I highly recommend that everyone read Eszter’s moving, almost unbearable post, in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, about her father’s experience as a three-year-old in the camps. The day, which marks the liberation of Auschwitz, makes me think of that scene in Shoah where Lanzmann is moving through a Polish village, as his guide, a local, points out the different homes where Jewish families once lived. If memory serves (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it), the guide recites the names of the families and then, with some prodding from Lanzmann, gives the names of the Polish families who live there now. Or maybe it’s the reverse: the guide recites the names of the Polish families, and Lanzmann prods him about the Jews who used to live there. Regardless, you get this terrible feeling of dread as you think about the generations of Jews who once lived in these homes, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not, but often uneasily. You think about their gentile neighbors who for centuries longed to see them gone. And then they were.
{ 17 comments }
bob mcmanus 01.28.15 at 1:54 am
Ida is a pretty good movie.
Felix 01.28.15 at 11:19 am
Yes, of course anti-semitism was widespread and Lanzmann drew out clearly and horrifically that even the holocaust was not enough to stop it dead. But it was not the people who now live in the places where Jewish people once lived who are the cause of their not living there now. Those centuries of co-existence – however uneasy, however imperfect – were precisely that. We may find those neighbours unattractive, deliberately obtuse about history, anti-semitic. But they are not the authors of the holocaust and they are not the perpetrators of Auschwitz.
otto 01.28.15 at 11:24 am
“You think about their gentile neighbors who for centuries longed to see them gone.”
Is that right, “for centuries they longed to see them gone”?
milx 01.28.15 at 5:01 pm
“Regardless, you get this terrible feeling of dread as you think about the generations of Jews who once lived in these homes, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not, but often uneasily. You think about their gentile neighbors who for centuries longed to see them gone. And then they were.”
Corey, I wonder if it’ll be the same experience when you’ve finally succeeded in ejecting the Jews from the Middle East.
J. Parnell Thomas 01.28.15 at 6:02 pm
I guess it would have been better to object at the time to the posts in question, but on a couple of occasions you’ve cited Jan Gross’s figures on Jedwabne, which I believe have subsequently been pretty well refuted (see Wikipedia for starters). I know that non-Jewish Poles tend to really object to being blamed for the holocaust, in part because something like 2 million of them were killed by the Nazis, and in part because Polish complicity (as well as Polish anti-semitism in general) is frequently exaggerated. I think you tend to be a bit too casual about this.
J. Parnell Thomas 01.28.15 at 6:08 pm
This is also useful on Jedwabne.
http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/J/
J. Parnell Thomas 01.28.15 at 6:12 pm
By “subsequently” I meant subsequent to the publication of his book, not subsequent to your post.
Harold 01.28.15 at 7:03 pm
@ 5
The useful link provided by J. Parnell Thomas shows the opposite of what he asserts. The fact is that the Poles have acknowledged to a large extent, their role in the holocaust and have been willing to publicly atone for it. Poles also have the distinction of having fought against, rather than beside the Nazis as happened in some neighboring regions.
Fuzzy Dunlop 01.28.15 at 8:35 pm
“You think about their gentile neighbors who for centuries longed to see them gone.â€
Is that right, “for centuries they longed to see them gone�
Probably there were some who did and some who didn’t, but it’s the ones who did (and all their various present-day successors) that we should be concerned about.
Corey Robin 01.28.15 at 8:57 pm
milx: “Corey, I wonder if it’ll be the same experience when you’ve finally succeeded in ejecting the Jews from the Middle East.”
We’re not turning this thread into a debate on Israel/Palestine. Any further comments of that ilk will be deleted.
J. Parnell Thomas 01.28.15 at 11:09 pm
Harold: it shows that the claims about Jedwabne have been exaggerated. A fraction of the number of claimed victims, a small fraction of the claimed Polish perpetrators, apparently acting under physical coercion.
I did not say that there was no complicity, merely that it is often greatly exaggerated; Gross’s writing on Jedwabne is the most notable instance of this.
J. Parnell Thomas 01.28.15 at 11:25 pm
I’ll note that some of the Polish people online who pointed me to examples of what I’m talking about struck me as really offensively antisemitic. My point is just that one ought to try to be careful.
Harold 01.29.15 at 2:58 am
The first document listed on the link an AP article by MONIKA SCISLOWSKA, states that: “The investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance put the number of victims at Jedwabne as high as 1,000, Machcewicz said. Officials had previously suggested the number could be lower.”
In cases of historical massacres it is not unusually quite difficult to enumerate precisely the number of casualties. Victims tend to estimate higher, and perpetrators lower numbers. The Nazi bureaucrats stand out as rather unusual in having maintained precise records. This was not the case in Jedwabne, where they were no longer on the scene. In any case, another of the documents referenced on this page states that “it doesn’t matter if the number of victims was 1,500 or 1,000 (can’t find this particular quote at the moment, but surely this is true.)
Harold 01.29.15 at 4:07 am
Furthermore, Jan Gross himself states that although his book was controversial in 2001 it is not longer so in Poland and he says that the best and most cutting research on the topic is now taking place in there.
J. Parnell Thomas 01.29.15 at 4:23 am
OK. Probably not the best place for me to bring it up anyway. I can be impulsive.
J. Parnell Thomas 01.29.15 at 5:33 am
BTW are you really getting the links from that page? On my computer they seem to have all gone bad, but it might be my connection or something. It’s been a while since I looked at that page and I didn’t double-check the links.
J. Parnell Thomas 01.30.15 at 4:38 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedwabne_pogrom
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