[...] I caught part of the festival's closing concert, a kind of Jewish Woodstock that grows bigger every year. In the heart of what used to be Krakow's Jewish quarter, before an outdoor stage dominated by a giant electric menorah, 10,000 exuberant Poles swayed, cheered, and sang along as dozens of Jewish artists performed. The concert lasted for seven hours and was broadcast live on TV. In a country with no more than a wisp of Jewish life, where does such an appetite for things Jewish come from? [...]This year's festival: Program of the 2006 Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow July 1-9 . More info here. It's not too late to arrange a visit.
Conventional wisdom holds that Jews killed in Poland immediately after World War II were victims of ubiquitous Polish anti-Semitism. This book traces the roots of Polish-Jewish conflict after the war, demonstrating that it was a two-sided phenomenon and not simply an extension of the Holocaust. The author argues that violence developed after the Soviet takeover of Poland amid postwar retribution and counter-retribution and was exacerbated by the breakdown of law and order and a raging Polish anti-Communist insurgency. Meanwhile, Jewish Communists fought to establish a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist regime. Some Jewish avengers endeavored to extract justice from Poles who allegedly harmed Jews during the War and in some cases Jews attempted to reclaim property confiscated by the Nazis. These phenomena reinforced the stereotype of zydokomuna, a Jewish-Communist conspiracy, and Poles reacted with violence.From the review:
He cites three reasons that Poles killed Jews: resistance to Jewish communists, to Jews determined to execute Poles who had collaborated with the Nazis, and to Jews attempting to reclaim property expropriated by Nazis and since claimed by Poles. ...From the response:
Chodakiewicz cites ample evidence to support claims about the Communist occupation that have been recorded in other works. The postwar Communist government of Soviet-occupied Poland did demonize and persecute the heroic Poles who had fought against the Nazis during the war. These Poles, including rescuers of Jews, faced often fabricated charges of antisemitism. This was one way to discredit Poland in the West and lend legitimacy to the Communist takeover. Anti-Nazi heroes were hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Similarly, the author provides ample evidence to support what has been acknowledged elsewhere but remains a contested factor of postwar Polish life. Jews were disproportionately represented in the Communist power structure, including among those actively torturing Poles.
Chodakiewicz does not deny the existence of anti-Semitism in Polish society nor in the Polish anti-Communist resistance as the reviewer suggests throughout the review. To the contrary, he provides many examples and shows in some detail how the Polish resistance often erroneously attributed the actions and opinions of Jewish Communists to the Jewish community as a whole. However, he rejects the dominant paradigm that all Polish actions and all Jewish deaths were caused by this single factor.From an Amazon review:
Chodakiewicz cites a number of documents (pp. 42-43) that prove the fact that Jews, at 1% of Poland's postwar population, represented upwards of 50% of leadership positions in the dreaded Communist secret police, a force responsible for torturing and murdering tens of thousands of Poles. Jews were also strongly over represented in its lower levels, though not to as extreme an extent. While there was no grand Jewish-Communist conspiracy as such, it is difficult to imagine how the existing situation could have failed to inflame Polish-Jewish relations. ...posted by russilwvong at 1:34 PM on June 26, 2006
The cited testimony of Jan Dawid Landau (p. 77) is instructive in understanding how Stalin recruited Polish Jews to do the dirty work for him (also facilitating the tarring of independentists with the label of anti-Semitism once they fought back). Landau was told by a UB (Communist secret police) officer that he now had the opportunity to take revenge for everything he had suffered from the Polish people. This illustrates the typical left-wing technique of stirring up resentments ("victim consciousness") of one group against another.
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posted by matteo at 8:28 AM on June 25, 2006