Abstract
In recent years, Jews, Germans, and Poles have stood at three corners of a triangle, labeled, respectively, as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders by genocide researchers treating the Holocaust. The formulation advanced previous equations, where scholars could only imagine the duality of victim-perpetrator.3 Newrevelations about kinds and layers of complicity, competing claims to victim-hood, and the recognition that individuals may inhabit more than one of the categories, force us to confront the complexity of interrelations. Yet, the rise of attention to public memory in Holocaust studies suggests, rather than a permanent two-dimensional geometry, a different idiom: an active, jockeying troika of nations, yoked together by a difficult history. This new metaphor allows us to anticipate and attend to the ongoing tensions and shifts that occur among members of the team, on whom different memorial burdens may be placed. In this chapter, I address the circumstances of a major, and quite recent, transmogrification of the symbolic Jews-Germans-Poles constellation. Namely, I argue that in the framework of Jewish Holocaust tourism to Poland, Nazi Germany (i.e., the perpetrator) disappears. In its place, Poland has emerged as much more satisfying object of opprobrium, even as—and indeed, I will argue, because—Poland is also beginning to be excavated as a site of more general relevance in Jewish memory-culture.
WARSAW (JTA)—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 [Director of the Warsaw-based NGO Forum for Dialogue Among Nations], 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.
Chris Burdick “Exploring Polish-Jewish Distrust”2
I thank Carol Berger, Matti Bunzl, Elke Heckner, Slawomir Kapralski, Avi Kempinski, Kristin Kopp, Jessie Labov, Ellen Moodie, Joanna Niżyńska, Carrie Rentschler, Joseph Rosen, and Michael Rothberg for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
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Notes
Postmemory describes the kind of memory inherited by a generation subsequent to those who experienced an event, but whose lives are nevertheless defined by these very personal-feeling memories. Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008):103–128.
See Jack Kugelmass, “Bloody Memories: Encountering the Past in Contemporary Poland,” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (1995): 279–301. Recent scholarship has unearthed both the depths of ethnic Polish wartime suffering and the important roles Poles played in saving Jews, along with more wide-ranging complicity with the Nazis than had previously been established.
Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 1–19.
Laurence Weinbaum notes, for example, that “Poland disappeared from the American Jewish Yearbook in the 1970s and only resurfaced in the 1980s.” Laurence Weinbaum, “The Jewish Communities in the Diaspora and Antisemitism in Poland,” Moreshet 6 (2009): 161–175.
Edmund L. Andrews, “Conceding the Grim Past, Germany Invites Jews,” New York Times, (August 2, 1998). This was surely an overstatement at the time, and is probably even less accurate today. But a far greater number of Ashkenazi Jews trace their roots to historically Polish lands than to Germany, and Jewish tourism is also distinct from more focused “Holocaust” tourism, the key category of Jewish community sponsored youth tourism travels that go to Poland. Further, whereas the impulse for travel to Poland comes from the Jewish side, most organized Jewish travel programs to Germany are both initiated and sponsored by the German state and local organizations. See Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 110.
Peter S. Green, “Jewish Museum in Poland: More Than a Memorial,” in New York Times (January 9, 2003), p. A3. Alex Danzig, consultant to the Israeli Ministry of Education, estimates that 40–50 percent of Israeli students take part in their mandated class trips to Poland, and Yaron Karol Becker of the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv stated that approximately 30,000 Israeli youth alone visited in 2006. This latter number was corroborated by Jacek Olejnik of the Polish embassy in Israel (formerly of the Israeli embassy in Poland) in October 2010 (personal communications).
Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 52.
This “crisis of continuity” was spurred in part by a demographic study of American Jews that suggested declining group cohesion and commitment to Jewish religious practice, particularly among youth. Barry A. Kosmin, Sidney Goldstein, Joseph Waksberg, Nava Lerer, Ariela Keysar, and Jeffrey Scheckner, Highlights of the CJF 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (New York: Council of Jewish Federations, 1991).
Jackie Feldman, “In Search of the Beautiful Land of Israel: Israeli Youth Voyages to Poland,” in Chaim Noy and Erik Cohen (eds), Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to Rite of Passage (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005); Kugelmass, “Bloody Memories”;
Rona Sheramy, “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem: Re-enacting Jewish History on the March of the Living,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 19 (2007): 307–326; and
Oren Baruch Stier, “Chapter 5: Performing Memory: Tourism, Pilgrimage, and the Ritual Appropriation of the Past,” in Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
Zvi Gitelman, “Collective Memory and Contemporary Polish-Jewish Relations,” in Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 271–290.
Carolyn Slutsky, “March of the Living: Confronting Anti-Polish Stereotypes,” in Robert Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska (eds), Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007), p. 191.
Claire Rosenson, “The Ball Is in the Jewish Court,” East European Jewish Affairs 27, no. 1 (1997): 67.
Rebecca L. Stein, Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 3.
Amos Elon, Journey Through a Haunted Land: The New Germany (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), pp. 13–14.
On this othering, see Eric Wolff, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
Feldman also observes such “hoped for fistfights with Polish skinheads” on Israeli youth trips. Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 22.
Jack Kugelmass, “Missions to the Past: Poland in Contemporary Jewish Thought and Deed,” in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York & London: Routledge, 1996), p. 212. I thank Jessie Labov for the observation that earlier waves of refugees—that is, those from late nineteenth-century pogroms—also cut ties with Eastern Europe. The problem of “rootlessness” thus predated the post-Holocaust version of the syndrome, and the construction of Israel-as-homeland only heightens it.
On recent Polish state-sponsored scholarship and diplomatic reaction to other new historical scholarship on Polish-Jewish relations see Grabowski, Jan. 2008. “Rewriting the History of Polish-Jewish Relations from a Nationalist Perspective: The Recent Publications of the Institute of National Remembrance,” Yad Vashem Studies 36, no. 1: 253–270; and Frommer, Benjamin. 2011. “Postscript: The Holocaust in Occupied Poland, Then and Now,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (August): 575–580. The representation—or lack thereof—of Poles among the victims depicted in the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was also a major point of contention before the museum’s opening, and the struggle is ongoing to raise awareness of “German persecution of Poles as well as the saving of Jews by Poles” (John Pawlikowski, “The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge for Polish-Jewish Relations,” in Robert D. Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska (eds), Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p. 116.
For citations of research on this matter, see Hagar Figler, Judaism in Germany (Munich: Grin Verlag, 2008), p. 8.
On the rise of experiential commemoration strategies, see Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Also worth considering is whether a historical shift toward favoring victim (as opposed to perpetrator) perspectives in learning about the Holocaust (and other genocides) makes the built heritage of destruction in Poland more compelling than the built heritage of its German-based masterminds, which can be seen in the relics of SS headquarters in Berlin or the Nuremberg stadium built for Nazi rallies.
Former Israeli Knesset member Avrum Burg has another theory of displacement, which raises altogether other concerns: that unresolved Holocaust rage has been transferred onto the Arabs. Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 79. This latter displacement is also suggested in R. Halaby, “On the Visit of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Students to Buchenwald,” Babylon (1999): 67–78.
Anna Szulc, “Młodzi Izraelczycy rozrabiają w Polsce,” in Przekrój 19 (May 10, 2007). This was not the first time that Jewish “missions” garnered government attention. Shevach Weiss, Israeli ambassador to Poland 2001– 2004, noted that “debates around the ‘March of the Living’ and other youth pilgrimages to Poland preceded other subjects of ‘normal’ discussion between [the Israeli and Polish] states” when they resumed diplomatic relations in 1990, and the subject of the trips comes up frequently at meetings between Polish and Israeli officials.
Shevach Weiss, “Israeli-Polish Relations: Shadows of the Past and Challenges for the Future,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 2 (2007): 89–96.
Or Kashti, “Education Ministry Seeks to Curb Unruly Behavior on Poland Trips,” Haaretz.com (June 8, 2009): http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090911.html (Last accessed August 20, 2011).
Contemporary Jewry was long written out of March of the Living materials, as they disrupt the image of Poland as a Jewish cemetery, and as a fundamentally anti-Jewish place. The “adjectives ‘Judenrein’ and ‘Judenfrei’— the sinister terms coined by the Nazis to denote an absence of Jews—were often applied [by Jews] to Poland.” While today’s Jewish community is beginning to be acknowledged, it is with studied ambivalence. Laurence Weinbaum, Polish Jews: A Postscript to the “Final Chapter”? Policy Study 14 (Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 1998), p. 7.
Stanislaw Krajewski, Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew (Kraków: Austeria, 2005), p. 103.
Thenotions of lieux and milieux are from Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24.
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© 2012 Kristin Kopp and Joanna Niżyńska
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Lehrer, E. (2012). Relocating Auschwitz: Affective Relations in the Jewish-German-Polish Troika. In: Kopp, K., Niżyńska, J. (eds) Germany, Poland, and Postmemorial Relations. Europe in Transition: The Nyu European Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137052056_11
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