Poles, Jews must learn to just be friends

Cezary Podkul

The Daily Pennsylvanian
6 December 2004

'My great-grandparents lived in Poland, and they didn't get treated very well over there, so why shouldn't Poland just fall off the map into the sea?"

Having just finished a speech on the Polish roots of Joseph Conrad's prose in front of a student group, I was surprised to get this question in the Q&A session. The speaker was Jewish and, not surprisingly, her Jewish ancestors endured discrimination in Eastern Europe and escaped it by fleeing to the United States. But what did surprise and deeply concern me was the level of animosity that she harbored toward Poland as a result of this past prejudice.

This may be an extreme example, but I think it highlights the fact that Poland does not enjoy an especially high reputation among many Jews. Here at Penn I've found myself in conversations, sometimes with my closest Jewish friends, in which I've had to defend Poland's history, people and culture against comparisons to Nazi Germany, generalizations about Polish violence against Jews, and misconceptions regarding Polish-Jewish relations throughout the ages. Since I believe that Poles and Jews should get along as well as Bert and Ernie, I would like to correct some of the misconceptions that currently sour Polish-Jewish relations.

First of all, the overwhelming majority of Poles had no role in the Holocaust; rather, they were victims of the Holocaust. Of course there were Polish Nazi sympathizers -- traitors -- who aided the Nazis in the Final Solution, but such sympathizers could be found in any Nazi-occupied territory. This alone, however, does not account for why many Jews view Poland as a Holocaust perpetrator.

Unfortunately, highly-publicized massacres, such as that at Jedwabne (for which the Polish government has publicly apologized) are often used to generalize about the extent of Polish violence toward the Jews. Jedwabne was an exception, certainly not the norm. Thus, while I fully admit that a few Poles did commit violence against Jews during World War II and that the lives that were lost are important and ought to be remembered, I think it is an insult to Poland -- a country that suffered so much as a result of Hitler -- to equate such violence with the violence perpetrated by the Nazis.

But let's step back further into history. What about the pogroms committed against the Jews in the Pale of Settlement during the 19th and early 20th centuries? This was the very sort of violence that the speaker was referencing in her question to me. But here we must be careful and separate Poland from Poles. Poland, as a political entity, did not exist for 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, because it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria. During that time, people of many different ethnicities -- not just Poles -- occupied the partitioned lands, parts of which comprise modern-day Poland.

Thus, pogroms and other violence that was carried out against the Jews in the Russian-imposed Pale of Jewish Settlement (aka "land we stole from Poland") were not the sole responsibility of Poles; Cossacks, Tartars, Russians and other ethnic groups are just as, if not more, culpable. So if your persecuted Jewish ancestors came from what is today Poland, it is not fair to say that that prejudice was the fault of Poles; Tsarist Russia was most culpable due to the severe restrictions placed on Jews and Poles and the pogroms that it passively accepted.

But, stepping back even further, it is acceptance, rather than anti-Semitism, that best describes the general Polish attitude towards Jews throughout history. For example, in the 1300s the Polish King Casimir the Great encouraged Jewish settlement in Poland by granting Jews royal protection. In later periods, Jewish-Polish history (see for yourself at www.PolishJews.org) is peppered with many similar royal decrees and laws granting Jews various rights and -- we cannot forget -- almost as many revoking those rights. Nonetheless, in the final analysis, one is hard-pressed to find any other nation in Europe where Jews were as welcome, or enjoyed as much freedom, as in Poland at that time.

Unfortunately, many Jews do not give Poland credit for this history of acceptance, perhaps because of anti-Semitism today or during the prewar period. I do not deny that anti-Semitism does exist, and has existed in the past, in Poland; after all, the Polish word for "Jew" (Zyd) still serves as a colloquial synonym for "bill collector." However, we cannot let perceptions of anti-Semitism blind us from the shared Jewish-Polish heritage of cooperation and friendship. That is why the Penn Polish Society, of which I am the co-president, has elected a Jewish Outreach Officer to promote better Polish-Jewish relations. Together, by learning from the past, we can look toward a brighter future in which neither Poland nor Israel will fall off the map into the sea.

Cezary Podkul is a junior Management and Philosophy major in Wharton and the College from Chicago, Ill. Cezary Salad appears on Mondays