"Schindler's List" and the Polish Question

MOVIES AND MEMORY

Discussions of the Holocaust often turn on two dominant issues. The first is grasping the nearly incomprehensible horrors of Nazi Germany's mass extermination campaign against Jews. The second, overshadowed by the monumental nature of the first, concerns the Holocaust's Polish setting and raises divisive questions about the history of relations between Polish Jews and Catholics not only during but also before and after the Second World War. Western popular culture, most recently Steven Spielberg's powerful film "Schindler's List," has tended to emphasize the first issue, the nature of the Nazi atrocities, while leaving the Polish setting as a fuzzy and often misunderstood backdrop.

Yet today such depictions are curiously outdated. Over the last few years, Polish Catholics and Jews have made remarkable progress in an emotionally charged debate that has moved well beyond past recriminations, bringing that backdrop into far sharper focus. For sure, this dialogue continues to generate acrimony, both between and within the two groups, and agreement remains elusive on how to present their common history in schools and to the general public. But increasing numbers of Polish Catholics and Jews, both inside and outside the country, are moving beyond the angry recriminations that had once all but obliterated previous attempts at understanding.

AN ATMOSPHERE OF RECRIMINATIONS

The debate since the Second World War over Poland's history can be reduced to two (simplified) opposing views. Polish Catholics often emphasized Poland's long record as a land of refuge for Jews, beginning with the great migrations of Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and as a land of tolerance, where Jews were sometimes granted special privileges by Polish monarchs and nobles. Jews, on the other hand, often emphasized the steady growth of anti-Semitism in Polish society, especially when Poland reemerged as an independent state between the two world wars.

Poland's wartime experience compounded these angry disagreements. Polish Catholics stressed their own suffering at the hands of the German occupiers, arguing that, under the circumstances, they did what they could to help the Jews. They pointed to those Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews, such as Sister Matylda Getter, the nun who transformed a network of Catholic orphanages into sanctuaries for Jewish children. They also noted the efforts of the Polish underground to convince disbelieving British and American leaders, including prominent Jews, that the wholesale extermination of Polish Jews was under way and that drastic measures were needed to save them. Largely denying the existence of postwar anti-Semitism, they blamed manifestations of such attitudes on the prominent role of Jews in the secret police and other organs of the Polish puppet regime imposed by Stalin.

Jews, on the other hand, stressed the actions of Polish szmalcownicy, those who denounced or blackmailed Jews, and took special note of the hostility or indifference of many Polish Catholics. They also bitterly invoked the distressing evidence that anti-Semitism had survived in Poland even after the destruction of most of Polish Jewry: the Kielce pogrom of 1946, when a Polish mob killed 42 Jews, and the infamous 1968 "anti-Zionist" campaign launched by hard-liners within the Polish Communist Party as an excuse for new purges, which led to the coerced emigration of many remaining Polish Jews.

In this atmosphere of accusations, the Polish Communist authorities displayed the same blatant disregard for truth as they did on other issues, stirring xenophobic feelings in the hope of gaining the popular support that had always eluded them. The most egregious examples were the exhibits at Auschwitz, which only mentioned Jews as one of many groups victimized there. It is little wonder that many Jews resented what they saw as Polish efforts to "Polonize" the Holocaust, blurring the difference between the Nazi treatment of Poles and Jews and even their identities in death. Many Poles, in turn, resented what they saw as Jewish efforts to present themselves as the sole victims, refusing to acknowledge the suffering or help of others and portraying Poles as unrelenting anti-Semites.

BROADENING THE DIALOGUE

Beginning in 1987, a more open national discussion gained momentum in Poland. The new dialogue was prompted by a now-famous article by Professor Jan Blonski that appeared in the Krakow Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny. Blonski called for a "moral revolution" in dealing with the Polish-Jewish past, to "cleanse our desecrated soil", and he urged Poles to admit the virulence of their anti-Semitism in this century and accept guilt "for insufficient effort to resist" the Nazis' wartime atrocities against Jews.

The article provoked an outpouring of heated responses both praising and attacking Blonski. But the author achieved his goal of initiating a catharsis, which has since caused Polish Catholics and Jews to reexamine their past together. Blonski's article thus encouraged an increasingly expanded dialogue, one that has already gone a long way toward clearing a once poisoned atmosphere. For all their lingering suspicions, many Jews and Catholics have discovered that their views are not as mutually contradictory as they had once maintained, but rather can be used to complement each other in providing a fuller picture of a highly complex history.