Back in 1995, two young adults on an official mission of multicultural tolerance get off a plane in Tel Aviv. One is German, one is Polish.
The Israeli host embraces the German with kisses and hugs.
But he stares coldly and suspiciously at the Pole, barely willing to shake his hand, as if the elderly Israeli had come face to face with an unrepentant pogromnik.
To the Pole, Andrzej Folwarczny, the gesture spoke volumes about the success of German-Jewish reconciliation and the challenges that lay ahead for Polish-Jewish relations.
“I couldn’t understand why suddenly I was the enemy,” he recalls.
During the same visit, Folwarczny overhears a German-speaking tour guide at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial tell German visitors, “Auschwitz was in Poland because the Germans knew that Poland was an anti-Semitic country.”
In fact, historians say the death camps were built in Poland because of the country’s large Jewish population and because it was an occupied country whose government had been deposed. The Nazi regime wanted to commit mass murder outside of its own territory where it sought popular support.
Regarding Auschwitz specifically, where most of the Jews killed were not from Poland, the location was convenient for railroad connections, historians say.
Such cross-cultural disconnects encouraged Folwarczny, now 37, to dedicate his life to Polish-Jewish relations.
Three years after the Israel experience he founded the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, a nonprofit that runs tolerance workshops in schools and universities, meetings between Diaspora Jewish students and Polish students, and an intensive education program on Jewish-Polish relations that brings together young Poles and Americans. The American Jewish Committee is a partner.
“In my personal opinion, people’s attitudes have not changed enough” since the end of communism, Folwarczny said. “There is still Polish anti-Semitism, but also there are also still problems with the Diaspora attitude toward Poles. The only way to change this is education and interaction.”
The culmination of the forum’s educational efforts is the recent release of “Difficult Questions in Polish-Jewish Dialogue.”
The 260-page book, subtitled “How Poles and Jews See Each Other: A Dialogue on Key Issues in Polish-Jewish Relations,” touches on probing doubts and stereotypes that for decades have driven wedges between Poles and Jews.
Religious scholars, politicians, diplomats, historians and journalists from around the world address questions about the Polish pogroms during and after World War II, anti-Semitism in Poland today, Poland’s relationship to Israel, why Jews don’t accept Jesus as the messiah and the reasons Jews flocked to Poland 800 years ago.
Stimulating counterpoints are featured on similar subjects.
A major contributor to the book is Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, twice appointed Polish foreign minister in the post-Communist era and a leading figure of Zegota, the underground army’s movement to save Jews during World War II.
In the chapter “How did Poles behave during the Holocaust,” Bartoszewski wrote that “all the political and social powers in occupied Poland similarly assessed German crimes against the Jews to be a willful and planned genocide.”
But in a chapter titled “Why did Poles collaborate with Germans in persecuting Jews?” Warsaw-born Israel Gutman, who survived the Majdanek concentration camp to become chairman of Yad Vashem’s scientific council, sounded a different note.
“During the occupation there were no Jewish citizens of Poland in the government-in-exile,” Gutman wrote. “In the course of two years, when Jews were dying en masse from hunger and illness in the cramped confines of the ghettos, no material aid, not even a voice of solidarity, reached them from the ‘underground state.’ “
“Difficult Questions” is intended to combat the perception that Poles are a monolithic entity which should be held responsible for the Holocaust and pogroms, just as the large proportion of Jews in the Communist leadership after World War II is probed but then dismissed as a justification for anti-Semitism.
The book is based on questions that have been asked repeatedly in meetings between young Diaspora Jews and Poles organized by the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations.
Released in Polish at the end of 2006, the book is now available in English. It can be ordered through the AJCommittee. Folwarczny is working on a Hebrew version as well.
Along with the AJCommittee, which is also responsible for the book’s content and financing, sponsors of the book include the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture; The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research; and American philanthropist Sigmund Rolat, a native Pole.
Folwarczny’s initial immersion in Jewish topics came in the early 1990s when he was a young campaigner for Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who was running against Lech Walesa for the Polish presidency.
Some of Mazowiecki’s opponents were trying to smear him by spreading the rumor that the candidate was Jewish. His shock turned to disgust when a crucial backer of Mazowiecki started a campaign to prove the candidate was not Jewish.
“I thought, what difference does that make?” Folwarczny said.
Folwarczny may be sympathetic to the outsider status of Jews because as a Lutheran, he is an outsider in a mostly Catholic country. He comes from Gliwice, a city in the Silesia region of southern Poland, and loathes what he says is a Polish stereotype of Lutherans as all having a connection to Germans.
During his time as a deputy in the lower house of the Polish Parliament, Folwarczny served as chairman of the Polish-Israeli group. Before becoming a deputy in 1997, he spent time in Washington as part of an AJCommittee young leaders program.
Although excited about publishing “Difficult Questions,” Folwarczny is disappointed by the lack of interest in meeting Poles by those who organize visits of American and Israeli youth groups to Nazi-run concentration camps that were built on Polish soil.
“In the majority of cases they don’t want to show anything positive about Poland because it reduces the effect of their programs, which is to show that Israel or the U.S. are the only safe place for Jews,” he said.
“Very often kids who finish these concentration camp tours think the Poles were murderers. They go home and say grandma, grandpa, you were right.”
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.
