions of all
of Europe, with its cultural and religious diversity, or it means at least reflecting upon how that evil heritage promoted the Holocaust.
Teaching about the Holocaust means something more, however, because without that particular form of German Nazi racism the Holocaust
would have been impossible. It would have been impossible to carry out
the Holocaust as a social enterprise solely on the basis of anti-Semitism,
even rabid anti-Semitism, whether it be the contemporary ideological form
or the traditional religious form. For that enterprise a new political ideology was needed, one combining anti-Semitic content with a racial national mythology and subordinating it to a project for a totalitarian new
world. The Nazi ideology of the Holocaust particularly deserves study
and recollection, because the menace it presented was assembled from
many different European and German strands, from a rich tradition, to
create a lethal weapon. To racism and a racial national mythology it was
necessary to add the populism of a totalitarian project for a supposedly
better arrangement of the world. This allowed the Jews to be stigmatized,
just as the capitalist and feudal exploiters were stigmatized in that other
communist totalitarian project. More than that, the blueprint for a better new world allowed the Jews to be excluded from the human family,
from that part of humanity worth building the new life for. Realization of
the totalitarian ideal required the elimination of threatening elements
from humanity: the Jews in the German Nazi version, the exploiters of the
proletariat in the Russian communist version.
Let us note, then, how important it is to have comprehensive education about this crime of the 20th century. First, it tells how religion can
29
degenerate into such evil and dangerous social prejudices, how peoples
deepest religious feelings can succumb to truly diabolical perversion. Second, it is the most shocking example of the workings of ideology, ideology as a system of comprehending the world but also as a system for
programming collective and individual life. The kind of organization that
shapes how people look at the world, and which penetrates, it would seem,
into the depths of intimate emotions, stripping man of his own individual
mental and moral strengths. Third and finally, it is an example of the special evil of the 20th century, an evil inseparably bound up with politics,
exploiting the deep human desire to live in a better world, placing that
desire in service to a denial of human freedom and dignity, in service
to the ruin of the entire European tradition, the culture that created the
individual person.
From the perspective I adopt here, the Holocaust was the central
aspect of a truly satanic enterprise designed in the 20th century, an enterprise to build a new world and, of course, a new man. The Holocaust was
the mass killing of Jews, which cannot be forgotten, but that attempt to
physically annihilate all of Jewish society was also an attack on the whole
tradition and civilization of Europe. It was an attempt not only against the
sum of human achievement, but against God, without whom that culture
certainly would not have taken shape. That is why the memory of the
Jewish Holocaust is and should be the memory of the spiritual tradition
from which we come, from which even secular Europe comes, however
much it has treated that tradition as the distant past. The point is that both
of those totalitarian enterprises of the 20th century were aimed at disinheriting the new societies and the new people of memory and tradition,
so that they would become like a wave propelled by the leaders of their
parties and activated by feelings hostile toward others.
There is still another issue linked to the memory of the Holocaust,
and relevant not only in Poland but also in the societies of Eastern Europe
30
only recently living in freedom: the issue of the enormity of suffering that
the Second World War brought, and the experience of two inhuman totalitarian systems. The complicated experiences of Polish people show, on
the one hand, the extent to which traditional anti-Semitic attitudes (both
religious and political/ideological) assisted the crimes of the German Nazis; on the other hand, they show that anti-Semitism as ritualized animosity toward Jews had to be surpassed for it to become a system of crime.
The paradox in the reality of occupied Poland was that people with antiSemitic attitudes helped create and provide organized aid to Jews. At the
same time, education about the Holocaust in Poland must make clear the
extent to which peoples ideological baggage, which the anti-Semitic prewar National Democrats had given them, made them resemble the key
actors, the German murderers, spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes
actively (as in the case of Jedwabne and that whole region).
National feeling has to be suspended here if we are to come to terms
with the villainy in our tradition, not in order to forget our nation but
in order to see it better and to love it with more wisdom. Particularly since
in Poland the memory of the Holocaust should mean again perhaps paradoxically recovering the memory of the presence of the Jewish world in
Polish social life, in Polish history, and above all in Polish culture. Even
today it is difficult to imagine Jewish culture, that in Israel and that in
America, without what it took from the centuries of its existence in Poland,
without the influence of Polish culture. All the more difficult to imagine
Polish culture without the contribution of outstanding creative people who
were at once Polish and Jewish. The point is for the memory of the Jewish
Holocaust to bring a sense of community, and not rivalry about who really
suffered more. In this lies the whole trouble in teaching honestly about
the appalling past: in Poland those particular, specific crimes of Nazi
Germany have to be presented in very accurate detail, because Poles also
suffered a great deal on this bloody soil. In making clear the specific plan
31
of Nazi Germany and the enormity of destruction and suffering dealt the
Jews, the commonality between that suffering and the suffering of Poles,
Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians and others must be shown. Teaching
about that atrocity should change young peoples view of the world: care
must be taken so that organized hatred cannot in any way take hold in
them.
32
Bohdan Michalski
Lets Teach All of It from the Start
Basha, little Barbara, is reading ghetto memoirs and weeping: this is the
scene her mother has recalled, and in this reading matter she sees the source
of her daughters huge problems in adolescence. Basha has decided to be
a Jewess, and has begun a search for her imagined Jewish ancestors. Why
wasnt sensitive Basha allowed to grow up in peace, and why were her
loving parents transformed, in her mind, into enemies concealing her fantasized Jewish roots from her? Why must our children, the third postwar
generation, have to undergo the torment of assigned reading of Holocaust
books?
Since unfortunately we cannot, I believe, spare them the shocking
truth about the century of the mystery of evil, knowledge that is even
beyond the endurance of adults, let us proceed cautiously so that the knowledge will not damage them but will, like a vaccination, immunize them
against evil. Is that possible? I dont know. In Holocaust education the
outcomes are unknown, after all; only the aim is clear. We teach so that
genocide on a mass scale, the specialty of the past century, can be circumvented in the future.
A precondition for peaceful coexistence between groups with different identities, that is, different cultures, histories or religions, is tolerance.
The political precondition of tolerance, as practice teaches, is democracy.
Thus it would seem to be a matter of inculcating in our children the conviction that the only guarantee of avoiding the tragic experiences of both
33
totalitarian systems lies in democratic mechanisms. But is democracy
really the panacea for intolerance? Unfortunately, not entirely. In democratic Poland we are still intolerant. We dont like Jews, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians and Germans. In the democratic United States there are
outbreaks of strong ethnic conflict every so often, the democratic French
cant stand Arabs, and the Germans can do without Poles and Turks. So
democracy can at most be a necessary and sufficient condition for tolerance on the state level, but it has little effect on what citizens feel deep in
their hearts. I think that knowledge of the Holocaust should above all serve
to soften those hearts.
Can tolerance toward a former foe be learned? And can knowledge
about genocide be helpful in this? The path to tolerance, and further to
reconciliation and forgiveness between former enemies, no doubt leads
through knowledge of the Holocaust. Knowledge of the singular explosion of evil that occurred in Europe in the fifth decade of the last century.
That knowledge should teach sensitivity to the suffering of others; it should
compel an ethical examination, and reflection on human nature and the
mechanisms of conflict. I do not think, however, that harmony and peace
will prevail as this knowledge is spread among nations, ethnic groups, or
individuals. In other words, I do not think that disseminating knowledge
about the Holocaust will eliminate anti-Semitism!
If it is to be reduced in the future, something more is needed. Knowledge of the Holocaust must become one element of a broader education
grounded in an interdisciplinary context of historical knowledge, psychological techniques of conflict resolution, sociological knowledge about
stereotypes, etc.
Here I shall use an example from personal experience I have quoted
often: I know that the Jews dont drink blood, but a drop of Christian
blood for the matzo is always needed. Such a thought occurred to an
older gentleman during the discussion after a lecture by Rabbi Jules
34
Harlow at the Institute for Jewish-Christian Dialogue of the Catholic Theological Academy in Warsaw in the spring of 1996.14 A month earlier, at
a conference on relations between Jews and Christians organized by the
Polish Institute in Stockholm, Rabbi Harlow had declared, Poland is the
last place on earth my wife and I would want to visit.15 When he learned
that in 1944 my father was shot by the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising,
he said, For the first time I see Poles as victims.
No doubt both the rabbi and the Christian participant in the dialogue
encounter had sufficient knowledge of the Holocaust; despite this, stereotypes did their thinking for them, stereotypes sprung from the blank spots
in their historical knowledge. In this case, it was more a lack of general
knowledge that determined the intolerance and enmity, rather than ignorance of the Holocaust. The ritual murder accusation, tragic in its results
for the Jews, stands in contradiction to elementary knowledge of Judaism,
in which blood is a major taboo. In turn, not seeing Poles as victims of the
Second World War results from a lack of elementary historical knowledge of that war. (It is unnecessary to add that in Poland the numbers of
victims among Jews and Poles were similar except that about 10% of the
Poles lost their lives, while less than 10% of the Jews survived. Those
proportions are very hard to grasp rationally.)
On the other hand, one should not underestimate the importance of
knowledge about the Holocaust. Demythologized knowledge of the Holocaust is particularly important to us Poles. Jan T. Gross, the author of
Neighbors, wrote, Will acceptance of responsibility for odious deeds
perpetrated during World War II on top of a deeply ingrained, and
Presently named Cardinal Stefan Wyszyñski University.
After the Stockholm conference, Rabbi Jules Harlow changed his negative stance
and since then he has visited Poland many times, becoming engaged in Polish-Jewish
reconciliation. He has also co-authored a Polish-Swedish multicultural program on the
Holocaust and modern forms of religious and ethnic prejudice.
14
15
35
well-deserved, sense of victimization suffered at the time come easily
and naturally to the Polish public?16
In Polish-Jewish relations, dissemination of knowledge about the
Holocaust could make some Jews stop seeing Poles as the main perpetrators, and make Poles finally perceive the sufferings of their closest neighbors and take to heart the shameful truth that sometimes not Germans
but we Poles were the cause of it. This will only happen if both peoples,
joined by so many bonds in the past, stop concentrating exclusively on
their own pain and become capable of understanding the pain of the other
party. How can you be my friend, wondered a certain tzaddik, when
you dont even know what pains me? Lets not fool ourselves, however
forget about adults. Polish-Jewish reconciliation will take place through
the efforts of the third post-Holocaust generation. So let us teach all of it
to our children from the start.
16
J.T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,
Princeton 2001, p. 145.
36
Stanis³aw Krajewski
Teach Everywhere,
and Especially in Poland!
There are universal reasons, European and Christian reasons, and specifically Polish reasons. Do the universal ones apply to everyone? It would be
hard to argue that in India or Japan they should teach about the Holocaust
of Jews somewhere in Europe. There have been so many massacres and
genocides across the span of history, in every corner of the globe. They
should teach about the ones that affect them directly. And yet, in Japan
there is interest in the Shoah! They come to Auschwitz. They sense the
presence of evil there. Auschwitz has become a symbol clear to the whole
world, probably to some extent because Western culture is omnipresent,
and in this culture, much intellectual and emotional energy has been devoted to the problem of the Holocaust. Why? What makes this genocide
different from others?
One way of answering is to point out the means used by Nazi Germany: true factories of death were organized. The best organizers and
modern knowledge were employed to make the assembly-line proceed
with the greatest efficiency. The product was death. The Holocaust of the
Jews thus becomes a warning: this is what technological development
without moral progress can lead to. (Another example even better illustrates the problem of misguided scientific advance the atom bomb.) The
second answer to the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust points to
37
the extent of the enterprise. The Germans wanted to eliminate all Jews
from the face of the earth. In one country after another they introduced
a system that would enable the capture of every Jew, old people and babies
as well. War aims were not the point. It is known that sometimes the killing of Jews interfered with the achievement of war aims because, for
example, it required the use of means of transport that could have been of
use to the soldiers. This becomes understandable when we consider the
third answer to the question of uniqueness: the goal was to cleanse the
world. Murdering Jews was not pleasant. It was understood, however, to
be an essential step in the achievement of a grand ideological vision: rule
by a better race and the removal of the personification of evil the Jews,
according to Hitler from humanity. These circumstances are worth studying, because they say something important about our civilization. They
also point to the fourth answer: it was not about just anyone, but about
the Jews.
In Europe and North America, and also in other countries whose culture has European roots, the Holocaust must be seen as the culmination of
many centuries of anti-Semitism. It did not have to happen, but the ground
prepared by Christianity enabled the growth of murderous anti-Semitism.
The ground was the Christian vision of Jews as a nation of Christ-killers
and as a people hardened in their rejection of the truth taught by the Church
and therefore deserving of humiliation and persecution. This led to outright demonization of the Jews. And isnt it right to get rid of the devil?
When it was realized in the West that ordinary anti-Semitism could turn
into a campaign to systematically murder every Jew within reach, in the
center of Christian Europe, it brought shock. Particularly when it became
clear that no few people actively or passively supported the Holocaust,
and that those who opposed it saw that as a priority only rarely. This shock
led to a profound revaluation of the Churchs attitude toward the Jews and
the Jewish religion. It became the basis for a historically new phenom-
38
enon: Christian-Jewish dialogue conducted on the basis of partnership.
This dialogue is going forward, though many Christians and Jews still see
no sense in partnering with the misguided other side.
The Holocaust also fundamentally affected the attitudes of Jews. It
sparked determination to achieve Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
And what happens there impacts the world. Jerusalem is important to
Christians and also to Muslims. Its current fate cannot be understood without some knowledge of the Holocaust, which left a deep, unhealed wound.
More generally, the Jews played a special role in the history of Christianity. Judaism is the root. Thus, the attitude to the Jews is a component of
the attitude toward ones own roots. The majority of European Jews were
murdered. If the war had gone differently, there would be no Jews now
the children would have murdered the mother. That is why the Jewish
tragedy is a special challenge for the West.
Poland is part of Europe and the Christian world, so all the above
arguments should apply. At the same time, in Poland there was no shock
comparable with the one in the West. That is why one of the most lethal
slanders in history accusing the Jews of ritual murder is dying a harder
death in Poland than in the West. A mural depicting this accusation in the
Sandomierz Cathedral still has no plaque informing viewers that it does
not reflect the truth. After the war, Poles lamented the harm and losses
inflicted on them. The Polish sense of being victims par excellence, that
no one could have suffered more than they had, demanded that the Jewish
Holocaust be spoken of as a part, a small part at that, of Polish losses. At
the Auschwitz site, for years no one mentioned that the great majority of
the victims were Jews. It is worth teaching Polish youth about the Holocaust if only to debunk that image.
There are many more of these specifically Polish circumstances.
Ninety percent of the Polish Jews perished. This changed Polands human
and social landscape. Moreover, it was in Poland that the death factories
39
operated. Is it possible not to teach about what happened right here so
recently? It is a part of Polish history. The Holocaust cannot be compared
to any tragedy within reach of the collective memory. Whole families
perished, and no one remained even to remember them, let alone bury
them. All of Polish society of the day was witness to those events. That
role of witness to the tragedy is not without psychological consequences.
As yet there has been no deeper examination of them. Some literary and
cinematic works take up the problem. The psychological consequences
cannot be understood without knowledge of the realities. By not teaching
about the Holocaust we make it impossible to understand some of the
poems of Czes³aw Mi³osz, Wis³awa Szymborska, Krzysztof Baczyñski or
Jerzy Ficowski.
Poles were not only witnesses of the Holocaust. There were also those
who cooperated in it. Although the main and the ultimate perpetrators
were Germans, the participation of Poles was not always the result of
compulsion by the occupier, not always the act of degenerate people from
the fringes of society. The murder of Jews in Jedwabne in July 1941 did
not become the subject of public discussion until 2000. For decades it was
a taboo topic. It was not spoken of publicly although everyone in the town
knew about it. Jedwabne was not the only one. The extent of the taboo is
still unknown, but it is clear that there is something to teach.
Poles are justly proud of the number of Polish Righteous Among the
Nations honored in Israel for aiding Jews during the war. I too think that
they deserve to be seen as Polands best representatives. However, their
deeds can be appreciated only when the context of their actions is taught,
showing why it required heroism. And the reason was not only the ruthlessness of the German occupiers, but also the frequent ill will of their
Polish neighbors. Moreover, one outcome of the murder of Jews was the
appropriation of their homes and much property by the neighbors. The
effect of this on Poland then and Poland now, when reprivatization has
40
become a subject of debate is little recognized.17 To teach all this is to
introduce students to a difficult but necessary truth about life. Finally, in
Poland as in Israel and everywhere else, it is necessary to have the kind of
education that shows how teaching contempt can lead to killing. The Shoah
provides an object lesson.
17
The term reprivatization is used in Poland to refer to restitution of property to its
original owners, not to privatization of state-owned companies.
41
Stanis³aw Obirek SJ
The Long Shadow of Be³¿ec
Today one cannot write or speak about the Holocaust in Poland without
including what happened in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. Leaving the details to be established by historians, I would like to recall a statement by
Rabbi Jacob Baker, who is from Jedwabne. Asked whether he expected
apologies from Poles, he said this:
I expect sincere contrition. That would be the best apology, and the best way
to extend the hand of reconciliation to Jews. Many of them, especially in
Israel, do remember Poland, and have good memories of it. Maybe it will
surprise you, but Jews are grateful to Poland that for a thousand years it was
their home, it gave them shelter, and our culture flourished most beautifully
here. What a beautiful country, Poland! How beautiful nature is there.
I remember Jedwabne, what a pretty place. I remember Jedwabne. I could
have said, to hell with the Poles, may they disappear, but believe me,
I dont feel that way. Jews dont feel that way. We do not have revenge on
our minds. Only God has the right to take vengeance. We would only want
the murderers to be punished if some of them are still alive. Them, yes,
because they deserve punishment. But ordinary Poles, the ordinary residents of Jedwabne? They were decent. We were good neighbors, friends.
In this same interview by Krzysztof Darewicz of New York for Rzeczpospolita newspaper, he added, I believe that although there no longer
are Jews in Poland, our friendship cannot be forgotten. It has to be main-
42
tained and strengthened, with good will shown on both sides. I am convinced that this is possible, even knowing what happened in Jedwabne.
Rabbi Baker was born in 1914, so he is a wise elder. I have met many
such people, older even, but more younger ones both Christians and
Jews. I am convinced that friendship between Christians and Jews is not
only possible but is already a fact. It does not have to be proposed or
appealed to; it needs to be described and spoken of as much as possible. It
is in speaking of such friendships that I see the only possibility of meaningfully (that is, in a way that enables us to uncover the meaning hidden in
the tragedy of the Holocaust) talking about what happened to humanity
during the Second World War. Because the Holocaust is not only the tragedy of the Jewish people; it is the tragedy of all of us, and we all are
responsible for it.
I want to tell about my attempt (which has barely begun) to understand the Holocaust. It is marked by the place where I was born, in
Tomaszów Lubelski, and the place where I grew up, in Narol. Both towns
are next to Be³¿ec, one of the locations of the German death camps for
Jews, in which, in less than a year (from February to November 1942),
600,000 European Jews were savagely murdered along with 1,500 Polish
Christians who had tried to help their Jewish neighbors survive.18 I have
visited the Be³¿ec camp many times, first as a child not completely realizing what I was seeing, and later after becoming a priest. I have looked at
the place through the eyes of my guests. Every visit has deepened my
awareness that we, Christians and Jews, are the ones who must remember
the victims. I can still see before me the deeply moved reaction of my
Originally, the plaque commemorating the death of 600,000 Jews at Be³¿ec also
had a reference to 1,500 non-Jewish Poles killed there for having aided Jews, but in the
absence of written proof it was removed. In my opinion there is no reason to eradicate the
traces of their existence. New research, I hope, will justify the original inscription. Abraham
Cykiert and Henryk Luft, Jews mentioned in this essay, confirmed me in this belief.
18
43
friend Abraham Cykiert from far-off Melbourne. That same evening, after
returning to Cracow, he wrote a stirring essay.19 Abraham had experienced the £ód ghetto and the hell of Auschwitz. Perhaps that is why he
heard the voices of the Be³¿ec victims so clearly, but thanks to his sensitivity we too can hear those voices.
Henryk Luft of Israel, who is among the few fortunate ones who
managed to escape from there, speaks of it differently. He tells his story
without bitterness. What he has preserved is a sense of gratitude:
We arrived from Lwów in the morning. I managed to slip out of the rail car,
and two other boys with me. They ran in one direction and were shot on the
spot. I made it. I knocked on a window. An older woman opened it for me,
and gave me bread and warm milk. She showed how to get to Rawa Ruska
we had a relative there who was a pharmacist. Along the way I met
a peasant with a wagon. When I asked how far it was to Rawa, he said
Get in. I awoke next to those same railroad tracks in Be³¿ec. He just said
to get out of the wagon and left. By some miracle a woman with two milk
cans was approaching. I grabbed one and went along. When the Ukrainian
policemen asked, she answered, Hes ours. That saved me. I could talk
about it for a long time. But why return to it.
Henryk returned to Be³¿ec and looked for the home that had saved his life,
but there everything had changed. There are more stories like that. They
should be recalled and recounted.
I return to Be³¿ec very willingly. I walk around that forgotten cemetery of European Jews. I think of those 1,500 Christians who were murdered together with the 600,000 Jews. I think of Abraham Cykiert, of
Henryk Luft, of those who helped and whom no one remembers. How to
join the memory of Be³¿ec, of the Jews of Tomaszów and Narol, with the
19
44
A. Cykiert, Milczenie Be³¿ca, Wiê 2001, no. 4, pp. 5962.
collective memory of my native region? I think, and cannot think of anything. Perhaps such an initiative as the publication of this little book is an
answer of a kind? Perhaps. I would like to think so, and that is why I have
written these few lines about the long shadow of Be³¿ec.
45
Tanna Jakubowicz-Mount
In a Spirit of Reconciliation
Whats the purpose of human evolution?
Some think we are here to gain divine
knowledge of how to combine opposites
and reconcile contradictions.
David Lynch
I am deeply convinced that the spirit of the new times is a spirit of reconciliation. Reconciliation of man with the world, people with people, man
with himself. We seem to be beginning to understand that it makes no
sense to direct human energy against life. But the road to making this
reconciliation a reality is long. If we do not want to pass a legacy of violence to our children, we have to heal evil at its root, and this means to
shed light on the dark side of our mentality. If the Holocaust is to be taught
about, it means not only revealing the truth about the past, but showing
how the same mechanisms operate in the world here and now, in different
societies and in man himself.
The Holocaust still-living history
The question of why intolerance, xenophobia, nationalism, fascism and
fundamentalism raise their heads not only in Poland but also in many places
around the world calls for deep reflection. I am not alone in my conviction
that we are living in a time of identity crisis. Humanity at the turn of the
46
century, a time of transformation, feels threatened by the worlds inconstancy and unpredictability, and fears the disappearance of boundaries,
the loss of individuality. Spiritual teachers from different traditions say
that the most visible signs of a time of change are chaos, a spiritual vacuum,
and fear of the unknown. When the ground shifts under our feet, we cling
tightly to a given identity and affiliation: national, political or religious.
I am a Pole, a Catholic, a Jew, a German. Fear of the unknown world finds
its outlet in fear and hatred of strangers. Nationalism and fascism draw
new energy in this way, providing an outward sense of identity and power.
The longing for an ordered, divided-up world seems to me to be the greatest danger, because that image of a world stamped with divisions, that
I Not I opposition, is the source of fear, enmity, suffering and violence. Thus it seems to me all the more urgent to convey the experience
of and knowledge about the Holocaust to young people. We have two
paths to choose from: either domination by the old order based on human
ignorance and fear, or the creation of a new model of coexistence on the
basis of a clear mind, an open heart, and empathy.
A community of suffering
I agree with Jan Gross, who said that dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust demands from us spiritual evolution and transformation above all.
What does that mean? I shall start with my own example as an illustration
of inner work, which can be difficult but extraordinarily helpful. The question of how to encounter the stranger in oneself and in other people enters
not only into my work with people but also deeply into my spiritual life
and practice. Every November for the last five years I have sat to meditate
on the ramp in Birkenau, where trains from all over Europe reached their
final end. Together with me sit a huge international group of people who
have come from around the world Jews, Germans, French, Japanese,
Poles and other people of different nationalities, religions, denominations
47
and skin colors. This takes place within a program of retreats run by the
Zen Peacemaker Order, an interfaith organization founded by the Buddhist
teacher Bernie Glassman.
The purpose of this meditation is to bear witness to what we apprehend in experiencing our presence at that place, in the face of the horrible
crimes that were committed there. First I felt shock, realizing the extraordinary precision with which the machinery of death had been organized.
I felt enormous hatred for the perpetrators who had granted themselves
the right to be masters of life and death and to destroy millions of human
beings. Later I went deeper into the process of identifying with the many
people from my family who perished in Auschwitz. I wanted to unite with
them in their suffering, to feel with my whole self their despair, their
terror in the face of death, of being torn away from everything... In the
crematorium, along with others in the circle I recited their names aloud.
When I went there the second time, I sensed that I could identify not
only with the victims. I began to discover within myself that stranger, the
perpetrator hiding in the shadow of my higher soul. My inner child
emerged, who in her time had been left marked by the specters of the last
war. So wounded and humiliated that she had dreamt of revenge, of taking
vengeance against her persecutors, of inflicting pain and watching them
suffer. Then a poem came...
From a wounded child you can grow up to be a wounded tormentor
Or a wounded healer.
With the same hands, with that same energy
You can kill or heal.
Which do you choose?
Do you who wound and kill see the people before you,
Or phantoms spun from your pain, fear and humiliation.
Do you prefer to shatter the mirror before you instead of seeing
Your own shadow?
48
During our meetings in Auschwitz I saw children of the Holocaust and
children of SS officers weep in each others arms. After the dark night of
the soul, that generation is making a tremendous effort to sit together, to
deeply feel the suffering of the other, and to join together in a heartfelt
intention to leave mutual rancor behind, to forgive each other.
How to teach about the Holocaust in schools?
Now I shall try to generalize and objectivize this experience in order to
formulate a sound program to convey knowledge of the Holocaust. It is
not a matter of dividing the world into perpetrators and victims, of shooting at each other from behind the piles of corpses, because this can only
fan hatred and vengefulness. The point is to expose the roots of evil and
uncover the truth, because only what is exposed can be disarmed. I suggest, then, that a teaching program about the Shoah should include the
following stages:
1.
2.
Bearing witness to the truth bearing witness to the truth about our
life and experience. This has a cleansing and healing effect. It would
be good to invite witnesses, the people closest to direct experience of
persecutions, or to offer diaries, memoirs, interviews, films with
people who experienced the Holocaust directly, and taped interviews
with victims.20
Demonstrating the community of suffering conveying the message that there is no pain in the world that does not affect us. Genocide
is the shared pain of all humanity, and it demands a global solution.
Victim and perpetrator often spring from the very same root suffering, despair and humiliation.
20
Many resources can be found at www.vhf.org (Survivors of the Shoah. Visual
History Foundation).
49
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
50
Meeting the stranger in ourselves and others exposing, through
workshop activity, the mechanism of projection, to show how we
fear meeting our own dark side, how unrecognized aspects of
ourselves difficult, painful, dark and stigmatized aspects are projected onto the world, and how in this way we create our enemies and
turn our aggression toward others, making them victims of our aversion to our own selves. In this way we add to the worlds suffering.
The so-called stranger reveals our unwanted side to us. I suggest
the workshop which for some time I have been conducting during
international Meeting the Stranger gatherings. The point of this
work is to identify, understand, accept and reconcile conflicted parts
of ourselves. The person who accepts himself entirely does not cast
a shadow upon the world.
Working on the mechanism of frustration and deprivation
showing the ways in which socially frustrated people look for inferiors in order to release their anger at the world.
Working on myths, stereotypes and prejudices examining the
myths and stereotypes about different nationalities involved in conflict, and how to neutralize them.
Sensitizing children and youth fostering their sensitivity to values such as the preciousness of human life and life in general, their
tolerance toward the differentness of other people, their appreciation
of all peoples fundamental right to a free, decent and fulfilled life,
their capacity for empathy with the suffering, and their sense of mutual dependence and connection with all living beings.
Showing the common root of all religions and spiritual traditions
conveying the kind of idea I communicated to His Holiness the
Dalai Lama during his visit to Poland: I believe that humanity is like
one huge, beautiful, strong tree whose roots draw from the common
soil which is the ground of the different cultures and spiritual tradi-
tions. The trunk is shared, and the crown with its thousands of
branches and millions of leaves mirrors our sacred differences and
sacred community. We should create a Council of the Worlds Elders,
consisting of the wise mentors from the different traditions, in order
to cultivate our Tree of Life together.
I think that already, very gradually, our evolution from homo tribus to
homo holos is proceeding. Tribal man sees the world as a battlefield, fights
to hold on to territory and survive, and is motivated by fear of the stranger.
Whole man has the capacity to unite with the whole community human,
planetary, and cosmic. I believe that the only place where this transformation from tribal to whole man can take place is the human heart. When
enough of us learn how to make use of our natural ability to love and heal,
how to rid ourselves of hatred and the desire to harm, when we replace the
old model of perpetrator and victim with one based on love and partnership, we shall no longer pass a legacy of violence to new generations.
51
Stefan Wilkanowicz
Lets Try to Understand!
A few years ago, reflecting on the war in the Balkans, I came to the conclusion that no European should receive a high school diploma if he cannot sensibly answer three questions:
1. Why Auschwitz?
2. Why Kolyma?
3. Why Sarajevo?
If he does not answer, it means he does not understand basic historical
facts, he may prove defenseless against new conflicts, and he may not
understand the tragedies that have occurred on other continents (Cambodia, Rwanda) and for which Europe bears some responsibility.
In preparing a dossier on the subject of the anticulture of hatred and
the culture of solidarity, centered mainly around the conflicts in the countries of former Yugoslavia, we observed that the methods of provoking
aggression are similar or the same in all the mentioned instances.21 They
serve to awaken race, class and ethnic hatred. They can be employed in
different circumstances and against various real enemies or others artificially created for one purpose or another. They are employed today and
they will be employed in the future, so they need to be recognized, and we
have to know how to prevent and counter them.
21
The dossier was prepared for the EuroDialog Internet service, accessible through
www.znak.com.pl/eurodialog
52
Though their propaganda methods are similar, each of these tragedies has its particular characteristics. The Shoah is distinctive not in terms
of the number of victims (class hatred has taken more of them) but in
terms of other circumstances. It was the first time it was decided to exterminate an entire people, including old people and children. Rational industrial methods were applied to the task, but at the same time the process
was lent a quasimystical quality; this mass murder was seen as an almost
redemptive duty to the German nation and to humanity, a kind of reverse
soteriology, salvation based purely on hatred. The rational fused with the
diabolical.
Every political, economic and psychological factor that led to or
facilitated the Holocaust can and must be studied. This is essential for the
prevention of similar tragedies. But it must be fully recognized that they
do not explain everything, that there is some mystery here, some depth of
evil which escapes us, and which demands some sort of spiritual response,
and not only the interventions of professional educators.
The same applies to Hitler and his devotees. One can fathom the
causes of his anti-Semitism, but it is hard to grasp his demonic character.
It is also hard to understand ultimately how he infected masses of people with that demonic virus, how ordinary, fairly decent people became
fanatic torturers without abandoning their nice bourgeois virtues.
All this presents educators with a mammoth task. How to convey it
all? How to communicate the uncommunicable? How to provide knowledge and a spiritual response?
Approaching these tasks realistically, first we have to supply book
knowledge, because most often it is lacking, and without it the rest is
impossible. This knowledge must be given not merely as something that
happened but as something that can happen. This seems shocking, but it is
not a psychological maneuver to shock young people. It has to be known
that man is capable of great evil, and young people do know this. They
53
also know that in our communities there are poisons that lead to hatred
and violence. Hate is now in style, wrote a high school student answering a youth and violence survey. Others are pessimistic; they feel powerless against evil. There are also those who want to combat it, who seek
ways of acting against it. They can be the best teachers of their peers.
Often they are the ones who most deeply feel the tragedy of the Shoah and
other calamities of our age, and they have a better understanding of their
peers. So let us make them full partners in meeting the joint responsibility
to learn about that tragedy and to draw conclusions from it.
Let us beware of isolating the Shoah from other tragedies, however,
because we have to build broad solidarity against contempt, hatred and
violence solidarity among people who feel close to other catastrophes
of humanity, as well as those who feel a particular link with the tragedy of
the Holocaust.
54
Robert Szuchta
Against Silence and Indifference
Why I teach about the Holocaust reflections of a teacher
The road to Auschwitz was paved
with the stones of indifference.
I was born in Warsaw and live there. Before the Second World War it had
one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. The Jewish citizens of
my town had their streets and homes here, their shops and theaters, businesses, schools and synagogues. Here they published many periodicals
and books, and studied the holy books of Judaism. They dreamed of building a Jewish state in Palestine, but they also considered how to achieve
harmonious coexistence with the Poles in a shared home, Poland. Their
culture radiated to the whole world and enriched Polands culture. As
a result of the Holocaust the planned, institutionalized, organized and
systematically implemented extermination of six million children, women
and men this world ceased to exist. The single and sufficient reason for
their killing was that they were born Jews.
Many years after these events, as a pupil in a Polish school, I searched
in vain in the history textbooks for information on how the Polish Jews
lived and how they perished. From I.B. Singers writings I learned that the
Poles and the Jews had lived next to but not with each other for eight
hundred years. I found out how difficult it is to work the history of the
Jews and their Holocaust into the mainstream of Polish history. On the
55
occasion of observances commemorating the last war, the martyrdom and
heroism of the Polish nation were placed in the foreground until only recently. Schools and scout troops were named after Polish war heroes. In
memoirs there was no room for my citys Jewish residents, who in 1942
went to the Umschlagplatz from where they took their last journey in cattle
cars to death in the gas chambers and crematoria of Treblinka. Nor was
there room for the heroic handful of Jewish youth who in the spring of
1943 launched an uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. Today, as a teacher,
I cannot fail to teach about the history and culture of the Polish Jews.
They who died in an inhuman manner cry out to us: Remember, do not
forget, speak of us to the next generations. I keep hearing that voice. It
calls to me from the cobbles of Warsaws streets, from the Umschlagplatz,
from the ruins of the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and from the
burning barn in Jedwabne. I cannot remain indifferent to that cry. Who is
to speak of this? Those who could do so have passed on.
Years ago, Theodor Adorno stated that the task of teaching after
Auschwitz is to oppose barbarity. According to the philosopher, the Holocaust was barbarity, and the frightening thing is that barbarity remains
a possibility so long as conditions permitting its return exist. The modern
history of Europe confirms those fears. Srebrenica, Kosovo, Rwanda and
many other places in the world do not allow us to forget the atrocities of
sixty years ago. The link between contemporary genocide and the Holocaust compels me to consider what I should do so that my students know
and try to understand what took place, so that they can counteract the
barbarity Adorno warned against.
I teach about the Holocaust because in conveying knowledge about
the history of Poland I must not forget that Jews lived among us for hundreds of years and created their own original culture, which enriched Polish culture. After all, it is difficult to explain Polands history without
discussing the place and role of Jews in it. If I overlook this part of Polish
56
history, the students will receive fragmentary, incomplete knowledge, and
this means that the picture of the past will be false. The history of Poland
is the story of a multiethnic state and society, the achievement of the many
peoples inhabiting Polish soil, including Jews. That world ceased to exist
more than sixty years ago. It was ended in such a dramatic way by the
Holocaust.
I teach about the Holocaust because it occurred on Polish soil, against
the will of Poles but in their presence. This prompts the question of the
variety of attitudes toward the Holocaust. How did Poles comport themselves in the face of the Holocaust of their Jewish fellow citizens and
neighbors? How did other communities of Europe and the world behave?
What was known? What was done? Although this problem has been raised
in the literature many times and continues to be raised, it still awaits an
unequivocal appraisal. However, this does not release me as a teacher
from considering and discussing this difficult and for many, painful
question with my students.
I teach about the Holocaust because it is a unique event in modern
history. I would like my students to understand that uniqueness, to be able
to evaluate it independently, to be able to tell the difference between genocidal acts such as pogroms, the genocide of the Thirty Years War period
(16181648), the Armenian genocide in 1915, the extermination of Polish
people in the years of World War II, the Stalinist crimes symbolized by
The Gulag Archipelago, or the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia,
Rwanda and Kosovo. That will allow them to understand the scale and
character of the particular instances of genocide that have befallen humanity over the span of history, and to perceive the uniqueness of the
Holocaust against that background.
The uniqueness of the Holocaust is tied to a further argument for
including it in history classes in school. Rabbi Byron L. Sherman, who
has devoted 30 years to teaching about this event, states that it is a para-
57
digmatic event of modern history. He compares the Holocaust to an earthquake, and sees it as the first and the strongest quake, which is followed
by aftershocks. The results of the Holocaust are felt to this day, and the
aftershocks are the terrorist acts, ethnic cleansing and mass murders of
populations committed in different corners of the world. The reflection
that accompanies teaching about this event creates sensitivity to those aftershocks. It makes us ask ourselves: what can we do so that they never
recur? The question, after all, is not pointless.
I teach about the Holocaust so that my students will remember what
happened, so they will not be silent in the face of the evil which unfortunately is present in our lives. It is said that sin begins with a word, but sin
also begins with the silence that becomes assent and which can be tantamount to participation. Protesting against the unfolding Holocaust of the
Jews, in 1942 Zofia Kossak-Szczucka wrote:
The world watches these crimes, more terrible than anything history has seen
and is mute. The slaughter of millions of defenseless people is taking place
amidst a general, sinister silence.... This silence cannot be tolerated. Whatever
its motives, it is depraved. Whoever is mute in the face of murder becomes the
murderers accomplice. Whoever does not condemn it permits it.22
I believe that these words are still relevant today. The truth that the writer
has conveyed to us must be borne in mind if we want the evil never to be
repeated again. I want to pass this truth to my students.
Finally, the most obvious reason I teach about the Holocaust is that it
is an element not only of the Jews history but of world history and
Polands history. Thus it should be a subject of teaching in Polish schools.
I would like all graduating students to have a basic knowledge of as many
22
Protest odezwa conspiracyjnego Frontu Odrodzenia Polski, in A.K. Kunert,
Polacy ¯ydzi. 19391945. Wybór róde³, Warsaw 2001, p. 213.
58
issues as possible, and to understand them, because they are entering adult
life supplied with a general education.
For me the Holocaust is an event without precedent in modern world
history. In teaching about it I am making my students aware of the dangers
inherent in intolerance, nationalism, xenophobia or totalitarianism. It
seems to me that the best way to do this is not merely to provide students
with the basic facts of the Holocaust but to reveal and analyze the mechanisms that allowed it. I am convinced that if we want to mold an open,
tolerant person who is sensitive to suffering and respects the life and dignity of his fellow man, we should provide solid knowledge of a time when
people were barbarously deprived of dignity and life. Teaching about the
Holocaust is not an easy task, but it is worth taking the trouble, in the hope
that we will at least slightly change ourselves, others, and the world, which
will become less brutal and more bearable. I have faith in this.
59
Sergiusz Kowalski
Its Obvious
Why teach about the Holocaust? And why not? It happened on Polish soil,
after all, and not all that long ago, in my parents generation. We dont ask
whether to teach and we do teach about things from much earlier
times, good and bad. About the dynasties of Polish kings, their feats and
reverses, the splitting of Poland into duchies in 1138, the election of kings
by the nobility, the Four-Years Sejm, the Confederation of Bar and the
Confederation of Targowice, the partitions, uprisings, and grass-roots reform movements under foreign occupation. About the recovery of independence, the death of President Narutowicz, and Pi³sudskis May 1926
coup. About the Second World War, about the struggle and suffering of
the Polish nation.
Why, then, not teach about the Holocaust, which engulfed millions
of Polands Jewish citizens and Jews from all over Europe who were transported and methodically murdered in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka,
Be³¿ec and Sobibór. Is that less important? It is not those who say teach
it who should explain their view, but those who still keep asking just
why, exactly. That is basically the most important reason: it has to be
taught, simply because it took place. Because it is a part and what an
important part of modern Polish history, regardless of the fact that the
death camps were organized by Germans, German Nazis. They organized
them here, in Poland, and put to death millions of Jews in them, a large
part of them Polish citizens. Thus the subject would be unavoidable even
60
if the teaching of history and literature were to be maintained in its obsolete, Polonocentric form, that is, with Polands history purged of information about the spiritual and material culture of the Jews, Germans, Italians, Dutch, French and many others who made outstanding contributions.
Another question can be put, however. Not why, because that is
completely obvious, but what for, for what purpose. Such a purpose
would be to restore accuracy to history, to make essential corrections, and
especially to fill in the huge gaps left from communist teaching. There are
many such things which must be taught because they have never been
taught up to now. When it comes to the Jews, in the schools of the Polish
Peoples Republic one could learn in history classes that in Auschwitz the
Nazis murdered all the peoples of Europe according to an alphabetical list
beginning with Albanians and Austrians and ending with Jews.23 Yes, also
Jews; but Jews were the ones in the huge majority, and this was not mentioned those Austrians, French, Hungarians and even Germans murdered as Jews. Who in those schools had an opportunity to learn anything
at all about the blackmailing of hidden Jews, the Polish police working
for the occupier, the Baudienst formations in which Polish youth served,
the Warsaw pogrom of Easter 1940, priests handing over Jews after hearing confession ... of Jedwabne and Radzi³ów, of the innocent custom of
burning Judas during the war ... of the glasses of water sold for gold
coins to the Jews who were crammed into the death trains. Or about the
rail actions of 1945 in which National Armed Forces partisans pulled
out of trains and shot about 200 repatriated Jews being resettled from the
east ... about the postwar killings of Jews returning home from exile, about
the Kielce and Cracow pogroms, and the hundreds of other unidentified
denunciations of wartime and postwar reality.24
In Polish the word for Jew begins with the letter ¯.
J. Tokarska-Bakir, Obsesja niewinnoci, Gazeta Wyborcza, January 1314, 2001,
pp. 2223, published as part of the discussion of Jedwabne.
23
24
61
In communist times, school teaching, including history teaching, was
not pure Marxist propaganda. True, it did ignore facts inconvenient to the
regime, for example Stalins murder of the majority of the Polish Communist Partys leaders, but it also ignored other facts troubling to the historical image of Poland as undeviatingly tolerant, unstained by collaboration,
fighting for our freedom and yours, pure, noble and beautiful, if one
ignores the few representatives of the age-old renegade camp of backwardness, obscurantism and reaction. Lets note that all the intricate historical meanders were supposed to have led, by the inevitable logic of
history, toward the reality of Peoples Poland, the land of fulfilled dreams.
The omissions and distortions were often deliberate, not motivated by
propaganda considerations, because among those who transmitted the
vision of history in the days of the Polish Peoples Republic there were
also nationalists among the communists the precursors, architects and
creators of the infamous anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. Some of them,
the likes of Leszek Andrzej Szczeniak, to this day are writing history
textbooks, improved but kept in that same tone, and recommended by
the Ministry of Education despite the protests of the leading experts and
intellectuals.
Not only the faction around Central Committee member Mieczys³aw
Moczar, but other champions of wrongheaded patriotism as well, preferred
not to let young people know about the darker chapters of Polish history,
and the flaws in Polish tolerance. Not until recently have many articles in
the press (and not yet in textbooks) treated Polish-Jewish subjects without
the customary hackneyed falsehoods and insinuations. Rev. Stanis³aw
Musia³ SJ, for example, writes candidly and acidly:
For at least three centuries the Church in Poland tolerated, supported, and
usually initiated trials against Jews about so-called ritual murder, and this
against the teaching of the popes. As the result of more than a hundred trials
62
in this matter, many hundreds of people suffered death, preceded by cruel
tortures not to mention the constant fear in which the Jewish communities
lived, because every chance discovery of a childs corpse could be used
against them. The Church in Poland was loath to condemn humiliating mistreatment of Jews, especially during Christian holidays, and did nothing
against these practices. Let a quotation serve as an example, from the 1618
work Mirror of the Polish Crown. The serious harm and great trouble it
suffers from the Jews, written by Rev. Sebastian Miczyñski: There is no
one to humble the Jew, and that hallowed and praiseworthy custom has
disappeared, when, seeing a Jew in town on a holy day, the boys and innocent children would chase him away with stones and mud, and pull him by
the beard, avenging the Lords suffering.25 The Church in Poland did not
defend the good name of Jews and took no action against the flood of vulgar
anti-Semitic publications, beginning with a collection of extraordinary slanders against the Jews in the notorious book The Jews Animosity Toward
God by Rev. Gaudencjusz Pikulski from the mid 18th century,26 and ending
in the third-rate journalism practiced by priests in the interwar period. These
are some of the sins of the Church in Poland as an institution, for which
apologies to the Jews should be made.27
Let us add that even today the Bishop of Sandomierz has not yet ordered
removed, or even appropriately labeled, the picture of ritual murder publicly exhibited in the church there, an example of the early iconography of
accusations drastically at odds with the entire spirit and letter of Judaism.
Others are writing, reconstructing the true picture, far from the
stereotyped ideal, of how Polish-Jewish relations were:
25
S. Myczyñski, Zwierciad³o Korony Polskiej, urazy ciê¿kie utrapienie wielkie, które
ponosi od ¯ydów wyra¿ai¹ce synom Koronnym na Seym walny w roku pañskim 1616
przez..., Kraków 1616.
26
G. Pikulski, Z³oæ ¿ydowska preciwko Bogu y bliniemu prawdzie y sumieniu na
obia¿nienie Talmudystów, Lwów 1758.
27
S. Musia³ SJ, Prosimy, pomó¿cie nam byæ lepszymi, Gazeta Wyborcza, May 21,
2001, pp. 2425.
63
[Niemcewicz] believed in the Talmudic poison eating at the Jews viscera
and was aghast.28
Duke Adam Czartoryski along with the Reform Committee declared in 1816
that the Jews could not yet be granted civil rights, since first they had to be
improved, that is, freed of the ignorance, superstitions and moral corruption we see in the Jewish masses.29
She graduated high school very young, and right away to Liege to study medicine! Because in Warsaw at that time, especially in that faculty, there was not
merely a numerus clausus for Jews, but in practice a numerus nullus. Those
were the worst times, you know, the bench ghetto, when Jewish students had
to stand during the lectures. Professor Kotarbiñski also used to stand then, but
Tatarkiewicz sat, she adds as if embarrassed. But I explain the Polish antiSemitism of those days with poverty, she quickly concludes.30
For now at least, the collective memory is being reconstructed, the labor
of committed essayists and journalists. Work on the canon of school education and catechesis is in its infancy. True, textbooks on the Holocaust are appearing, by Robert Szuchta and Piotr Trojañski among others,
but thoroughgoing change awaits a teaching methodology for and a general willingness on the part of the ordinary teachers of history and literature all over Poland who do not know the subject. The point is not to
humiliate the Poles, to suddenly transform them from victims and heroes
into a nation of blackmailers and torturers. That would be an equally false
reversal of the stereotype. The point is for teachers and students in free
Poland to recognize themselves as a more ordinary society sometimes
heroic, sometimes ignoble like every other sensible nation.
28
M. Janion, Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi umar³ymi, Warsaw 2000, p. 123.
Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz was a writer, politician, and hero of Polands independence
movement; he coauthored Polands May 3rd Constitution of 1791.
29
Ibidem, p. 104.
30
E. Berberyusz, Rzeczy mieszne, Rzeczpospolita, April 11, 1998. Tadeusz
Kotarbiñski and W³adys³aw Tatarkiewicz were eminent philosophers who taught at the
University of Warsaw during the period in question.
64
Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz
The Holocaust
and the Folk Stereotype of the Jew
You have no little Jewish towns in Poland, none anymore.
In the windows of Hrubieszów, Karczew, Brody, Falenica,
there are no lighted candles, pointless to search for...
Elegy for the Shtetls
... thus wrote Antoni S³onimski in 1950, recalling a world that had ceased
to be. At the time the poem appeared, however, that world did exist in
memoirs and in peoples memories. It was easy to find there. Today in
seeking the Jewish world we often resort to what tradition tells us on the
subject. Not to examine the concept of tradition in depth, I shall restrict
myself to highlighting two of its basic features: it conveys the past to us
selectively, and it perpetuates stereotypes that came into being at some
earlier time. And we know, after all, that Polish societys centuries of
living next to Jewish populations dwelling in tightly knit groups in towns
and villages had to lead to the creation of the stereotype of the Jew, and
then to its perpetuation in many elements of traditional folk culture. This
stereotype emerged when the two cultures coexisted on the same land,
and the basis for its creation was the differentness expressed in language,
religion, ceremonies, dress, and so many other generally known features.
The stereotype of the Jew appeared in the tradition of rural Poland next to
the rest of the others such as the German, Hungarian, Gypsy or chimney
65
sweep. He was encountered much more often, however, and was much
richer in terms of both exterior attributes and the functions performed.
Important to our considerations are the following questions, then: where
should we look today for a traditional source conveying the figure of
the Jew, what does that figure look like, and what are its fundamental
features?
The frequency of occurrence of the stereotype of the Jew in the tradition of the Polish village or small town was largely associated with the
variety of roles he played. We see this dichotomy clearly in Christmas
plays or caroling customs featuring the figure of King Herod. Both of
these customs have lost their currency, but they persist and form part of
the array of spectacles performed not only locally but also in all kinds of
competitions for folk ensembles. Today we also find the traditional figure
of the Jew above all in souvenir figurines and trinkets intended mainly for
tourists visiting Poland. Thus it seems important to trace, at least in a few
examples, the diversity of the stereotype of the Jew as it is communicated
nowadays.
We see this diversity most accurately in examining the role of the
Jew in folk Christmas plays. Herod, the image of absolute evil the Jewish king issuing an order to kill the innocent is a Jew, but so is the rabbi,
symbol of wisdom. The latter is summoned by Herod to pore through his
books and interpret the future. In this same performance, a group of villagers on their way to Bethlehem call to their Jewish neighbor to come
along with them to pay homage to the Christ child. Thus the village sees
the neighbor as one of their own. During the intermissions of these plays
a pair of Jews dance, sing and amuse the audience, taking on the role of
jesters. Examining the role of the Jew in annual ceremonies related to the
seasons, we see clearly that he is the protagonist of various scenes that are
magical in nature, associated above all with the magic of the harvest cycle.
He leads a goat, symbol of fertility, and when the goat falls he revives it;
66
this symbolizes the return of winter-dead nature to life. The Jews costume is also associated with the magic of fertility: he is often hunchbacked,
clothed in a sheepskin with the fleece worn outward, belted with a straw
rope. And these, after all, are characteristics of a dichotomous figure. The
variety of roles of the Jew is connected with the variety of costumes in
which he appears, of course. The costume is as varied as the roles he
plays. In contrast to the generally accepted conception, the Jew appearing
in annual ceremonies very seldom appears in Hasidic costume, but he
often has the caricatured features established by anti-Semitism.
We find the figure of the Jew not only in annual ceremonies. One
craft which in the past forty years has propagated the stereotype of the
Polish Jew abroad as well as in Poland has been folk sculpture and the
making of figurines. The Cracovian figurine revived after the war continues its traditional forms, recapitulating the figures of Hasids rocking
back and forth as at prayer.31 The continuation of the established forms
of the toy means that its movement, costume and, most important, the
lines of the face are perpetuated. Most of the faces invoke anti-Semitic
caricatures.
The figures represented by folk sculptors are completely different.
Secular folk sculpture, we know, did not flourish in Poland until the postwar years. The subject matter imposed on folk sculptors in the first period
was supposed to refer to the pre-1939 period. Naturally, then, the figure of
the Jew could not be absent from sculptures representing village life before the war. Because of the commercial success of these figures, they are
still frequently made today. Wishing to present figures from the interwar
period, folk sculptors often rely on their own memories, recreating a whole
range of characters from many different vocations, with their characteristic attributes and in different traditional costumes. Usually they are the
31
These are figurines sold at Salwator Square in Cracow on Easter Monday.
67
figures with whom Polish society had direct contact: itinerant traders,
craftsmen, klezmer musicians and, less often, people representing the interior Jewish world, such as rabbis, yeshiva students, etc. For this reason,
in these sculptures we most often meet male figures. Often, especially in
the earlier period, the authors of particular sculptures stressed that their
works showed particular figures they knew, that they had tried to portray
their faces.
Not to multiply the examples from other areas of folk creativity such
as writings or proverbs, it is time to consider what kind of stereotype of
the Jew is conveyed to us by folk tradition. It certainly is not uniform, but
we can point to two basic types: traditional, known in the interwar period
and now copied unchanged or very little changed; and new, created at
a time when traditional Jewish society has ceased to exist. The latter invokes memories of those times of coexistence, which are also the memories of the youth of the creators of the stereotype and which are subject to
all the laws of a remembered time when we were young and carefree.
Thus, in accord with the basic features of tradition mentioned earlier,
this tradition conveys the image of the Jew to us selectively, and we must
bear this in mind in reconstructing the life of small-town Jewish communities. However, it seems to me more important to stress that the selection
is made not only within the framework of elements of Jewish culture but
also within the categories of the time that is being conveyed. According to
laws known to psychologists, human memory can purge itself of times
that seem alien, cruel and terrifying. For the problem under discussion,
the Holocaust is certainly such a time. To perpetuate the memory of that
time and to come to terms with what happened to ones Jewish neighbors
during the Holocaust would have required a huge emotional investment,
and this did not happen in rural or small-town society. The reproduced
stereotype is rigid. It shows the Jewish world at a time when it existed. It
does not come to terms with the question of what happened to this world,
68
why it is no more. In the material familiar to me, including more than 500
sculptures representing figures of Jews, only a few refer to the time of the
Holocaust: Jewish man and woman part before entering the ghetto, Jew
returning after the war and seeking his family, etc. Thus the Holocaust
period is not communicated through the traditional means of repetition of
stereotypes, and other means must be found to communicate it.
69
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska
General Francos Daughter
A few years ago, in the first class of a graduate seminar devoted to the
problem of how the Holocaust is represented in American films and literature, I conducted a brief survey among the students who had expressed an
interest in taking the two-year course. My purpose in making the survey
was to find out how much they knew about the Holocaust. These were
fourth-year English majors who had completed high school in the mid
1990s, when the history textbooks had already been partially corrected
and supplemented, and when the Polish language curriculum included, in
addition to Tadeusz Borowskis and Zofia Na³kowskas stories, also Hanna
Kralls To Outwit God and Andrzej Szczypiorskis The Beautiful Mrs.
Seidenman.32 The seminar candidates represented a generation maturing
at a time when more and more was being said in the mass media about the
Holocaust. This period saw the official observances of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the liberation of Auschwitz, and
the Kielce pogrom, so I assumed that they should be better grounded
than earlier generations attending high school in the 1970s when Jewish
32
Tadeusz Borowski and Zofia Na³kowska both wrote stories with uncompromising
depictions of the dehumanizing effects of the Nazi occupation. Borowski survived
Auschwitz and Dachau; Na³kowska was a member of Polands postwar Main Commission
for Investigation of German Crimes. To Outwit God (Chicago, 1992) centers around an
interview with Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman (New York, 1989), set in occupied Poland, portrays the
reactions of Polish Christians and of Germans to the plight of the Jews.
70
subjects were taboo, or in the 1980s when the school textbooks still
presented a falsified picture of history despite the emerging fashion for
Jewish subjects.
I asked for brief definitions of the Shoah, Umschlagplatz and
Endlösung, identifications of a few historical figures, organizations and
institutions (Anne Frank, Dawid Sierakowiak, Dawid Rubinowicz,
Emanuel Ringelblum, Jan Karski, ¯egota, Yad Vashem), and the date of
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.33 Other questions related to the number
of victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, the origins of the majority
of them, and the events of 1968. Finally I asked how many Jews lived in
Poland before 1939, and how many do at present.
It turned out that only one of the ten could answer most of the questions (except for the questions about historical figures like Sierakowiak,
Rubinowicz and Ringelblum, whom no one was able to identify). Later
I found out that the well-informed student also worked as a tour guide and
often took groups from Israel through Lublin and Maidanek. Among the
rest, only one gave a correct answer about the Shoah (an exhaustive one at
that, explaining that it is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust and also saying a few words about Claude Lanzmanns film Shoah). Another person,
again only one, gave a partial answer about the Umschlagplatz, but most
knew what Endlösung means. Two gave identifications of Anne Frank,
but one of them said she was the daughter of General Franco writing her
memoirs. This person, however, was the only student besides the tour
Dawid Sierakowiak and Dawid Rubinowicz were ghetto children whose diaries
were found after the war. Emanuel Ringelblum, historian of the Warsaw ghetto, wrote
reports and collected statistics, memoirs and other documentary material about the situation of the Jews under Nazi occupation, hiding it in buried containers, two of which were
recovered after the war. Jan Karski was a Catholic Pole, a resistance hero who entered the
Warsaw ghetto and also infiltrated a transit station to Be³¿ec in order to learn firsthand
what was happening to the Jews, later escaping and personally pleading in vain with Allied
leaders to stop the Holocaust. ¯egota is explained in footnote 12.
33
71
guide who could tell who Jan Karski was. They all left a blank space next
to the name ¯egota, except for one who stated that it was a district in
which Jews were placed. Two gave answers about Yad Vashem, and
only one of those was partially correct. For the ghetto uprising only two
students gave the correct year of 1943 (without giving the month), one
offered a rather lengthy answer about the circumstances of the uprising
without giving the date, two gave the year 1941, and the others wrote no
answer at all. About the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the answers
ranged from 100,000 (the majority Jews) to eight million (the majority
Jews or, in another version, members of different nationalities) victims. In
fact no one gave correct numbers. On the other hand, almost all of them
provided correct answers about March 1968. The last question, about the
numbers of Jewish people before the war and now, remained without answer most often; those who tried to provide numbers stated that there are
very few Jews in Poland today, perhaps a thousand, and before the war
34
there were perhaps about 30,000, or maybe more than 500,000.
Practically all the seminar participants later wrote excellent masters
theses on literary representations of the Holocaust. During the classes and
their own research they demonstrated great interest, sensitivity and commitment, and often in hindsight they recalled with laughter or embarrassment how little knowledge about the subject they had brought from school
or home.
My observations were confirmed in July 2001 during qualifying interviews for the cultural studies program, a major program that attracts
people with broad interests in the humanities, who are often active in various clubs and associations. Despite this, when the interviews touched on
Jewish issues most frequently at the interviewees initiative, because the
examination did not include this particular subject there were statements
34
72
Professor Tomaszewski gives the number at almost 3.5 million in his article herein.
like these: they were interested in Jews and the Holocaust because it was
a super subject; that the term Holocaust means persecution of the
Italian minority (obviously an effect of watching the film Life Is Beautiful); that Maidanek is Lublins most interesting or oldest monument.
Perhaps those last responses should not be so surprising, since I have heard
many times from guides I know at the Maidanek Museum that they least
like to guide Polish school groups, not so much because of the students as
the teachers, as the youth usually have not been prepared for the tour of
the camp, and the teachers are cramming the visit to Maidanek between
other items on the itinerary, leaving less than an hour for the tour, which
should last at least 2.5 hours not including prior preparation. Israeli and
German groups are better in comparison, according to the guides, arriving
much more prepared.
All these examples show how essential it is to place greater emphasis
on teaching about the Holocaust. It is also important for the subject not to
be disconnected from the history of the Jews in Poland or Europe. What
until recently typified the published guidebooks to various places in
Poland, when Jews were presented exclusively in the context of the
Holocaust, should have no place in middle school or high school curricula. To convey the tragedy of the Jewish people, an appropriately broad
context can be provided by showing the rich culture and history of the
Jews and their contribution to Polish and world culture, by pointing out
that in prewar Poland there was, besides literature in Polish, a flourishing
literature in Yiddish and Hebrew, and by teaching that Poland is the ancestral land not only of ethnic Poles in America and other countries but
also of a large part of the Jewish Diaspora scattered around the world.
When I mentioned to an American professor friend, the author of
many books about the Holocaust, that the majority of my students had
never heard of Anne Frank, he told me, with the ignorance of his own
students and the Americanization of the Holocaust in mind, Why give
73
them Anne Frank? After all, you have Dawid Rubinowiczs and Dawid
Sierakowiaks diaries in Polish, with much fuller and much more representative descriptions of what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust!
No doubt he was right about the value of those writings, but those
diaries are even less well known in Poland than the diary of Anne Frank.
In this country we often hear complaints about foreigners ignorance of
the history of Poland, including the history of the Holocaust. We hear
people gripe that Israeli students arrive with a particular ideological stance,
that they perceive Poland as a cemetery and not as a country where Jewish
culture developed freely for centuries. Undoubtedly there is a great deal
of truth in those statements, but before we begin to instruct others it would
be worthwhile to start with ourselves and prepare the young generation
for an encounter with their own history, often painful, often difficult, but
how essential to their intellectual and moral growth.
74
Hanna Wêgrzynek
Every Third One of Us
Walking along Warsaws streets, I wonder how the city looked before the
Second World War. True, I was born many years after it ended, but as
a historian I have a need to know the past, and as a Warsovian I try to
imagine the bygone city that was called the Paris of the north. They say it
was beautiful, more beautiful than today, and different.
Do many Warsaw citizens ask themselves the same question? Probably most are concerned with the here and now. Their roots here, like
mine, do not go deep. In most cases their parents or grandparents did
not move to Warsaw until after 1945, filling the gap left by those who had
departed forever. The family traditions of many modern residents of
Warsaw lie elsewhere, and this does not encourage reflection on the look
and the character of the city in the past.
In the old photographs we do not see chaotically scattered blocks of
grey housing projects. The houses are set tightly side by side, forming the
streets. Whole thoroughfares pulsing with life, filled with little shops,
eateries and workshops, the likes of which are few today. Most of the
surviving photos are of the grandest streets. The life of the side streets is
less often documented and how interesting it must have been!
It has all passed. The people are different as well. They dressed and
acted differently then. Women wore hats; it was the fashion, but also a kind
of norm imposed by the customs prevailing in certain social groups.
75
Looking at the pictures, we understand that styles change, but among
the crowds of Warsovians from the days of the Second Republic we find
yet another difference, one not the result of fashion but of religion and
customs. Men in long black topcoats and narrow-brimmed hats. Women
in wigs, in dresses completely concealing their elbows and knees. Today
we do not meet people dressed like that anymore.
The speech of the prewar streets was also different. It had different
sounds, a little harder and grittier, full of the long w sound. This was
Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazi Jews Polish Jews. A blend of German, Hebrew and Polish. The smells of the prewar streets were other
smells, permeated with goose fat, ginger and garlic. In todays Warsaw
there is no way to hear those sounds or sense those smells.
It is hard to believe that there are such places in the world, in Israel or
in Brooklyn, New York. There, when the people reminisce about the old
Warsaw, the important street names they mention are not Jerozolimskie or
Ujazdowskie, but Nalewki, Krochmalna, Gêsia and ¯elazna. These streets
were the setting of that other world described and popularized by Isaac
Bashevis Singer in Shosha and The Family Moskat. Jewish Warsaw lived
beside us Poles for two hundred years. Supposedly the same town, but
how remote and unknown.
Before 1939, about 370,000 of the residents, almost a third of
Warsaw, were Jews. Can we really appreciate that in every third home
Christmas Eve was not celebrated, the Christmas tree was not decorated,
and St. Nicholas did not arrive? Completely different holidays were observed, with names that sound foreign to us: Purim, Succoth, Chanukah.
Walking down the street, lets imagine that every third person was a member of another culture and religion. Every third person would be someone
we could say nothing about today.
The world described by Singer or preserved in a few photographs is
one we can no longer find. It perished between October 1940 and May
76
1943. Tens of thousands of Warsaw citizens, crammed into the ghetto,
died of diseases, hunger and repression, and nearly 300,000 were murdered, with systematic and calculated cruelty, in the gas chambers of
Treblinka. One third of the residents of the city, the capital of a European
state, ceased to exist, along with their language, customs and culture. The
way that happened is not a matter of no concern. We cannot fail to know
how the life and death of every third one of us Warsovians looked.
The tragic fate of the Warsaw Jews can be contained in an emphatic
phrase the Holocaust, a premeditated atrocity carried out by Nazi Germany. We cannot forget, however, that it was done in our midst. The absence of that memory is our Polish shame. The world of the Warsaw Jews
does not exist in the consciousness of the Warsovians who live on
Krochmalna, ¯elazna and Grzybowska Streets today. It has turned out to
be appallingly easy not to know about one third of the residents of the city,
who lived here, worked here, and together with Poles created a common
history and culture only sixty years ago.
When I attended university, and only then found out that before 1939
as many as 370,000 Jews lived in Warsaw, at first I could not believe it,
and later it dawned on me that I had been deceived. In the many books
I had read, nothing on the subject was written. I think that this is what has
to be changed. I would not want some young resident of Warsaw to someday experience the same feeling that I had when I was already a student in
the history department. I would not want them to feel deceived by the
history professionals.
77
Leszek Hoñdo
And the Sun Shone
and Was Not Ashamed
I live in Tarnów, where before the Second World War more than 44 percent of the residents were Jews. Today, little evidence remains to tell us
that Jews helped to build and shape the city, and left a mark on its character. A magnificent Jewish cemetery is preserved. After the war, a monument was erected at a site where mass executions were carried out. Its
main element is a broken column from the New Synagogue, which the
Nazis destroyed. On it is a Hebrew inscription: The sun shone and was
not ashamed.35 It is a cry of despair in the face of the tragic events of the
Holocaust of the Jews.
Decades have passed since the Second World War. Today, for children and youth the atrocities of those years, including the Holocaust, are
not so horrifying, neither in the scale of the crime nor in the way it was
carried out. The Holocaust is an extreme example of what racism can lead
to, with its ideology of the superiority of some races, its intolerance of
different groups of people within a single society who differ in their world
views or fundamental political ideas, or its xenophobia, that is, aversion to
or hatred of foreigners. One consequence of World War II was that the
generations growing up after the war had virtually no contact with the
35
The inscription is taken from a poem by Nachman Bialik about the Kishinev pogrom, and refers to Isaiah 24:23.
78
problems of ethnic minorities, but it is still important to make them realize
the consequences of racism and to place them in the broad context of other
ethnic conflicts and the moral norms that apply to the relations and actions
of individuals. As we can read in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, these individuals differ by race, skin color, sex, language, faith,
political and other views, nationality, social origin, wealth, birth or other
status. These individuals have many different needs which they cannot
meet by themselves. They cannot live by themselves in isolation from
other people. Contact between them takes two forms: communication and
cooperation. In the context of a unifying Europe, these forms take on a new
dimension. Every person belongs not only to his family, region or class;
his bonds of affiliation to cultural and religious communities extend beyond the boundaries of his country of origin. It is in the perspective of the
Holocaust that we see that hatred and hostility toward those who are different or who, on the basis of irrational premises, are outside ones own
group, can lead to collective violence and crimes.
Experiences of the Holocaust that relate to the attitudes and behavior
of individuals and social groups toward loathsome acts of violence or
coldly performed mass executions are important in the moral dimension,
for the present and future. The tragic fate of the Jewish people points to
the need to seek a new sense of coexistence which overcomes divisions
and seeks alternatives to nationalism, racism, extremism and hegemony.
Evil springs from ignorance. In the course of school education it is important for a young person to learn not only what differentiates and divides
nations, societies and cultures, but what joins them. Showing the richness
and values of a multicultural society is one way to inculcate an attitude of
respect and tolerance.
The tragic fate of the Jews alludes to the present. Terrible atrocities
do not take place in a single moment. They are introduced gradually, with
the more or less active or else passive support of the society in which they
79
occur. It begins with a failure to react to derision and humiliation. Later
comes denial of rights, and segregation. At the end, the belief emerges
that these others not only are dispensable but are simply an obstacle to
normal life. Thus, teaching about the Holocaust is a reminder that a criminal ideology can arise in any place and at any time. The Holocaust contains the message that it is necessary to react at the beginning, not when it
is too late as is the common practice in the modern world.
The example of the Holocaust can be used to show students universal
experiences manifested in the attitudes of both individuals and societies:
moral choices about good and evil and about the criteria of responsibility
for ones actions in the extreme circumstances of war. These decisions
were expressed in the different stances taken toward Jews, from selfsacrificing aid often beyond the rational limits of assistance (providing
hideouts, food, money and false documents) to vile denunciations and
blackmailing of Jews.
Perhaps this kind of sensitizing will put an end to attempts to calculate who owns the worlds largest cemetery, Auschwitz-Birkenau the
Jews, more than a million of whom perished there, or the Poles, about
75,000 of whom were murdered there. According to Jean-François
Bouthors, such an approach corresponds to the Nazi grasp of the world
according to ethnic criteria. Numerical thinking is an affront to each individual victim regardless of ethnic affiliation, for every death was unique.
Every murder magnified the contempt for the individual and his
differentness.36
To explain the horror of genocide is not easy. Many young people
come to the conclusion that they will never understand the problem of the
Holocaust and therefore do not even try to understand it. Teaching about
36
J.F. Bouthers, Auschwitz nakazy i warunki pojednania, in: Pamiêæ ¿ydowska,
pamiêæ polska (papers from a colloquium held in Cracow on June 1011, 1995), Cracow
1996, p. 155.
80
the Holocaust should become a permanent element of public education;
it should provide reliable knowledge to adults as well as schoolchildren.
Its purpose would be to supply arguments that can be used in combatting
prejudice and stereotypes, arguments referring to the genocide of which
Auschwitz is undeniably a symbol. The student will have to deal with
stereotypes in order to handle, for example, the oft-repeated statement
(based on the frequent opinion that anti-Semitism was rife in prewar Poland
and on ignorance of the nature of the Nazi occupation on Polish soil) that
the extermination of Jews would have been impossible if Poles had not
collaborated with the Germans in putting Jews to death. The mere fact that
the killing of Jews from other European countries took place in Poland
was supposed to be proof of this!
Knowledge is needed when bizarre statements are made in Poland
as well negating the very fact of the genocide, or of particular atrocities
in the systematic mass murder of Jews (the Auschwitz lie). Followers
and imitators of David Irving have surfaced in Poland too. Finally, an
argument really very important to me is that we have a responsibility to
teach about the Holocaust so long as the word Jew remains a term of
abuse in the vocabulary of young people.
81
S³awomir Kapralski
Why Teach About
the Romani Holocaust?
Why is it worthwhile and necessary to teach about the mass murder of
Roma during the Second World War?37 The immediate answer is that we
are obliged to; we owe it to the Roma and to historical truth. Until recently, the wartime fate of Romani people was a blank page in historiography. Much research is still needed, and previous findings have not been
disseminated broadly enough. Ignorance about what happened to the Roma
has a moral dimension as well: it prevents us from seeing them as victims
of a campaign of racial persecution that was sustained by all the capabilities of modern Europe, and this in turn makes it difficult to free ourselves
from perceiving Roma within the categories of the ingrained stereotypes
that led to their tragedy, stereotypes which still lie at the root of discrimination against them.
In addition to the need to fill gaps in our factual knowledge (and to
reach the broader public with this knowledge), and in addition to the need
for ethical discussion of the moral implications of recognizing the Roma
as victims of Nazi persecution, study of the Romani holocaust also presents an important challenge for social theory. It raises a host of questions
I use the term Roma in its political and not ethnic sense, as the one recommended by international organizations of Roma to denote all people belonging to groups
who are named Gypsies (Cyganie, Zigeuner, etc.) by their surrounding communities.
In German-speaking countries, the term Sinti und Roma is used in this context.
37
82
that can promote reflection on the mechanisms of collective memory,
the link between memory and group identity, and the role of contemporary social, political and cultural processes in the formation of new
perspectives for understanding the past and the new meanings that the
past acquires in the present.
Thus, in teaching about the Romani holocaust it seems that at least
four groups of problems must emerge. The first of these concerns what
exactly happened to Roma during World War II. The second is connected
with the problem of why Roma did not create a culture of memory of
their holocaust immediately afterwards, why they themselves stifled the
memory of the war or else regarded it as not important. The third group of
issues relates to the question of why Roma (or at least certain groups of
them) are creating such a culture of memory now, and in what way this
process is connected with transformations in Romani culture and in their
present-day circumstances. The last group of issues concerns what to call
what happened to the Roma during World War II, and what role contemporary discourses attributing meanings to past events plays in interpreting
the past: specifically, the dispute about whether the Roma were on a par
with the Jews Holocaust victims, or whether the persecution they suffered, though tragic, was of a different order than that which befell the
Jews and therefore does not fall within the discourse on the Holocaust.
What happened?
In regard to the first group of problems, the forms of Nazi persecution of
Roma in the period directly preceding World War II certainly deserve attention. According to certain researchers, one can speak of three such forms:
(1) intensification and coordination of already existing means of control and
coercion applied to Roma by the authorities; (2) the creation of new guidelines for dealing with Roma, aimed at increasing control and repression, and
in consequence at removing Roma from society through an institutionalized
83
policy of deporting them and placing them in concentration camps; and
(3) the application of race legislation and policy to Roma, based on an ideology of their biological inferiority which served as the basis for actions
leading to their physical annihilation. In part these forms succeed each other,
and in part they are simultaneous and overlapping.38
Analysis of these problems in the teaching process could lead to
a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of Nazi persecution: was it encoded, as it were, in the logic of contemporary society, as Zygmunt Bauman
and others maintain, or was it a phenomenon of its own, explainable in
terms of the Nazis anti-Jewish obsession, as for example Yehuda Bauer
states. Analyzing the persecution of Roma, and the ideology that justified
that persecution, would also reveal the role played by science, as practiced
in the Third Reich, in formulating and justifying political decisions, and
also in creating a climate of moral acquiesence to the murder of human
beings.
Equally important to an understanding of Nazi persecutions is the problem of the process by which decisions about the fate of the Roma were
made. The ideological inconsistencies and conflicts between the different
institutions that formed the machinery of mass murder are particularly evident in the case of Nazi policy toward Roma. Analyzing this aspect would
contribute to a deeper understanding of the tragedy of the Roma and the
functioning of the Nazi state.
Another important problem involves examining the extermination process and its different forms. If the fate of Roma in the concentration camps
and death camps is fairly well known, much work remains to be done if we
are to comprehend the whole extent of the tragedy that befell the Roma,
because the majority died in summary executions by the military and police
38
p. 14.
84
See: G. Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, OxfordNew York 2000,
or, especially in the territory of the former Soviet Union, as a result of operations by special units whose task was to exterminate defined categories
of people. This leads us to the question of the number of victims. That is
extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to establish precisely, because of
the lack of exact data on the mass murder and also because estimates of the
number of Roma living in Eastern Europe before the war are only approximate. Nevertheless, analysis of the disparities between the numbers given
by different researchers (from 200,000 according to Yehuda Bauer, through
the most frequently given figure given in current literature, 500,000, to more
than a million according to Ian Hancock) would be an instructive example
of the objective as well as subjective limits of our knowledge.
Mute memory
The second group of problems opens up a fascinating field of considerations about the relation between history as what happened and history as
what has been remembered. Here the focus is the Romas long silence
about their holocaust. That silence existed because traditional Romani
culture did not create a discourse in which the Second World War and the
tragedy of the Roma could be presented as a singular, unprecedented occurrence, and because historical memory has taken on a very specific form
in that culture and has played a lesser role than in other cultures. As an
eminent expert on traditional Romani culture, Lech Mróz, writes, memory
of the past did not become an element of group identity in that culture;
group identity has been based on the effort to maintain the timeless ideal
of the way of a Rom in the present day, and to defend it against outside
influences through a radical separation of the Romani world from the foreign, hostile reality surrounding it.39 In that reality, history has usually
39
See: L. Mróz, Niepamiêæ nie jest zapominaniem. Cyganie-Romowie a holokaust,
Przegl¹d Socjologiczny, 2000, vol. XLIX/2, pp. 89114.
85
served to legitimize claims to a given territory from which the Roma,
through their nomadism or through marginalization and subordination,
were excluded. In a sense, Roma had no reason to remember their history
as a course of events succeeding each other: their identity was always
based on a fairly delicate balance between replicating a certain stable cultural model and adjusting, of necessity, to the situations of daily life and to
the changing contexts in which this replication took place. Change came
from the outside; it belonged to the foreign, non-Romani world in which
Roma endeavored, as much as possible, to live according to their own
suprahistorical rules.
The Roma are not a people without a history; the point is that an
attempt to contain their history in the form of a narrative of historical
events which became the shared fate of the group would be something
foreign to their traditional culture. Such narratives belong to the nonRomani world. Roma traditionally were separated from that world by
a wall of ritual regulations, and were removed from it, often on the other
side of walls built of something besides rituals. Thus, to comprehend their
fate in the form of history, Roma would have had to transgress the boundaries of their world, and that would have amounted to a dramatic threat to
the cultural foundations of their existence. For this reason, the memory of
the victims of wartime persecution, often vivid and emotionally experienced by individuals and families, could not find cultural expression on
the level of discourse of the group as a whole. Thus it was a mute memory,
and in that muteness impermanent and fated to disappear gradually.
Moreover, the memory often was expunged from consciousness in
a subliminal process of defense of cultural identity; one way of effecting
this was to erase the period in which its principles were undermined. Life,
survival in harsh conditions, and the continued existence of ones group
have been the highest values in traditional Romani culture. Thus, the
memory of holocaust times, however vivid and painful in the memories of
86
individuals and families, was not automatically generalized, institutionalized, and transformed into a buttress of group identity that would unite
(at least potentially) all Roma.
It should also be noted that the Roma are divided into many groups,
often with no communication between them, that until recently their culture depended on oral transmission of tradition, leaving no written sources,
and finally that the majority are people without formal education. All these
factors have contributed to a lack of interest in their own history, that is, in
history as a narrative of events that became the lot of all Roma.
New need for history
In the 1950s this situation began to change. Economic transformations,
a voluntary or coerced shift to a settled style of life, assimilation processes,
the growing role of formal education all these made traditional Romani
culture, based on replicating in the present the suprahistorical model of
the way of a Rom, more and more anachronistic, and incompatible with
a reality in which Roma ever more frequently had to come into contact
with the non-Romani society around them on terms set by the latter. In the
absence of options such as effective integration of Roma with the communities in which they lived, the disintegration of traditional Romani culture
meant that intellectuals and Romani activists faced the problem of developing new cultural forms with which Roma could identify in the changed
reality. One such cultural form has been a vision of the Roma as a diaspora
people, having their own history and grounding their modern identity in it.
The vision of history put forward by Romani elites as the domain in
which the modern identity is constructed includes the following elements:
common roots in the culture of India; the common experience of long interaction with the European peoples amidst whom the Roma ultimately constituted themselves as a group (or number of groups); the common experience
of persecution the Roma suffered from others, the culmination and new
87
dimension of which was the Second World War; and finally, the still-brief
but important history of political organizing by Roma.
In presenting such a vision of history, Romani activists wish to stress
the antiquity of Romani tradition and culture (the connection with India),
while defining themselves as a European people par excellence (with an
inalienable right to live among the peoples of Europe). They call attention to
the modernity of the kind of identity proposed: political self-organization,
which takes on many different forms.
The experience of persecution during World War II plays a particular
role in this vision. First, making it a fundamental dimension of Romani
history is an effort to show the Roma as a people at the center of the most
important events in Europes modern history, not as a marginalized people
vegetating outside of history. Second, a historical narrative of the fate of
Roma during the war can become an excellent link to unite the different
groups into which Roma are divided, by making them aware that in certain historical situations their differences did not matter: they were treated
the same (at least in principle) because they were Gypsies. In this way
a uniform narrative of the holocaust period allows the members of different Romani groups, who often do not feel closely associated or are even in
conflict, to envision the commonality of fate of the Roma, and this can
have important consequences for the forms their political cooperation takes
now and in the future. Third, the conception of the history of the Roma as
a people which Romani activists have elaborated can contribute to the
creation of a paradigm of collective memory in which they can find themselves and can bring together dispersed individual or family memories. In
this sense, a history centered around the holocaust of the Roma can create
a discourse that will allow forms of expression to be found for the experiences of many Roma who have been silent about their sufferings because
they lacked a language to express them until now.
Sufferings in the past are bound up with present-day sufferings. This is
88
the fourth aspect of the vision of history presented here: it can depict contemporary persecutions of Roma as a continuation of the Nazi persecutions
and thereby surround them with a similar aura of moral condemnation. Such
delegitimation of anti-Romani violence can prove important in education. It
allows existing prejudice and acts against Roma to be classed together with
the Nazi-inspired racism that is universally condemned. For many students
in various European countries whose people suffered during World War II,
it will probably be a surprise to learn that they are linked by a commonality
of suffering with the generally scorned Gypsies (though the Roma suffered to an incomparably greater degree).
Romani activists are fully cognizant of the political weight of such
a vision of history. These historical dimensions mentioned above are interwoven with, for example, the political program of the International Romani
Union, according to which The Roma are a legitimate part of European
culture and society and
by virtue of their unique history and problems
they deserve special treatment within a European framework. The IRU
advocates recognition of the Roma as a nation and is dedicated to building
unity around its symbol, a standardized Romani language. The IRU demands
the creation of a special status for the Roma and Sinti as a nonterritorial
(multistate-based or transnational) minority in Europe, in order to protect
a people who experienced a holocaust during World War II and violence,
pogroms, and genocide in the present era.40
In this manifesto we see the confluence of many earlier-presented
elements, comprising a self-definition of modern Roma. The experience
of the holocaust appears as one justification of the special status of Roma.
In expanding upon the IRU program, the Romani intellectuals Andrzej
Mirga and Nicolae Gheorghe write that Romani political elites were never
40
A. Mirga, N. Gheorghe, The Roma in the Twenty-First Century: A Policy Paper,
Princeton: Project on Ethnic Relations 1997, p. 22.
89
driven to demand their own territory and state. Thus, to legitimize their
claim, they advanced other elements of the concept of nation the common
roots of the Romani people, their common historical experiences and perspectives, and the commonality of culture, language and social standing.
The experience of the Porraimos the Romani holocaust during World War
II played an important role in providing the Romani diaspora with its
sense of nationhood.41 Here as well, an extraordinarily important nationbuilding role is attributed to the experience of the holocaust.
What is its name?
In the context of these quotations, finally it is worth calling attention to the
terminology used to describe what happened to the Roma during the Second World War. In the quoted excerpts the term Romani holocaust (characteristically, written with a lower-case h) appears, and also the Romani
word Porraimos, which literally means the devouring, used by some
Romani intellectuals to describe the persecutions suffered by the Roma during the war. Here the terminological problems mirror a very complicated
cognitive and ethical problem: what in fact to call what befell the Roma in
wartime. In terms of the historical events, we do now have much information about what happened, despite all the limitations on our knowledge.
However, the meaning of those events or the definition of the essence of
what occurred to the Roma during the war remains a subject of debate.
According to many scholars, both Romani and non-Romani, the Roma
were victims of the Holocaust (with a capital H) as much as the Jews
were. These scholars (e.g., Ian Hancock, Gabrielle Tyrnauer, Sybil Milton,
Michael Zimmermann) believe that the atrocities committed against the
Roma form part of the Nazi plan or intention to completely exterminate
racially inferior people (Jews and Roma), carried out on a huge scale and
41
90
Ibidem, p. 18.
employing modern technology and a bureaucracy. For others (Yehuda
Bauer, Steven Katz, Elie Wiesel, or recently Guenter Lewy) the Holocaust
was the fate of the Jews alone; it was something exceptional, one-of-a-kind,
while the persecution of the Roma, undoubtedly cruel though it was, was
not aimed at exterminating the entire group on racial grounds. For the latter
group of researchers, only certain Roma were condemned to slaughter on
racial grounds (so-called half-breed gypsies), while the extermination itself was not a planned operation (except for the campaign to sterilize Roma
in the Third Reich) but was carried out incidentally, on the fringes of the
extermination of Jews.
It is no wonder that scholars belonging to the first group, especially
those who are Romani activists, engage in sharp polemics with such views;
this is particularly pronounced in the work of Ian Hancock. He sees the
denial of the right to the Holocaust to the Roma as a continuation of the
centuries-long tradition of the same persecution and marginalization of the
Roma that led to their almost complete annihilation during the war. In many
official documents of Romani organizations, however, a less conflictive
notional convention is applied, according to which the Roma were victims
of a holocaust whose relation to the Holocaust of the Jews remains an open
question. Another convention involves promulgating the term Porraimos;
one aim of this is to focus on the Romani experience of their holocaust
without reference to what happened to the Jews.
The debate about defining what befell the Roma has, of course, huge
practical significance for the process of constructing the modern Romani
identity (as well as for the Jewish identity, to the extent that it rests on the
memory of the Holocaust as an event that affected only and exclusively the
Jews). As a debate essentially about values, it does not seem resolvable on
the basis of the social sciences. Analyzing it in the teaching process could,
however, direct our attention to the current twists and turns of the memory
of the time of slaughter, part of that memory being Holocaust education. In
91
particular, such an analysis would permit an understanding of the dual role
of memory: as an instrument for understanding history, and as a justification of the rituals uniting or forming a people. According to Adi Ophir, the
author of a work in which that dual role of memory was presented as an
antinomy, the more we use the Holocaust as an element of a strategy for
constructing or maintaining particular identities, the less chance we have to
understand history, to learn the universal aspect of holocaust experiences,
and in consequence to have an effective defense against the repetition of
tragic events in the future.42
In such an understanding, Santayanas famous formula, which everyone visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum can read, to the effect that
those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, would be
guilty of Enlightenment naivete. It is not a matter of whether we remember,
but of how. Perhaps Nietzsches vision should therefore be admitted as true:
memory enmeshed in the dynamic of our current interests inevitably reproduces the murderous determinism of history. One may ask, though, whether
a memory other than memory enmeshed in our interests and in our strategy
for constructing identity is at all feasible as a socially important phenomenon. This relates especially to the memory of tragic events that leave
traumas in which, as Barbara Misztal writes, collective identities are most
intensively engaged.43 For the more tragic the past, the less the chance that
it will be remembered in a purely intellectual, context-free manner.
For those who teach about the Holocaust, as for their students, it would
be worth bearing in mind those conditions of context, and their own role in
the process of reproducing memories. Studying the problem of the Romani
holocaust can help them in this.
A. Ophir, On Sanctifying the Holocaust. An Anti-Theological Treatise, Tikkun,
1988, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 63.
43
B.A. Misztal, The Sacralization of Memory, European Journal of Social Theory
7 (1), 2004, p. 74.
42
92
Andrzej Mirga
For a Worthy Place Among the Victims
The Holocaust and the Extermination of Roma
During World War II
The extermination of Roma during World War II used to be spoken of as
the forgotten Holocaust. Basically it still is. Unlike the Holocaust of the
Jews, or the genocide committed against other peoples and minorities, the
massacre of Roma has not yet entered the canon of modern history curricula. In the majority of European countries it would be useless to search
the school and university history textbooks for even fragmentary information about what happened to this minority in the Nazi era.
Does this in some way implicate the state institutions responsible for
curricula? Does part of the responsibility lie with the historians themselves,
who excluded or overlooked the fate of a marginal minority in their studies and thus did not supply the sources and knowledge needed for teaching?
Was it a result of the creation of a dominant narrative of the fortunes of the
nations citizenry, in which there was no room for the plight of the Romani
minority? Or, finally, does it implicate the Roma themselves, who for one
reason or other did not manage to present the world with their history of
suffering and persecution, so that it would become part of the institutionalized memory of the Second World War in European countries?
History both the history that researchers write and the living history
formed of memories that are cultivated, maintained and ritualized is not
something that exists and functions for its own sake. It is often subservient, it fills a need, or is instrumentalized, particularly when it is ethnic
93
history. Written and lived history also functions within the broader context of political and international relations, so it is often revalued. Finally,
it is a central element of national or group identities, in the maintenance of
which institutionalized education plays a fundamental role.
In attempting to answer the questions posed here, it is worth first noting that history is something learned, that historical memory is not only the
result of personal experiences and imparted knowledge, but above all its
elaboration by historians, and its teaching. States, or ethnic minorities that
had the backing of their states, disposed the means to teach history and in
this way fashion the historical memory of their national or ethnic communities. The Roma never had such a chance; they did not have their own ethnic
school system like other minorities, and in the schools they may have attended, the history of the dominant society was taught, not their own.
In the little Gypsy settlement attached to Czarna Góra village in the
Polish part of Spisz, where I was born and spent my childhood, the memory
of the war was virtually nonexistent.44 In my family home, only Mama
occasionally returned in memory to that time, and only sporadically. In
the evenings, as if casually, she told stories of the Germans and of what
had happened to people she knew, or to herself. So we found out that
during the war Czarna Góra was in Slovakia (during the time of Fr. Tiso),
that our father had been in a P.O.W. camp somewhere in north Germany,
liberated by the English.45 That as a young girl (she was 17 at the outbreak
of the war) my mother had survived several roundups in the Gypsy settlement in Czarny Dunajec, that few of the many taken to Auschwitz had
returned; one of the victims did return, and had a camp number tattooed
on her forearm... For us children, those fragments of Mamas wartime
recollections left impressions of what our parents had experienced. School
Spisz: a region in the Western Carpathians.
Jozef Tiso: President of the collaborationist government of Slovakia from 1939 to
1945; executed for treason and war crimes.
44
45
94
and history lessons filled out the picture of the horrors of World War II,
but did not lead to an understanding of what nazism and the war were for
the Roma, and why the Roma were murdered and persecuted... The individual memory of the victims, even if present in the form described above,
was not generalized in the form of reflection on the fate of the Roma
during the war. For that would have required going outside the individual
framework of memory to trace and reconstruct the course and scale of
events, to discover existing sources and compile reference works; thus it
would have required an elite able to put together the experiences and generalize them, an elite able to create and disseminate a historical narrative.
Historiography and the teaching of history cannot proceed without the
educated elites that perform those tasks. The Roma had no such elites, neither before nor directly after the war. Nor were there individuals among the
Roma who would have recorded their personal tragedy or the groups tragedy in memoirs, or left traces or documents of those experiences in some
other form. The case of Papusza and the poem Bloody Tears, or of Karl
Stojkas Auschwitz pictures are exceptions.46 This absence of elites, especially the absence of Romani historians, is still felt today. The majority of
works devoted to the extermination of Roma are by non-Romani historians.
Shaping historical awareness is also the task of political elites. A few
Romani ethnic organizations began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s in
46
Papusza (Bronis³awa Wajs), 1908?1987: Romani singer, poet and composer of
songs, some of whose work was translated to Polish and published by Jerzy Ficowski,
including the autobiographical ballad Bloody Tears: What We Went Through Under the
Germans in Volhynia in the Years 43 and 44; Papusza, Lesie, ojcze mój, Warsaw 1990,
pp. 6681. Ficowski was the first to write about the extermination of Roma, in: Cyganie
Polscy, Warsaw 1953. See also an article about Papusza by Gigi Thobodeau at
www.kmareka.com/growinganewskin.htm
Karl Stojka (19312003): Roma from eastern Austria, imprisoned in AuschwitzBirkenau at the age of 12, who made paintings in his later years depicting the wartime
sufferings of his family and people; The Story of Karl Stojka: A Childhood in Birkenau,
Washington, D.C. 1992.
95
the countries of Europe. The first congress of Roma, held in London in
1971, initiated a wider Romani ethnic movement. This led to the establishment of the International Romani Union (IRU) in 1972. The Romani
elites associated in the IRU raised the question of the extermination of
Roma and began to demand a worthy place among the victims of nazism.
IRU efforts for recognition of the Holocaust of Roma became part of the
construction of broader historical awareness in Romani society.
The lack of Romani intellectual or political elites after the war does not
furnish a strong argument to explain the historians silence or indifference
about the fate of this minority in the course of the war. More significant, it
would appear, was the way the Nuremberg trials dealt with the mass murder
of Roma, on the one hand, and on the other hand the outcome of efforts by
German Sinti and Roma to obtain compensation for war victims from the
newly established Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the Nuremberg trials, the sequence of events and the scale of the
mass murder of Roma were treated only marginally; there was not a single
Roma among the witnesses, and the documents and other testimony confirming the extermination of Roma were few. In the indictment against
Hermann Goering, based on Article 6 of the Charter of the International
Military Tribunal (IMT) (conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes
and crimes against humanity), the Roma were mentioned in the war crimes
charge, but did not appear in the charge for crimes against humanity. In
Judge Robert H. Jacksons opening statement, the Roma were mentioned
in the context of the experiments in the concentration camps (the first
victims were four Romani women in Dachau). In the closing statements
of the English, French and Russian prosecutors, there were references to
genocide committed against Roma, but the Roma were not mentioned,
as for example the Jews were, in the wording of Goerings sentence.47
47
M. Rooker, The International Supervision of Protection of Romany People in
Europe, Nijmegen 2002, pp. 3851.
96
More attention and space was devoted to the Roma in successive
trials: the so-called medical trials, those against the justice system, and
against the Einsatzgruppen. The ones on trial were Nazis of lower rank,
however. Thus the Nuremberg trials did not become a watershed for the
Roma as they did for the Jews; the Holocaust of the Jews was proven and
was judged, while the extermination of Roma was merely noted. Not until
the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1962 in Jerusalem were the crimes against
the Roma broadly presented and proven. That was still not enough of
a stimulus for historians to turn their interest to the Roma and undertake
laborious research into the plight of this community during the war.
The efforts by German Sinti and Roma in the Federal Republic of
Germany to get reparations and compensation for the persecution and repression, fruitless for decades, illustrate the difficulties facing this minority and any historians who may take up the subject. The new Germany
was obliged by the Allies to compensate the victims of nazism. This obligation was fulfilled under three federal laws. The first was enacted in
1953, and the following two were revisions of the first, in 1956 and 1963.48
They dealt with reparations for victims of persecution for political, racial,
religious and ideological reasons. If the question of reparations to Jews
for the Holocaust was clear, and settled through direct negotiations with
the Claims Conference (Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany), the comparable demands of German Sinti and Roma were challenged by the authorities of the new Germany. They could only direct
individual lawsuits to the German courts, invoking the laws mentioned
above. The German courts dismissed these claims on principle, stating
that they had not been persecuted on racial but rather on social grounds, as
asocial. In other words, the German courts questioned the fact of the
genocide perpetrated against this minority the preplanned policy of ex48
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, German Compensation for National
Socialist Crimes, at: www.ushmm.org/assets/frg.htm
97
termination for racial reasons.49 This view was widely shared by German
society, its elites included. Having no strong support in the Nuremberg
trial judgements, disposing no broad base of sources documenting the
crimes committed by the Nazis against this minority, having no support
from influential historians and German political circles, up to the early
1980s the Sinti and Roma were unable to seriously challenge that interpretation applied by the German courts.
A few voices of support came from Jewish victims of persecution
who had witnessed the extermination of Roma. Simon Wiesenthal is one
example. In the early 1960s he began to collect documents attesting to the
Holocaust of Roma. In 1965 he transferred them to the Central Office for
the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. In his book from 1967,
The Murderers Among Us, he included a chapter on the persecution of
Roma.50 Similar motivations support for the efforts of German Sinti and
Roma before the German courts spurred Donald Kenrick and Gratton
Puxon to gather together all the available archival sources and articles on
the subject from many countries of Europe. The result of their research
was the book The Destiny of Europes Gypsies, published in 1972.51 It
helped break through the dominant narrative of the Holocaust in the decades that followed. It also supplied strong arguments to the Roma themselves, in their work to get Germany to recognize the persecutions of that
community as crimes of genocide. In this process a special role was played
by the Heidelberg organization Verband Deutscher Sinti und Roma, and
its leader Romani Rose. With support from the German organization
49
S. Milton, Persecuting the Survivors: The Continuity of Antigypsism, in:
S. Tebbut (ed.), Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in German Speaking Society and Literature,
Oxford 1998.
50
J. Wechsberg (ed.), The Murderers Among Us. The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs,
New York 1967.
51
D. Kenrick, G. Puxon, The Destiny of Europes Gypsies, New York 1972.
98
Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (Society for Endangered Peoples) of
Göttingen, German Sinti and Roma organized a number of spectacular
actions intended to shake up German public opinion. It was this kind of
activity, like the demonstration at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1979 and the hunger strike at Dachau in 1980, or the 3rd
Roma World Congress in Göttingen in 1982, that led Helmut Schmidts
government in that year to make a declaration acknowledging Germanys
responsibility for the Holocaust of Sinti and Roma, affirming that they
had been persecuted on racial grounds.52 One consequence of Schmidts
declaration was the establishment of government-supported foundations
in the German states, whose task was to review claims and pay compensation to German Sinti and Romani citizens who had been victimized by
Nazi persecutions.
Schmidts declaration broke down a certain mental barrier, at least
among the political elites in Germany, not to say the whole of society.
Jewish circles frequently resisted acknowledging that the mass murder of
Roma was perpetrated out of the same racial motivations as in their own
case. According to Simon Wiesenthal, when the anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp was observed in 1985, the Central Council of Jews in Germany refused the request of German Sinti for a place
among the speakers. Wiesenthals personal intervention proved fruitless,
so he turned to then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who referred to the tragedy
of the Sinti and Roma in his address.53 Similarly, when the Council of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington was estab-
52
Y. Matras, The Development of the Romani Civil Rights Movement in Germany,
19451996, in: S. Tebbut (ed.), Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in German Speaking Society
and Literature, Oxford 1998.
53
S. Wiesenthal, Jews and Gypsies: Genocide of Non-Jewish Victims in the Holocaust as Seen by a Survivor of the Holocaust, in: I.W. Charny (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Genocide, vol. I, Santa Barbara, California 1999, pp. 502505.
99
lished in 1979, there was no Romani representative among its members.
Years later, in 1987, William Duna was invited to the Council, and he was
followed by Ian Hancock in 1997. The barrier has been breached among
the historians as well; more and more researchers in Germany and other
countries are tackling topics related to the Romani Holocaust. With his
many publications on the subject, Ian Hancock has played a special role in
this process.
The gains of German Sinti and Roma became the gains of Roma in
other European countries a decade later, after the collapse of communism
and the Berlin Wall. Today, in anniversary observances commemorating
the Holocaust of the Roma or Jews, representatives of both communities
participate. The annual ceremony on August 2nd at Auschwitz-Birkenau
the date of the liquidation of the so-called Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp)
is already a permanent element of the observance schedule there. Every
year it gathers multitudes of Roma from all over Europe, as well as representatives of the national executives and governments of many countries,
including Israel. In 1997, the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma was established in Heidelberg;54 there is a permanent
exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum; and the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington now devotes more attention
to the Holocaust of Roma. In this way, gradually the memory of the Romani
tragedy is becoming part of the institutionalized memory of the Holocaust.
It is high time for it likewise to become part of the historical memory of both
Roma and non-Roma. Incorporating the history of Roma, including the history of their persecution and their Holocaust, in core curricula, can bring
this about, for it is understanding, not the refusal of understanding, that
makes it possible to prevent a repetition of the horror.55
See: www.sintiundroma.de/english/html
T. Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, New
York 1996, p. 277.
54
55
100
Natalia Aleksiun
The History and Memory of the Holocaust
The Central Jewish Historical Commission
Icchak Schipper, a historian of Polish Jewry, ended up in the Maidanek
concentration camp. Explaining a point to his fellow prisoner Aleksander
Donat, he said this:
...everything depends on who transmits our testament to future generations,
on who writes the history of this period. History is usually written by the
victor. What we know about murdered peoples is only what their murderers
vaingloriously cared to say about them. Should our murderers be victorious,
should they write the history of this war, our destruction will be presented as
one of the most beautiful pages of world history, and future generations will
pay tribute to them as dauntless crusaders. Their every word will be taken
for gospel. Or they may wipe out our memory, as if we had never existed, as
56
if there had never been a Polish Jewry, a Ghetto in Warsaw, a Maidanek.
Of the Holocaust testimonies I know, Schippers words are particularly
moving, even though he does not directly describe the atrocities committed at that time. Schipper realized that preserving documentation, allowing the fate and the murder of particular families and communities of Polish
Jews to be reconstructed, would shape the way they would be remembered.
56
A. Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom. A Memoir, New York, Chicago, San Francisco
1965, p. 210.
101
During the occupation, in fact, many Jews were already making efforts to leave some trace after the abominations that were being perpetrated; they kept diaries and left written testimony. According to Emanuel
Ringelblum, during this terrible war, everyone generally has been keeping diaries.57 In many ghettos, labor camps and even the death camps,
Jews strove to record and store official documents as well as their personal statements. Efforts were undertaken individually, and archives were
organized. The largest archive, Oneg Shabbat, was established in Warsaw
as early as the autumn of 1939, by the historian and social activist Emanuel
Ringelblum.
After the years of persecution and the daily struggle to survive, the
Polish Jews who remained alive placed great importance on collecting
historical documentation of the Holocaust. They saw in it not only a form
of vengeance against those guilty of the crimes committed against the
Jews, but also as a moral duty to those who had perished. With this motivation, Filip Friedman began to gather materials on the history and the
slaughter of the Jews in Lwów in the summer of 1944, shortly after the
city was liberated from German occupation. One of the first institutions
organized by a group of surviving Jews in Vilnius was a Jewish museum,
where Abba Kovner and Abram Sutzkever collected Holocaust-related
documents.
Among the efforts undertaken by Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, the work of the Central Jewish Historical Commission occupies
a special place. In Lublin on August 29, 1944, only a month after the
towns liberation from German occupation, five Polish Jews met to discuss the creation of a historishe komisye under the Jewish Committee
57
Emanuel Ringelblum recalls the general phenomenon of writing memoirs in the
Warsaw ghetto in: E. Ringelblum, Kronika getta warszawskiego: wrzesieñ 1939 styczeñ
1943, Warsaw 1983, p. 490.
102
operating in the city. Four months later the Historical Commission was
renamed the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, with
Dr. Filip Friedman at the head. In March 1945 the Commissions headquarters was moved from Lublin to £ód. In the spring and summer of
1945, regional, provincial and local historical commissions were established in Cracow, Warsaw, Bia³ystok, Katowice, Gliwice, Bytom, Bêdzin
and Przemyl. Correspondents were dispatched to many other localities,
including Czêstochowa, Wroc³aw, Piotrolesie and Parczew. At the peak
of its activity the Commission had 25 branches.
The Commissions statute called for the establishment of an archive
and library, and publication of materials describing what befell Jews during the Second World War, for the purpose of assembling the information
needed to pursue war criminals. One of the most important areas of the
Commissions activity was the creation of the archive. Among the materials it amassed were photographs, documents, accounts by victims and
witnesses of Nazi crimes, poetry, memoirs, descriptions of childrens
games, and sayings. Songs sung in the ghettos, camps and partisan units
could be found in the archive. Also collected were ghetto seals and coins,
ritual objects, and even urns with the ashes of murdered Jews, destined for
the future museum. By 1946 the Commission archive already held about
7,000 documents and more than 3,000 photographs.
One important task the founders and staff of the Commission set for
themselves was to record survivor accounts. At its founding meeting in
the autumn of 1944, the participants decided to collect testimonies of Jews
who survived the German occupation, and they prepared a questionnaire
covering their experiences. In a report of the Central Jewish Historical
Commissions activities from 1946, Noe Grüss noted that 1,800 testimonies had been taken in Commission offices, private homes and orphanages. The Society of Friends of the Central Historical Commission made
an appeal to all Jews in Poland:
103
We, the small handful of Jews saved by a miracle from the hands of the
murderers, are duty-bound to do everything in our power so that those horrors experienced, that appalling time, will be preserved forever for future
generations.... It is the duty of every Jew to describe his experience, because
every living, conscious Jew experienced the various events differently.
Whoever cannot write should immediately go to the nearest Historical Commission, where his experiences will be recorded. No instance of cruelty, no
instance of self-sacrifice should be left untold.58
One of the Commissions main goals was to research the history of the
Polish Jews under German occupation and to educate both Jews and the
broader Polish public on the subject.59 A library was established, and the
Commission began to publish primary sources as well as the first historical works. The Commission initiated research about the perpetrators, witnesses and Jewish victims. One of its aims was to disseminate research on
the crimes committed against Jews during the war. The Commission published many books and articles that set the direction of Holocaust research.
Among the first were compilations of primary source material, including
the memoirs of Ró¿a Bauminger, Gusta Dawidsohn-Draenger, and Noemi
Szac-Wajnkranc.
Holocaust education entails many challenges. One is to avoid the
danger of focusing all attention on detailed study of the atrocities, probing
the mechanisms that made Nazi ideology assume one form rather than
another. Teaching about the Holocaust can also be an opportunity to remember its victims. In one of his lectures, Elie Wiesel spoke of the loneliness of those dying: to be remembered, that was all they wanted.60
Archiwum ¯ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, CK¯P, Komisja Historyczna, 336/
31, Sprawozdania Towarzystwa Przyjació³ ¯ydowskiej Komisji Historycznej, pp. 2122.
59
N. Grüss, Rok pracy Centralnej ¯ydowskiej Komisji Historycznej, £ód, 1946, p. 9.
60
E. Wiesel, The Holocaust as literary inspiration, in: Dimensions of the Holocaust. Lectures at Northwestern University, Evanston, 1996, p. 16.
58
104
Both during the Holocaust and after the wars conclusion, Polish Jews
did much to rescue the memory of those people. I think that these very
efforts to pass on the truth about the crimes committed, to safeguard the
memory of Jewish life under German occupation, impose a moral obligation to convey that truth, and to remember. In this sense, the attempts to
communicate the truth about the fate of the Jews under German occupation constitute a fascinating page in the history of Jewish resistance.
105
Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs
Attitudes of Polish Youth
Toward the Holocaust
Research from 19972000
The Holocaust is part of Polish history, but not enough about it is taught in
the schools. When it is taught, usually the subject is not related to current
events or to concern for the shape of the future.
Data from research done in 1997, 1998 and 2000 permit an examination of the attitudes of young Poles toward the Holocaust, attitudes which
reflect knowledge about and emotions elicited by the Holocaust.61
The subjects in the 1997 research were 568 primary and secondary
school students from southern Poland. The subjects in 1998 and 2000 were
a random, representative national sample totaling 1,002 students. The
research employed a questionnaire with 78 items including 14 open questions, plus nine questions to establish the students sex, age, place of residence, type of school, average grades, parents education, religion, degree
of religiosity, and frequency of church attendance.
Earlier national research, on adult Poles attitudes toward Jews and the Holocaust,
was done in 1992; see: I. Krzemiñski (ed.), Czy Polacy s¹ antysemitami? Wyniki badania
sonda¿owego, Warsaw 1996. The 1997 research was financed by a grant from the Rabbi
Marc Tanenbaum Foundation for the Advancement of Interreligious Understanding. The
data from 1998 and 2000 were collected and processed in the Alternative methods of
education in overcoming ethnic prejudices project (grants from the Jagiellonian University Central Research Fund from 1998, 1999 and 2000, and from the Open Society Foundation RSS 122/98).
61
106
The questionnaire was administered to groups and filled in voluntarily and anonymously in 93 randomly selected secondary schools in ten
regions of Poland.62 The questionnaire took 45 minutes to complete. The
same questionnaire was given in three experimental and three control
classes at high schools in Cracow, Warsaw and £om¿a.
In 1997 the statement that knowledge of the crimes committed in
Auschwitz should be conveyed to the next generations as a lesson for
mankind was affirmed by 90.3% of the total sample, 94.9% of the secondary school students, and 100% of the students from classes with innovative experimental programs formed at the initiative of individual teachers.
In 1998, 88% of the national sample of 1,002 students affirmed a similar
statement. More students (95.8%) from the experimental classes, which
had course content going beyond the standard curriculum and designed to
increase openness to ethnic and religious minorities, affirmed the stateTable 1.
Knowledge of the crimes committed in Auschwitz and other concentration camps
should be conveyed to the next generations as a lesson for all mankind.
Responses in experimental classes from 1998 and 2000.
Year of
survey
1998
2000
Group
All*
Warsaw
Cracow
£om¿a
All*
Warsaw
Cracow
£om¿a
Number of
answers
71
17
30
24
69
17
28
24
Yes
(%)
95.8
94.1
93.3
100.0
98.6
100.0
100.0
95.8
No
(%)
4.2
5.9
6.7
1.4
4.2
* Only students who participated in both years are included in these statistics.
62
The questionnaires were administered by the CEM Institute for Market and Public
Opinion Research of Cracow. Only two schools declined to participate in the survey.
107
ment in 1998; two years later in 2000, all the students from the experimental classes in Warsaw and Cracow affirmed the statement (Table 1).
Nevertheless, 57.1% of the total 1997 sample (65.9% of small-town
elementary school students and 64.1% of academic high school students)
were not bothered by or ashamed of anti-Jewish graffiti, and 16.8% found
it amusing. A year later, 30.6% of the larger, national sample disagreed
with the statement that anti-Jewish graffiti was disturbing or shameful to
them, but only 6.1% of the experimental class students and none of the
Warsaw experimental class students responded that way. The difference
between the 1997 and 1998 results might be attributable to the methodolTable 2.
Many of the crimes in Auschwitz and other concentration camps did not really
take place. Responses in 1998 and 2000.
NATIONAL SAMPLE AND EXPERIMENTAL CLASSES IN 1998
Group
All
Academic
Technical
Vocational
Experimental classes
National
sample
Number
of answers
962
314
375
273
78
Yes
(%)
12.8
7.6
11.5
20.5
2.6
No
(%)
87.2
92.4
88.5
79.5
97.4
EXPERIMENTAL CLASSES
Year
1998
2000
Group
All*
Warsaw
Cracow
£om¿a
All*
Warsaw
Cracow
£om¿a
Number
of answers
68
16
29
23
71
17
30
24
Yes
(%)
2.9
8.7
1.4
4.2
No
(%)
97.1
100.0
100.0
91.3
98.6
100.0
100.0
95.8
* Only students who participated in both years are included in these statistics.
108
ogy (the 1998 survey had five possible answers to the question, and the
1997 survey only three), but the answers in the experimental classes seem
to evince those students greater awareness.
The breakdown of responses from the 1998 survey reveals that 12.8%
of the total sample (7.6% of academic high school students, 20.5% of
vocational students, and only two students from experimental classes)
believed that many of the crimes of Auschwitz and other concentration
camps did not really take place. None of the experimental class students in
Cracow and Warsaw expressed any doubt in either 1998 or 2000 that the
genocidal crimes took place (Table 2).
For comparison and we should not take comfort from this 28.8%
of 223 students from three Manhattan schools surveyed in 1997 gave answers expressing doubt about the Holocaust.63 In Sweden, 8,000 students
from 120 schools were surveyed, and 34% of them were not certain that
the Holocaust had really occurred.64 The Swedish governments reaction
to this was swift, however: an informative book about the Holocaust was
sent to every home.
In the 1998 national survey, one question was Do you think the Poles
helped the Jews during the war? The most frequent answers checked
were yes, as much as they could (46.2%) and hard to say (42.9%).
Only 9.3% (28.8% in the experimental classes) stated they could have
done more, and 1.6% said they didnt help at all (Table 3).
Opinions about whether Poles could have rescued more Jews during
the war were polarized. More than half of the surveyed youth were unsure
or avoided answering. To understand what went on during the war, students
definitely should learn more about Polish-Jewish relations in the past.
Data from my survey evaluating the educational program of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in New York. See more in: J. Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, C. Yung, What Is in the Way?
Teaching About the Holocaust in Post-1989 Poland, in: Remembering for the Future:
The Holocaust in an Age of Genocides, Basingstoke 2001.
64
Gazeta Wyborcza, June 13, 1997, p. 5.
63
109
Table 3.
Do you think the Poles helped the Jews during the war?
Responses in 1998 and 2000.
NATIONAL SAMPLE AND EXPERIMENTAL CLASSES IN 1998
Group
All
Academic
Technical
Vocational
Experimental classes
National
sample
Yes,
Number
as much as
of answers
they could
(%)
962
310
377
275
73
46.2
50.3
49.6
36.7
57.5
Hard
to say
(%)
42.9
36.5
39.5
54.9
13.7
They could
They
have done
didnt
more
help at all
(%)
(%)
9.3
11.6
10.1
5.5
28.8
1.6
1.6
0.8
2.9
EXPERIMENTAL CLASSES
Year
1998
2000
Group
All*
Warsaw
Cracow
£om¿a
All*
Warsaw
Cracow
£om¿a
Yes,
Number as much as
of answers they could
(%)
64
14
28
22
64
14
29
21
56.2
50.0
67.9
45.5
70.3
42.9
86.2
66.7
Hard
to say
(%)
17.2
14.3
3.6
36.4
6.2
14.3
3.4
4.8
They could
They
have done
didnt
more
help at all
(%)
(%)
26.6
35.7
28.5
18.1
23.5
42.8
10.4
28.5
* Only students who participated in both years are included in these statistics.
The attitudes of Polish students toward the Holocaust, toward Jews,
and toward foreigners and ethnic minorities are interrelated. The lack of
consistency in their answers concerning the Holocaust can be attributed to
their lack of knowledge, and to emotions bound up with patriotism and
their attachment to an image of the special role of the Poles in history.
Another factor in the inconsistency of attitudes could be socially inherited
conflicts elicited by the subject of the Holocaust, and the defense mecha-
110
Table 4.
Do the Jews deserve special treatment and care because of the losses and
suffering they sustained during the war?
Responses in 1998 and 2000.
NATIONAL SAMPLE AND EXPERIMENTAL CLASSES IN 1998
Group
Number
of answers
Yes
(%)
All
Academic
National
sample
Technical
Vocational
Experimental classes
993
327
389
277
81
7.4
4.6
9.0
8.3
8.6
Dont
know
(%)
41.4
33.9
43.4
47.3
28.4
No
(%)
51.2
61.5
47.6
44.4
63.0
EXPERIMENTAL CLASSES
Year
1998
2000
Group
All*
Warsaw
Cracow
£om¿a
All*
Warsaw
Cracow
£om¿a
Number
of answers
Yes
(%)
71
17
30
24
69
16
29
24
7.0
5.9
13.3
14.5
25.0
10.3
12.5
Dont
know
(%)
29.6
29.4
26.7
33.3
26.1
37.5
20.7
25.0
No
(%)
63.4
64.7
60.0
66.7
59.4
37.5
69.0
62.5
* Only students who participated in both years are included in these statistics.
nisms used to attenuate those conflicts. The survey data could also be
interpreted as an expression of a peculiar type of contest for moral superiority between Poles and Jews, which would support a thesis put forward
by a Warsaw research group under the direction of Ireneusz Krzemiñski,65
regarding the fear that acknowledging another nations greater losses and
65
I. Krzemiñski (ed.), Czy Polacy s¹ antysemitami..., pp. 20, 103114, 193.
111
suffering might diminish ones own losses and suffering. Of the total national sample, 51.2% negatively answered the question about whether Jews
should merit special treatment and care because of their wartime losses
and suffering (Table 4).
When the Nazis created the ghettos and death camps, they located
the majority of them on occupied Polish territory. The Holocaust is part of
Polish history, but current curricula still do not direct the attention of young
Poles to the facts of the Holocaust and its implications for the future.
In explaining the inconsistency of answers related to the Holocaust,
we should take developmental factors into account (the subjects were 16
to 18 years old, a period when changes in self-image and social perspectives occur), and should also consider the teenagers opinions about the
reasons for the anti-Semitic attitudes of some people. Among the reasons
the students gave are these:
negative opinions of Jews in the community (64.4%)
conflicts from the past (51.6%)
some peoples aversion to foreigners (50.2%)
lack of direct contact with Jews (46.9%).66
A typical scapegoating cliche (the Jews own responsibility for that
attitude) was not the most frequently selected reason (14.4%). It seems
that the students repeat opinions they hear at home or in the media. These
opinions are not necessarily deep-rooted another explanation of inconsistent answers.67
Like most teaching in Poland, teaching about the Holocaust is not
linked to the students natural curiosity. History instruction that relies on
imagination and interest is more effective than transmitting information
The respondents had nine answers to choose from, and they could pick more than
one or write their own opinion.
67
Such an opinion was expressed by the American psychologist Lane Arye, who
lived in Warsaw for four years in the 1990s.
66
112
about historical events from textbooks. Facts are important, but large numbers do not say everything. It has to be remembered that each victim of the
genocide died individually and only once. That is why documents from
witnesses, such as memoirs, diaries, photographs, drawings and films,
should be used to a much greater extent in history classes. Unfortunately,
oral history does not enter the curriculum until post-secondary school, and
not in every university.
The Holocaust can be a topic of integrated teaching in the form of
multidisciplinary projects. It should not be limited to a subject heading in
a textbook or a collection of historical facts. Teaching about the Holocaust requires exploration of the context, the use of primary sources, and
analysis of peoples moral choices and attitudes toward the Holocaust and
postwar reactions to it.68 This teaching can go on not only in history or
literature classes but also in civics or religion courses.
In teaching about the Holocaust it is essential to make reference to
current manifestations of anti-Semitism, combined with analysis of the
sources of prejudice and hatred, which in conducive circumstances can
lead to discriminatory behavior. Anti-Semitism should have disappeared
after the Holocaust, but it did not, and that is one reason we should teach
about the Holocaust.
68
M. Weitzman, Coming to Grips with Teaching the Holocaust, Momentum: Journal of the National Catholic Educational Association, 1988, no. 2, pp. 5557.
113
Holocaust-Related Topics
on the Internet
The Internet offers new opportunities for Holocaust teaching and learning. The sources on the subject are very extensive, particularly in English
and German, ranging from historical treatments to primary sources and
pictorial material. Internet discussion groups provide a worldwide forum
for the exchange of views and information.
The small selection of web sites listed below is an expanded version
of a list of descriptions compiled by students Anna Dziadyk (sociology)
and Andrzej Ca³a (psychology) for a course entitled Anatomy and dynamics of prejudice given by Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs during the
2000/2001 academic year in the Institute of Polish Philology of the
Jagiellonian University. Some of the sites and their institutions are devoted exclusively to the Holocaust, some include it as part of a larger
program, and others have related interests such as anti-Semitism, teaching
tolerance, or the Jewish community in Poland today. More links can be
found at http://tolerance.research.uj.edu.pl
115
Amcha. National Israeli Center for Psychosocial Support
of Survivors of the Holocaust and the Second Generation
http://www.amcha.org
Languages: English, Hebrew
Amcha is a codeword Jews used to identify each other as survivors after
the Holocaust. The organization that goes by that name in Israel is a support network of psychologists, educators and social workers, for survivors
and their families. It is focused on the psychological effects of experiences connected with the Shoah.
The site contains links to a selection of articles on post-traumatic
stress disorder and survivors (particularly in regard to children), and the
next generation living with the legacy of the Shoah. Some of the material
can be downloaded as Word documents or purchased.
The site also offers a detailed calendar of conferences. There is
a section to help with searches for relatives, and providing information on
recovery of property or art lost during the war.
American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters House
http://www.friendsofgfh.org
Language: English
This organization supports the Ghetto Fighters House Museum in Israel,
publicizes the history of Jewish resistance during the war, and educates.
It promotes the International Book-Sharing Project for joint study of
Holocaust literature between schools in Israel and the United States. It
gives lectures and seminars for teachers. The site offers books for sale, the
majority devoted to Holocaust resistance and to Janusz Korczak.69
Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldschmidt) was a Polish Jew, army officer, physician,
educator and writer, who pioneered an education methodology based on respect for children. Refusing a chance to save his own life when the orphanage he ran in the Warsaw
ghetto was liquidated, he went with the children under his care to death in Treblinka.
69
116
Anne Frank House
http://www.annefrank.nl
Languages: Dutch, English, German, Spanish
The Anne Frank Museum was created in the home where she hid and
wrote her diary during the war. Its educational effort is directed mainly to
young people. The site includes fragments of the diary, a biography of
Anne, and several articles (one is about the role of a sense of humor in
counteracting prejudice).
Anti-Defamation League
http://www.adl.org
Language: English
The Anti-Defamation League, ADL, aims to fight anti-Semitism, bigotry
and extremism. It prepares educational programs and resources to help
combat prejudice and build tolerance toward others. The organization,
created in 1913, sets out to fight intolerance and to disseminate knowledge about the Holocaust, human rights and religious freedom, as well as
to inform about terrorist threats, hate on the Internet, and the harmful effects of hate symbols. The World of Difference Institute, functioning on
the web site, prepares primary and secondary teachers to fight prejudice.
The Campus of Difference plays that role in higher education, and the
Workplace of Difference in private and state institutions. The ADL site
offers exercises, guides and programs aimed at helping develop tolerance
and mutual understanding. The organization has an on-line store, where it
is possible to order magazines, books, videos and educational resources
for teaching about the Holocaust, multiculturalism and human rights.
117
Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia Today
http://www.axt.org.uk
Language: English
The Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia Today (AXT) Internet site publishes
analyses regarding the presence of racism, xenophobia and especially antiSemitism, considered against the backdrop of the more general social and
political contexts in which such manifestations occur. AXT is an integral
part of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) a group of independent experts and intellectuals based in London. JPR has both a research and
an opinion-forming role, influencing the political scene. The JPR staff use
the AXT site to disseminate analyses. The sites content includes reports
and educational material on demographics, migration trends, media and
culture, court verdicts and significant manifestations of discrimination.
The Association of Roma in Poland
http://www.stowarzyszenieromow.hg.pl
Language: Polish
The Association of Roma in Poland was founded in 1992. Its primary task
is to work for full participation by Romani people in Polish public life.
One of the Associations main goals is to recall and commemorate the
extermination and the Holocaust of the Roma; this is accomplished through
education, publishing, research and exhibitions. The Association also engages in many different activities aimed at overcoming negative stereotypes about Roma prevailing in Polish society.
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Owiêcim, Poland
http://www.auschwitz.org.pl
Languages: English, German, Polish
Before planning a class visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, it is worth visiting
the Museums official web site. There one can find clearly presented or-
118
ganizational details (directions, accommodations, rules during visits, and
visiting hours) and plainly written information on the history of the camp
(establishment, expansion, the crematoria and gas chambers, number and
nationalities of victims, liberation). The scope of information seems to
exactly match the needs of secondary school students. Unfortunately the
Museum archives are not yet accessible to Internet users, as work on computerizing the collections is in progress. The Education Department works
with teachers and school youth, arranging lectures, training, museum lessons, competitions, etc. The Latest News section tells about changes at the
Museum (e.g., newly opened visitor areas, new informational systems)
and all kinds of observances and events connected with Museum activities. The site also presents the Museums publications, including academic
works, popular works, literature, albums, guides, catalogues, posters, post
cards and educational films, but they cannot be purchased on-line. There
is information on the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp Victims Memorial Foundation, which supports the Museum.
Also functioning in Owiêcim are these organizations: the International
Youth Meeting House (www.mdsm.pl); the Center for Dialogue and Prayer,
headed by Rev. Manfred Deselaers (www.centrum-dialogu.oswiecim.pl);
and the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (www.ajcf.org).
These institutions organize several-day sessions for youth groups,
involving historical, religious and civic education.
Beit Warszawa
http://www.beit-warszawa.org.pl
Languages: English, Polish (English sections less current)
The Beit Warszawa Jewish Cultural Association is a progressive, egalitarian Jewish social organization. Beit is Hebrew for home. Beit Warszawa
is a home open to everyone who wishes to participate in building the progressive Jewish community in Warsaw and across Poland. The creation of
119
a Jewish community means participating in all aspects of Jewish spiritual,
cultural, secular and religious life. It is for those searching for their path in
Judaism or who wish to broaden their knowledge of the culture and history of the Polish Jews. The Beit Warszawa site has information on observances of Jewish holidays and other events organized by the Association.
Beyond the Pale. The History of Jews in Russia
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/beyond-the-pale
Languages: English, Russian
This is the on-line version of the original 1995 exhibition shown in Russia.
It shows the history of the Jews in Europe and Russia, their daily life and
religion. Its purpose is to convey the great danger posed by intolerance and
prejudice, by showing the anti-Jewish myths that accumulated through the
centuries, and the discrimination and isolation that led to the Holocaust. The
exhibition consists of archive photographs, drawings, pictures and documents, accompanied by brief notes. The exhibition is easy to navigate. The
material is divided into subject blocks: The Middle Ages, The Development
of Modern Anti-Semitism, Jews in the Russian Empire, Jews in the Soviet
Union, Nazism and the Holocaust, 1941 to the Present, and Democracy and
Minority Rights. Particularly worth attention is some rarely presented material: propaganda posters, caricatures and medieval frescos.
Center for Culture and Dialogue
http://www.ignatianum.edu.pl
Languages: English (part), Polish (part)
The Center for Culture and Dialogue was established at the Ignatianum
College of Philosophy and Education in Cracow. It was founded by Polish
Jesuits in 1998 and is directed by Professor Stanis³aw Obirek SJ. Its goal
is to bring distant cultures closer and to find a platform for understanding.
The Center also conducts research. The site presents news and statements
120
from the point of view of the Catholic Church, and the work of Jesuits on
behalf of Christian-Jewish dialogue.
The site contains information on academic seminars the Center organizes (e.g., Toward Better Familiarity, or, On Polish-Israeli Relations),
publications (e.g., The Cross and the Star of David [in Polish] by Professor Jan Grosfeld) and conferences to promote dialogue (e.g., Jesuits and
Jews: Towards Greater Fraternity and Commitment). The reports from
academic seminars are supplemented by transcripts of some speeches.
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
http://www.chgs.umn.edu
Language: English
The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies is an academic institution
operating under the auspices of the University of Minnesota. Its goal is to
further Holocaust research. It studies not only the Nazi crimes against the
Jews, but also other genocides that took place in the 20th century. The Center addresses such problems as the massacre of Armenians in 1915, Nazi
medical experiments on human beings, and the situation of Roma and Sinti,
Poles, Jehovahs Witnesses, homosexuals and other victims of nazism.
Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Peace Studies
http://www.unr.edu/chgps/blank.htm
Language: English
The Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Peace Studies operates at the University of Nevada, Reno. It is engaged in studies of the Holocaust, prejudice, and contemporary ethnic conflicts. Besides offering a number of
courses to the Universitys students, the Center cooperates on the making
of documentary and feature films on the Holocaust. Award-winning films
can be purchased at the site. It also has an archive of related articles.
121
Cybrary of the Holocaust
http://www.remember.org
Language: English
This is a very extensive but user-friendly site that covers many subject
areas, set up by the Alliance for a Better Earth. It consists of several sections. One is a virtual library of more than 2,000 titles on the Holocaust,
with many items accessible at the site. Articles and reviews of new publications are in a separate section.
The Education section has a comprehensive set of materials for classroom activities, and promotes exchange of experiences and ideas (e.g.,
reports of experiments and alternative teaching methods).
The site also has a section devoted to art inspired by the Holocaust,
including works by survivors. There is a special Children of Survivors
section where feelings can be shared and the effect of the Holocaust on the
postwar history of families can be described. The fate of some of the people
who disappeared during the war is still unknown today. The Search and
Unite section provides help with searches and also in recovering lost property. The site is updated monthly.
Davids Holocaust Awareness Project
http://members.aol.com/dhs11/remember.html
Language: English
The author of the site is 11-year-old David from New Jersey, who wrote
what he learned about the Holocaust. David encourages the reader to learn
more about the subject so that no similar events will take place anymore.
The site contains photographs and links to the most important sites about
the Holocaust. More of the photographs David used can be found at
http://www.fmv.ulg.ac.be./schmitz/holocaust.html
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Forum for Dialogue Among Nations
http://www.dialog.org.pl
Languages: English, Polish
This foundation aims to create a climate of tolerance and promote democratic values, and to draw together the peoples that through the centuries
have coexisted in Poland and have co-created its history, tradition and
culture. By presenting the little-known histories of the town of Gliwice
and the Silesia region, it hopes to encourage coexistence without stereotypes, prejudice and fear. In its educational activities the foundation focuses on youth. Ongoing projects include Meetings on the Borderland,
a series of meetings to familiarize Silesians with the culture and issues of
particular national minorities, and two-day retreats for tolerance workshops for high school students, with simulation games, tests and psychological games to engage participants with issues of tolerance, stereotypes,
and life in a multicultural society. Another interesting initiative was an
academic session on the history of Silesian Jews, commemorating the 60th
anniversary of Kristallnacht. The web site contains well-developed educational resources for teachers and students, as well as links to other Polish sites devoted to tolerance and multicultural education. The web site
provides an opportunity for students and teachers to participate in PolishJewish dialogue, and a discussion forum in English.
Forum Jews Poles Christians
Znak Foundation for Christian Culture
http://www.znak.com.pl/forum
Languages: English, Polish
This site is intended to foster cooperation between Christians and Jews. It
was created with assistance from the Polish Council of Christians and
Jews and from EuroDialog, an Internet service devoted to intercultural
dialogue. The site has pages of information and reflections on Polish-
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Jewish relations, exchange of experiences, and presentations of new proposals. The site is updated continually with current events and an extensive review of the press. The Viewpoint section features statements by
journalists and clerics, especially those involved in promoting dialogue
and understanding. The Znak Foundation lets young people speak through,
for example, its Why Auschwitz, Kolyma, Kosovo? competition.
Students can learn the views and feelings of their peers and can familiarize themselves with the chronicle of those tragic events and with art
inspired by them. The site is also a source of information on other institutions promoting dialogue.
Gedenkstätten für NS-Opfer in Deutschland
http://www.topographie.de/gedenkstaettenforum/uebersicht
Languages: English, French, German
This web site, prepared by the Stiftung Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror Foundation) of Berlin, has well-designed interactive maps
of the places of Nazi terror (camps, etc.) in the Federal Republic of Germany, grouped by their names and locations. The descriptions give basic
historical and bibliographical data, information on visiting hours and conditions, and links to other sites related to the listed place.
Ghetto Fighters House
Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum Israel
http://www.gfh.org.il
Languages: English, Hebrew
The Ghetto Fighters House was founded in 1949 by surviving ghetto fighters and partisans in Western Galilee. It was the worlds first Holocaust
document archive. Soon it began to function as a museum, research institute and educational center. It forms a community of people who survived
the Holocaust, tells their stories and passes on their message. The basic
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units of it are the Ghetto Fighters House, the Yad Layeled Childrens
Memorial Museum, archive, library and educational center.
The site presents the permanent historical and documentary exhibitions on the life of Jews before the Holocaust, their fate during the Holocaust, resistance and uprisings. It describes a unique collection of works
of art made in the camps and ghettos, and postwar art inspired by the
Holocaust.
Yad Layeled is dedicated to the memory of the child victims of the
Holocaust. It is intended for young visitors. Museum visits include art
workshops, film showings, dramas, and meetings with witnesses to the
Holocaust. The Museums Janusz Korczak International School runs the
International Book-Sharing Project, a cooperative effort between schools
in Israel and other countries involving exchange of views on Holocaust
literature. The Internet site provides a means to join the project.
The sites Archives have an enormous collection with a search facility. Library staff offer assistance in compiling bibliographies.
The Educational Section and Overseas Department organize seminars
and training for groups of teachers and students from different countries.
The Pedagogical Resource Center consists of two sections helping students
and teachers. The site also has a section devoted to Janusz Korczak.
Grodzka Gate NN Theater Center
http://www.tnn.lublin.pl
Language: Polish
The Center is a local government cultural institute in Lublin, working for
the preservation of cultural heritage and for education. In its programs the
Center invokes the symbolic and historical meaning of its site, the Grodzka
Gate (formerly the gate separated the Christian and the Jewish towns),
as well as the city of Lublin, a meeting place of cultures, traditions and
religions.
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The NN Theater was founded in 1990. At first it was strictly a theater,
but with the passing of time it opened up to other social and educational
activities. The Center remodeled its headquarters, the 14th-century Grodzka
Gate and adjoining buildings, reinvigorating this part of Lublins old city
center. The Centers program activities are connected with perpetuating the
memory of the Jewish town through artistic activities, exhibitions, meetings, sessions, the promotion of books and magazines, films, concerts and
social activities. It also runs a publishing house. In 1998 the Center began
a program entitled The Great Book of the City in which archive materials connected with the Polish-Jewish history of Lublin (photographs, oral
history, documents) are gathered. Those materials were used to create an
exhibition showing the prewar bicultural city of Lublin, accompanied by
an educational program devoted to preserving the heritage of the Lublin
Jews. The Center also runs a cultural heritage program entitled The
Forgotten Past: The Multicultural Traditions of Lublin and its Region,
addressed mainly to young residents and their teachers. Another project is
The Virtual Library of Lublin and Surrounding Regions, a computer
database with texts, pictorial material, sound, and educational tools.
The Center cooperates with teachers through the Roads of the Past
School Discovery Club, with a network of almost 100 clubs around the
entire Lubelskie Province. In 2001 the Center hosted the Education for
Reconciliation workshop organized by the Carnegie Council of New York
and the Jagiellonian Universitys Department of Judaic Studies.
Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz. Gedenk- und Bildungsstätte
http://www.ghwk.de
Languages: Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian,
Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
The Wannsee Conference House Memorial and Educational Center is
located in the building where, on January 20, 1942, leading officials of
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the Third Reich finalized the organizational details to implement an
earlier decision to deport the Jews of Europe to the east and murder
them en masse. Since 1992 the building has served as a memorial and
a center for historical education. The site briefly describes the institutions
work: a museum exhibition about the Wannsee Conference and the Jewish
Holocaust; a media library that contains books, documents, microfilms
and videos; and one-day or several-day educational programs for youth
and adults. In regard to the latter, the educational department works with
schools. The site also contains the protocols of the Wannsee Conference,
with English and Polish translations. There is a well-prepared section of
links grouped by country and subject.
Holocaust History Project
http://www.holocaust-history.org
Language: English
This site is an archive of Holocaust-related documents, photographs, recordings and essays. It also contains materials for combatting Holocaust
denial. There are answers given for even detailed questions. A virtue of
the site is that it not only gives information about documents but allows
original photos of them to be printed, with transcriptions and English translations. There is an alphabetical keyword index to questions that were sent
electronically to, and answered by, specialists dealing with Holocaust subjects. New questions can be answered in the same way.
Holocaust Memorial Center
http://www.holocaustcenter.org
Language: English
The Center, located in Farmington Hills, Michigan, was established at the
initiative of Rabbi Charles H. Rosenzveig in 1981. Its mission is to perpetuate the memory of the culture and way of life of the Jews murdered
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during the Holocaust, to point out the indifference of those who did nothing to prevent it, to present the richness of the culture of European Jews,
and to help future generations to create a free, open society.
The site contains a historical section describing the period from the
beginnings of nazism in Germany to the end of the war, with a chronological review of events illustrated by many archival photographs. It provides
access to a very extensive English- and German-language Internet bookstore grouped by subject. The Museum Exhibits On-line section invites
visitors to the Holocaust Memorial Centers exhibitions, but has no Internet
access to them, except for the interactive Life Chance exhibition, which
allows the site visitor to take on the role of a young educated Jew living in
Nazi Germany and make crucial decisions. The program shows the hopelessness of all actions and the Jews powerlessness during that time.
Holocaust Museum & Studies Center
http://www.bxscience.edu/organizations/holocaust
Language: English
The Museum was established at the Bronx High School of Science in
1977, and is one of the oldest institutions of its kind in the United States. It
also boasts close cooperation with Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Simon
Wiesenthal. The site allows viewing of a small part of the Museums rich
collection, including propaganda posters from World War II and works by
artists who survived the Holocaust. The Holocaust Educational Guide section contains ready lesson plans, suggestions for innovative exercises, brief
historical descriptions of the most important issues connected with the
Holocaust, many maps, and methodological guidelines.
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Holocaust Teachers Resources Center
http://www.holocaust-trc.org
Language: English
This web site was established by the Holocaust Education Foundation,
Inc. The main purpose of the organization is to combat prejudice by disseminating knowledge of the Holocaust. The site collects and collates educational materials. Much space is devoted to lesson plans prepared for
classes at different levels of education. They are described in great detail,
in terms of methodology as well. The lessons often rely on specific books
(the corresponding chapters can be accessed at the site). Many types of
educational materials are described in the following sections: videos on
the Holocaust, a guide to educational materials (an extensive catalogue of
books and audio and video cassettes, grouped by subject), and a guide to
literature about the fate of children during World War II (diaries, memoirs, history books, documents, literature and encyclopedias).
The Holocaust: A Tragic Legacy
http://library.thinkquest.org/12663
Language: English
The site is edited by students in ThinkQuest, an organization that promotes Internet learning. Its basic virtue is interactivity. The site visitor has
opportunities to solve moral dilemmas, take part in a virtual Nuremberg
trial, test his or her knowledge in one of the five quizzes, and observe life
in a virtual concentration camp. The site also has a chronological review
of events from 1933 to 1945, connected with a glossary of the most important Holocaust-related terms. The sites attractive visual design and original way of communicating knowledge makes it particularly interesting
to youth.
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iEARN The Holocaust/Genocide Project
http://www.iearn.org/hgp/
Language: English
The International Education and Resource Network is a program for students from ages 12 to 17, involving schools from all over the world, including Poland. It relies on communication possibilities offered by the
Internet: on-line discussion and e-mail. It also has workshops and annual
world conventions of the participants. The site covers many interdisciplinary topics, including a subject block on the Holocaust and other genocides. Within the iEARN framework, teachers can take advantage of innovative exercises employing literature, history and art. Students taking
part in the program edit the An End to Intolerance annual magazine, the
whole of which is Internet-accessible. It enables the web site visitor to
learn the views and feelings of young people from all over the world about
the Holocaust. The site has a rich collection of links to other sites devoted
to the Holocaust.
Janusz Korczak
http://www.janusz-korczak.de
Language: English (2 items), German
The site is dedicated to the life and legacy of Janusz Korczak. It contains
his biography, a list of German and English literature on his life and work,
and information on translations of his writings in those languages. The
site presents the pillars of Korczaks educational practice of respect for
the rights of the child, based on the principle that adults respect for the
child teaches the child to be cognizant of other people.
There is a list of institutions in Germany that bear Janusz Korczaks
name. Also provided are Holocaust-related links. The English items are a
speech by Yitzhak Rabin in Warsaw and a complete play about Janusz
Korczak.
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Jewish Historical Institute
http://www.jewishinstitute.org.pl
Languages: Polish
The Institute, which traces its beginnings to 1928, is engaged in research
and education on the history and culture of the Jews in Poland. The headquarters in Warsaw houses a large archive and a varied collection of art
and artifacts of Jewish culture. The daily work of the Institute involves
protecting, preserving, completing, exhibiting and studying its collection
of documentary and other material. It also organizes seminars, conferences, competitions and a Hebrew language course. All departments are
committed to filling gaps in the publics knowledge, countering stereotypes, and opposing prejudiced opinions resulting from ignorance. Particularly useful for Holocaust studies is the archive: among its prewar,
wartime and postwar holdings are 7,200 survivor accounts, which, as the
web site text emphasizes, all deserve the attention that a few well-known
accounts have received.
The web site opens with a schedule of upcoming lectures. The web
site describes the Institutes three permanent exhibitions, which show the
life and death of the Warsaw ghetto, photographs and documents from the
Ringelblum Archive, and Jewish sacral and secular art. There is also a
catalogue of the librarys collection of 70,000 items; material may be used
in the library or photocopies may be requested. The bookstores many
books for sale are listed; orders can be placed by post or e-mail.
Jews in Poland. To Save from Oblivion. To Educate for the Future.
http://www.historiazydow.edu.pl
Languages: Polish (German and English site maps)
The organization is an educational service for teachers and students, providing basic information on Jewish history and culture, and materials for
teaching tolerance. The web site aims to make young people aware of
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cultural, ethnic, religious and political diversity. The service was founded
in cooperation with the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, the Stefan
Batory Foundation, the Dutch Embassy in Warsaw and the Polish-German
Center Association (which coordinates and develops the service in Poland).
The service has a 24-slide multimedia presentation on the Jews in Poland:
past, present and future. Since 1998, the exhibition has been presented in
dozens of Polish and German cities. The teachers section has ready
teaching materials, lesson plans and bibliographies. The service welcomes
original teaching plans. The students section encourages submission of
opinions and thoughts on the subject matter, essays, and presentations
of educational projects carried out in schools. There is information on competitions, seminars, teacher training, lectures and other events.
Judaica Foundation Center for Jewish Culture
http://www.judaica.pl
Languages: Polish, English, German
The idea of creating the Judaica Foundation Center for Jewish Culture
was born in Cracow at the end of the 1980s, a time of historic changes in
Poland. The idea emerged among people from the worlds of culture, education and the arts. The late President of the Jewish Congregation in
Cracow, Czes³aw Jakubowicz, was actively involved in this civic initiative. The Foundation began its activities in 1991, and on November 24,
1993, the Center was opened under its auspices in a former house of prayer
in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Cracow.
The main aims are to preserve the Jewish heritage, to perpetuate the
memory of the centuries-long presence of the Jews in Poland, to disseminate knowledge of the history and culture of the Polish Jews among young
people, to create a platform for Polish-Jewish dialogue, and to promote
the values of an open civil society.
The Centers program, addressed to the Jewish and non-Jewish pub-
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lic from Poland and abroad, includes lectures, meetings with authors, book
promotions, conferences and seminars, showings of documentary and feature films, concerts, exhibitions, and special summer programs.
The Centers Bayit Hadash (New Home) Encounters with Jewish
Culture is a ten-week program packed with thematically grouped events,
organized since 1996, beginning in the first month of the Jewish year
Tishri, during the High Holidays.
The Centers Aleksander and Alicja Hertz Annual Memorial Lecture
is a series of lectures related to Polish-Jewish issues, subsequently published in Polish and English. Czes³aw Mi³osz inaugurated the series in
1999, followed by Shoshana Ronen, Ryszard Kapuciñski and Karl
Dedecius.
Literature of the Holocaust
http://www.english.upenn.edu/afilreis
Language: English
Al Filreis, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, gives a
bibliography of articles and other material about the Holocaust, with a list
of links to related web sites.
Mordechaj Anielewicz Center
for Research and Education on Jewish History and Culture
http://www.centrum-anielewicza.uw.edu.pl
Language: Polish
The Mordechaj Anielewicz Center for Research and Education on Jewish
History and Culture was founded in 1990 under an agreement between
Warsaw University and the Jack Fliderbaum Foundation. Currently it functions as a unit in the Institute of History at Warsaw University. The Center
conducts classes for history students and those from other faculties who
are interested in the history and culture of the Polish Jews, with under-
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graduate and postgraduate programs. The Center also organizes regular
field trips and seminars for historians and researchers. Publications by
young historians and students are funded by the Irena GrabowskaKruszewska and Enta Marmelstein-Kotkowska Foundation. On May 8,
2003, the Center organized the first Jewish Day at Warsaw University.
Museum of the History of Polish Jews
http://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl
Languages: English, Polish
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews web site is about a museum
currently being created in Warsaw, devoted to the memory of the Polish
Jews and financed by the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute
in Poland. It is planned as a large center for exhibitions and educational
activity, to supplement the collections and publishing activities of the
Jewish Historical Institute. The Museum will present the history and culture of Polish Jews. Historians from Poland, Europe and the United States
are involved, directed by Professor Israel Gutman of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Replicas, dioramas and models will be created. Over
40,000 artifacts have been located, photographed and computerized. The
next stage is to search the eastern territories of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine,
Russia and around the world, and to cooperate with Jewish museums in
Europe, the United States and Israel that have many artifacts from Poland
or connected with the history of Polish Jews. The web site has information
on the project and a brief guide to the history of the Jews in Poland.
Nadzieja-Hatikvah Society
http://www.nadzieja-hatikvah.org
Languages: English, Polish
Students and academics of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Wroc³aw founded the Polish-Israeli Nadzieja-Hatikvah Society in
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the autumn of 2000. It also functions as an academic club for interested
students in the Institute of International Studies at the University of
Wroc³aw.
The Society fosters contact between communities, social and educational organizations in Poland and Israel, and the Jewish minority in Poland. An important element in Hatikvahs activities is the fight against
racial and ethnic prejudice among young people in Europe, especially in
Wroc³aw. It introduces young people to the history and culture of minorities. The Societys interests include the history of the Jews in Europe and
in Poland, the State of Israel, Polish-Israeli and Polish-Jewish relations,
and multicultural education. The Society organizes and participates in open
discussions, meetings and lectures, international youth seminars, social
work, workshops for students, and study trips. The Society also publishes
Hatikvah twice per semester. Other important activities include the Minorities in Poland and Around the World lecture series, cooperation with
the Education Ministry on student exchange programs with Israel, the
Peace Education training course for teachers of multiculturalism, painting
over and removing anti-Semitic and racist slogans around the city, and
coordinating the volunteer work of young people from different countries
in Jewish cemeteries and memorial sites.
Nizkor
http://www.nizkor.org
Languages: English, some sections in Spanish and Russian
Nizkor is Hebrew for we will remember, and preserving the memory of
the Holocaust is the main purpose of this site. It gives access to a rich collection of historical data, intelligibly grouped. Particularly useful is a section
with 66 commonly asked questions about the Holocaust, and their answers.
Another section enables on-line purchases of teaching aids such as
books, videos, posters and lesson plans. Many antiracist organizations and
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academic institutes dealing with the Holocaust can be contacted through
the site.
Open Republic Association
Against Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia
http://or.icm.edu.pl
Language: Polish
Open Republic fights racism and xenophobia by initiating and promoting
educational activities, documenting manifestations of prejudice, and making the public aware of them. The association aims to foster openness to
and respect for those of different ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, religions, cultures or societies, and to oppose attitudes that undermine human
dignity. The members of Open Republic are teachers, writers, journalists
and the clergy. They disseminate information on the sources of xenophobia,
anti-Semitism and racism, and bring them to the attention of government
authorities, churches, teachers, scholars and the media. The association
cooperates with the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, the Polish
Humanitarian Campaign and the Never Again Association.
The Associations School of Openness project analyses and describes school textbooks in the humanities, with a view to whether their
content promotes the idea of open civil society. The Open Republic site
also has reviews of anti-Semitic or extreme nationalist publications.
Ronald S. Lauder Foundation in Poland
http://www.lauder.pl
Languages: English, Polish
The Polish office of the New York City-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation opened in 1991. The main aims of the Foundation are to preserve and
protect the Jewish cultural heritage in Poland, to conduct cultural and charitable activities for the Jewish community in Poland, to help meet their
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cultural and religious needs, to support initiatives aimed at presenting the
culture, history and tradition of the Jews in Poland, and to support activities that create new possibilities of Polish-Jewish dialogue, especially in
cultural matters.
The Foundations projects in Poland include a kindergarten, educational camps, primary schools, Hebrew language courses, youth clubs,
a genealogical project, a yeshiva and publishing house, a journal, annual
Jewish Book Days, and holiday observances. Guides and information
packages in pdf. format can be found at the web site.
Shoa.de
http://www.shoa.de
Language: German
The site is part of a project that also addresses the Third Reich, the Second
World War and the postwar years. It has four sections: Subjects (dozens
of topics including anti-Semitism, Einsatzgruppen, ghettos, concentration
camps, the Nuremberg laws and Zyklon B), Victims and Heroes, Perpetrators, and Sources (e.g., literature on Hitler, films and archival recordings).
The site does not have its own discussion forum, but links to Aktion
Kinder des Holocaust (www.akdh.ch).
Shoah Project
http://www.shoahproject.org
Language: German
The Shoah Project site has several sections, introduced by News. The
Documentation section has materials on the Dachau concentration camp,
and a work by Dr. Rolf Kornemann, Doppelmord, describing the Nazis
anti-Jewish policy on property and housing. The Resistance section contains information on manifestations of resistance to nazism in Germany
(Die weisse Rose student movement, and a link to the Kids im Nazi-Regime
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site). The Internet section has Holocaust-related links, with a subsection
Uncensored Against Nazism. In the section devoted to literature there
are stories, essays and poems on Holocaust subjects, and the bibliographical section gives information on new German books, reviews, and an extensive bibliography grouped by subject.
Simon Wiesenthal Center
http://www.wiesenthal.com
Language: English
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an international organization engaged in
promoting tolerance, defending human rights and preserving the memory
of the Holocaust. The site has brief news items about terrorism and other
manifestations of intolerance around the world, mostly from the Middle
East, and also information on neo-Nazi groups and methods of opposing
them. The Museum of Tolerance section relates to the Centers educational activity. The Special Collections contain thousands of text files and
photographs describing the history of the Holocaust and World War II,
virtual exhibits, and many articles and essays. The site has a bibliography
prepared especially for teachers, and 36 important questions and answers
about the Holocaust.
Survivors of the Shoah. Visual History Foundation
http://www.vhf.org
Language: English
The Foundation was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994. Its purpose is to collect eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust in the form of
filmed documents on CD and video cassette. So far more than 50,000
accounts from 57 countries and in 32 languages have been collected.
The site gives information about the project and the educational films
made as a result.
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Work is proceeding on cataloging the recordings and utilizing the
archives for education in the classroom. The archive will be made available at the following institutions: the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, New Haven; the Museum of Jewish
Heritage in New York City; the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles;
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; and
Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
http://www.ushmm.org
Language: English
The Museum was established in 1980 to study and interpret the history of
the Holocaust. The site tells the user about the institutions wide-ranging
research and educational activities, with information on current studies
and access to part of the archives. Documents are also presented in some
of the on-line exhibitions. The site offers educational material in sections
geared to students, to families, to teachers, to adults, and to university
students and scholars. These sections develop many Holocaust subjects:
the situation of children and women, resistance, etc. Film of the liberation
of Auschwitz can be viewed. Clearly written material for students recounts
the history of nazism and the Holocaust. The material is supplemented by
many photographs and maps, and a glossary of the most important terms.
The section for teachers presents several books recommended for teaching about the Holocaust. A broad assortment of books can be purchased
from the Museums Internet shop.
Webs Center for Holocaust Education
http://www.hopesite.ca
Language: English
The site was created by the Victoria Holocaust Remembrance and Educa-
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tion Society, a Canadian organization. It has three main sections: Remember, Reflect, and Rekindle.
Remember is a collection of Holocaust survivor memoirs (interviews, video recordings, diaries). One section is devoted to childhood
during the Holocaust.
Reflect is where anyone can post an opinion, poem or other reflection. Here there is also a special section for helping the children of Holocaust survivors (support groups, therapy groups, etc.). There is also a link
with a guide to Holocaust-related web sites.
Rekindle speaks of the need to build hope. It suggests actions anyone can undertake against intolerance, prejudice and racism. It also raises
issues such as racism in schools, human rights, understanding other cultures, and teaching about the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem
http://www.yad-vashem.org.il
Languages: English, Hebrew
The Yad Vashem Memorial Institute in Jerusalem is one of the best-known
institutions dealing with the Shoah. The wide-ranging site reflects the
Institutes many areas of activity. The About Yad Vashem section contains detailed information about its history, current activities and plans for
the future. The section on the Holocaust has a list of questions most often
asked and their answers, a chronology of events, a bibliography of more
than 200 books considered most important by scholars and teachers, hundreds of documents from that time (translated to English), and monographs
on the Jewish communities of Grodno, Lida and Olkieniki. The Remembrance section contains biographies of victims. The Eleventh Hour Collection Project is intended to collect testimonies, documents and material
evidence from private persons. The Commemorating the Names project
gathers the names and biographical details of victims. The On-Line Exhi-
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bitions section presents 13 interesting exhibitions from the Museum collections. Especially moving is No Childs Play, about the fate of children
during the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem has much experience in teaching about the Holocaust.
In the Education section one can find general guidelines and pointers, and
information on workshops for teachers and on conferences. There is also
a Pedagogical and Resource Center with a range of educational aids and
e-mail contacts. The Research and Publications section presents current
research projects of the Institute and also offers the latest publications
(Yad Vashem Publications) and lesson materials (Teaching Units) for sale.
The Righteous Among the Nations section gives biographies, photographs of memorial sites, and statistics about those who took great risks to
save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
http://www.yivoinstitute.org
Language: English
The YIVO Institute was established in 1925 in Vilnius as a center for
research on the history and culture of the Jews in Eastern Europe. At
present the Institute is continuing its activity in New York. It has an archive
and a multilingual library, not accessible through the Internet. Available
at the site are parts of photographic and documentary exhibitions, and
a list of YIVO publications, some of which can be purchased through the
Internet. The site provides a great amount of information about the Yiddish language, including an alphabet with audio of how the letters are
pronounced.
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About the Authors
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska Professor of American and comparative literature. Head of the Center for Jewish Studies, Marie CurieSk³odowska University, Lublin. Translator of American and Yiddish
literature. Member of the editorial staff of the annual Polin: Studies in
Polish Jewry. Publications include Polska Isaaca Bashevisa Singera:
Rozstanie i powrót (1994), Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland:
An Anthology (with A. Polonsky, 2001) and Odcienie to¿samoci.
Literatura ¿ydowska jako zjawisko wielojêzyczne (2004). Recipient of the
Jan Karski and Pola Nireñska Prize (2004) from the YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research.
Natalia Aleksiun Historian. Researcher at the Center for Near Eastern
and Far Eastern Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Doctoral candidate in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New
York University. Recipient of the Prime Ministers Award (2002) for her
2001 doctoral thesis in the Faculty of History of Warsaw University. Publications include Dok¹d dalej. Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce 19441949
(2002) and many articles on Polish-Jewish relations, the history of the
Jews in Poland, and Jewish historiography.
Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs Researcher at the Jagiellonian University Institute of European Studies, Cracow. Member of the OSCE/ODIHR
Advisory Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and its Working Group on Education for Tolerance. Member of the European Consor-
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tium for Political Research Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy. Publications include Me Us Them. Ethnic Prejudice and Alternative Methods of Education: The Case of Poland (2003) and Tolerancja.
Jak uczyæ siebie i innych (2003). Research interests include prejudice,
anti-Semitism, intercultural education and reconciliation policy.
Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Lecturer at the University of £ód (19611967). From 1969, Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Jewish and Comparative Folklore
Program of the Hebrew University, and head of that program for many
years. Research interests include Polish folk art; the Jews of Poland, Iraq
and Yemen; and transformation and mutual borrowing in traditional Polish and Jewish culture.
Leszek Hoñdo Head of the Research Section on Jewish Culture in the
Department of Judaic Studies of the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Secretary of the Commission on the History and Culture of Polish Jews of the
Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chairman of the Committee for
Protection of Monuments of Jewish Culture in Cracow. Publications include Stary cmentarz ¿ydowski w Krakowie (1999), Inskrypcje starego
¿ydowskiego cmentarza w Krakowie (2000) and Cmentarz ¿ydowski
w Tarnowie (2001). Recipient of the Jan Karski and Pola Nireñska Prize
(2002) from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Tanna Jakubowicz-Mount Psychotherapist in Warsaw. Cofounder of
therapy centers: the Therapies and Personality Development Unit, the
Psychoeducational Laboratory, and the Holistic Training Center. Leads
the Polish Transpersonal Forum, which strives for the creative coexistence of people of different cultures, nationalities and spiritual traditions.
Conducts Meeting the Stranger educational workshops.
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S³awomir Kapralski Sociologist. Faculty member, Centre for Social
Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy and
Sociology, Warsaw. Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Central European
University, Budapest. Member of the European Association of Social
Anthropologists. Co-organizer of educational programs at the Center for
Jewish Culture in Kazimierz, Cracow. Publications include Wartoci
a poznanie socjologiczne (1995), The Jews in Poland (1999), Reformulations: Markets, Policies, and Identities in Central and Eastern Europe
(2000) and Democracies, Markets, Institutions: Global Tendencies in Local Contexts (2002). Research interests include theory of culture, nationalism, ethnicity and changes in identity, anti-Semitism and Polish-Jewish
relations, and the situation of Roma in Eastern Europe.
Sergiusz Kowalski Sociologist. Faculty member, Polish Academy of
Sciences Institute of Political Studies, Warsaw. Publications include
Krytyka solidarnociowego rozumu. Studium z socjologii mylenia
potocznego (1990), Narodziny III Rzeczpospolitej (1996), and Polish translations of Izaak Berlin, Timothy Garton Ash and Ralph Dahrendorf. Also
writes for Res Publika and Gazeta Wyborcza. The recent Zamiast Procesu.
Raport o Mowie Nienawici (with M. Tulli, 2003) analyzes five rightleaning Polish newspapers. Research interests include analysis of political and public discourse, particularly the ideology of the right and extreme
right.
Stanis³aw Krajewski Faculty member, University of Warsaw Institute
of Philosophy, specializing in logic and the philosophy of mathematics.
Co-chairman of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews since its founding in 1989. Member of the Executive Committee of the International
Council of Christians and Jews (19921998). Member of the Board of the
Federation of Jewish Religious Community Councils in Poland since 1997.
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Chairman of the Jewish Forum Foundation. Member of the International
Council of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Polish consultant to
the American Jewish Committee. Publications include ¯ydzi, judaizm,
Polska (1997), Twierdzenie Gödla i jego interpretacje filozoficzne: od
mechanicyzmu do postmodernizmu (2003), 54 komentarze do Tory dla
nawet najmniej religijnych poród nas (2004), and articles on Judaism,
Jewish history and Christian-Jewish dialogue.
Ireneusz Krzemiñski Sociologist (proponent of humanistic sociology)
and journalist. Professor at Warsaw University. Head of the Section on
Theory of Social Change of the Warsaw University Institute of Sociology.
Fellow of the Kociuszki Foundation. Prorector of the J. Giedroyc College
of Communication and Media, Warsaw. Board Member of the Polish Pen
Club. Member the Advisory Board of the Polish Journalists Association
Press Freedom Monitoring Center. Publications include Socjologia
i symboliczny interakcjonizm (1996), Bitwa o Belweder (with M. Grabowska,
1991), Czy Polacy s¹ antysemitami? (1996), Co siê dzieje miêdzy ludmi?
(1992), Solidarnoæ projekt polskiej demokracji (1997), and Druga
rewolucja w ma³ym miecie. Zmiana ustrojowa w oczach mieszkañców
M³awy i Szczecinka (with P. piewak, 2001). Research interests include the
Solidarity movement, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, national stereotypes and
attitudes to social minorities, including sexual minorities.
Zdzis³aw Mach Professor of sociology and social anthropology. Head
of the Social Anthropology Section and of the Jagiellonian University
Institute of European Studies, Cracow. Director of the Jagiellonian University Institute of Sociology (19911993), and Dean of its Department of
Philosophy (19931999). Publications include Kultura i osobowoæ
w antropologii amerykañskiej (1989), Symbols, Conflict and Identity
(1993) and Niechciane miasta: migracja i to¿samoæ spo³eczna (1998).
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Research interests include the cultural formation of identity, ethnicity and
nationalism, migration, theory of culture, and European integration.
Bohdan Michalski Philosopher. Professor at the Leon Komiñski Academy of Entrepreneurship and Management, Warsaw, and the College of
Social Psychology, Warsaw. Director of the Polish Institute in Stockholm
and advisor to the Polish Embassy in Stockholm (19941997). Member
of the Association of Polish Writers. Member of the Editorial Committee
for the 24-volume critical edition of collected writings of Stanis³aw Ignacy
Witkiewicz, and author of many works on his philosophical and aesthetic
views. Recipient of the Reconciliation Award (1996) from the Jewish
Community Council of Stockholm for his work to promote Christian-Jewish dialogue in Sweden through the Jews and Christians: Who Is Your
Neighbor After the Holocaust? program. Research interests include reconciliation ethics and policy, tolerance, multiculturalism, universal human rights versus minority group rights, and experimental programs for
teaching tolerance.
Andrzej Mirga Ethnologist. Cofounder of the Association of Roma in
Poland. Consultant to many international organizations. Chairman of the
Council of Europes Specialist Group on Roma. Chairman of the Project
on Ethnic Relations Romani Advisory Council, Princeton, U.S.A. Fellow
of the Kociuszki Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Has lectured
at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, and Rutgers University, United
States. Was the Jagiellonian Universitys first Romani student. Publications include Cyganie. Odmiennoæ i nietolerancja (with L. Mróz, 1994),
The Roma in the Twenty-First Century: A Policy Paper (with N. Gheorghe,
1997) and Romowie proces kszta³towania siê podmiotowoci
politycznej (1998, in: P. Madajczyk (ed.), Mniejszoci narodowe
w Polsce).
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Stanis³aw Obirek SJ Philosopher, theologian. Lecturer at the Ignatianum
College of Philosophy and Education, Cracow. Director of the Center for
Culture and Dialogue. Rector of the Jesuit Seminary and College, Cracow
(19941998). Former lecturer at Holy Cross College, Worcester. Editorin-Chief of the quarterly ¯ycie Duchowe (19942001). Publications include Jezuitów w Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodów w latach 15641668
(1996), Sezon dialogu. Rozmów dwadziescia trzy (2002) and Co nas ³¹czy?
Dialog z niewierz¹cymi (2002).
Robert Szuchta History teacher at High School LXIV, Warsaw, specializing in teaching about the Holocaust and the history of the Jews and
other minorities on Polish soil. Member of the Educational Commission
of the Polish Historical Society. Publications include articles on historical
and methodological subjects related to multicultural education and teaching about the Holocaust. Editor of the educational supplement to Mówi¹
wieki monthly. Member of the Program Council of the Open Republic
Association Against Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia. Publications include
Holocaust. Program nauczania o historii i zag³adzie ¿ydów na lekcjach
przedmiotów humanistycznych w szko³ach (with P. Trojañski, 2000; the
first Polish curriculum for Holocaust teaching) and Holokaust: zrozumieæ
dlaczego (with P. Trojañski, 2003; the first Polish textbook on the subject). Recipient of awards for outstanding achievement in educational work
from the Polish Ministry of Education (1995) and the Polcul Foundation,
Australia (2000).
Jerzy Tomaszewski Professor of history. Faculty member, Warsaw
School of Economics. Faculty member, College of National Economy,
Kutno. Faculty member, University of Warsaw (19702002). Member of
the Academic Board of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw (1970
1994). Founder and head of the Mordechaj Anielewicz Center for Research
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and Education on Jewish History and Culture of the Warsaw University
Institute of History (19902001). Publications include many works on the
economic and political history of Poland and Central European countries,
and the history of minorities in Poland, among them Z dziejów Polesia
(1963), Gospodarka miêdzywojenna w latach 19181939, v. IIV (with
Z. Landau, 19671969), Historia gospodarcza Polski XIX i XX w. (with
Z. Landau and I. Kostrowicka, 1975), Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów
(1985) and Europa rodkowo-Wschodnia 19441968 (1992).
Hanna Wêgrzynek Historian. Assistant Professor at the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw. Publications include Czarna legenda ¯ydów.
Procesy o rzekome mordy rytualne w dawnej Polsce (1999), a report on
content about Jews in history textbooks entitled Nauczanie o ¯ydach
w polskich szko³ach (1999), and the dictionary Historia i kultura ¯ydów
polskich (2000).
Stefan Wilkanowicz Chairman of the Znak Foundation for Christian
Culture, Cracow. Vice-Chairman of the National Council of Lay Catholics. Vice-Chairman of the International Council of the AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum. Vice-Chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death
Camp Victims Memorial Foundation. Editor-in-Chief of Znak monthly
(19781994). Member of the Pontifical Council for the Laity (19851995).
Chairman of the Catholic Intellectuals Club in Cracow for many years.
Published in Tygodnik Powszechny.
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