'ONE SHOULD NOT PITY THE GERMANS'

Interview of Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising published in Tygodnik Powszechny n°33, p 3, August 17th 2003, Poland.

Q; Is the suffering of a German whose child was buried alive while trying to escape the bombardment of Swinemünde, less painful than that of a Polish woman whose son was tortured to death at [occupied Warsaw's] Pawia street prison? Or less painful than the suffering of a Jewish woman who miraculously survived but lost her children in the ghetto? This was the question raised by Helga Hirsch in the debate on the project to build a Center for the Expelled in Berlin.

MAREK EDELMAN: This is a moral issue. The Second World War changed people's mentality; all of a sudden, human beings were changed into objects, objects of contempt, things that could be destroyed.

Of course it is painful when you are driven from your home, from your land. During the war I had to move about twenty times. I didn't want to, but either the German authorities forced me to move or I had to go into hiding to escape death at their hands. But somehow I could live with [the removals]. It is not that terrible.

Ultimately, those Germans who were resettled after the war came not too bad out of it. True, some dramatic events, killings, violence, might have occurred during the expulsion. But those expelled to West Germany were resettled from [the land of] poverty to the land of prosperity, The Americans helped them through the Marshall Plan, and Mr. Erhardt produced the economic miracle. Even those resettled to the communist-ruled part of Germany did not protest (with the single exception of 1953 Berlin uprising). Apparently they fared better than the Poles. After all, the 'Solidarity' [movement] developed in Poland, not in Germany.

And I wonder if any of those Germans - except for the oldest ones who still remember their homes, a beloved apple tree or willow - if indeed any of them would wish to return to their patrimony in the East. It should be borne in mind that deportations were practiced by all European dictatorships. The communists resettled the Tartars, the Chechens, the Germans, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Estonians, and other peoples. They also deported the Jews, which happened to save the lives of some of them. The Poles were deported to Siberia, other Poles were resettled from Eastern Poland to the Western Recovered Lands. Somehow nobody intends to erect monuments for those people.

The project to build a Center for the Expelled Germans, to build it now, half a century after the war, is a purely political undertaking. This is a nationalistic, chauvinistic move. In politics, it is not so much what is said that matter, but who says it. The same words -love, law, equality, brotherhood, justice - mean one thing when spoken by a democrat and something else when spoken by a dictator. It is the circles connected with the Union of the Expelled that have launched the drive to build a Center, which means that this is a camouflaged return to the idea of Drang nach Osten. The conviction that the Germans haven't got enough of the Lebensraum, that so great a nation needs, and has the right to, a greater space to live in, keeps smouldering in Germans' subconscious. And there is also the arrogance, and the self-assured conviction that the nation has an extraordinary position in Europe. The promoters of "Center for the Expelled" exploit these feelings.

Q, However, the Union of the Expelled has also been supported, more or less openly, by people of the generation [of rebels of] 1968. For instance, the '68 student leader, and now a prominent intellectual, Daniel Cohn Bendit or Joschka Fischer, formerly the leader of the Green and now the chief of German diplomacy. They are the living symbols of the German Left which takes pride in denouncement of Nazi crime. Why do these people support the nationalist Right?

When in 1968 the French authorities wanted to deport Cohn Bendit [as an undesirable foreigner], the [French] student crowd expressed their solidarity calling "We, too, are German Jews, all of us" Bendit must have been proud that such, was the rebellion's spirit. Now he is joining those who shout 'We Germans have been wronged!' Joschka Fischer used to be in the forefront of the great social, and intellectual upheaval brought about by the movement of 1968, Now as the minister of foreign affairs he is simply playing the political game. A man of this stature! He should be ashamed of himself.

I am particularly disappointed and indignant about the attitude of these people. They, the leaders of the students' movement of May '68, seemed to understand where was the right place for the Germans. They seemed to be aware of the necessity to keep educating the German mind, for years and years to come, to prevent the recurrence of some form of Nazism. They seemed to understand that the Germans had to be double cautious, cling to the democratic principles, to the idea of human rights, fight every manifestation of nationalism, oppose the idea of ethnically uniform state, or else a Hitler might come back. And a new Hitler would convince the nation again that they cannot remain squeezed between the Oder and Rhine rivers and must expand to the East or to the Balkans.

I keenly wish for my friend Joschka Fisher and Mr. Cohn Bendit to begin pondering the last century's German history, and the need to be cautious. If they do, they might give up supporting the project of a monument, for German victims.

At present, their attitude and policies contribute the possibility that history repeats itself. Nationalism is a latent plague.

Q. But what are their aim?

The aims are political The votes.

Q. Can one really in 21st century's Europe achieves political gains with nationalistic slogans?

Nationalism is still a force, in particular in Germany where in the recent past the policies were entirely nationalistic. Such history does not pass without leaving a trace. That's why reviving such attitudes is so dangerous.

Q- But if all this is just a political game? Before the elections Chancellor Helmut Kohl also courted the expellees. According to several expert, however, he did so in order to take over thus constituency and pacify their radicalism.

I don't know what Kohl's aims were, I made the acquaintance of a few German Christian Democrats who visited Poland, Rita Sussmuth was one of them. I have no disagreement with these people. Were 'socialism' not a discredited word in Poland. I would say: these people are decent socialists.

Paradoxically, in Germany the Rationalist scenarios have always been more popular among the social democrats than with the Christian democrats, But I appreciate [socialist prime minister] Willy Brandt's great gesture of 1970. [While in Warsaw,] at 9 PM he learned about the existence of the monument to the Ghetto Uprising, and at 6 AM he was there. Except for his following nobody was present but the photograph of the kneeling chancellor was seen all over the world. He wanted to pay a tribute but he also wished to change the image of the German nation.

Q. Precisely.

Perhaps the change in the attitude of the generation '68 results from the fact that the Germans no more want to expiate the guilt of their fathers and grandfathers. How many generations must do penance for the guilt of their ancestors?

As many generations as are needed to eradicate the longing for Herrenvolk status from the German mentality.

Why nobody in Poland conceived the idea to erect a monument to the expelled, for instance to the population of Warsaw expelled from the city after the [Polish] uprising? Or the people resettled from Eastern provinces of Poland? Or the expelled Jews? Gloria victis would do as a motto. But the expelled don't have a monument in this country. There are monuments for those who perished.

I understand Günter Grass when he laments the ship sunk in the Baltic Sea with thousands of refugees on board. Yes, "Wilhelm Gustloff" was a tragedy. It's painful to realize that women and children perished. But let me remind you that during WWII the Germans sunk many ships carrying civilians. They displayed no humanitarian attitude, not even a trace of it.

And the tragedy of "Gustloff" cannot be compared with the crimes of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek.

Q. Human beings perished here and there... Near the monument for the expelled there will be a monument for the victims of the Holocaust. Perhaps the young people won't see it as equalizing the victims but as a symbol of a common tragedy?

These tragedies are incomparable. Certainly, an expulsion is a dramatic event in the lives of the expelled. But expulsion, did not take away the victims' lives. The Holocaust did. If a person died due to the expulsion, it was by accident. The Holocaust intended and planned the death of all its victims. So please, don't exaggerate. Expulsions belong to an entirely different dimension than the Holocaust.

Every war brings about deaths of people on both sides. But Great Britain does not erect monuments to English civilians killed by German bombs. On the other hand, the Germans keep loudly complaining that their civilians perished due to Allied bombardments. It is presumptuous. And insolent. It shows that they have not learned anything from the lesson of World War II. This was the war they wanted. Their nation supported Hitler. They wanted to be masters of the world. And they could succeed, were it not for America entering die war.

The Germans say that there were women and children among the expelled. They omit to say that these women powerfully supported Hitler. Just look at Leni Riefenstahl's [documentary] movies. They show these thousands of German women and maids in a trance, shouting "Heil! Hei"l!

[They claim the return of their lost property ] but do not they tell us that all the time during the war they lived by slave labor of the conquered nations, owing to which they were much better off than other Europeans.

And let's not delude ourselves that ordinary Germans did not know about the death camps, ghettos and so on. If not all of them, then surely the great majority knew what the Nazis were doing. Thousands of soldiers were involved in conquering Europe. Every one of them had relatives and wrote to them or told them what he saw. The millions of Jews were not killed by a few criminals; thousands of Germans were involved in the extermination. Murdering on such a scale could not be hidden. And it was to Germany that trains loaded with clothes were sent. Transports with objects of art and everything stolen, in the conquered countries, fur coats, radios, paintings, gold from the ghettos... The German peasants must have known that their unpaid alien workers had been caught in round-ups. And that these workers could be hanged for insubordination.

Let's remember, too, that the Germans have not liberated themselves. It was the Americans who liberated them from the Nazis,

The so-called expulsion was the price which the Germans paid for their politics, for endorsing Hitler's policies.

O. Could the post-war expulsions have been avoided? Could a different solution have been found for the Germans living in countries that had been occupied by the Third Reich?

At that time, Europe's political order was dictated by Stalin. It was Stalin who cut off Poland's Eastern territories. This ultimately turned out to the advantage of the Poles since instead of underdeveloped East they received the developed Western lands.

But to understand the post-way expulsions of Germans we must also recall the psychological situation, the society's mood of that time, the overall hatred of Germans. This hatred wasn't undeserved. It was not only the desire of revenge for all the killings. The everyday conduct of the Germans had been hateful. It often happened that when a German, no Gestapo but a military man, an elegant officer wearing white gloves, saw in the street a person with a Star of David armband, he tapped him in the face - for nothing, just to humiliate him.

Q. You suggested after the war that the Jewish state should not be created where now Israel if but in the cradle of Nazism. In Bavaria, which would have necessitated expelling the Germans from that area.

Yes. I said then that Bavaria had a better climate than Israel... And it would have been an opportunity for the Germans to do penance for their crimes against the Jews.

Q. Wouldn 't that be - to apply the present terminology - an ethnic cleansing? you have condemned the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Don't you think the expulsions of Germans after World War II were acts of similar kind?

No. The expulsions of Germans were a consequence of their defeat in World War II. They had unleashed that war. They conducted a total war against civilian populations. From 20 to 30 thousand militants fought in Warsaw's Polish uprising [of 1944], but 200 thousand civilians were killed. So you can see against whom the Germans fought their war. Rather than, build a monument for the expelled. [the Germans] should mourn those they killed.

There are young Germans who feel remorse for the guilt of their parents. These young people do not talk about a monument for the expelled. Some of them told me that at a certain point they realized that their families became prosperous by dispossessing the victims of the war. A young German doctor asked me what he should do: he found little bags with gold, apparently brought by his father or grandfather from a death camp where he had served during the war. I advised him to equip a department of neonatal and infant care at the hospital in Sarajevo.

I can't say how much political clout can be achieved in Germany by emphasizing the wrongs to die expelled. The 'associations of fellow countrymen' [unions of people stemming form various German lands] have been quite vocal about this issue for many years. It was the source of their income. Apparently, the issue is important to a part of the society.

The denazification of Germany [should not have] ended in 1948 with the creation of the Federal Republic; it should proceed. It is not just a political problem, it is the problem of the nation's psyche. Germans, with their past, are no normal people. With such a past one cannot be normal. Neither am I normal - with my past and my memory. With this difference that my past was, and had to be, anti-German. I don't seek revenge. I don’t have a quarrel with them, I only don't want to see them in the role of victims. Because in that case I would have to consider myself an executioner. The reverse is true: the Germans were my executioners. The erection of a Center for the Expelled would be an anti-Polish act: an accusation that expelling the Germans the Poles wronged them. It would also be hostile to all nations that had been the victims of World War II. It was the Poles and other nations conquered by the Germans that were the victims. I spent five years under German occupation. They say there were good and bad Germans. Somehow I haven't had the chance to come across a good one.

Q. Not a single one?

Not a single one. I was not fortunate to meet a good German. Only the ones that slapped my face.

Yes, I'm really sorry if a young woman perished during the expulsion, together with her baby. But I have no pity at all for the German nation. This was the nation that elevated Hitler to power. For five years the German society lived at the cost of the occupied Europe, at the cost of myself and my friends. I was allotted twenty grams of bread a day [a little more than two-thirds of an ounce], while the Germans were eating to their hearts content. For that they must still atone. Let them weep a long, long lime. Perhaps then they'd realize that they had been Europe's executioners. Erecting a monument for the expelled would corroborate the view that the Germans have been wronged in World War II. This would be disastrous. More than that: it would mean that they have the right to seek revenge.

Q. What if they only ask for respect for their own memories? The expulsions are part of their nation's history.

What memories? Were they that much wronged? Did they loose homes? They did, but the Jews lost their homes and their entire families. Please stop pitying the Germans. They have not been wronged,

Q. You signed the appeal to build - instead of a Center for the Expelled - a European Center Against Expulsions, Forced Resettlements and Deportations. What would it be like?

The most important is to show that every totalitarian state system leads to such tragedies.

Q. And what place would the Germans have in such a Center?

None. They must not boast about their ill fortunes. They do not deserve compassion. Their lot should be expiation, for many generations to come, if they don't, they'll recover their haughtiness, their arrogance.

Q. You don 't even try to be in their shoes.

There is no reason for me to be in killers' shoes. Only God is so righteous that He mourns even a killer's ill fortune.

STATEMENT BY MR. JOSCHKA FISCHER, GERMAN MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

In a statement published on August 18, 2003, in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Joschka Fischer declared himself against the project of the Union of the Expelled to build a memorial Center for the Expelled in Berlin. "The debate has taken a turn contrary to my way of thinking" said the Minister; 'the suffering of our nation has been self- inflicted'. Mr, Fischer stated further that if a memorial place dedicated to the victims of expulsions were created, it would have to be a European institution.

Interviewed by Krzysztof Burnetko and Jaroslaw Makowski.