Anti-Semitism Fading in Poland

"As Europe diversifies, nearly every nation and culture on the continent seems to battle for victimhood status. Poles have especially good reason to see themselves as long oppressed, having been fought over and occupied for much of the last century by vicious regimes. Shifting political power struggles during and after the war, among other complications of Polish Jewish history, led some Polish Jews at certain points to side with Soviets against Nazis and Polish partisans. The whole moral morass, essential to Polish identity, tends to be lost on outsiders, many of whom unthinkingly regard the country, throughout most of the last century at least, as just a Jewish killing field.

Jerzy Halbersztadt is director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which will soon begin construction of a new $60 million home next to the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, paid for by the nation and the city.

Polish anti-Semitism persists, Mr. Halbersztadt said. “But Poles are more strongly pro-American, and a side effect is that Poland also has the strongest pro-Israel policy, to which there is no opposition anywhere on the local political spectrum,” he added. “Anti-Semitism is no longer an issue particular to us in daily life.”

Michal Bilewicz, a young Jewish psychologist who specializes in Polish-Jewish relations, echoed that thought. He sat one recent morning in his office at the University of Warsaw, in a building that used to be Gestapo headquarters, beside the former ghetto.

Not that there isn’t anti-Semitism in Poland, “but there is no place for it in public today,” Mr. Bilewicz said. “The last time a national survey was done here, in 2002, although the number of anti-Semites rose slightly — and these were almost all older people — more important the number of anti-anti-Semites went way up.”

He pointed to books like “Fear” and “Neighbors” by the historian Jan T. Gross, documenting pogroms at Jedwabne and other atrocities by Poles against Jews during and after the war, which provoked much public soul-searching and made denial of Polish complicity no longer possible.

Culture, despite the virtual absence of Jews here, has meanwhile helped shift attitudes in this country, not entirely but significantly. Walk into a Polish bookstore these days, and you’ll find shelves heaving with volumes about Jewish history and culture. There is a Jewish book fair here in Warsaw, a Jewish cultural festival in Krakow, not to mention Mr. Halbersztadt’s museum, planned to open in 2012."