The ways in which governments and other groups have distorted the memory of the Holocaust, as well as the necessity of an accurate and respectful remembrance of that great historical calamity, was the subject of a lecture by Polish scholar Anna Sommer in the James and Betty Hall Theatre at Dutchess Community College on Thursday, April 10.
The talk, titled “Stealing the Holocaust: Who Owns the Memory? Controversies over Auschwitz and Distortions of Memory,” was delivered twice, in the afternoon and evening, to engaged and appreciative audiences.
Sommer, who is of Polish-Catholic descent, is a lecturer and doctoral candidate in the department of Jewish Studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She is a guide at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and has served as an assistant to the European Parliament in Poland and the Polish public radio station. She was a lecturer in Krakow for the Heritage Seminars of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, and has done research at the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel and the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Her lecture was presented by the DCC Greenspan Trust – Handel Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Holocaust Studies.
“I am not going to speak about the Holocaust today,” Sommer informed her listeners at the outset, “but about the memory of the Holocaust, and how it has been abused since 1945. The interpretation of memory is different for individuals, nations, and religious groups. In the case of the Holocaust, memory in all its forms was twisted and turned to avoid sometimes harsh realities and serve current political agendas by postwar communist governments and others.
“The changing faces of memory are always problematic, but it is when they are falsified to serve governments that they are the most dangerous.”
Reminding her audience of the immensity of what befell Polish Jewry after the Nazi invasion of September 1939 – out of a population of 3.5 million (at 10 percent of Poles, the highest concentration of Jews in Europe), only 250,000 survived – Sommer proceeded to narrate the bizarre twists and turns that the communist government of Poland’s own discriminatory Jewish policies took under Soviet direction after the tentative liberation of 1945.
Surprisingly, there was an initial period in the late 1940s when Jewish political, cultural and even religious groups were given encouragement by the communist authorities. Sommer cited the fact that the new totalitarians for all their own repressiveness fully appreciated what had happened to the Jews under the Nazis, and that in attacking by means of propaganda their genocidal policies, as well as the actions of pre-war Polish anti-Semites, the new government sought to establish its own legitimacy. The fact that Jews had formed the backbone of the pre-war Communist Party of Poland was also critical.
“There was some method in this ‘madness’,” Sommer said. “They had a motive of showing to the outside world that communists were benevolent to Jews, and therefore the legitimate rulers, as liberators, of not only Poland but all of Eastern Europe.” The continuation of smaller scale anti-Semitic violence in the form of mob pogroms that killed dozens allowed them to strike this pose, she said. Yet this relative benevolence proved to be a short-lived moment.
“Slowly the grip of communism began to squeeze,” Sommer said. “Anti-Semitism was strong in communist Europe, and became a useful instrument in intra-party struggles, such as the purges and show trials which were initiated at Stalin’s direction in the late 1940s. By the beginning of the 1950s, all Jewish political and cultural groups were suppressed, and a new phase of distorting memory had begun.”
By presenting a narrative of World War II which centered on the heroism and victory of the Red Army, the communists sought to downplay or extinguish what had happened to the Jews and other minorities, such as the Gypsies, Sommer said. The official narrative became one in which Poles and Jews suffered in the same way, epitomized by the inscription on the first monument erected at Auschwitz, “To the martyrdom of the Polish people and other nations.” There was no specific acknowledgement of the Jewish identity of the victims or the role that identity had played in their deaths.
“This is not to say that the communists denied that Jews were killed,” Sommer said. “But by ignoring and downplaying the specifically Jewish Holocaust, they de-legitimized it.”
This new anti-Semitism culminated in 1968, with a campaign against Jews that was in part a response to the attempted liberalizations undertaken by the communist leader Alexander Dubcek in neighboring Czechoslovakia under the name “The Prague Spring,” which were crushed by the Soviet invasion of that country in August of that year. In Poland, the government of Wladislaw Gomulka expelled 20,000 Jews, drove many more from their jobs, and further “consigned Jewish history to oblivion,” as Sommer puts it.
“Many of us believe that these events were among the most significant in postwar Polish history,” she said. “Today the Polish media is awash in 40th anniversary commemorations of this terrible campaign, in which its meaning is being examined and its perpetration deplored.”
Yet does this signify that there has indeed been a break with a tragic past, which when not characterized by the extreme of genocide, has seen repeated and brutal discrimination against the country’s Jewish minority?
“People ask me if there have been any changes in Poland, if there are any developments which give me hope, and I answer that there have been some,” Sommer said. “The public debate on the past, the creation of programs of Jewish studies, the re-dedication of Auschwitz to accurately reflect what happened there – all are positive developments.”
After her talk, the Beat asked Sommer whether the Holocaust can also be stolen by people agitating over recent and current conflicts, such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Darfur.
“This is a very complex issue,” she said. “It is important to re-affirm that the Holocaust was unique, and that these events are not another Holocaust.
“At the same time, the Holocaust has to be used as a warning against the possibility of genocides in the future. We, after all, are seeing these things on television. If we blame those who did nothing to help the Jews during World War II, then we must blame ourselves if we do nothing in Darfur.”