Dear Friends,
As some of us may know, the Polish Parliament recently passed a law declaring it to be illegal in Poland to attribute Nazi war crimes during the Holocaust to the “Polish nation or the Republic of Poland.” Violators are liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to three years.
Students of the Holocaust -- and certainly those who endured and survived its atrocities -- find this very distressing. Indeed, this news should be distressing to all of us.
Polish sensitivity to being held responsible for wartime atrocities is not new. In 2012, President Obama was criticized for using the term “Polish death camps.”
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But this law goes much further, and threatens to have a chilling effect on war crime documentation and analysis. It threatens to impede the ability to learn lessons from the past to inform the future. True, academics and artists are apparently considered exempt from its provisions. And Poland’s president stated that no Holocaust survivor should feel frightened to give personal testimony.
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But certainly this does not bode well for Poland’s ability to come fully to grips with its war time role.
I recently read an essay that argues that Jews should refrain from traveling to Poland and supporting Poland economically, as ways of expressing our collective distress.
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Although I understand and appreciate the moral basis for this position, I don’t agree. As the author of the essay acknowledges, going to Poland to get a sense of what happened there is invaluable. Many of us or our children have travelled to Poland on “March of the Living” or similar trips. Think how important it has been to do so.
I am not convinced that boycotting will help Jewish or Israeli relations with Poland, and I don’t think it will engender change in Poland. Even though they may seem deserved, boycotts can distance and delegitimize boycotters themselves.
I want to draw to your attention a thoughtful reflection on the recent Polish law. It was written by a teacher of mine, Professor David Roskies.
In his article, published in Tablet magazine,
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, Professor Roskies traces the fraught relationship between the Jews and the Poles all the way back to the story of Judas in the New Testament.
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And he brings to our attention an entire genre of post-war Polish literature that grapples with the complicated, uncomfortable relationship among Poles, Jews and Nazis.
Professor Roskies makes the point that over the past seven decades, Polish writers themselves have explored this complicated relationship. "I would advise," he writes, "Polish parliamentarians to go back to school, to brush up on their contemporary classics." He suggests that this literature can help readers come to understand that the reverberations of the "Judas plot" extend even to our own time and place, and that becoming aware of this is crucial to moving forward.
I hope that, notwithstanding the recent law, efforts toward a full understanding of what happened during World War II will continue to advance. They must, if Jewish-Polish relations are to be well-grounded in the future.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Carl Perkins
