The vast majority of Poles favor keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, but they stress their own suffering under the Nazis as much as that of the Jews.
These were among the findings of a new survey by the American Jewish Committee, released this week to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The survey also found that fewer Poles than four years ago hold opinions generally considered anti-Semitic.
Only 16 percent of Poles believe that Jews have too great an influence in society, down from 26 percent in a 1991 AJ Committee survey.
There was a similar decline in the number of Poles who would prefer not to have Jewish neighbors and who think that Jews behave in a way that provokes hostility.
For all of these questions, Jews received among the lowest negative ratings compared with other groups such as Gypsies, Ukrainians, Arabs, Romanians, businessmen and the Catholic Church.
At the same time, just under half of those surveyed said anti-Semitism is “somewhat of a problem” in Poland today. The rest were almost equally divided between considering anti-Semitism a “very serious problem” or “not a problem at all.”
The survey was conducted for AJCommitlee by the Warsaw-based Demoskop polling agency in late December and early January. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 1,145 respondents. The margin of error is 3 percentage points,
Eighty-five percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that “We should keep the remembrance of the extermination of the Jews strong even after the passage of time.”
Only 10 percent agreed with the statement, “Fifty years after the end of World War II, it is time to put the memory of the Nazi extermination of the Jews behind us.”
Asked whether Poles or Jews had suffered more from Nazi persecution, 40 percent volunteered that both groups had suffered the same, with the rest being evenly divided.
Strong majorities said many Poles rescued Jews during the Holocaust, few participated in the persecution of Jews and Poles generally did enough, or as much as they could, to help Jews.
The survey also revealed a greater knowledge about the Holocaust than did a similar survey in the United States last year.
But while nine out of 10 Poles were able to identify Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka as concentration camps, they were far less accurate when it came to knowing the number of Jewish victims.
Only 34 percent of the Poles selected 6 millions as the approximate number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Thirty-eight percent chose numbers ranging from 25,000 to 2 million for this multiple-choice question. This finding is similar to those of an AJCommittee poll of Germans last year.
The survey released this week brought together two streams of research that AjCommittee has been conducting in various countries over the past several years – one relating to knowledge and remembrance of the Holocaust, the second focusing on attitudes toward Jews and other minorities.
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