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The new life

Three things about Poland shocked me. The first shock came when I arrived in Warsaw on a very clear fall day last week — a bright blue sky, miles of green parks, the afternoon sun glinting off glass-fronted office towers in shades of steel, silver and blue. I was taken aback, but at the time I wasn’t sure why.
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October 20, 2010

Three things about Poland shocked me.

The first shock came when I arrived in Warsaw on a very clear fall day last week — a bright blue sky, miles of green parks, the afternoon sun glinting off glass-fronted office towers in shades of steel, silver and blue.  I was taken aback, but at the time I wasn’t sure why.

I had been invited to speak at a three-day conference on Polish-Jewish relations, an initiative in public diplomacy sponsored by the country’s Foreign Ministry.  That first afternoon I ran into another speaker, the author Zev Chafets.  He nailed my initial reaction.

“Coming from the airport,” he said, “weren’t you surprised everything was in color?”

That was it: Where had I seen Poland outside of World War II newsreels,  Holocaust movies and photos, and, of course, “Schindler’s List”? That entire movie was in black-and-white, except for the fleeting image of a tragic figure, a doomed little Jewish girl in a bright red dress.

And that’s how most of us see Poland. Our attitude can be summed up in two ideas, said Israeli scholar Larry Weinbaum: “Poles are worse than Germans” and “Forget Poland.”  That’s what our grandparents told us, that’s what the survivors tell us, and they were there.

And, let’s face it, the numbers are, on their face, damning. Until 1939, 3.5 million Jews lived in the Polish Republic — the largest Jewish community of its day outside of the United States. In Warsaw, Jews made up 30 percent of the population.  By the end of the war, perhaps 300,000 remained — the majority of these inside the Soviet Union. Fully 90 percent of Poland’s Jews were murdered in the villages, ghettos and concentration camps.

Continuing outbreaks of anti-Semitism in the postwar years prompted a subsequent exodus of the beleaguered survivors.  Today’s Polish Jewish population is estimated to be around 5,000.

Part of the conference was devoted to reiterating facts now widely accepted by Holocaust historians, facts that challenge the common understanding of Poland’s Holocaust record and anti-Semitism.

The Holocaust was worst in Poland because that’s where the Jews lived. Auschwitz was a German concentration camp on Polish soil. The Poles themselves were a victimized population (the first 100,000 victims of Auschwitz were non-Jewish Poles). Only in Poland was the punishment for aiding a Jew death for the rescuer and his or her entire family. And yet, Yad Vashem has recognized far more Righteous Gentiles in Poland than in any other country — 6,000.

Following the war, the 1,000 or more Jews killed in Polish pogroms include victims of outright anti-Semitism, strains of which continue to this day.  But some of that brutality was the result of Soviet provocation, of anti-Communism, of postwar deprivation and chaos — in other words, history refuses to let us take as the entire truth the black-and-white images or even our zeyde’s own stories.

A big part of the problem was Soviet rule, the Israeli scholar Shlomo Avineri said at the conference.  Until the Eastern bloc crumbled in 1989, Polish authorities suppressed information and education, plunging the Holocaust into what Avineri called “a dark hole in Polish memory and conscious forgetting.”

Germany and Austria have had 60 years to face up to their pasts, to atone and, to be coarse, rebrand themselves. Poland, with just 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, is playing catch-up.

But Poles, it struck me, are as memory-obsessed as Jews: The promenade in the nicest section of Warsaw was lined with posters describing the history of Soviet-era secret police interrogation. Polish politicians battle over what strategy should have been taken during the Solidarity movement two decades ago with the urgency that only Israeli Revisionists and Mapainiks could love.  Not surprisingly then, Poles have found natural partners among many local, Israeli and Diaspora Jews to revise our understanding of history and repair relations.

Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the American-born Chief Rabbi of Poland, explained how this has come about. The late Pope John Paul II led the way by declaring anti-Semitism a sin. Every consecutive Polish government and president has been open to accounting for Poland’s Holocaust history and forging good relationships with Jewish communities in Poland and abroad. The Jewish community within Poland has been growing. American Jewish philanthropists like Severyn Askenazy in Los Angeles and Ronald S. Lauder in New York, as well as the San Francisco-based Taube Foundation, have been instrumental in building or revitalizing community centers, social services, cultural projects and synagogues to serve Poland’s Jews. There has been a renewed interest in Jewish culture on the part of Poles, who are beginning to see it as integral to their own heritage. Finally, the Israeli government has forged a close political and economic relationship with Poland.

“There is no greater friend to Israel in Europe today than Poland,” said Rabbi Schudrich. “Israelis know this. American Jews don’t.”

The American Jewish challenge when it comes to modern Poland is to reverse the “Schindler’s List” images, to see the country as mostly color, with a little black and white.

But on the second day of the conference, one thing was clear to me: I wouldn’t see the color from a conference room at the Hyatt Hotel. So, I slipped out after the first session and jumped into a cab.

It was in a bakery on Nowy Swiat, one of the historic main streets of the city, that my second shock came. There was the smell of poppy seed cake, of a tall chocolate babka, of cheese-filled Danish, of rye and pumpernickel. There was the stout woman behind the counter, both brusque and mothering.  And there was challah — in every bakery — sprinkled with crystallized sugar, but as common as white bread. I closed my eyes and I was at Canter’s or Diamond’s or Bea’s Bakery. It was disconcerting how Poland could feel so comfortable.

At dinner one night with Zvi Rav-Ner, Israel’s ambassador to Poland, I mentioned that the Nowy Swiat, with its cafes filled with artists and tea-sippers, and in the tone of conversations and arguments, the delicatessens smelling of herring and lox, the traditional restaurants serving stuffed cabbage and brisket — it was a dead ringer for Tel Aviv’s Lillienblum Street.

“Yes!” the ambassador’s wife, Diti, said.  “That’s exactly what I tell people.”

Israel was founded between Pinsk and Minsk, Chaim Weizmann, the great Zionist leader, once said, and though Jewish life in Poland is a shadow of what it was, I felt the truth of that saying in the culture that surrounded me.

If Israel embodies the shock of the new — a new kind of Jew, a new Jewish future, new language — Poland gave me the shock of the familiar. On Nowy Swiat, I felt it in my bones — my ancestors lived for centuries in this land: This, too, is my birthright.

The key, according to many people at the conference, is to get American and Israeli Jews to see Poland that way. While many have applauded the March of the Living tours that take tens of thousands of Jewish high school students to Poland and then to Israel, they urged organizers to treat Poland less like a giant death camp and more like a living, vibrant country.

On our last day, we took a formal Jewish tour of Warsaw. The focus wasn’t just on what was, but what will be. Of the Warsaw Ghetto, there is nothing left — a vibrant city has risen on its ashes. But there are increasing efforts to honor the life and death of Poland’s Jews and their contributions.

In the plaza of the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we toured the skeleton of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which, when it is completed in 2012, will be a huge, ultramodern building that will rejoin together the past and present, enshrining our story for future generations.

The Museum will be a catalyst for even greater interest and activity, Shana Penn, the executive director of the Taube Foundation, told us.

“It will be a game changer,” she said.

More than one speaker said that in Poland what matters is not whether the glass is half full or half empty, but whether the water is rising or falling. Everyone agreed it is rising.

But there is still work to do. The final shock came when I wandered into the souvenir shops of the rebuilt Old City to find that each one sells little carved wooden statues of Chasidic Jews clutching money bags and holding a real coin zloty.

They are called zydki, the diminutive, and often pejorative, term used for Jews.

“In Poland, there is a nostalgia not just for Jews,” Avineri said, “but for photogenic Jews.”

Poles evidently display their Lucky Jew to bring prosperity.  Sure, Americans think nothing of wearing American Indian mascots to invoke bravery for their sports teams. But it was just — weird — to have my own culture reduced to a convenient pocket-size Jew doll.

Andrzej Folwarczny, a former Polish parliamentarian and founder of the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, conducts encounters between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles, as well as opinion surveys. He has devoted much of his life to explaining Poland to Jews, and Jews to Poles. The people who sell those dolls, he tells me, shouldn’t be taken too seriously.  They’re a sign of a waning stereotype among a generation of older, less-educated Poles. Anti-Semitism rates drop to insignificant levels among the younger generation.

On my way out of Warsaw, I couldn’t resist: I bought two of the Jew dolls.  They are kind of cute, in a bizarre way. And they’re in color.

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