Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener
evident in the weeks leading up to the parliamentary elections in January 1947. The provisional government had already shown itself capable of electoral manipulation during a July 1946 referendum, and in the January elections, the PPR-led “Democratic Bloc” garnered an 80 percent majority of the vote. The communist victory was, however, the result of falsification and intimidation at every level. A million voters were disqualified, thousands of others were arrested or beaten, workers were transported en masse to the polls—all for the purpose of consolidating PPR power while unsuccessfully attempting to give the appearance of a viable democratic process.
It is clear that the communists held the dominant position in Polish political life, but their takeover of Poland was neither a facile assumption of power nor the imposition of authority on a population wholly opposed to the PPR’s goals for a new society. There were, to be sure, aspects of the PPR program that appealed to various sectors of the population: for peasants, land reform; for some intellectuals, a break from grandiose and irrational nationalist traditions; for workers, the promise of dignity and fair wages. To those willing to support the authorities, the promised social order appeared to offer opportunity, stability, and at least a modicum of personal freedoms, for the regime allowed freedom of religious practice7 and, at least in 1945 and 1946, a relatively pluralistic press.8
Despite what might appear to be a straight path to Soviet-style communism in the immediate postwar period, Polish political life, as Padraic Kenney has argued, included at least a discourse of democracy.9 Before the onset of Polish Stalinism in 1948–49, the language of democratic politics was not yet vacuous, and it may come as a surprise to some that in the ceremonies and exhibitions at the Auschwitz memorial site, for example, representatives of the new Polish state were responding to the needs of the public as articulated by a variety of public voices. It was, as Krystyna Kersten has observed, an era of contradictions. If installing a communist regime in Poland was, as Stalin had claimed, akin to “saddling a cow,” then it is understandable that the provisional government used force and intimidation, while in other instances it exercised restraint. As Kersten notes:
A great majority was decidedly against the Communists, opposed the order established by the PPR and, at the same time, excepting the armed underground, was compelled to cooperate with the new authorities in the rebuilding of the country. In sum, that accumulation of contradictions created a very complex internal situation in the country. The fragmentary picture conveyed by the documents of that time or in memoirs gives an incomplete image, even a false one. The authorities attempted to win society over but, at the same time, burned villages and mistreated AK prisoners. The population fought against the authorities, even by terror, and simultaneously cooperated with the state. The strategy of the authorities depended on the eradication of all existing and potential centers of organized opposition. Society’s strategy, which rested upon millions of individual positions, depended on the defense of cultural values in conditions limited by reality.10
The “reality” of the immediate postwar era was grim on every level and gave rise to the paradoxical situation that Kersten describes. Exacerbating the political chaos and oppression were enormous economic and social problems. Nearly 20 percent of the population was lost in the war, depriving Polish society of the energy and talent of youth crucial to the rebuilding effort. Poland’s demographic upheaval was also the result of massive population movements, for the Yalta and Potsdam agreements shifted the country’s borders to the west, compensating Poland for losses in the east with territory at Germany’s expense. This resulted in the flight or expulsion of 3.5 million Germans from Poland. Two million Poles returning from slave labor or camps, as well as refugees expelled from formerly Polish territory annexed to the Soviet Union, replaced them.11 Ironically, one goal of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Polish nationalists became a reality: by 1947 Poland was a homogenous and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country. The Germans and their accomplices killed nearly 3 million Polish Jews; the Soviets took the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belorussians for their own; and the Poles expelled the Germans: the sum of these actions was an irreplaceable cultural loss for the postwar generation.
Population loss, economic deprivation, and political chaos had, of course, devastating psychological effects, not the least of which was a wartime legacy that appeared to be the result of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. France and Britain had declared war against Germany in defense of Poland’s independence; Poland, although defeated at home, continued to fight around the world alongside the victorious Allies, only to be abandoned to the Soviet Union as a recalcitrant member of its new postwar consortium of client states. For this, there seemed to be few clear moral explanations. The Soviet Union’s tremendous wartime sacrifice resulted in the defeat of Nazism and a new super-power status. Britain and the United States could be assured that their dead had fallen in defense of freedom and democracy. Even the Germans could blame their wartime devastation on leaders who had led them astray. In Poland, none of these arguments applied or offered any consolation. Poles fought the war, opposed the Nazis on all fronts, and emerged, in a sense, victorious, but they could not reap the rewards that their honor seemed due.12 This sense of irreparable, unjust, and, for many, inexplicable loss helps to explain the insistent and omnipresent commemoration of Poland’s fallen in the early postwar years. To what end the sacrifice? The emerging culture of martyrology could ameliorate the pain of this question, if only in small measure and even if it failed to provide a satisfactory answer.
In mourning the nation’s losses, Poland’s commemorative culture also had to come to terms with the loss of millions of Jews on Polish lands. In the aftermath of the war, relations between Poles and their Jewish fellow citizens were strained at best. At worst, a residual and reawakened anti-Semitism resulted in pogroms and murder, and it stands as one of the tragic ironies of the Polish situation that anti-Semitism would take this form in the country that suffered most under Nazi regime.
Of the few Jews remaining in Poland or returning after the war,13 a sizable percentage attempted to reorganize themselves as a legitimate national minority with religious, educational, and cultural institutions. Many of these Jews, believing they would be secure under a socialist or communist government, were even optimistic about the future.14 Conditions in Poland, however, were not as accommodating as they had perhaps anticipated, for a wave of attacks against Jews swept across the country in the years 1945–47. In 1945 alone, 355 Jews were killed in Poland, and in the July 1946 Kielce pogrom, 41 Jews were killed and 59 wounded.15 By summer 1947 nearly 1,500 Jews had died as the result of violent attacks, although it is unclear what percentage of them were murdered because they were Jews.16 Not surprisingly, many surviving Jews emigrated to western Europe, the United States, or Palestine.
Part—but only part—of the explanation for the violence lies in a history of anti-Semitism in Polish culture and society that reached its apex in the years just prior to the war. In the words of one contemporary commentator, the national tradition of anti-Semitism “continues in Poland as a residual attitude, as a habit, and as a reflex.”17 Moreover, the prevailing stereotype of the żydokomuna, or Jewish-inspired communist conspiracy, fueled anti-Semitism and incited violence. In Poland, as in most other European countries, many associated the communist movement with Jewish conspiracy. In addition, popular perceptions alleged that Jews had enthusiastically welcomed and served in the administration of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939,18 suggesting not only pro-communist sympathies, but also a traitorous anti-Polish attitude. Because of these assumptions and stereotypes, many in early post-war Poland identified Jews with the unpopular Soviet-installed provisional government and especially its security forces.19 As Władysław Bartoszewski, a member of the wartime Council for Aid to the Jews, or “Żegota,” explained:
After the Second World War, the stereotype of the communist Jew—advanced by the pre-war parties and right-wing political groups, and also to a certain extent by Church circles—was unexpectedly and spectacularly reinforced by the public activity of those Jewish communists who played an important role in the security and propaganda apparatus, at a time when the majority of Polish society was inclined to see this activity as pursued in the direct interests of the USSR. There was a dangerous, and morally absolutely unacceptable tendency to blame the Jews in Poland en masse for the complete suppression of human rights by the new authorities