When I first went to live in Poland in 1994, I didn’t know anything about the Polish resistance during the war. I first learned of it in one of the barrack displays at Auschwitz, but I thought then that the word "resistance" referred strictly to the military operation at the beginning of the war, when after 27 days, the major cities were decimated and the Polish army was finally overpowered.

Through extensive research for the World War II thread of my novel, I later found that these 27 days were only the opening salvo of the intricate underground resistance that the Poles orchestrated throughout the five years of Nazi occupation. This network stretched to involve the vast majority of Poles, either in active roles or as sympathetic to the cause. The government-in-exile, located in London from 1939 to 1989, primarily raised funds and tried to convince especially the British and American governments to become more involved in Poland’s and the Polish Jews’ plight. The partisan fighters spearheaded the efforts inside the country.

The two main umbrella armies for most of the war were the AK (The Home Army) and the AL (The People’s Army). At its height, the Home Army alone numbered 350,000 fighters, usually clustered into cells of 3-5 men, only one of whom was in contact with the leaders. Thoughout the war, they were engaged in sabotage (bombing thousands of Nazi trains, train tracks, military vehicles and supply routes) as well as intelligence, setting up networks of messengers, newsletters and radio stations that would broadcast information to the West from the middle of the Polish woods for very short periods of time. There were even a few partisans who were voluntarily interred in labor and death camps so they could help to smuggle information to the outside world about what exactly was occurring there.

Another key mission of the partisans was to deter collaboration with the Nazis. A special detachment of the Home Army was dedicated especially to "revenge"–carrying out the sentences of the underground court system, which actively tried and convicted those Poles who had provided information or other assistance to Nazi soldiers. These collaborators were known as szmalcowniks, so nicknamed after the Polish word for "grease".

But the partisans would not have been able to operate so effectively without the continuous support of the rest of the population. Like the characters of "Pigeon" (most partisans took on animal names as their nom-de-guerre) and W?adys?aw Jagie??o in my novel, many of the partisans spent the entire war effectively homeless, living either in bunkers in the woods or by staying in the barns of sympathetic farmers. Priests and other trusted members of communities kept lists of people who would provide food, shelter and other assistance to the partisans.

There were many Jewish resistance fighters as well, who chose to embed themselves in these cells rather than join the Jewish underground. One of the only first-person partisan accounts I found is a memoir called Fire Without Smoke by Florian Mayevski, a Jewish Pole who fought with the Home Army. In my novel, I wanted to represent these often overlooked Jews, who actively went into combat against the Nazis. After one gruesome visit by the Nazi soldiers in the area, Berek, the son of the Jewish family who lives in the cellar in Half-Village, grows sick of hiding and joins up with the People’s Army.

Besides the partisans, there were numerous other underground efforts devoted to education, culture and civil disobedience. The detachment in charge of civil disobedience regularly issued missives to the general population about how to best resist the Nazis through passive means. This was not difficult to convince the average Pole to hold their occupiers in contempt. Catholic Poles were not considered Aryan by the Nazis, but were racially defined as "Untermenschen," or "subhuman." Since early in the war, the Nazis had closed and prohibited Polish schools, universities, publishers, theaters and cultural institutions, executing or sending to the camps many teachers, professors, priests and intellectuals. Poles were not allowed to own radios, sing Polish folk songs or keep books or other Polish "cultural relics," which had been replaced by everything German. Underground schools, universities, theaters, and self-published books and newspapers proliferated across the country.

Of course, one of the underground organizations most frequently written about is the one that was in charge of providing direct assistance to the Jews. It was called ?egota, named after an imaginary man named Konrad ?egota. ?egota often partnered with the Jewish underground resistance to forge papers, smuggle people, especially children, out of the ghetto, and provide supplies and weapons. Many of the 6,000+ Righteous Polish Gentiles assisted Jews through this unified effort. One who has been in the news recently is Irena Sendler, who smuggled an estimated 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and placed them with Polish Catholic families, or in convents or orphanages, burying their true identities in jars so their families could be located after the war. ?egota was also actively engaged in converting Poles who, though rabidly anti-Nazi, were not sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. One famous leaflet, distributed widely in 1942 at the beginning of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, described the atrocities committed against the Jews in great detail, condemned the worldwide silence in the face of these atrocities, and concluded that anyone who did not protest against the "bloody spectacle taking place on Polish soil…is neither a Catholic nor a Pole."

 I couldn’t have said it better.

The post A Brief History of the Polish Resistance appeared first on Jewcy.

We write about it because 70 years later, we still cannot wrap our heads around what happened. I think there is a misconception that writing requires pure intellect, but I heard another writer say once that it also requires a certain amount of thick-headedness, to stare at the same spot on a wall for years and years. I think that’s very accurate in this case. Many people, especially we who didn’t experience the war, read the facts and the anecdotes and wonder how it was possible for these horrific scenarios to be perpetrated by sentient human beings. In this way, fiction is like myth-trying to reconstruct what we cannot explain. We write about it to vicariously experience the ideals of that time. Strength of community. Steadfastness in love. Resilience in the face of suffering. Regret, forgiveness and redemption. Most of the time, these are considered outdated values in today’s society. We live lives where we shy away from asking friends and family for even the smallest favor because we don’t want to trouble them. Break-ups, divorce and cynicism in dating are commonplace. In our country especially, apathy, modern medicine and technology have been systematically eliminating emotional suffering, physical pain and each slight inconvenience as soon as it appears. And dense cities and relocation make it easier to avoid the person we have wronged rather than ask for forgiveness. The suffering of the war forced many of these ideals to the surface, but they have since receded. To go back to them, we need to resort to fiction.

We write about it because the war provides clear moral boundaries. In World War II, unlike in many other wars, there were achingly clear moral boundaries. Two opposite touchlines of right and wrong. Black and white. Good and evil. And the swift military actions of this war (unlike World War I for example, when soldiers languished in trenches), the extended occupations in most of Europe, and Hitler’s plan to destroy the Jews meant that the civilian population was thoroughly and forcibly entangled. Yet because of the non-binary nature of human beings, if you put a character between these unmovable boundaries, you need to examine the gray areas within each character, the nearly imperceptible shifts that happen with each choice. And of course, reading or writing forces us to examine our own gray areas. What would we do in the same situations? What is the right choice in any given situation? And would our bodies softened by corn-syrup and cubicle life, our minds clouded with moral relativism be strong enough to act? We write about it to honor the generations that came before us. In Poland, I would look at the faces of the old people I passed on the street and imagine what they had to endure and witness in their lifetimes: the suffering through the Nazi occupation, the fifty years of communism, personal tragedies and then the whiplash of societal changes in their later years. Because we are a country of immigrants, every major city is home to refugees and survivors of all kinds of tragedies, who carry around lifetimes of pain inside as they go about their everyday work and errands. Most of our grandparents had much more difficult lives than we do. Many of them endured war, deaths of loved ones, and aching separations from their homelands in order to provide their children and their children’s children with more opportunities. And I feel that we sometimes unthinkingly squander those opportunities on the moment and don’t do enough to honor our ancestors’ sacrifices. It seems to be a theme that I will return to over and over in my writing.

The post The Neverending Story appeared first on Jewcy.

Now, I tend to read only for daily sustenance, without necessarily dwelling on the individual books, but I definitely remember reading that book.  It was the summer of 2005, and I took it along with me on a trip to Poland, the first leg of which was a few days in the Tatra Mountains with my friend Anna (who inspired the character of Irena in A Long, Long Time Ago).  I started reading it on the long bus ride, and laughed so often through the first chapter that I tried to translate it for Anna into Polish.  That night, we were staying in a one-room cabin, but I was so restless (or maybe jet-lagged) that I took the book into the bathroom and shut the door so Anna wouldn’t be woken by the light.  I thought I would read one more chapter to put myself to sleep.  Maybe two.  At five in the morning, I was still sitting on the floor of that bathroom, finishing the last page. Now that A Long, Long Time Ago is out, a few people (including whoever wrote the jacket copy) have said my book reminds them of Foer’s.  Personally, I think Foer is a lot more adventurous in his experimentation with voice and structure, the way he loops back and forth in time, overlapping reality and magical realism.  In fact, these days I use his writing as an example for my students of the possibilities of fiction.  I think of my style as more straight-forward, old-fashioned storytelling, and I think I tend to visualize events in discrete scenes with clean edges.   As for the material, we’re definitely both pulling from the same realm.  World War II and the 90s were the crucial turning points of the 20th Century for both Poland and Western Ukraine, and it would be hard to write a book about either place without including these two time periods.  Also, L’viv/L’wów and Krakow share similar culture and aesthetics, and a common past.  (At several points in their history, modern Ukraine and Poland were joined, or at least jointly occupied by a third country.)  In both cities, Austro-Hungarian facades stand shoulder-to-shoulder with well-intentioned Soviet monstrosities, and the hippest cafés are adorned with collections of old clocks, sewing machines and school desks, a style that can perhaps best be described as "ironic attic chic."   The rural areas are nearly identical as well.  Villages with names like "Cold Water" and "Squirrel" seem straight out of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jerzy Kosi?ski.  A few years ago, on a road/cowpath-trip around Bieszczady (in Eastern Poland) with my friend Anita (whose younger self inspired the character of Magda), I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was driving through the pages of a storybook, as if at any moment, we might catch a glimpse of Baba Yaga’s chicken-feet house or be stopped by a talking fox.   And just as the mythical and the real coexist, so do the present and the past.  In conversations, people talk about the war as if it were yesterday, and the most hotly debated controversies usually have to do with things that happened several generations before.  Finally, after a long and often shared history of invasion, I think Jews and non-Jews from both countries wield a dark sense of humor as an antidote to suffering.   Two summers ago, after living in and traveling to Poland for fifteen years, I finally crossed the border to Ukraine.  I spent a month volunteering in a village near the western border, which turned out to be not far from where my father’s family is from, and probably not far from the character Jonathan Safran Foer’s travels.  When I arrived, I have to say, I was a little disappointed that Alex and Sammy Davis Junior Junior were not waiting in a Lada to pick me up.  And this is probably the greatest testament to Everything Is Illuminated, that Foer, in such a short time was able to absorb and capture that singular atmosphere that I still find difficult to articulate, and create characters that, two years later, felt as if they could come alive and meet me at the train station.  I can only hope that my book will stick with its readers long enough for them to see Poland for themselves.

The post Jonathan Safran Foer, Eastern Europe, and Me appeared first on Jewcy.

In Krakow, there is one operating synagogue (Remuh) with a congregation of about 150.    Estimates of the number of people with Jewish roots who are still living in Poland run into the tens of thousands, but very few of those actually identify with being Jewish.  Why is that?  I’m not entirely sure.  Some were probably never told of their roots or have lost the connection by living in an overwhelmingly non-Jewish society for so many generations.  On occasions when I have heard a young Pole talk about his or her Jewish grandmother (or Roma or Ukrainian grandmother for that matter), it doesn’t sound like either pride or shame; it’s presented as a benign curiosity, as if they are telling you they are double-jointed or have a twin. So without a significant Jewish population, is Poland ragingly anti-Semitic? I’m not Jewish, so of course, it could be possible that I’m just missing something.  But I think that in our world, it’s generally true that the worst prejudices reveal themselves behind closed doors, when people feel like they are among "their own kind."  I’ve been behind many closed doors in Poland, and I have to say that aside from a night at a bar where there was a group of skinheads (who also consider American expats a threat to the gene pool, by the way), I have never personally experienced anyone spewing hate.  (About Jews, I should add.  There is still plenty of bad blood for Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians to go around, and once in a while, I will hear a comment about Africans or Asians that makes me turn around and check which decade I’m living in.) This doesn’t mean that intolerance for Jews isn’t still out there skulking around.  I just googled and found a Polish-speaker out there spreading his venom on the Internet.  And as in other countries in Europe, every so often you’ll catch a whiff of the Zionist conspiracy theorists, the skinheads, the soccer hooligans and their bottomless cans of spray paint, and those who have just generally been brought up to hate.  The point is that the anti-Semites and the racists comprise a very small percentage of the population now, and they are generally disdained for their prejudices and thought of as uneducated.  In the case of the aforementioned venom-spreader, I found several successive threads from Poles tapping away at their keyboards, telling the first guy off for his ignorance.   Part of this is due to the political and economic and social changes the country has undergone in the past twenty years.  Today’s young Poles have been through a relatively modern school curriculum.  They have studied the history and literature of the Holocaust.  They have learned at least one other language.  About two million Poles have worked somewhere else in the E.U. in the past five years, and vacationing abroad is now much more common than it is among Americans.  To them especially, racism and anti-Semitism tend to be viewed as archaic and backwards.  

Added to that is the fact that over the past several years, Jewish culture has become…well, trendy.  The center of this phenomenon is the district of Kazimierz in Krakow.  Up until September of 1939, Kazimierz contained a thriving, self-governed Jewish community of over 60,000.  When I first arrived in Krakow in 1994, it was a neighborhood where it was best to watch your back if you were out at night.  Now, it’s the most expensive real estate market in the city, and a hub for hipsters, artists, expats, tourists and locals, who flock to the cafès and restaurants, most of which reflect the Jewish origins of the neighborhood in the food, music and decor.  Klezmer music has made its way into pop music and movie soundtracks.  Even in the case of those persistently ignorant soccer hooligans, part of the reason that the Cracovia squad is the subject of anti-Semitic chants and the ubiquitous "_yd" scribbled on the side of buildings is because, like Ajax in the Netherlands, Cracovia fans wear their team’s Jewish origins as a point of pride.   More significant changes have occurred as well.  In 1994, the old synagogue was a shell of a building, overgrown with weeds, and my friend and I had to convince a lone caretaker that we wanted to go inside.  Today it has been completely renovated, and houses a museum of Jewish culture, a central point for the constantly rotating schedule of Jewish festivals, concerts, art exhibits, educational programs, and cooperative cultural exchanges that take place throughout the city.  The other synagogues have been renovated as well.  New plaques and memorials have been erected.  Old cemeteries and memorials have been properly maintained, including, of course, the site of Auschwitz, which is about an hour and a half drive from Krakow.   Cynics and non-Polish-speakers might tell you that this Renaissance is just for the tourists.  But under the new facades and the event posters, there is an actual conversation going on.  Two, actually.  The first, an extensive collaboration between the Jewish and Polish organizations and individuals who have made this all happen, and the second, among Poles themselves.  As near as I can tell, it began in the late 80s with an article in a Catholic magazine urging Poles to take greater moral responsibility for the atrocities of the Holocaust, and it resurged in 2001, with Jan Gross’s book (Neighbors), about the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne.  Many articles, forums, documentaries and books have followed.  The individual discussions open and close, but since the fall of communism, the accuracy of the historical record of the Holocaust and the war has been one of the major themes.   So although the permanent Jewish population in Poland is very small and not likely to increase any time soon, I still think that Poland serves a few crucial roles for Jews today.  First, to continue their collaborative role in preserving the physical sites and the documentation of the Nazi atrocities, and to continue to draw people from all corners of the globe to witness the past and reinforce the covenant to never forget.  Second, Poland, and especially Krakow in the last decade, has become a place for Jews and non-Jews to gather together for the celebration, revival and renewal of Eastern European Jewish culture.  And finally, the traces of Jewish existence in Poland and the holes that have been left in Polish society can now serve as tinder to start (or continue) important conversations, both within Poland and across borders.

The post Does Antisemitism Still Exist in Poland? appeared first on Jewcy.

Brigid Pasulka is the author of the novel A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, which takes place in Poland. She is guest-blogging on Jewcy this week, and this is her first post.

When I went to Poland for the first time in 1992, I was a junior in college. It was not my idea; I was tagging along with some friends from my study-abroad program in Germany. We had already made it as far as Berlin, and they thought it would be fun to hop over to Poland, so we took the train to Warsaw and found a six-dollar hostel near the train station. (Note to travelers-in any city in Europe, never stay in a place that’s near the train station.) I only have vague memories from that trip: broken windows in the station, flocks of pigeons wandering around inside, Kris Kross videos playing on a loop in the waiting room, black market dealers harassing us to sell dollars. All around us the language sounded like angry buzzing and shushing, and when we did approach people on the street (in German because, after all, we were studying German) they were curt. Some of them simply walked away.

Overall, my impression of the country was gray. Poor. Depressing. And I remember thinking that there wasn’t even that much to see, since all the buildings dated from 1945. I wrote the entire weekend off as a waste and vowed never to return to Poland.

Then my senior year at Dartmouth, I took a joint literature and history class on the Holocaust. I should have been winding down my education, thinking about my future, but instead I became obsessed with knowing about what had happened to the Jews and how it was possible for human beings to do this to each other. I read voraciously. We went to the just-opened Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and watched many documentaries. When I would talk with my friends, the topic of the Holocaust somehow always came up. I think that this class, more than my Polish roots or my sense of adventure, was what made me decide not only to return to Poland, but to live there for a year after I graduated.

So when I arrived at the train station in Krakow in August of 1994, I knew far more about Jewish Poles than I did about non-Jewish Poles. I went to see the old synagogue in Kazimierz, the towering memorial in the field at P?aszów, and Oskar Schindler’s enamel factory long before I thought about going to the castle or the salt mine. I didn’t even know about the legendary Polish resistance against the Nazis until, ironically, I read about it in one of the buildings at Auschwitz.

Some people might find this odd. After all, my family, who came to America from Poland in the early 1900s, are practicing Catholics, I spent most of my childhood in a farming township in rural Illinois, and except for one aunt by marriage, didn’t meet anyone Jewish until I was eighteen. Seriously. But in talking with people, I have since learned that this is not all that odd, that the atrocities of the Holocaust are many people’s introduction, and sometimes sole knowledge of, Poland.

Anyway, my desire to know more eventually led me to find my grandmother’s cousins, who lived in a tiny farming hamlet between Krakow and O?wi?cim (known to most of the world as "Auschwitz"). My grandmother’s cousins were gracious hosts, but when I began to ask about the war and the Holocaust and whether they knew at the time what was being done to the Jews, they avoided my questions. This disturbed me greatly at the time, just as my brazenness probably disturbed them. It also fueled my curiosity and led me to read more about the experiences of non-Jewish Poles in the war.

And so I continued my endless odyssey of learning.

I learned about the total Nazi occupation of Poland for the duration of the war, about the 3 million non-Jewish Poles who were killed, about the Polish universities, schools, theaters, books and other evidence of Polish culture that were completely wiped out. I learned that Poland was the only country where the penalty for sheltering someone of Jewish origin was summary execution of the entire family, and yet anywhere from 50,000 to 450,000 Jews were saved in this way. I found out that of those whom Yad Vashem has recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, nearly one-third are Poles. I read over and over about the comparatively low numbers of Polish collaborators and about the systematic resistance against the Nazis-the vast networks of partisan fighters, spies and underground institutions that caused the Nazis to retaliate against the Poles and cause far more human and material destruction than in any other European country. I read about the Polish government-in-exile’s exhortations to the West that the Nazis be stopped, their proclamations to the Polish people that anyone who cooperated with the German murder against the Jews was going against Polish law, and the systematic work of underground courts, who carried out death sentences against Poles who assisted the Nazis. I learned about the once-thriving Jewish community in Poland, dating back to the 11^th Century, when Poland was seen as a refuge.

But in my reading, I also learned about the flaring and ebbing anti-Semitism that is said to have begun in the 1600s. I learned about towns and villages who did cooperate with the Gestapo and give up their Jewish neighbors, businesses who profited from Jewish labor, the "Blue Police," and the imprisoned Poles who held roles as kapos to their fellow prisoners. I learned that while some leaders of my own faith gave up their lives to protect Jews, some were known to hear the confessions and grant absolution to Nazi soldiers. And of course, some stayed silent. I learned of Jedwabne, where in 1941, non-Jewish Poles killed hundreds of their Jewish neighbors, and of the pogrom in Kielce in 1946, when 40 newly returned Jewish Poles were killed. I read that while sympathy for the Jews motivated some heroic actions during the war, others were motivated more by hatred of the Nazis than anything else.

And I tried to put many of these things into my novel.

So how do I reconcile these pieces of information? I don’t. Because I don’t find these facts to be contradictory or competing truths, but rather completing truths-details that fill in and anchor the entire historical record.

There seems to be a trend in society today to seek out only those sources that repeat what we already know and confirm what we already believe. And perhaps this is human nature, to search for clean edges and conclusive Truths with a capital "T". Though the Internet is a miracle of community-building and information-dissemination, it also allows people to make a sport of lobbing spurious "facts" back and forth at lightning speed, snowballs whose only purpose is to hit the target and then disintegrate into the ether, never to be checked.

Of course, the antidote to this is to return to one of the most fundamental traditions in both the Catholic and the Jewish faith-lifelong study and returning to the core texts. In this case, that means primary documents, statistics, and the testimonies of the people who were there. Today, thanks to the work of many dedicated people, there are vast caches of information at our disposal, but our goal in reading should not be to homogenize the information, or to narrow it down to fit our current comprehension. Rather, our goal should be to create an ever-widening perspective, a horizon vast enough to include even what we don’t want to hear. Because acknowledging even what we don’t want to hear is not only the key to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, but is also the key to recognizing the violence, persecution and genocide that has happened and is happening in other places in the world.

Simple reading. The same act that we use to keep the past from eroding is the same act that can prevent the acid of ignorance and hate from seeping into the future.

The post Going After Krakow appeared first on Jewcy.