nathanael
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: “Die Wahrheit macht frei und ist das Fundament der Einheit (John Paul II)
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Post by nathanael on Jan 18, 2008 5:09:01 GMT -7
The Washington Post Foreign Service has published today another intriguing article on fresh accusations against Poland as regards antisemitism, by the Ivy League Princeton professor Jan T. Gross. This latest event proves why the Polish people need to be concerned about these "rumors," which seem never to go away. Mr. Gross's latest book, "Fear," has been immediately denounced by Cracow prosecutors as a potential "slander to the Polish nation," and even Card. Stanislaw Dziwisz has said that "reading the book filled me with pain." I have not read the book yet, but I am upset as a Polish-born person. I can read the writing on the wall: we need urgent government action to reeducate the people not to engage in ready-made ethnic condemnations! I wouldn't write about this if that "would help," but I am afraid that the opposite is the case! Mr. Gross, who is also known for his earlier book "Neighbors," on the pogrom of Jews by the Polish vallagers in Jedwabne, tends to be sensationalistic, but factual. And this is why all this is so scary. The book uncovers the truth about Poland which is frightening! It is interesting to see how this develops, since Mr. Gross is scheduled to appear in Cracow shortly, to publicize his book. Will he be arrested for "stereotyping the entire population" and for "inflaming the public opinion," as the authorities are suggesting? It's anybody's guess, but I hope that it never happens! That would inflame the whole world against Poland! What is certain, is that this gentleman needs some security protection in a hurry, given the many threats he has been receiving!
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Post by pieter on Jan 18, 2008 6:22:24 GMT -7
The problem of anti-semitism in Polands past and the Polish-Jewish element in the Stalinist regime of the Polish Peoples republic - 1945-1953 - will not go away if the older generations keep digging it up and repeating these issues, without looking at the present situation. We must be able to discuss history openly and objectively, but we must restrain ourselves from naming and blaming. What do I mean? I point at the stereotypical images: Pole = Antisemite, American-Jew = Anti-Polonist, German/Russian = unreliable imperialistic anti-Pole. In the Polish perspective I even heard the rediculous acquisition that the Jews were the henchmen of the Germans. (Maybe this myth was created by the fact that Jiddish is a German dialect. So jews speak a German dialect, so they have a German connection). Fact is that today Polish-Israeli connections are strong and that the Polish army has Israeli equipment, that there is a direct flight connection between Krakow and Tel Aviv, and that American-Jews and Israeli's go on rootjourney's and pilgrimage to Poland. (Do you go to a country where you would be threatened).
Jan Tomasz Gross
Jan Tomasz Gross (born December 8, 1947 in Warsaw, Poland) is a controversial American sociologist/historian of Polish Jewish origin. He spent his youth in Poland, where he attended Warsaw University. Arrested and expelled from the university for his participation in Polish student and intellectual protest in 1968, he emigrated to the United States in 1969, following the anti-semitic campaign launched by Poland's ruling communist party. He later earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University, and has taught at Yale, NYU, and Paris, in addition to Princeton. Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society at Princeton University. He is most known for his work on the Jedwabne massacre, the controversial Neighbors book (2001), describing the pogrom of Polish Jews by gentile Poles in the village of Jedwabne in Nazi occupied Poland during Second World War. In the book he argued that the massacre was conducted by Poles and not by the German occupiers, as previously assumed. The results were the subject of vigorous debate in Poland, and were subsequently largely supported by the results of the investigation of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. The investigation however resulted in the number of victims being about 380, while Gross earlier claimed 1600 in his book. Gross has also written extensively on other aspects of post-War Polish life and totalitarianism. His other notable book is Fear -Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, in which he covers the Kielce pogrom and instances of violence against Jews in post-war Poland. The book (available in Polish since January 11, 2008) has caused uproar and provoked many conflicting opinions in Poland. While Jan Gross takes care to point out that thousands of Poles risked their lives to save Jewish neighbours from the German Nazis, he claims the alledged mounting toll of anti-Semitic historic detail in Fear undermines in his view Poland's self-image as the heroic and the principle martyr of the war. For Gross, Poland's communist regime took over where the Nazis left off in the annihilation of three million of the 3,5-million Jews who lived in Poland before the war. Poland's communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state, Gross writes. He ascribes Poles rejection of Holocaust survivors who re-surfaced after hiding out in wartime Poland or taking refuge in the Soviet Union to the Poles desire to keep abandoned Jewish properties and guilt over having profited from the riches left by Holocaust victims. On January 10 2008, a spokesman for the Polish prosecutors office in the southern city of Kraków said it would decide within days whether to press charges against Gross for slandering the Polish nation. If convicted, Gross could face up to three years in jail. In an interview with Polish daily Rzeczpospolita published on Friday, January 11 2008, Gross rejected charges that his book was directed against Poland. "I am convinced anti-Semitism was one of the main poisons that were injected into the Polish identity," he was quoted as saying, in addition to claiming that "Hatred to Jews is a Christian tradition" in a televised interview.
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Post by pieter on Jan 18, 2008 6:56:05 GMT -7
Nathanael, I come from a country where anti-semitism was not a traditional problem, and where the anti-something thing was reserved for segregation or cohabition between two sort of Christians, Protestants and Catholics, with a clearly Protestant domination. But there was anti-semitism in here in the past too! Fundamentalist christians rejected other religions, because the Gospel was the only truth. In their view the Messiah did come with Jesus-Christ, while the Jews rejected that, and believed and believe that the Jewish messiah has to come yet. Jan Tomasz Gross is true when he speaks about Christian anti-semitism that came from an absolustist truth, that the New testemony (the Christian faith of the hart that replaced the Jewish faith of the law) is true. The Jews however only believe(d) their Torah (Tenach/Pentateuch), which is the Old testemony (the faith of the Law and the One G'd, Jahweh, Adonai or Hashem), the book of the Rabbinical debates, comments and theory, the Talmud, their method of exegesis of a biblical text Midrash, their oral tradition the Mishnah and their Halakha, the collective corpus of Jewish religious law. In my view the problems between jews and christianity has been and is that christianity is a religion that has merged in the local environment by concessions and adaptions throught the centuries. You have the christian core which merged with headen traditions and customs, like it is sure that Christmas is a celebration that fitted with the headen celebrations that took place before christianity arrived here. For many christians it is a hard fact to believe or to accept that in the beginning christianity was a Jewish religious sect that was an offspring from christianity and that Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, which preached in a sinagogue. Fact is that he was rejected by the Jewish clergy elite and most of the Jews of that time as a blasphemer, false prophet and a jewish heretic. Christianity also in my view became an European rooted local and regional religion, because it addabted the European language latin as it's church language and later used local language during the reformation (bible translations), while Judaism stayed an alien, Mid-eastern, oriental religion and culture and Jews an alien people for the European Christian majority, because they used the original Hebrew semitic language, dressed in an ancient way and had customs and names that distinguished them clearly from the local majority where the jews were living amongst. In Poland that segregation or division was more clearly, because Poland had the largest Jewish majority, so that's why it's clear to me that problems between the gentiles and jews were more visible there than in other parts of Europe where jews were tiny minorities. Pieter Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Polanden.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torahen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmuden.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midrashen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishnah
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Post by livia on Jan 18, 2008 10:23:51 GMT -7
Did you all read the book already? I haven't yet. So, does the author give the background on which anti-semitic feelings arouse in Poland after 1939? Does he mention the term paradisum Judeorum in his book? I would appreciate the info - as it will show if the book is worth reading.
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Post by pieter on Jan 18, 2008 11:03:39 GMT -7
Paradisum Judeorum
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, known as a "Jewish paradise" (paradisum Judeorum) for its religious tolerance, attracted numerous Jews who fled persecution from other European countries, even though, at times, discrimination against Jews surfaced as it did elsewhere in Europe. Poland was a major spiritual and cultural center for Ashkenazi Jewry, and Polish Jews made major contributions to Polish cultural, economic, and political life. At the start of the Second World War, Poland had the largest Jewish population in the world (over 3 million).
Pieter
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Post by livia on Jan 18, 2008 11:50:00 GMT -7
Paradisum JudeorumThe Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, known as a " Jewish paradise" (paradisum Judeorum) for its religious tolerance, attracted numerous Jews who fled persecution from other European countries, even though, at times, discrimination against Jews surfaced as it did elsewhere in Europe. Poland was a major spiritual and cultural center for Ashkenazi Jewry, and Polish Jews made major contributions to Polish cultural, economic, and political life. At the start of the Second World War, Poland had the largest Jewish population in the world (over 3 million). Pieter Yes, correct. So does the author of the book mention it? Does he give the general background. Does he point to the reasons of for the rise of ant-semitism in Poland in 1939 in his book, Pieter?
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Post by pieter on Jan 18, 2008 13:22:47 GMT -7
Livia,
I live in the Netherlands, so I did not have the chance yet to read the book overhere, because it is published in the USA and there seems to be a Polish translation. I haven't heard of a Dutch translation and did not read about it in the serious Dutch quality press (newspapers and magazines).
Pieter
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nathanael
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: “Die Wahrheit macht frei und ist das Fundament der Einheit (John Paul II)
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Post by nathanael on Jan 21, 2008 12:45:58 GMT -7
I decided to try to buy the book tomorrow. The book is about the pogrom of Kielce, in 1946. I heard about that horrible incident before, but this is something much more serious. It is bone-chilling! It is not possible, it simply cannot be true what this Princeton professor is saying! The whole Poland is being accused. There are already scathing reviews throughout the world. The soul of Poland "depends on mourning what was done in Kielce" one review says. It is "a moral indictment of an entire nation," another says. You can read the reviews on MSN, click "Fear," by Gross, and then "Fear by Jan T. Gross - Books Random House. The book can probably be ordered from: webmaster@press.princeton.edu
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nathanael
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: “Die Wahrheit macht frei und ist das Fundament der Einheit (John Paul II)
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Post by nathanael on Jan 25, 2008 13:41:54 GMT -7
I hate to write about this, but I comment briefly about the book which I bought. There is something inside of me that revolts against the whole gamma of nauseating associations that the book creates. I was unable to read the book in its entirety. I have no time, but even if I did, it's too sickening. Throughout the book, one single question lingers and returns: How was it possible that one year after the horror of the Holocaust, a crowd of 4,000 people in Kielce, a perfect cross section of society - young girls, boy scouts, fathers with children, mothers with baby carriages, policemen, firefighters, soldiers, etc. - all devoted Catholics, were ready to restart the killing of the Jews with a bone chilling atrocity unknown since Attila and the Genghis Khan? Reading this, one feels paralyzed inside, less proud of being Polish, and for me it is a feeling that will never go away. The writer is a prestigious author, decorated with the Polish Commonwealth's Kawalerski Cross of Merit. His research may be pumped up by the Jewish outrage, but it is credible. To make the story short, the entire book speaks of unspeakable horrors - a massive moral breakdown. Policemen shooting children by the side of their dead mothers, "so they stop crying." Peasants choping off the heads of their victims with axen, for lack of bullets, some even driving wooden stakes into their hearts, with sledge hammers. Most dying of slow stoning to death and blows with iron bars to the head. Some thrown out from passenger trains, and shot. Thirty women and children and men brutally assessinated, plus two Poles killed trying to defend the Jews. All because of a rumor, by a miscreant 9-year old boy who "who went to steal cherries in an orchard, and then, to avoid a beating at home, concocted a fictitios story that "the Jews at Planty Street 7 tried to kill him and other Polish boys to bake their unleavened bread with their blood"! Enough for today. The Polish people are not like that! They cannot be like that! What happened on that chilly November night of 1945 bespeaks of a nightmare better not to be dwelt upon! It was a temporary glitch on the heart of humanity. It has to do with the hidden dark side of human beings and it's too disturbing! It was one of the darkest moments of humankind!
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Mary
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Post by Mary on Jan 25, 2008 13:55:27 GMT -7
Nathanael,
I think I have heard of this. What is the name of the book?
I have heard that people can become desensitized to normal feelings and concept of right and wrong given the circumstances and length of time exposed to it.
Could it be due to all that happened in the prior years? Could the population have been so desensitized that they actually saw no evil in these acts?
Mary
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Post by holaola on Jan 25, 2008 16:09:13 GMT -7
I have taken this from my post in the thread named "The roots of anti-Semitism" but it looks as though it should have gone here. Take a look at this declaration made in Poland just before the war by Dr. Chaim Weizmann which puts a chilling twist to the story and which David Ben-Dor reports in his book “The Darkest Chapter”, I quote from p.28:
“Palestine was no solution for the Jewish problem of Europe……We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only people of education to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want our Tel-Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.”
The author cites as his source for the above piece: Hecht, Ben, "A Child of the Century" (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1954), p. 531
Ben-Dor’s own book is “The Darkest Chapter”, ISBN 086241 606 X, published by Canongate, price £9.99.
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nathanael
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: “Die Wahrheit macht frei und ist das Fundament der Einheit (John Paul II)
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Post by nathanael on Jan 26, 2008 5:53:28 GMT -7
Mary (Generation 3) makes a good point that, months after the war, the population may have been abnormously desensitized morally, each person trying to make up for the families and properties lost. But this to me can never explain the collective evil in Kielce. It appears that those people blamed more the Jews than the Nazis for all that happened! The Jews were the perennial scapegoats! How could a mixed population of doctors, lawyers, workers and peasants, have believed that "Jews were baking their unleavened bread with the blood of innocent Polish boys"? I go back to my own youth. In the forties, during that same period, in my town, we boys and girls were being instructed at home " to be careful when stepping on the metalic covers in front of Jewish stores, on Aleje Jerozolimskie Avenue in Warsaw, for the covers might collapse, and we might be trapped in the basement to be made into sausages." This admonition, circulated among all children, probably originating in the schools, and it was in response to articles in newspapers "on sausages made with human flesh"! (the articles may have been planted by the former "folksdojcz"). The families were divided insofar their sentiment toward the Jews. My "noble" family branch, Princess Zofia Po³ubiñska, Szo³owscy,coat-of-arms Wczele, (my grandfather, Kazimierz Szo³owski, died at Auschwitz, Block 2, prison number 11770), and other nobility members, never spoke a word against the Jews, at home. And neither did the family of Arthur Or-Ot Oppman, whose son was my other grandfather. I recall my family telling me that my aunt (Po³ubiñska) was so sensitive, that she cried each time she heard a foul word on the street or in the train. My "other" family, the one of Kazimierz Szejner, in youth a commander of czar Nicholas II hussars, and later a secretary to Prince Lubomirski, though, the one that advised me "not to step on the storefront covers," was less educated, but never antisemitic. Still, our house was filled with "unexplained" expensive paintings, Rembrandts and Murillos and the likes. I was too young to know if they were copies or originals, and where they came from. They surely could not have been bought at a street corner kiosk, and probably were bought from Jews. I was soon transferred to several orphanages after my mother was killed and never saw that family again. I recall the never-ending teasing of Jews by Polish boys in the orphanages, in Otwock, Konstancin, Rabka, P³ock and Jaci¹¿ek. You could constantly hear the hateful expression "ty parszywy ¯ydzie"(you scabby Jew) at every classroom, dining hall, soccer field! The boys used this phrase more frequently than all other four letter words! They even used it more often, than the word "Szwab," which was the par excellence expression of hate against the Germans, ... and which was my favored. The point is: there appears to be a disproportion between the moral level of the intelligentsia and the moral level of the populace! This, to me, explains the antisemitism in Poland! The Polish masses, even today, delight in calling each other names! And they also delight to gang up against a single "victim"! It's in their nature not to respect the human dignity of others, whether szlachta (nobility), or foreigners! Lest we begin to restore this respect for human dignity and nobility in the populace, the antisemitism, which feeds on the "easy target," will always fester in Poland! Finally, to answer your question, Mary, the book is called Strach, Antysemityzm w Polsce tu¿ po wojnie: Historia moralnej zapaœci. The English title is Fear.
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Post by livia on Jan 26, 2008 11:02:59 GMT -7
Poles say: Gross's book wrongs and offends us Polacy: książka Grossa nas krzywdzi i obraża"Strach" to krzywdząca dla nas książka - tak uznała największa grupa osób przebadanych przez instytut ARC Rynek i Opinia na zlecenie "Polski". Nasza ankieta dowodzi powszechności poczucia, że pisarz traktuje nas niesprawiedliwie i fałszuje historię.» www.polskatimes.pl/
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nathanael
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: “Die Wahrheit macht frei und ist das Fundament der Einheit (John Paul II)
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Post by nathanael on Jan 26, 2008 13:05:31 GMT -7
No one knows where this controversy will end. Polish Attorney General's Office "is reading the book," trying to ascertain if Poland has been slandered," which here is a major crime. The Catholic Church is very critical of Prof. Gross, in Poland and in England. According to www.onet.pl, Norman Davies, a respected British professor of Polish history, has just held a conference in the oldest Polish parish on the British Isles. Prof. Davies called the book a "publicistical polemics, and not a scientific analysis." But, alas, this "expert" had also admitted that "he hasn't read the book." How can such a person judge the scientificity of a book, without reading it? I should note at this point that the accusation of "publicystyka" is the weapon of choice in today's Polish academia, church and state. The person that is not liked for speaking on a controversial issue, whichever the issue may be, is invariably accused of "publicity, not science." Normally, in Polish linguistics, "publicystyka" refers to "writings on actual life problems, social, political, cultural and economic," much like the now somewhat obsolete usage of "publicity" in the United States (see Webster, "publicist"). However, the modern Polish academicians have given an additional spin to the meaning of this word. For them, publicystyka "is everything that is not dispassionate, unbiased analysis of events, considering all historical circumstances, then and now." Under such measurement, writing on the pogrom of Kielce cannot be scientific for it presents the whole of Poland in a negative light, ignoring the Communist element, the German element, and the contemporary exigencies. Thinking along these lines, Card. Stanis³aw Dziwisz and most Polish professors have strongly criticized "Strach" for "resurrecting the demons of antisemityzm and anti-Polishness simultaneously in our time." Abp. Józef ¯yciñski, in addition, called "Strach" "contrary to the spirit of dialogue between Jews and Christians." I am not qualified to criticize any of the aforementioned dignitaries. But there is something unfair in the idea of hiding truth for the sake of self-defined "scientificity"! The scientist who wrote "Fear," is now himself in fear of being arrested! What kind of scientific freedom is this? Recently, I myself came under surprise criticism in Poland for "engaging in publicystyka," when I analyzed the social Encyclicals of John Paul II, Laborem exercens and Sollicitudo rei socialis, and this despite the fact that it was my duty, as a scientific writer, to admit the publicistic element (speaking of actual social problems), as necessarily inherent in the nature of John Paul II's social writing! Not only was my doctoral track compromised, but I still am in fear of other unforeseen repercussions. If anything, this last example shows that there is a long way before we Americans and Poles can speak with one voice, scientifically!
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Mary
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Post by Mary on Jan 26, 2008 17:27:33 GMT -7
Nathanael,
Thank you so much! You are very thorough and informative, I enjoy reading your posts. I'm getting an education!
Mary
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