The Crime and the Silence by Anna Bikont

Author:Anna Bikont
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710323
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Journal

JUNE 18, 2001

I’ve brought Ramotowski to my house. Today Marek Edelman, who promised to examine him, is coming from Łódź. I give them lunch. Edelman says he finds him in pretty good shape.

“The main thing is for him not to get short of breath,” Edelman says.

I press him to tell me the prognosis.

“He could go on like this for a few months, half a year, even longer.”

In the Republic an interview with Professor Feliks Tych, the director of the Jewish Historical Institute and author of The Long Shadow of the Holocaust. Based on a reading of hundreds of diaries (most of them unpublished), he claims that at least 10 percent of Polish society was—sporadically or for a substantial period of time—engaged in activities to help Jews, a majority regarded the Holocaust with indifference, and at least 20 to 30 percent thought the Germans were helping the Poles deal with their Jewish problem. “It’s a bitter conclusion, but as a historian I cannot shy away from saying it publicly, even though for many years I didn’t even want to say it to myself.”

Until recently such an interview would have had no chance of appearing in a mainstream newspaper. I remember the reactions to Jan Błoński’s article “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” in the Tygodnik Powszechny (General Weekly) in 1987, which spoke of the sin of indifference. It provoked a storm of protest, and I’m not talking about nationalist and anti-Semitic circles but liberal Catholics. Gross’s book has opened up an entirely new level of discussion.

Tych recalls a truth self-evident elsewhere in the world and difficult to accept in Poland. There was no common fate for Jews and Poles in wartime. Every Jew was sentenced to death, even children. Of those who found themselves under German occupation, 5 to 7 percent of ethnic Poles were killed, as opposed to 98 percent of Polish Jews.

In the evening I summarize the Tych interview for Jacek Kuroń and he tells me of his first day at school in Lvov during the war. His family had just moved, so he knew nobody in the class. The teacher said, “Good thing the Jews are gone.” The children in the class responded with laughter, and he didn’t dare react.

“My guilt for not speaking up then made me speak up for the rest of my life,” says Kuroń.

JUNE 20, 2001

The same unpleasant thing happens to me for the umpteenth time. It surprises me, or I should really say it hurts, when some of my friends and acquaintances say directly or at least suggest to me that I’m “not objective,” because of my background. I have the feeling I’m in the hot seat all the time. (I’m repeating the experience of generations of assimilated Jews, though my ancestors already went through this process.) At the same time—if you don’t believe the nonsense about the Jedwabne affair being stirred up so Jews can demand billions in compensation from Poland—it’s not quite clear to me why I supposedly prefer Poles to have killed Jews in Jedwabne, rather than Germans.

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