A major factor in the maintenance of the silence was the Communist con-quest of Eastern Europe and the effects of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Jewish efforts in Eastern Europe to collect testimonies were suffocated by the Soviet-dominated leadership. Whilst there was a trial of those who participated in the 1941 massacre of Jews in Jedwabne in 1946, half of the accused were
15 Sophie Gelski and Jenny Wajsenberg, ‘Teaching the Holocaust Today’, in Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthäus, eds, Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust (Westport, London: Praeger, 2005), 225.
16 ibid., 225.
17 ibid., 224.
18 Jenny Wajsenberg, ‘Teaching a lesson of memory: Melbourne’s Holocaust Centre’, Australian Jewish News (AJN), 30 June 1988, 20.
acquitted and the other half received minimal sentences.19 For over 40 years there was ongoing Communist obfuscation with denial of specific Jewish victimhood. In 1961, the Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, wrote a poem on Babi Yar, highlighting the denial of Jewish suffering and victimhood and the extent of Soviet anti-Semitism. This poem developed ‘incredible resonance’,20 but the Communists continued with their obfuscation. They held official ceremonies, for example in the Bikernieki woods outside Riga, but referred to the murdered as ‘victims of Fascism’, even though the majority of those shot were Jews.21 In the museum at Auschwitz, specific reference to Jewish suffering was severely minimised. In Warsaw there was the Rapoport monument at the site of the Warsaw ghetto, and in Auschwitz-Birkenau block number 27 referred to ‘Jewish martyrdom’. However, this was evidence of Communist tokenism.
During his visit to Poland in April 1988, Australian Yiddish writer Abraham Cykiert highlighted the labelling of Auschwitz victims as ‘Polish citizens and citizens of other nations’, without even a mention of the Jews who represented 90 per cent of the victims.22 The main monument con-structed in Auschwitz in 1967 included 19 languages, of which Hebrew and Yiddish were two. In Poland during the Communist era, there was a dual form of the politicisation of memory: on the one hand, specific Jewish suffering in the main was denied; and on the other hand Polish nationalists denied the extent to which some Poles had collaborated with the Nazis in the Jewish genocide and only referred to instances where assistance was offered. In her recent article discussing Holocaust memory in Polish scholarship, Karen Auerbach quotes historian Gunnar S Paulsson that
‘with the end of Communism … has also come the end of the distorted rhetoric, both Communist and anti-Communist, that disfigured the debate over Polish-Jewish relations for so many years’.23 Coming to terms with its past anti-Semitism before, during and after the Second World War is part of present debate in recent Polish Holocaust scholarship.24
19 Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
20 Gal Beckerman, When they come for us, we’ll be gone: the Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 30.
21 ibid., 31.
22 Abraham Cykiert, ‘The Polish-Jewish Paradox revisited’, Outlook, AJN, 5 August 1988, 21.
23 Karen Auerbach, ‘Holocaust memory in Polish scholarship’, AJS Review, April 2011, 139.
24 ibid., 140.
Monuments were built to commemorate the suffering of Polish citizens under Nazism without any specific references to Jews. The Płaszów forced-labour camp has become well known across the globe through the movie Schindler’s List. It was built in 1942 on the site of a large Jewish cemetery, known as the New Cemetery for Cracow, and its satellite town, Podgorze.
In 1942–1943, the cemetery was completely destroyed, with the gravestones used to pave the roads and provide foundations for the barracks. Under SS Commandant Amon Goeth, conditions were appalling. Starvation and terror left its toll on the number of inmates. It was in this camp that my grandfather, Solomon Perlman, perished, and cousins of mine were selected and taken away for an unknown death. After liberation, Goeth was arrested and executed by the Poles.
By 1946, almost all the buildings in Płaszów were demolished. The terrain was overgrown, only attracting locals to walk their dogs. In 1964, the Polish Communist regime erected an imposing monument at the top of a hill overlooking the camp area. Designed by Witold Ceckiewicz, the inscription reads: ‘In memory of the martyrs murdered in the Nazi genocide, 1939–1945’.25 There was no mention that the majority were Jews. A much smaller monument, a single gravestone, was erected by the Jews of Cracow in memoriam of the thousands of Jews who perished there. Yet this Jewish memorial is still overshadowed by the Communist-built structure. Overall, despite all the publicity of Schindler’s List, the terrain has not been main-tained. In 2003, a guidebook described the camp as follows: ‘The area of the camp is now derelict and neglected and there is not a single signpost that would make it easier to get around.’26 Other monuments erected in the 1960s at the killing sites of Bełżec (1963), Treblinka (1964) and Sobibor (1965), where the vast majority of people murdered were Jews, manifested the same denial of specific Jewish suffering. The original mon ument planned for Treblinka had more of a Jewish theme, but this was replaced by a more universal monument, even though it was partly funded by a Claims Conference grant,27 which was not publicly acknowledged.28 At its unveiling
25 Eugeniusz Duda, Jewish Cracow: A Guide to the Jewish Historical buildings and monuments of Cracow (Cracow: Vis-à-vis Etiuda, 2003), 123.
26 ibid., 119–120.
27 Grants allocated to organisations that support Nazi victims or promote Holocaust education and research.
28 Audrey Kichelewski, ‘A community under pressure: Jews in Poland, 1957–1967’, in Leszek W Gluchowski and Antony Polonsky, Polin, Studies in Polish Jewry: 1968 Forty Years After, vol. 21 (Oxford, Portland, Oregon: Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 2009), 179.
ceremony, Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, himself a non-Jewish sur-vivor of Auschwitz concentration camp, ‘referred nonetheless to the victims as “800,000 citizens of European nations”’.29 The classic justification by Poland’s Communist authorities for their failure to make any specific references to Jewish suffering was that they were not fascists and did not make any distinction between different ethnic groups, as they all suffered, all human beings were equal, and the Nazi murders were a crime against humanity.
Thus, for over 40 years the areas behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, containing most of the gravesites of the murdered Jews, remained unmarked and un-disturbed. Visiting Poland for the first time in 1988, on a personal visit, Australian Jewish writer Arnold Zable described the prevailing silence:
During this journey through Poland I have come to know that silence has many levels, many possibilities. It is a language with infinite vocabulary. I have listened to the silence in which reverberates the echoes of ancestral presences, and I’ve witnessed the silence in which it is possible to focus on every slight shift in the breeze, to see the movement of a speck of dust, an insect or a pod floating from a dandelion with the faintest promise of re-birth.30
He referred to the silence of the cemeteries, of the mass graves in the forests, and above all in the three death camps he visited – Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. If the silence in Israel and the free world was largely self-imposed, under Communism in the East it was a policy influenced by the Soviets, who fostered anti-Semitism for their own political ends and did not wish to acknowledge Jewish victimhood.