News Release
Heard on campus – Michael C. Steinlauf
February 3, 2009
After decades which included genocide, political ostracism, anti-Semitism, isolation, denial, and forced emigration, Poland is finally coming to grips with the history of its Jewish culture and history.
The slow elimination of this self-inflicted “amnesia” among the Polish peoples was profiled Jan. 27 on the Penn State Harrisburg campus by visiting lecturer Michael C. Steinlauf, a faculty member at Gratz College and an internationally acclaimed observer of the history of the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe.
Hosted by Penn State Harrisburg’s Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies, the Steinlauf lecture is an installment in a series of public presentations during the spring semester. On February 26, filmmaker Lisa Gossels will host a showing of her Emmy Award-winning “Children of Chabannes” at 7 p.m. in the Olmsted Auditorium, and on April 30, the college will host a tribute dinner to Holocaust survivor Kurt Moses and Doris Moses.
Through generous community support and involvement, Penn State Harrisburg has assumed a lead role in preserving the legacy of the Jewish experience and Holocaust survivor generations in Central Pennsylvania. The Schwab Family Holocaust Reading Room in the college library serves as the center’s focal point.
Steinlauf is author of Bondage of the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust, a study of postwar Poland’s efforts, first to deny, and now to begin to deal with the complex reality of the genocide. His lecture was based partially on his research for the book. His lecture entitled “The Revival of Jewish Memory in Poland,” began with his mention that “the subject is contemporary, but I’m a historian so I should tell you how we got here to this point.”
He explained that the history of Jews in Poland stretches back to the 1400s. “The Jews and the nobility needed each other,” he explains, “but as time went on, non-Jewish merchants and the church viewed the population as competition.”
He adds that the Jews lived in autonomous communities for centuries, but Polish nationalism in the late 1800s set the stage for the first round of serious anti-Semitism when the National Democrats espoused exclusion. “That period also saw a Jewish national movement – the development of their own national culture – which heralded even more trouble,” he adds.
The stages for the Holocaust, he explains, were set in the post-World War I period when the National Democrats gained even more power and developed the notion that there were too many Jews in Poland. “They wanted to take over what the Jews did; to push them out of the economy and the nation,” Steinlauf asserts.
“Then the Nazis came and murdered 3 million Polish Jews,” nearly eliminating the entire population of that nation. “The vast majority of Poles watched the Holocaust passively. They said the Jews are not us; they are not our business,” he says. The post-World War II period was also a “horrendous time” for the remaining Jews in Poland “when the Communists took over and the nation fell behind the Iron Curtain. There was a feeling of abandonment by the West.”
“That period saw the notion that the Jews were helping the Communists become very rooted in the Polish consciousness,” Steinlauf says, “and with the end of the war came a period of incredible demoralization. Life was cheap and to come to grips with the conflict, Poles focused their hatred on the survivors – the Jews.”
With the late 60s, the Communist government began an anti-Semitic movement and a war on Zionism began. “The government turned on the Jews and forced 20,000 of them to leave for Israel. The idea was no more Jews in Poland,” Steinlauf says. And all through this, the Polish people continued to suppress their historical memory of the Jews.
The turning point came with the Solidarity movement a quarter-century ago when the young reformers and Jews began to build a link to the past with the Jews again becoming part of Polish history and tradition in “a slap to the Communists.”
Steinlauf then said, “Let’s fast forward 25 years to the present. Is there anti-Semitism in Poland today? Yes, but it’s primarily among the elderly and the poor.”
But, an important turning point came when the president of Poland apologized for the WW II murders of 1,000 Jews at the hands of Poles, not the Nazis. “Today, there is a Jewish community in Poland.”
“The last 25 years have also seen an upsurge in an interest in things Jewish,” he concluded. “A synagogue and cemetery have been restored and a very large-scale Festival of Jewish Culture is hosted each year in Krakow as the nation taps back into memory and history. And the “awakening” in Poland is continuing in earnest with the creation of a government-funded Museum of Jewish History adjacent to the famous Warsaw Ghetto. “The museum will be about Jewish life, not Jewish death,” Steinlauf adds. “It will follow the tracks of history as the Polish people again awaken to the rich history of the Jews.”