Joanna Tokarska-Bakir OBSESSED WITH INNOCENCE GAZETA WYBORCZA, thirteen-fourteen January two thousand one

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir OBSESSED WITH INNOCENCE GAZETA WYBORCZA, thirteen-fourteen January two thousand one

LAST SUMMER three Nobel Prize laureates met in Vilnius to discuss the meaning of memory. From the many words spoken then, I best remember what Günter Grass said about the strange vicissitudes of German memory. Referring to the recent public discourse in his native land, Grass described the rituals of collective memory that cause some trouble for his countrymen, especially the older generation. Germans would not be Germans if they did not create a special neologism: "memory work" (a concept that Grass nevertheless mocks-memory is involuntary, unintentional, or, he says, does not exist). Germans are required to work on their memory "as a confession of guilt, it is rejected as an insinuation, and they carefully cultivate it, because for decades, as long as history finds us again and again, it is reworked ... by younger generations- presumably those without its burden. And it is as if the children and the grandchildren remember in substitution for their silent fathers and grandfathers." What's more, "it seems as if the crimes ... acquire more importance the greater the distance from the crime."

The Authority of Historians

This portentous epigraph from a Nobel Prize laureate makes a good introduction to the two cents I would like to contribute to the far margin of the discussion of Jan Tomasz Gross's book about Jedwabne. I am following this discussion from Germany, and I think that if it were not for this foreign perspective, which weakens the influence of self-censorship, I would not be able to notice certain elements in this discussion at all. I cannot resist the thought that Gross would not have written this book if he had not worked abroad.

I am referring not to the censorship of academic circles but to a more optical phenomenon. From up close, and especially from inside, it is impossible to see certain things. The Polish obsession with innocence is impossible to notice. It is also impossible to see that the rules that govern Polish public and private debate are controlled by this pressure of innocence. Above all, one cannot see that what Thomas Merton called the "pitiable refusal of insight" is seen by everyone but ourselves.

It appears that one sees only what one knows. How does what Poles know about themselves and about the Holocaust translate into Polish innocence? The question "What do Poles know?" is directed first to historians. Rightly so, because historians are the ones who construct school curricula. And not rightly so, because as the German example shows, even the most certain knowledge about historical guilt translates into national awareness of this guilt indirectly and with difficulty.

If we can talk at all about the responsibility of Polish historians for what Poles do not know about the Holocaust, we can do it only in terms of the sin of relinquishment. This is often the result of the innate caution of historians, which drives them away from certain subjects. The aspiring young historian knows of the price that can be paid in Poland for a "premature" publication. Is it necessary to recall here the name of Michał Cichy and the list of historians who replied to his article? A historian, like any other academic, wants first of all to be "serious." "Serious" in Poland means "uncontroversial." An uncontroversial Polish historian strokes his beard, watches with forbearance those who are in a hurry.

What we are to do with this leisurely manner of the historians in a country in which the last witnesses to the war and the Holocaust are dying out is not really known. The quotation from Günter Grass cited above gives us further perspective. It seems that Polish children and grandchildren will also remember in lieu of their silent fathers and grandfathers. Undisturbed by historians, those witnesses will take with them to the grave everything that still should be told about szmalcownictwo [blackmailing] and the Blue Police, about the Baudienst formation in which Polish youth served, and about the pogrom in Warsaw during Holy Week in nineteen forty, about priests informing on Jews on the basis of information received in confessions, about Jedwabne, Radyłów, and about the innocent ritual of "the burning of Judas" practiced during the war, about the glasses of water sold for gold coins to the Jews packed in "death trains." And about the "railroad action" in nineteen forty-five, in which the partisans of Narodowe Siły Zbrojne dragged some two hundred Jews repatriated from the East out of the trains and shot them, about the murder of Jews returning from exile, about pogroms in Kielce, Kraków, and hundreds of other unknown denunciations during and following the war. Surely this will happen unless, leaving the historians to their own reputations, we do what Jan Tomasz Gross has done and start talking about it.