Poles endeavouring to rescue their history

Press, 19 August 1981, Page 22

Poles endeavouring to rescue their history

By

MARK FRANKLAND,

recently in Warsaw

The reclamation of the past has become an obsession for many Poles after years in which their history has been expurgated to protect the sensibilities of Polish Communists and the Soviet Union'

Recently deputies in the Sejm, the Polish Parliament, proposed the striking of a medal for those who had taken part in the campaign of 1939, when Poland fought hopelessly against the' joint invasion, by Germany and the Soviet Union, and of another for the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The latter was undertaken by the antiCommunist Polish Home Army and for years has been an embarrassment to the Communists. -

There is a large cross of flowers laid out on Victory Square in the centre of Warsaw on the spot where Cardinal Wyszynski’s coffin rested during his funeral mass. People add their fresh flowers to those that have withered and in the evening light candles around it and sing hymns. Catholic Poles have simply refused to‘let their great cardinal vanish without any memorial and there are now also plans to put up a more substantial monument. It is hard to imagine the Government tolerating the flowery cross a year ago. before Gdansk.

But there is one part of the city which has not been touched by this devoted remembrance of the past — the great Jewish cemetery where since the beginning of the 19th century a half-million, perhaps even as many as a million, Jews were buried. The explanation is simple and horrible. Before the war there were three million Jews in Poland

and every day 30 or 40 were buried in the great cemetery. Today there are perhaps 20,000 Jews left in the whole of Poland and only a quarter of them still practise their faith. In one year the cemetery may see only a dozen funerals.

It is close to the main Catholic cemetery where there is always pious activity of one kind or . another. Warsaw’s., Jews, though, lie in neglected peace. Trees have been allowed to grow over many of the graves and in some places their roots have tilted tomb stones that were already struggling to keep their heads above the undergrowth. The part of the cemetery where some of. the rich or famous are buried is more trimly kept. There is a powerful businessman’s tomb with two tearful cherubs perched on top that scandalised Jewish Warsaw in the 19205, for Jewish graves- should not have human images. . >• • Here, too.- the creator of Esperanto lies next to the mayor of the Warsaw ghetto, who at first collaborated with the German occupiers, in the hopes of making life easier for his people and then committed suicide when he discovered that they were being sent to the extermination camp at Treblinka. There is a memorial to the leaders of the ghetto uprising of 1943 who committed suicide in their command bunker just before the inevitable defeat. The grave of one of the early leaders of the Polish Socialist Party is a rare link with the present. 'His great-nephew is an adviser to Solidarity. The cemetery would not be such a forgotten place had it not been for certain events in

1968. At that time there were still some 100,000 Jews living in Poland, the survivors of the war and of the emigration to Israel between 1945 and 1948. That was encouraged by a pogrom in the town of Kielce shortly after the war ended.

But in 1968 turbulence among students and intellectuals was severely put down by Polish hardliners, who declared they had discovered “a group of conspirators affiliated to. the Zionist Centre ... and which was plotting a coup d'etat." In fact ,the Jews were used as a pretext to attack liberal Polish Communists -in general; but that did not make it any more pleasant .for them and many left the country, when they could. There have been echoes of this unpleasant incident recently for a small group of hardline Communists have again tried to revive old antiJewish feelings by blaming Jewish Communists and security service officials for the persecution of “patriotic" Polish Communists during the Stalinist period. The purpose'is the same: to associate today’s liberal Communists with the handful of almost completely assimilated Polish Jews who are active in politics and then with Stalinist cruelties (which were •' indeed ' committed by. somg Communists of Jewish origin • but. also by a great number of pure Poles). A few Poles are working to keep the great cemetery in a decent state, believing, as one of them said, that “it is part of Polish history too.” Some Poles still find that hard to accept. No Polish Government has yet suggested that any apologies are due for the events of 1968.—Copyright, London Observer Service.