The book by Jan Gross, Neighbors, calls into question a view I had so far held, and which could be put in a nutshell as follows: in Poland, anti-Semitism has existed and was commonly accepted; however, it has nothing to do with the extermination of Jews under Nazi occupation. This belief represented a paradigm, that is, a basic, unquestionable tenet of my understanding of Polish-Jewish relations and modern history. Now, this paradigm of innocence has crumbled. This is typical of paradigms: irrefutable facts, which are contradictory to paradigms, make the overwhelming assumptions disappear, and their sudden negation makes us wake up in a completely different world. Nobody likes it. Imagine what a problem, an Englishman would have if he realized that he was not living on an island! It would be better for us if we did not make such discoveries.
The paradigm of innocence is very deeply rooted in the Polish vision of history. In
particular, we have grown accustomed to believing that we are innocent of the
extermination of the Jews-all of us, including "our anti-Semitics," who rescued
Jews despite the fact that they did not like them, which made it all the more admirable.
It is more difficult to make sacrifices for people one dislikes... I know that there were
such humanitarian anti-Semites, as depicted in the Władysław Bartoszewski's book Ten
jest z Ojczyzny mojej [This One is From My Homeland]. That's the point-the ones
who rescued others were from my homeland. We cross the szmalcownicy off the
list. They are hyenas, only ostensibly our fellow Poles-in fact, they are foreigners. This
was still possible.
Reading Gross's book, I cannot classify the perpetrators of the Jedwabne pogrom in this
way. It was surely a pogrom carried out on license from the Nazi occupation authorities,
an authorized pogrom inspired within the framework of the larger, pre-planned Shoah. As
such, in fact, it represented participation in the Shoah. This pogrom could never have
happened without the underpinnings of classical anti-Semitism, which is similar to the
anti-Semitism that still crops up left and right in today's Poland.
In my opinion, one of the most important insights in the present debate on Gross's book,
and one that makes things all the more terrifying, comes from Professor Krystyna
Skarżyńska. She writes that "in the light of psychological knowledge, it is almost
certain that, among the Jedwabne population, there would not have been so many people
willing to kill their neighbors had they been certain that their countrymen would condemn
them for doing so. Even if they acted under strong Nazi pressure. People always assess the
social costs and benefits resulting from their actions. It is very likely that those who
murdered their Jewish neighbors felt that they had the support of what they assumed were
like-minded Polish neighbors and opinion makers." If this is so, then the paradigm of
innocence that I also believed in no longer exists. Luckily for me, I have someone to
teach me how to live without this paradigm. The method was invented years ago by German
friends from the movement Aktion Sühnenzeichen
[Signs of Repentance Action]. I learned about this as we sifted side by side in silence
through the soil of death at Birkenau or in the ruins of a carpet-bombed hospital in
Dresden.
It's going to be difficult. Even some Polish Jews are attached to the paradigm of Polish innocence. Who wants to join in the sort of long-overdue repentance that is defined as self-flagellation? The Signs of Repentance Action model is probably obsolete. Flagellation is better done privately, only in the eyes of God, just as fasting and praying are done discreetly. What is needed in public is truth. Not self-flagellation, but the removal of the bandages from old wounds-and this is said to be painful-in order to see what is underneath: only a scar, or the return of the cancer?
Many years ago, a young Polish Jew said while talking about the memory of the Holocaust
that she wanted to have children, but only if they were daughters. A son must be
circumcised, she said, and wondered whether she had the courage to mark him that way,
perhaps for death. Her words stunned us. Yet we did not stop defending our collective
innocence. She may have been worried about a future child because an inherited injury from
the past was fixed in her memory. Now, after Gross's book, I think things are
different-and worse. That reasons for fear are also provided by today's anti-Semitic
slogans and games, which are not unrelated to what happened back then. That something is
still smoldering, which makes us realize that another conflagration is not to be ruled
out. What Professor Skarżyńska wrote about Jedwabne is still relevant.
Having supported Professor Skarżyńska's arguments, let me return to Jacek Żakowski's
remarks against the acknowledgement of collective responsibility. For Żakowski, the
paradigm of collective innocence is superfluous, for each neighbor, each other, has a name
of his or her own. Guilt is attributed to unique individuals, and individuals must be
recognized as innocent if they do not join in the crime. Each neighbor has a name.
However, I might not know that name, or I might have forgotten it. And the other, that
neighbor, may also forget my name - my personhood - or may negate it. And thus, in such a
case, one neighbor may somehow suspend or annul the moral imperatives that apply to
relations with others. We know from Gross's accounts that the neighbors' names were used
in Jedwabne when people pleaded for rescue. Rarely did it do any good. When a pogrom
breaks out, names no longer count. Nor are there neighbors any longer. So it was-not far
away, but in a certain place and in certain circumstances, in Poland.
What Skarżyńska suggested is still relevant: the responsibility of each and of all to remember the personhood of others, and the responsibility to preserve memory as a warning-the memory that is opposed to the large-scale quantifiers that dehumanize. Work by historians is needed on Jedwabne and other places where we already know that things were similar, or where we do not know and need to check. When the paradigm of innocence was removed, the fear arises that there may be far more such places than we previously thought.
Aside from historical revelations, there is also a need for action addressed to those people who are vulnerable to anti-Semitism. What kind of action? Professor Skarżyńska indicates the general direction. They must know that the poison they bear makes them unwanted. The fact that the specter of anti-Semitism haunts the whole world, or almost the whole world, is no excuse. The point is our own, Polish anti-Semitism, especially the kind that appears among the people who accent their Polishness, rather than their own name.