Poland's Jews

My sister sent me this Boston Globe op-ed piece called "The silence lifts on Poland's Jews" by Joseph Polak. He writes, "Everyone knew that Poland had turned a corner when in 2001 then-President Aleksander Kwasniewski spoke at the village of Jedwabne. There, on behalf of his country, Kwasniewski apologized for the 1941 massacre of Jedwabne's Jews, who were burned alive by their neighbors with little help from the Germans. In the past, when Poland had spoken of the Holocaust, it saw itself as a victim among victims, and when it spoke about its almost 2 million citizens murdered by the Nazis, it was not referring to its Jews, 3.5 million of whom were also murdered by the Germans.For 60 years Poland was silent when it came to its slaughtered Jews, echoing, if that is the word, the silence of their absence. The Kwasniewski speech finally brought the silence to an official end....Last month, the door that had been pried open by Kwasniewski swung wide with the groundbreaking for a Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to be erected on the grounds of the former Warsaw Ghetto....Omnipresent in Poland is a loss so massive that its proportions are not manageable -- almost not imaginable. Not just the numbers, but the humanity gone -- the mothers, the children, the schools, the clubs, the communities; hundreds, perhaps thousands of villages, emptied. Poland, for the most part, was not the murderer, yet death oozes everywhere from its pores. A mass grave of children here, a death camp there; the wind, blowing through decapitated, wearied frames of synagogues; bathhouses for family purity and bath houses that were gas chambers; the wind howling, through abandoned cemeteries and leveled ghettos, of an all-embracing sadness that will not subside and for which there is no consolation. Visitors will come to the museum, appreciate its energy and intentions and displays, and then ask -- so where are these Jews? Does anybody here miss them? This silence, this great absence into which the visitor leaving the museum will surely be slammed, will undo the museum's messages, will sabotage its best intentions, will ask: Who here weeps for the Jews besides the Jews? Indeed, unless it can make Poland itself cry for its murdered Jews, the museum will represent a dry nostalgia, an exercise in historical anthropology, with the Jews as Poland's Mayas."