The debate this week over the Polish Holocaust law created the impression that the law was simply reviving the old, evil anti-Semitism.
There is some truth in that, but anyone who thinks it is entirely true should have to provide an answer as to why the old anti-Semitism is rearing its head precisely as Poland is undergoing a "Jewish renaissance," which includes the opening in 2013 of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
As I understand it, this has to do with the conflict between two contradictory perceptions of the Holocaust in Eastern and Western Europe. Since 1945, a universal view of the Holocaust has formed in the West, which defined it as a crime against humanity and then became a metaphor – the metaphor – for human suffering. Just consider extreme comparisons such as "Gaza is Auschwitz" or "the animal holocaust." At the same time, the more the Holocaust is turned into a metaphor, the more the unique suffering of the Jews is obscured.
On the other hand, until the communist bloc in Eastern Europe collapsed, the Holocaust did not hold any special place in history. There was one narrative: the communist victory over fascism. Only when the communist bloc disintegrated was there a place for national memories and the unique suffering the collective experienced.
Poland's self-image is anchored in political victimization – the memory of being wiped off the map in 1795 and two failed revolutions against the czar in the 19th century – before being reborn in the 20th century only to find itself left out in the cold yet again in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Polish army was defeated and the elite was wiped out by the Bolsheviks and then by the Nazis.
In the national memory of the "suffering nation," there was no room for the suffering the Poles themselves caused, such as the massacre of the Jews in Jedwabne in 1941. When Poland was about to join the European Union, then-President Aleksander Kwasniewski acknowledged the stain on his country's history. At a commemoration ceremony in 2001, he asked forgiveness for what the Poles had done to the Jews. That was a sign that the Western view of the Holocaust was being adopted, a view that demanded introspection from the Europeans. But in modern Poland, the Eastern European view of the Holocaust is more prevalent: There are absolute victims or absolute victimizers and Poland falls into the first category.
So on one level, the stain of the pogroms is hushed up, as happened this week, and on another level, there is discussion of the so-called "Zydokomuna," which allows the pogroms to be classed as retaliatory acts supposedly aimed at the Bolsheviks, whose ranks included a large proportion of Jews. Otherwise, the Holocaust is simply reframed as "another" collective crime in Eastern Europe: Didn't the Poles suffer from Ukrainian nationalists and from Stalinist purges? Weren't the Ukrainians intentionally starved by the Soviets in the 1930s? In Eastern Europe, everyone suffered, every people had its "holocaust," so crimes against the Jews are minimized and Poland's responsibility for them is obfuscated.
If Holocaust relativism in Eastern Europe plays down anti-Semitic persecution, Western Europe has reached the same point by a different route: The more the Holocaust comes to symbolize suffering, the more collectives that suffer are seen as metaphorical Jews. And what about flesh and blood – or ashes and dust – Jews? They are just blocking the way.
For a simplified symbol to be effective, it needs to be detached from its concrete, historical roots. Remember what happens to Jesus in Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" when he shows up at the auto-da-fé: The inquisitor threatens to burn him at the stake because Jesus could ruin the entire spiritual-institutional world that was built in his name, but no longer has anything to do with him.
The saga about the Polish Holocaust law might be about something other than the glorification of their own suffering, suffering that leaves no space to discuss the crimes the Poles themselves perpetrated.
It's not impossible that the law is also fueled by a desire to match the Jews when it comes to suffering or even be seen as the true sufferers. For a Catholic people like the Poles, it must seem to be a distant echo of the revolution the apostle Paul instituted when he defined Christians as "children of the promise" as opposed to "children of the flesh" (Romans 9:8).
