Recently in Anti-Semitism Category

Nepszabadsag 10.05.2008 (Hungary)
Does man need to remember? There is no question about it for writer György Konrad: "The personal history is an active working instrument, a collection of examples, a living metaphor which shows its muscles like an animal. (...) It is human to remember, it is was makes us human. Nature is indifferent to history. Grass growing on a mass grave is no less green than anywhere else. Nature does not mourn and bears no witness. To remember is an unnatural action, which takes a stand against death. Why would I want someone to live who is no longer alive? Is it not humility which prescribes the over-simplicity of forgetting. One says that people who never forget are dangerous. But one also says that God never forgets. Man's memory is a similar hubris, an audacity, like the invention of fire. The apple which forced Adam to decide between good and evil gave everything he had ever lived a simultaneous presence in his mind. Remembering is rebellion."

And the Warsaw Weekly's series on the history of Polish Anti-Semitism

Polityka 02.06.2008 (Poland)

The Warsaw weekly has now started translating selected articles into German - one of them being Tomasz Wolek's instructive history of Polish anti-Semitism and the complex relationship between Poles and Jews. It ends in a rallying call: "If anti-Semitism is an infectious disease, then it must be treated. But every therapy should be preceded by an appropriate diagnosis. We must be untiring in our efforts to get to the bottom of this shameful phenomenon and attack its historical roots. This text is not a moral treatise but a modest attempt to do just that."

The Holocaust victims were confronted with more or less open hostility on the part of the Polish population, which ultimately ended in pogroms. Gross' book examines three of these in detail, in Rzeszow (1945), Krakow (1945) and the most notorious pogrom in Kielce (1946) in which 37 Jews were murdered.

For Gross, neither the allegedly widespread participation of Polish Jews in the slowly consolidating Communist regime nor the horror stories circulating about the ritual murder of Christian children were the real reasons for these occurrences. Ultimately, economic interests were behind the events. Many Poles had taken possession of Jewish property after the German occupiers fled, and the Holocaust survivors' return was perceived as a real threat. Regardless of the pretexts for the pogroms, Gross writes, their real purpose was to get rid of the inconvenient victims.

Although many Poles had heroically come to the aid of their fellow Jewish citizens by providing them with shelter at their own peril, most had looked on with indifference – sometimes even approval – at the crimes committed by the German occupiers on the Jews. Pangs of conscience can be very effective, destructive even, especially when they veil a clear interest.