From: kkniaz@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Krzysztof W. Kniaz)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Re: Misreading Gutman and Krakowski's "Unequal Victims"
Keywords: Estimating Effects of Polish Actions on Jews during Shoah
Date: 1 Oct 92 20:10:53 GMT
Organization: University of Pennsylvania



W. Bartoszewski once said :

"There is nothing easier than to talk to the Poles about Jewish
anti-Polonism and to the Jews about Polish anti-Semitism, since
this is what most of them want to hear."

How true. 

Adam Reed got `flabbergasted' at my posting:

>I am flabbergasted at seeing these numbers posted as though they
>were totals of some kind. The only explanation I can think of is
>that Krzysztof skimmed the book until he found some numbers, and
>then posted them without reading the chapter they were in. 

If he read carefully the following sentence of mine:

>>Being real scholars, the authors remark that both numbers are probably 
>>way too low. ,

perhaps he would be spared the emotions. My posting was too short to
explain this in detail (I am paid for doing other things), and perhaps my
wording was not accurate, but the quoted sentence of mine makes it clear, 
I think, that I did not take these numbers as totals for the whole Poland, 
in both categories.

Not for the first time I get an impression that there is but one
`proper' way reading a book, namely `a way according to Adam Reed'.
Anything else is a `misreading'. 

I will not join this level of sophistication in discussion.

I tend to be very wary about using statistical methods in speaking
or writing about a phenomenon as tragic as death. Any extrapolation
of the numbers given by Gutman and Krakowski, however, seems to 
confirm what I have myself heard from many persons, both Jewish and 
Polish, who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland: the percentage
of people who denounced and killed the Jews, and people who helped
them was approximately equal, and quite small (a few percent?).
Incidentally, Istvan Deak writes the same about his native Hungary
in "The Incomprehensible Holocaust:"

"In that country, as everywhere else, there was for every fascist a 
decent human being"

It has been a marked tendency in the Polish historiography to ignore
the scum or treat them as exceptions - this is how the occupation
period has been taught in schools, for example, and people like
Bartoszewski are not free from this reasoning, either. On the other
hand, many if not most Jews (judging from the postings of Adam
Reed and many other people on s.c.j.) think exactly the same
way, only au rebours: it was a righteous Gentile in Poland who
was a rare (and negligeable in any discussion) exception. In my 
opinion the adherents of both beliefs are very much like each other,
usually do not notice the similarity, however.

If it is true what I wrote above, i.e. that both the scum and the
righteous represented a small percentage of the total population,
and I believe I am right, there remains an important question of
the majority who remained inactive and silent. Gutman and Krakowski
put this category squarely together with those who denounced and killed
Jews. This opinion is probably shared by the majority of Jews.
I do not blame the survivors like Gutman - finding oneself in
a situation of a hunted animal in an ambience which mostly turns
their heads away must evoke a very strong resentment indeed.

For those, however, who do not remember, to their good fortune,
these times themselves, I have a few questions:

It is an undisputable (I hope) fact that helping a single Jew in 
Poland was an act of heroism, since after 1941 it was punishable by 
the death of the culprit and all his immediate family, children included. 

The questions are the following:

- Why was it necessary to introduce such a cruel penalty in
  Poland? If we are to believe that most of the society was so 
  hostile to the Jews that the Nazis could count on their widespread 
  cooperation, was noy such a measure totally superfluous? Why
  was it not introduced in countries like Holland, where the Jews
  stood a supposedly higher chance of being helped by the Gentiles?

- Can we expect an `average person' to behave as a hero? What right 
  do we have to demand it from him/her?

- What would your response in a similar situation be? For those
  who would answer: of course I would give shelter to the
  stranger, let me construct a Gedankenexperiment: The U.S is
  invaded by Martians who for reasons known to them only are
  bent on exterminating e.g. all the Hispanics. The Hispanics turn
  into hunted game, and helping them is punishable by death. 
  I have a choice: helping a stranger - who is unknown to me, 
  usually does not look like a Caucasian, and often speaks bad or 
  no English, risking my own life, the life of my wife and 
  children - or turn my back. Perhaps I am a pessimist but I do 
  not envision this `average person' to behave like a hero. Also, 
  after the Los Angeles riots, I see likely candidates for the scum.
  
  I realize the above experiment will probably be ridiculed, but this 
  was the kind of a real-life dilema faced by `an average Polish person':
  not a scum and not a hero, during the Nazi occupation.


- What would happen if the situation were reversed, i.e. the
  Poles were the persecuted minority, and the Jews were largely
  tolerated? Would the Jews behave differently? This is not quite an 
  abstract question as a similar situation developed in the eastern part
  of Poland after it was taken over by the Soviet Union in 1939. The 
  experiences were not encouraging.


As the Jewish scholar Rafael F. Scharf eloquently put it in "Polin" 
v. 1 (1985), p. 275:

"It is the tragedy of the Poles that in the midst of the cruel visitation
of fate they were exposed to an unprecedented moral trial. They did
not come through it victorious."

    
I wonder which nation can claim it would pass such a trial victorious?
Has Europe as a whole come from it victorious?








--

Krzysztof Kniaz, University of Pennsylvania |Due to circumstances beyond
Lab for Research on the Structure of Matter |your control, you're master of 
Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA                |your fate and captain of your soul