Behind the Headlines Poland and World Jewry

Poland wants to strengthen its de facto relations with Israel in the fields of culture and exchange of information, but a renewal of diplomatic ties will have to await a change in the Middle East situation. The Poles also want better relations with Western Jewish communities, which they regard as a key to better ties with the Western world as a whole.

This is one of the impressions gained in Poland by Dr. Sneier Levenberg, a leading member of the World Jewish Congress, who attended the opening on April 18 of the Jewish Pavilion in the former Auschwitz concentration camp and the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. Levenberg, 70, attended in his capacities as chairman of the WJC’s International Affairs Committee and as a vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Other prominent Jews present were Dr. Nahum Goldmann, honorary president of the World Jewish Congress; M. Armand Kaplan of Paris; Gideon Hausner, head of Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust Memorial Institute, and Dr. Yitzhak Arad, director general of Yad Vashem; Anselm Reiss, leader of World Federation of Polish Jews; Stefan Grayek, chairman of the World Federation of Jewish fighters and a veteran of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. There were also representatives from Eastern European countries, including two Moscow Jews, but none from Rumania.

TAKES ISSUE WITH PRESS REPORTS

Levenberg, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, took issue with Israeli press reports that the Polish authorities had given a cooler welcome to the 30 Israeli representatives at the ceremony than those from other countries. To counter this, he showed this reporter clippings from the Polish press, saying they gave equal prominence to speeches by Hausner, Grayek, Arad and Reiss, and referred to their Israeli nationality.

The Polish government’s goodwill to their Jewish guests was evidence throughout the visit–from the VIP airport treatment and the special plane provided to fly them from Warsaw to Cracow for the Auschwitz tour, to the 90-minute meeting with President Henryk Jablonski, at the Presidential Palace.

The Poles seemed to be signalling that they wanted to break completely with the anti-Semitic policies of 1968 when Jews were persecuted in the name of “anti-Zionism” and many were forced to leave the country. The anti-Semitic nationalist elements still exist in Poland, but the official line is to improve relations with the Jewish people, Levenberg added.

This was evident, too, in other recent Polish gestures such as the Polish military veterans organization acceptance of an invitation to Israel. The editor of the leading Polish cultural journal has already visited Israel, as has a delegation to the Israeli ceremonies commemorating Janus Korczak, the Jewish pediatrician who is a war hero to Poles and Jews alike.

Referring to his Warsaw press clippings, Levenberg noted that the report of the Ghetto ceremonies was placed directly alongside the main front-page story about the visit to Moscow by Polish Communist leader Edward Gierek. As a member of the Soviet bloc, Poland was limited in its freedom to improve ties with Israel, he said. However, it was clear that if Moscow were to renew diplomatic relations with Israel, Poland would be happy to do so immediately afterwards.

ANXIOUS TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED

In preserving the monuments of Jewish suffering, the Polish authorities were also anxious that the young generation of Poles should understand what happened under the Nazis. They are, for example, sensitive to the charges that many Poles participated in the extermination of the Jews. While admitting that some Poles did assist the Nazis, the Warsaw government wants to propagate the message that Poles and Jews suffered and resisted together and that there were also Poles who risked their lives to save Jews.

This was demonstrated at the ceremony in which the Yad Vashem officials from Israel handed over certificates to 18 Polish “Righteous Gentiles.” As each one came forward, he or she recounted how they had helped Jews to escape from the Nazis during the war. According to Levenberg, the Poles are also keenly aware of the stirrings of neo-Nazism in the West and of the attempts to deny or discredit Jewish sufferings at the hands of Nazi Germany.

Besides attending the ceremonies in Auschwitz and at Mila 18, center of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, Levenberg was one of five people who drove to Treblinka, 100 kilometers from Warsaw. “Compared with Auschwitz, in which many non-Jews also perished, Treblinka is a completely Jewish monument, “he said.

The monument is a forest of rough-hewn stones, each bearing the name of one of pre-War Poland’s 17,000 Jewish communities, wiped out except for a small remnant who today live in 17 communities. In all 800,000 Jews died in that desolate spot, in pine forests, four miles from the nearest railway line. As in Auschwitz, there was fierce resistance, of which the world is still insufficiently aware, Levenberg said. But only about 50 Jews escaped and survived the war.

EMOTIONALLY SHATTERING EXPERIENCE

Although he once worked for two years on a Warsaw Yiddish daily newspaper, this was Levenberg’s first visit to Poland since World War II. He described his visits to the scenes of Jewish suffering as “emotionally shattering and beyond tears.” “In a place like Auschwitz,” he said, “you feel you are dead, like the place. The ground is soaked in Jewish blood and in thought of the voice which Moses heard telling him to remove his-shoes for the earth on which he stood was holy.”

Levenberg plans to tell the Board of Deputies of British Jews that it should follow the example of French Jewry and organize pilgrimages of communal leaders to concentration camp sites like those he saw in Poland. He also stressed how incongruous it was that neither in New York nor in London, which both have large Jewish communities, is there a public monument to the victims of Nazism.