Impressions from Poland

I asked Mirt, 50, who drove me to Majdanek, what his parents told him about the war. “I don’t understand,” he replied in Polish. I don’t get it, I told him, your English is excellent. But he insisted: “I don’t understand.” Karol, 60, a driver and mechanic, works the Krakow-Auschwitz route almost every day. I asked him if he ever entered the camp. He said he never did. “I go to the parking lot, and stop,” he said. “I don’t move from there.” “Do you understand why the Jews come here en masse?” I asked. “I don’t understand,” he replied, and decided to dedicate his life to his cellular phone. One person who was glad to talk to me was Kazimierz, 71, who has a white goatee and has been working with delegations visiting the extermination camp for 10 years. He was born and bred in a village near Lublin, with the Majdanek camp nearby, a part of the landscape of his childhood. “Dad would tell me to not to stare in that direction,” he said. “If you stare, a German would come and take you there.” “Everyone knew, of course,” Kazimierz said. “The Poles were divided like a loaf of bread. Half of them didn’t care. Some of the others were anti-Semitic. The other part was pro-Jewish, but what could they have done? It was very dangerous to be pro-Jewish.” “During the Polish Rebellion against the Germans my father was a member of the underground. He hid Jews in a bunker in our basement. I have a certificate from Yad Vashem,” he said. “When I tell Poles Jesus was Jewish, they start swearing at me,” Kazimierz said. “They are absolutely unwilling to believe that.” How do you distinguish between the Jews and non-Jews who come to visit the camps, I asked. “Non-Jews don’t cry,” he said. “We don’t cry in our father’s funeral, so why should we cry for the death of others. Jews cry. I ask them, why do you cry, and they answer, I cry for my grandfather, or for my great grandfather.” And I thought, I said, that the extermination was a tragedy that shook every human being. “Of course, it’s a tragedy,” Kazimierz said. “But there are other tragedies. People are bombarded daily with tragedies reflected from the television screen.” “The Holocaust is not the biggest problem now,” he said. “It’s history. The other Poland Israel’s relationship with the current Polish government is excellent. It’s a pro-American, anti-Russian government, with the country constituting NATO’s eastern border. Indeed, Israeli companies are now competing in a tender for erecting a fence in Eastern Poland - not an Israeli fence, of course, a Polish one. Moreover, Israel has an excellent ambassador in Poland, David Peleg, who is among the Foreign Ministry’s top professionals and is well-liked by the Polish president, prime minister, and ministers. Yet still, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who traveled to Poland Thursday to participate in the annual March of the Living, landed there as if he was arriving at a no-man’s land, devoid of sovereignty. Indeed, it was as if he landed in some remote spot replete with hostile elements in the West Bank or Lebanon. This is not how one should be conducting oneself in a sovereign country. Sharon agreed to deliver a speech at Thursday’s commemoration ceremony in Birkenau. Accordingly, a day before his arrival, the site completely changed its face. A large tent was erected, to allow security guards screen the guests. Meanwhile, the intimidating fences were supplemented by new ones, less intimidating, but approved by the prime minister’s bodyguards. The Polish president’s offer to fly Sharon to meet him was declined. Meanwhile, as late as Wednesday, Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka did not know when and how he would get to meet with Sharon. I met Belka in the reception held by the Polish president to celebrate Constitution Day, the Polish equivalent of Israel’s independence day. He was amused. “I will travel to Katowicz (where Sharon was slated to land.) We’ll meet when we meet,” he said. Israel has already sent F-16 fighter jets to fly over Auschwitz and brought IDF units there. It has yet to conquer the camps. It wouldn’t hurt to find out Poland doesn’t only have the crematoria - It has a government, too.

Impressions from Poland

Some Poles want to forget the war, but there is another Poland, Nahum Barnea writes