Poland
turns history into diplomatic weapon
A
Polish-Jewish historian comes under fire for questioning Poland’s
historical record.
By JO HARPER
2/19/16, 5:30 AM CET
WARSAW — In a
campaign to give a better gloss to Poland’s history, President
Andrzej Duda launched what he calls an “offensive,” and the first
target is U.S.-Polish Holocaust historian Jan Gross.
Duda is mulling
whether to strip Gross of one of Poland’s highest honors for
suggesting that during World War II Poles killed more Jews than they
killed Germans. The assertion, which Gross backed up with numbers in
an interview with POLITICO, strikes at the heart of Poland’s
national narrative — that it is a nation uniquely harmed by history
and for that reason should have a louder voice on the world stage.
It’s a key
component of the worldview of the country’s nationalist Law and
Justice (PiS) ruling party.
“Historical
politics should be conducted by the Polish state as an element of the
construction of our international position,” Duda said at a recent
conference dedicated to the country’s revision of history.
“The
majority of Poles grew up on the myths of Polish knighthood,
conspiracy and struggle and this majority is unwilling and unlikely
to change its mind” — Jan Muś, an academic from
Lublin.
Duda’s efforts are
part of a broader campaign by Law and Justice to use the wrongs of
the past to fend off criticism of the present.
Death camps
The party has come
under international censure for recent steps undermining the
functioning of the constitutional court, politicizing the civil
service, combining the offices of justice minister and prosecutor
general, and putting state media under tighter government control.
Officials like Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro have been especially
sensitive to any disapproval from German politicians, quickly
bringing up Germany’s bloody wartime occupation of Poland.
Ziobro is also
behind a push to punish publications that refer to “Polish death
camps” in reference to wartime Nazi concentration camps on Polish
soil. The previous center-right government would send angry
diplomatic letters to newspapers and magazines which slighted Poland
in that way, but Ziobro wants miscreants to serve jail time for the
suggestion.
“This will be a
project that meets the expectations of Poles, who are blasphemed in
the world, in Europe, even in Germany, that they are the Holocaust
perpetrators, that in Poland there were Polish concentration camps,
Polish gas chambers. Enough with this lie. There has to be
responsibility,” Ziobro said.
The government isn’t
just focusing on World War II.
Wałęsa’s past
One of the central
narratives of Law and Justice, strongly promoted by its leader
Jarosław Kaczyński, is that the end of communist rule in 1989 was
in large measure a trick that allowed communist elites to enrich
themselves with the help of corrupt leaders of the pro-democracy
Solidarity labor movement. That means Poland’s independence over
the last quarter century has been a sham.
A central part of
that account is that Lech Wałęsa, the Solidarity leader, Nobel
Peace Prize winner and former Polish president, was in fact a
communist agent.
This week fresh
allegations arose that he worked for the communist secret services in
the 1970s. He was cleared some years ago by the Institute of National
Remembrance, a body that investigates Nazi and communist crimes, but
documents seized this week from the house of recently deceased
General Czesław Kiszczak, a communist-era interior minister, suggest
Wałęsa had been issued with the a codename ‘Bolek.’ Wałęsa
has admitted to an “incident” with the secret police in the early
1970s, but has adamantly denied being an informant.
“You aren’t able
to change the real facts with lies,” he wrote on his blog.
That’s not the
view of Sławomir Cenckiewicz, an anti-Wałęsa historian, who issued
a statement that Wałęsa’s past “had a crucial meaning” in the
way he ran Solidarity and “on the shape of reforms after 1989.”
Mateusz Morawiecki,
deputy prime minister and development minister, told Poland’s TVN
television that it was “obvious” that Wałęsa was a
communist-era agent.
A carnival float
featuring the leader of PiS party Jaroslaw Kaczynski oppressing
Poland, at Duesseldorf's Rose Monday parade
While Wałęsa’s
reputation is crucial to PiS’s internal Polish narrative, the most
sensitive historical issue for the new government outside the country
is Poland’s wartime reputation.
Gross angered many
Poles in 2015 by denouncing Poland’s reluctance to take in asylum
seekers and in particular pointing out Kaczyński’s reference to
refugees as disease carriers, saying it could be traced back to
Polish treatment of Jews during World War II. The government prefers
to refer to the country’s fierce resistance during the war, and to
the heroism of thousands of Poles who saved Jews from death.
“PiS itself is not
overtly anti-Semitic,” Gross said. “But … it feeds on
associations with anti-Semitic rhetoric. The language used about the
refugees is sinister, these strangers in our midst that carry
disease.”
He especially
agitated nationalists by contending that Poles had killed many Jews
during the war.
Controversial
wartime record
“About 17,000
Germans were killed during the September [1939] campaign, about 5,000
during the Warsaw Rising of 1944 and another 5,000 during the German
occupation in Poland,” he said. “Many more Jews were murdered.”
Auxiliary Polish
police, fire brigades and ordinary people killed Jews running away
from the ghettoes when the Germans were rounding Jews up for
deportation to extermination camps, Gross said. “Of the
200,000-250,000 Jews that were alive after the liquidation of the
ghettos many were killed by Poles, so that only about 40,000 survived
the war.”
Gross is best known
for his 2001 book “Neighbors,” which describes the 1941 massacre
by Polish villagers of 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne, a small town in
north-eastern Poland. He says there were many more other “Jedwabnes
that we haven’t heard about.”
Another book of his,
“Fear,” described a 1946 pogrom by Poles against Jewish Holocaust
survivors.
“The
language used about the refugees is sinister, these strangers in our
midst that carry disease.” — Jan Gross, historian.
Gross was born in
Poland, but left in 1969 during an anti-Semitic purge by the
communist authorities. He was awarded Poland’s Knight’s Cross of
the Order of Merit in 1996 for his academic work and support for the
democratic transformation.
Duda told a
television station his office had received 2,000 letters asking him
to withdraw the medal. He is awaiting the opinion of the foreign
ministry on the matter. Wałęsa has also weighed in, calling on
Gross to hand the medal back.
“PiS is obsessed
with stimulating a patriotic sense of duty,” Gross said. “And
given that most Poles do not know their own history very well, and
think that Poles suffered as much as Jews during the war, the new
regime is playing into a language of Catholic martyrology.”
A central theme in
this version of the national narrative is of a morally clean nation
that has witnessed horror but not been an active collaborator in it.
“The majority of Poles grew up on the myths of Polish knighthood,
conspiracy and struggle and this majority is unwilling and unlikely
to change its mind,” said Jan Muś, an academic from Lublin.
While the government
attacks Gross, he also has defenders. A group of Polish academics
signed a petition supporting him. U.S. historian Timothy Snyder, who
has long sympathized with Poland and written about the wartime
suffering of its people in his 2010 book “Bloodlands,” said he
will return his own Order of Merit if Gross loses his.
“Whether the
Polish government and president decide to strip Jan Gross of the
Order of Merit will not make a difference to Jan Gross,” said Anita
Prażmowska, professor of international history at the London School
of Economics. “What the government should be doing is focusing on a
proper debate of Polish history and on fostering an understanding of
it. What this petty act will do is discredit the PiS government and
consolidate the international perception that it is driven by a
narrow nationalist agenda. It’s a shot in its own foot.”
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