Today FORWARD is publishing the paper version of the article Chasing Ghosts, Reviving Spirits: The Fall and Rise of Polands Jews A Movement To Resurrect Life in the Home of Death Camps by Jane Eisner. Read more: forward/articles/209962/chasing-ghosts-reviving-spirits-the-fall-and-rise/?p=all#ixzz3KqAXOCWj In the last 3 days I have multiple times send the below letter, also in a shorter op-ed version to Forward asking for publication. No response at all which is a very alarming phenomena of ignoring any other voices in the debate. Phenomena so much in the spirit of the article in question. The letter to FORWARD by Tomasz Cebulski I am amused and mortified by yet another Western journalist discovering Poland and Polish-Jewish relations through the lens of personal stereotypes and prejudices with a manner of moral superiority, being too fast to judge and all of that spiced with good dose of insecurity in the face or complicated, sometimes even schizophrenic historical and contemporary reality of Central Europe. The anxiety, to say the least connected to Poland is more then understandable and I am facing it almost every day. It is mostly caused and shaped by the decades of after WW II Polish-Jewish separation and cessation of natural dialogue which lasted for 900 of years. The layers of after war trauma were not challenged for a long time and once the opportunity arrived the Jews and Poles went through this process no longer facing each other but in separation and within the new ideological environments they happened to live their lives. Such separation deepened stereotypes, caused mutual accusations and prejudices but also deprived the victims and their families of the tangibility of the geography and access to the sites of before the war life and latter war time genocide. Poles, Poland, its Jewish life and the Holocaust , once finally debated, were defined as some imagined, impossible to express, access and process layers of trauma. Visiting Poland is often about facing this anxiety and reliving the real and imagined family trauma again. The process takes different intensity but it always has to be based on truth , facing facts though research, dialoging with people, processing anxiety, filtering off ideology based narratives and challenging stereotypes. Unfortunately neither of those became available for the author, who as a journalist shall be the leader of such a process. If someone comes to Poland for chasing ghosts and is guided by personal anger and stereotypes then for her and her only reviving spirits process is doomed to fail. I am afraid that this text of the letter of mine will never be published as I am commenting here on the work of the editor in chief of Forward. Either way I feel obliged to write it for the sake of continuing Polish-Jewish dialogue free of personal anxieties on both sides. With each and every paragraph of the article I was more and more convinced about the significance and importance of the new museum of History of Polish Jews in Warsaw to give depth to contemporary Polish-Jewish relations. But let’s confront the basic mistakes in the text and the points at which it is becoming contradictory. 1. The contemporary Warsaw is , to use the author poetic, build on the graves of Jews and Polish Christians alike. This statement of mine is not about so much cherished on both sides competition in suffering but about historical facts. 2. Apart of the debating about it, Poland does welcome the Jews back, they are not “its” Jews and the country just tries not to do it by force. 3. How shall we speak of the population that doesn’t exist in the volume and meaning as it did in the past if not in the third person plural? 4. Insecurity based in realizing the fact that contemporary Jews can live somewhere else then Israel or US is palpable in the text. 5. The Polin Museum is essential for the reason so that we don’t hear ever again that “Poland was where we fled from or died”. 6. The admiration for Poles described as “outsiders” for their depths of knowledge of Judaism is contradictory with the whole text. At the same time serves as a good occasion to judge and stereotype Jews in the US. The use of phrase “tribal obligation” in XXI century sounds like a bad joke. Defining being Jewish in case of Poland by either showing face at the synagogue or participating in AIPAC meetings sounds like a very bad joke. 7. Assumption that the Poles need to take the same path of redemption as the Germans did is result of historical ignorance. The lack of knowledge about reconciliation steps already taken in the last 25 years unveils the lack of any prior research about the subject. 8. The fact that “Poles are still viewed as perpetrators and enablers of genocide” is a result of lack of education and often will to educate about common past outside of Poland. Reconciliation is a two way highway of confronting stereotypes at which the Poles are breaking the speed limits when the author, opinion leader in this case, have not yet fond the entrance. 9. The Museum is not there to change the national narrative but to complete the narrative which is already largely changed by showing the context and depth of history. 10. The narrative to the Israeli youth visiting Poland carefully protected and controlled through Israel’s Ministry of Education is not at all a Polish problem. It will become a problem of a country and society promoting such kind of education in an “ideological bubble”. 11. There is a major, probably personal only, identity problem when someone states and believes that the history of Polish Jews presented in the POLIN museum is fundamentally subversive to the Jews in the Diaspora and Israel. Its just like saying the Jewish history is subversive to the Jews. Is it? 12. I know few historians in this world who would undertake the task of comparison of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 with the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Here the author in two paragraphs confronts the Uprisings, discards the Polish one as “badly lost” and glorifies the Jewish one as a sign of resistance. What an insight and analytical brain again fast to judge. 13. According to the author there is a lack of traces of Jewish life in Poland or you need to look for them. I know that looking for knowledge is a hard task but it pays off. Warsaw has a multitude of monuments, commemorations and plaques to the ghetto history in public space. Will it ever be enough…no. 14. This phrase is probably the final incarnation of ignorance “ Poland has yet to conduct the sort of therapy forced upon the Germans. There were no Nuremberg-style trials here.” What therapy was forced upon the Germans and by whom? Why shall Poland undergo the similar treatment and who shall enforce it? There were after war trials in Poland ,too many of them at certain point, including the trials of those who persecuted the Jews in after war pogroms. 15. What were the actions of Polish communist government that made the life of Jews in particular “especially miserable” in 1956? 16. Why is the author angry at almost every stage of her discovery and the most important weather she does something with this anger or just finds a security vent for frustration in the described article. 17. The prejudice holds strong as the research of Michal Bilewicz shows but its always mutual phenomena and judging by the spirit of the article, in which the author either way needs to curb her frustration, little is done on her side to overcome it. Those were just the basic historical and factual faults in this text. In reality almost each and every sentence requires to be analyzed for factuality. The captions to photos are amusing when for example the girl with visible name tag Kinga is called Kasia. This might be an argument for the basic truth that anger is blinding. Basking oneself in stereotypes and anger and multiplying those in media coverage doesn’t promote understanding and dialogue on the contrary it brings frustration. I would expect some more inside and better journalism from the Forward. This article cuts, by calling it subversive, the branch of culture on which the Forward was build by personalities like Abraham Cahan who among other Polish/Central European Jews was the very founder and spiritual father of the Forward/Forverts. Tomasz Cebulski, Ph.D.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 12:47:02 +0000
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