In Mad Dreams, Saving Graces: Poland, A Nation in Conspiracy (1989), journalist Michael Kaufman relates a story told to him by an aide to then Polish prime minister Wojciech Jaruzelski. “He reminded me that when he was growing up in Warsaw, he would often read to his illiterate grandmother from a rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper,” he writes. “That prewar church paper was edited by Father Maksymilian Kolbe, the priest, who in another sad Polish irony was to join millions of Jews as a Nazi victim at Auschwitz.” Apparently, Father Kolbe hated the Germans more than he detested the Jews; his monastery was the source of anti-Nazi publications, and the Germans arrested him in February 1941. He died in the camp in August after an injection of carbolic acid.
In October 1982, the Polish cleric Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Pope John Paul II, canonized Kolbe, asserting that the Nazi assault on entire categories of humanity included the persecution of Catholics and Poles (in Poland, these are equivalents). Kolbe’s death in Auschwitz offered a dramatic means of conflating the eradication of the Jews with the sufferings of the Poles. Dramatic, but not convincing.
Recently, the Poles doubled down on their insistence that they are innocent of charges of having broadly committed anti-Semitic crimes before, during and after World War II. Two years ago, an “Amendment to the Law on the Institute of National Remembrance” decreed prison sentences for those who accuse Poles of “co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” In February, the Holocaust scholars Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski were ordered by a Polish court to apologize for identifying a town mayor, the late Edward Malinowski, as a Nazi collaborator.
A few days after I read about the Malinowski revelations, Andrew Kornbluth’s new book arrived in my post office box. The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland focuses on the more than 32,000 trials, presided over by Polish judges, and initiated in August 1944. Kornbluth writes, “Over the course of twelve years, more than 20,000 guilty verdicts were issued, including 1,835 death sentences, although fewer than 130 may have been carried out … While the overall rate of conviction for crimes covered by the decree was likely around 50 percent, the conviction rates of persons accused of crimes against Jews may have ranged as low as 14 percent.”
In 1956, with the advent of de-Stalinization and the restoration of a Polish-run government, the trials lost momentum. But two ensuing events brought Polish anti-Semitism back to the world’s attention – the country’s 1968 declaration of thousands of Jews as enemies of the state, and the 2001 publication of Neighbors, Jan T. Gross’ unflinching account of the Polish massacre of Jews in the town of Jedwabne. Kornbluth’s narratives of the earlier August trials reinforce our understanding that the Poles foresaw “that the destruction of the country’s entrepreneurial minorities, foremost the Jews, and the enormous property transfer that ensured – from factories and storefronts right down to wedding rings and blood-spattered linens – would clear the way for a Polish middle class in a society that had been mired in agrarian feudalism when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939.”
Kornbluth details the “’crowdsourcing’ of mass killing, in which ordinary people were invited to contribute as much or as little as they wanted to the larger project of ethnic cleansing. That this system functioned as effectively as it did, at a time when the occupiers’ threats and blandishments had little effect on resistance activity or black marketeering, is itself a testament to popular attitudes to the Holocaust in the countryside.” The testaments of such barbarity come one after another here. In a typical instance, Slawa Chamit, a witness, testifies that after individual killings of Jews in her village, “she decided to take refuge with her children and approximately 200 other Jews in a nearby forest in October 1942. Material and exterminationist motives went hand in hand: the flight of the Jews had been preceded by the German-ordered confiscation of their valuables, which were stored in the firehouse, and once in the forest, the Jews were approached by villagers demanding bribes. Shortly thereafter, a group of ten firemen swooped down on the forest, nabbing around twenty Jews and putting the rest to flight.” Chamit then saw two Germans hand their carbines to the firemen who proceeded to shoot their captives as they begged for their lives.
The stories are horrific, yet the twisted rationales and bland denials of accused killers, who usually walked away from court with impunity, are equally chilling. The collaboration and killings were routine, based on German tactics: German police and Polish village leaders enlisted peasants to comb the forests for Jews who, once found, were shot on the spot. The looting of Jewish property was commonplace.
Kornbluth’s mode sets out the frameworks of many trials — and then details how they devolved towards exoneration, or at least mitigation. In the later chapters, he looks beyond the end of the August trials to Poland under the Communist regime — and how the lives of Jewish survivors faced anti-Semitism reframed by new accusations. Most of those Poles resisting the Russians regarded Jews as socialists; most of those accepting the Russians reshuffled their anti-Semitic deck. He writes:
“If the government, judiciary, and society all had a day in the outcome of the trials, the voice of one key party was conspicuously absent: the Jews. Even in the rare cases where a Jewish witness remained, they often could not or did not come forward. Although it had already waned significantly by mid-1948, the civil war that had raged between the government and the anticommunist resistance since 1944 made it extremely dangerous for anyone identifiably Jewish to live or travel in eastern Poland. As [Wladyslaw] Grzymala mentioned in his memoirs, ‘Jew’ was ‘synonymous with communist in those days.'” (Grzymala was a post-war deputy prosecutor.)
Kornbluth reminds us that the Catholic Church avidly espoused ethnic hatred, characterizing anti-Semitism as a “healthy reflex” and a “defensive reaction.” To give but one example, the highest Church official in Poland, Primate August Hlond, endorsed the “boycott and isolation” of Jews in a 1936 pastoral letter, accusing them of “belittling the Church, being mired in free thought, being the avant-garde of atheism, Bolshevism, and revolutionary action,” of having a “fatal influence” on “morals,” of propagating pornography, and of “engaging in fraud, usury, and human trafficking.” The Vatican has been considering sainthood for Hlond (photo, left).
Competitive victimization is a sport in nationalistic Poland, now the most ardent ally of the United States in the EU. Among the most pathetically immoral characters of recent years was Cardinal Józef Glemp, named head of the Catholic church in Poland in 1981 by his pal Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Pope John Paul II. Upon being confronted by Jan Gross’ uncovering of the Jedwabne mass killing, Glemp said, “Jews were clever, and they knew how to take advantage of Poles.”
[Published by Harvard University Press on March 2, 2021, 352 pages, $45.00 hardcover]
* * * * *
Poland Finds It Hard to Say I’m Sorry
Cardinal Józef Glemp drinks a glass of water.
The sound of his swallowing recalls
a bolt-action rifle discharged in the woods.
He gulps the bubbly citric water
listening to the mayor of Jedwabne on tv
admit he dyes his hair.
They exhume 200 bodies or so in Jedwabne.
Cardinal Glemp sits on the toilet, grunting
behind the door kept ajar to hear
exactly what that idiot might say.
The sound of the flush
describes an infinite evil seducing us
into believing it can be eliminated.
Neighbor killed neighbor.
Something horrible came over them.
The mayor of Jedwabne is briefed
on the hour. He divulges a chin tuck.
A gentleman knows never to apologize.
The right wronged people don’t importune
by demanding apologies, and the wrong
wronged ones are extortionists.
Now Cardinal Glemp is watching tv in bed.
Here, you can see for yourself, the Jews
embraced the Soviets, watch the film.
Thus, Poland up on its cross looked down
on them with dispassion,
pressed down on them firmly,
just as the Cardinal’s trigger finger
presses the remote to change the station.
The mayor admits to an eyelid lift.
So it seems you hid your real face from us,
the irreverent talk show host says to his guest.
Come on, say you’re sorry!
— RS
Thanks for reviewing this book (right up my alley in terms of historical reading). And the poem is brutally gorgeous. “A gentleman knows never to apologize” sums up quite a lot.