Polish anti-semitism

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

I am quite familiar with the issue, which is currently hotly debated in
Poland.  This is actually what I had in mind when I wrote the original
missive.  The bottom line appers to be like this: after the Red Army
entered Poland in 1939, many Jews were openly pro-Communist which offended
the sensibilities of some rabidly nationalistic Polish rightwingers.  So
after the Nazis invaded the USSR and the  Red Army withdrew, the
nationlists took a revenge, which took a particularly ugly turn in Jedwabne
(but there were other attacks as well).  As I understand it, the points
being contested in the debate are the scale of the massacre, and whether it
was "justified" given the openly pro-communist stance of the Jewish community.

This is consistent with the points I tried to make, namely:

- communist authorities curbed anti-semitism, or perhaps its worst excesses
(the perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre who were apprehended after the
war were sentenced under the communist government);
- ideology and religion were generally more important dividing factors than
race in E.Europe (Jews were ususlly defined in those terms, rather than a
separate ethnicity).

wojtek

 

 in the aftermnaAt 10:41 AM 6/26/01 -0700, you wrote:
>  You read the new Jan T. Gross vol. from Yale Univ. Press, on the village
>in Poland that slaughtered the Jews en masse w/o the Nazis, yet? TNR
>recently had Michnik and Wieseltier debating the issues.
>Michael Pugliese
>
>
>