It was an awkward situation.
The ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz were over, but at Menora, the one kosher restaurant in Warsaw, a group of Jews, half-Jews and non-Jews exchanged barbs as they attempted to settle a long and bloody account between Poles and Jews.
As they spoke, each member of the group first presented his Holocaust credentials.
As I was freezing at the Auschwitz ceremony, I asked myself: How did I survive so many winters in the concentration camp with hardly any clothes on?” said Dov Shilansky, deputy speaker of the Knesset.
“Half of my family was murdered in the Holocaust,” was the introductory remark of Adam Michnik, one of Poland’s most prestigious journalists.
It was as though the proximity to death and suffering provided each with a license for an open exchange of feelings.
Indeed, it was a frank and sometimes bitter exchange.
The debate erupted during a meeting between a small group of Polish journalists and the Israeli delegation to the Auschwitz commemoration.
With the Israelis ready to depart in an hour, the exchange became a battle not only over historic times, but also over speaking time.
The Israelis’ main line of attack was that too many Poles had collaborated with the Nazis. Anti-Semitism is too deeply rooted inside the Polish society, they said.
“When I left Auschwitz, a Polish journalist asked me: `Which is worse, the human tragedy, or the Jewish tragedy?'” said Shevach Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and speaker of the Knesset.
“I reminded him that Jews were humans as well,” said Weiss, who headed the Israeli delegation at the commemoration.
The bitterness of the Israelis was in large part inspired by their differences with the Polish organizers of the Auschwitz events.
According to them and other Jewish critics, the Polish government had focused on Auschwitz as a symbol of universal suffering, and had paid too little attention to the specifically Jewish dimension of the atrocities committed there.
“It hurts that after 50 years, in Poland of all places, we must reiterate that Jews are humans,” Weiss said, “and that the Holocaust is predominantly a Jewish tragedy.”
Shilansky, also a Holocaust survivor, did not mince words, either.
“The Polish people better do some soul-searching,” he said, “because if they don’t, they will sink in their own mud.”
Shilansky recalled that the parents of two former Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, had been murdered by Poles, not by Germans.
Weiss, in turn, noted how Polish informers had turned Jews over to the Germans.
The Poles, editors of some of Poland’s most prestigious newspapers, did not like what they heard-and they responded emotionally.
When Shamir made the statement that “every Polish child had sucked anti- Semitism with his mother’s milk, it was anti-Semitism the other way around,” said Michnik, editor of Gazetta Wyborcza.
“The stereotypes which Shilansky presented besmear Poland and are historically false,” said Michnik, whose father was Jewish.
“Indeed, we have difficult issues of search our souls over,” he said, “but throwing the blame for the annihilation of the Jewish people on the Poles in an exaggeration.
“We are convinced that the Polish people have no responsibility for the criminal margins [of the population] who collaborated with the Nazi occupation.
“Collaboration occurred in every country, but in Poland less than in any other country under occupation,” Michnik maintained.
As the Israeli guests moved uneasily in their chairs, Michnik went on with the attack:
“I would have liked you to show the same goodwill toward the Poles as you have shown toward the Russians,” he said. “Why, sometimes you are even more tolerant toward the Germans.”
The Israelis, needing to rush to the airport, wanted the encounter to end on a less discordant note.
This is the beginning of a dialogue, not the end, Weiss said. And Professor Yisrael Gutman, the renowned Israeli historian of the Holocaust, provided a terse summation intended to end the debate:
“Regarding responsibility for the Holocaust, the Germans are responsible. Period.”
The tow parties parted on friendly terms, noting how important it was to exchange ideas.
But as he left the restaurant, Shilansky remarked to his Israeli colleagues with satisfaction: “I really gave it to them, didn’t I?”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
