My family was from Poland and I speak Polish rather fluently…..This sentence is dead wrong and ridiculous “It was the Poles alone who armed the Jewish underground during the war and did more than any other nation in Europe to try to save European Jewry. ”
Calling the relationship “desperately complicated” is putting lipstick on a pig. It is a dreadful history of Polish complicity in the murder of two thirds of world Jewry. But, and here is a big but….Polish youth is astonishing….having overthrown the shackles of Communism they revel in capitalist freedom; while they eschew too much talk about their role in the Holocaust, it is amazing how many boast of having had a Jew in the family- many going as far as wearing Jewish stars; they respect and admire Israel; some even bemoan the “Jewish brain drain” that has left Poland without great advances in science, medicine and technology. Unlike Hungary there is no seriously anti-Semitic political party in Poland. The media is generally very pro-Israel….History is clear but the present is “complicated .” rsk
Capturing a ‘desperately complicated’ history in a new museum, one that is also a warning to Europe.
Warsaw
The translucent green building lights up the working-class neighborhood of Muranów. Its glass exterior reflects the trees from a park and shabby Communist-era apartment blocks nearby. A memorial to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising stands outside. The architectural boldness of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews is matched by its intentions.
The opening of the museum’s core exhibition on Tuesday, coming 10 days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a fitting tribute to the possibilities of freedom in Europe.
What is most remarkable is that this institution ever came to be. To utter the phrase “Polish-Jewish relations” is a provocation. Poland is the world’s largest Jewish graveyard. Before Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust mostly on its soil, for half a millennium Poland was Europe’s largest Jewish sanctuary. Four in five American Jews and nine in 14 world-wide trace their roots back to Poland. Everything else is debatable, and these debates inevitably bring out the passions and misunderstandings of the worst family quarrels.