24 January 2008
The recently released Polish edition of a book by the American historian Jan T. Gross (‘Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz’) has stirred a heated debate about anti-Semitism in Poland after World War II. The book was first released in the United States in 2006, where it was greeted with mostly positive reviews. In Poland, however, the book has been sharply criticized in newspaper editorials, book reviews and by historians accusing Gross of using inflammatory language and unfairly labeling all of post-war Polish society as anti-Semitic.
Gross, who was born in Poland to a Jewish father and a gentile mother, left the country in 1968 during an anti-Semitic wave sponsored by Poland's then-communist regime, said he had written his book “as a Pole.”
"I would like for my book to show people what an incredibly strong toxic poison anti-Semitism is in the general psychology of Poles, because it made us incapable of withstanding temptation," Gross told a crowd of some 250 people who crammed into a cultural center in Kielce, a town of 200,000 inhabitants south of Warsaw where many Jews were killed in a pogrom in 1946.
In ‘Fear’, Gross describes how many Jews who survived the Holocaust returned to their pre-war homes only to face further persecution at the hands of their Polish neighbors. He argues that Polish anti-Semitism was driven by guilt over collusion with the Nazi-plunder and murder of Jews during the Holocaust, which largely played out in death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Few in Poland argue with the facts Gross presents in the book, but many dispute his interpretation – even some Polish Jews who lived through the trauma of the war and post-war years.
Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, has said the post-war violence against Jews was "not about anti-Semitism."
"Murdering Jews was pure banditry, and I wouldn't explain it as anti-Semitism," Edelman said in an interview with the ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ newspaper. "It was contempt for man, for human life, plain meanness. A bandit does not attack someone who is stronger, like military troops, but where he sees weakness."
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