Commemorating the Ghetto Space

One might be tempted by the simple argument that Polish communists had much more on their minds than the fate of Jewish sites in a city virtually of no Jews. The ambivalent handling of Jewish space was not necessarily deliberate or out of bad faith, but rather the natural outcome of an ideological and political system dominant throughout the Soviet bloc. Although the influence of communism is clearly evident, the ambivalence toward Jewish space in Warsaw reflects a distinct unease with the Holocaust. It is not just a couple of Jewish sites that is at issue here, but an entire district of central Warsaw that remained unequivocally linked to the persecution and murder of the Jews. Few other spaces in Poland symbolized so exclusively the Nazi campaign against the Jews than the area of the former ghetto. The PZPR boldly used this space for the redemptive renewal of Warsaw. And it did so not just through the physical rebuilding of the area, but also by turning the ghetto into a site of Polish martyrdom that all but denied its connection to Polish Jewry. This mnemonic erasure of Jews from the history of the ghetto was the final act in the postwar disappearance of Jewish Warsaw.

On April 19, 1948, on the day that Rapoport’s monument was unveiled, the writer Maria Dąbrowska noted in her diary: “I do not have anything against the Jewish heroes. But so far

94 _{Natalia Aleksiun, “Polish Historiography of the Holocaust –– Between Silence and Public Debate,”}

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Warsaw does not have a monument for the insurgents and children who fought in the uprising!”95 Dąbrowska attempts to reassure herself that she has nothing against the “Jewish heroes,” but she unmistakably does: they are overshadowing Warsaw’s rebellion against the Nazis. The Jewish rebellion is not her rebellion; her rebellion is Warsaw’s rebellion. Many ordinary Poles probably resented the attention the PZPR lavished on the ghetto uprising as it ignored the city’s other rebellion of 1944. The party in fact realized this and responded by transforming the ghetto uprising into a distinctly Polish event. Unable to use the Warsaw uprising led by the AK, the PZPR tailored the ghetto rebellion into a heroic moment of opposition that valorized the actions of left-wing Poles and Jews who fought against the Nazis.96 _{The rhetoric employed to construct} this image of the past was at times formulaic and predictable. In 1950, at the height of Stalinism, the party’s leading paper, Trybuna Ludu, declared that the ghetto uprising was “a constituent part of the fight of the entire Polish nation to expel the occupant from the country, a constituent part of the war for liberation, carried out by the subjugated countries of Europe, of which the heroic forces of the Soviet army played the central and deciding role under the leadership of the magnificent Stalin.”97

In 1953, the party went even further, boldly linking the uprising with the communist resistance movement during the war and the formation of the PPR: “The fight in the ghetto was an inseparable part of the struggle in the entire country led by the Polish Worker’s Party. … Almost all died, sacrificing their lives for People’s Poland.”98 _{By connecting the ghetto uprising} with the larger opposition movement in Poland, the PZPR not only reduced to vague references that the uprising broke out as a rebellion against the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany, but also

95 _{Maria Dąbrowska, Dzienniki powojenne 1945-1965 vol. 1 (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1997), 212.}

96 _{On the handling of the 1944 uprising, see Borodziej, Warschauer, 205-218; Klaus-Peter Friedrich,} “Kontaminierte Erinnerung. Einfluß der Kriegspropaganda auf das Gedenken an die Warschauer Aufstände von 1943 und 1944,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung no. 3 (2006): 395-432.

97 _{“W siódmą rocznicę powstania w getcie warszawskim,” Trybuna Ludu, April 19, 1950, 2.} 98 _{“W 10 rocznicę powstania w getcie warszawskim,” Trybuna Ludu, April 20, 1953, 2.}

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portrayed it as a crucial moment when Poles and Jews had fought hand-in-hand against the Nazis. The ghetto uprising epitomized the heroic actions of Poles who supported every opportunity to oppose the Nazis, even when it came to Jews whose fate they saw as inseparable from their own. In short, the party used the ghetto uprising to valorize the behavior of Poles and put forward a highly fabricated image of Polish-Jewish brotherhood. As an article published on the tenth anniversary clearly put it, “the ghetto uprising was an expression and effect of the efforts and struggles in the unified fight against the occupant. It was not an isolated act, but a precise, organized one in connection with the struggle of the entire nation; it was a heroic, grand epoch in the pages of the history of the Polish opposition movement.”99

This interpretation of the ghetto uprising dealt uneasily with the Nazi policies against the Jews that lay at the heart of the ghetto’s history. In the 1950s and 1960s, Poland was one of the leading places in the world for research on the genocide of European Jewry conducted at ŻIH, but the PZPR only marginally touched upon the isolation, ghettoization, and extermination of Warsaw’s Jewish population.100 _{It portrayed the ghetto as merely one part of Nazi policies against} the Polish nation as a whole: “The Nazi criminals transformed the entire country into one large prison, into one large concentration camp. From the first days of the occupation, the Nazi torturers applied toward the Jewish population the most terrible racist terror and mass extermination. The terrible fate that Nazism brought upon the Jewish population was the beginning of the huge crime of destroying the entire Polish nation.”101 _{This unease with the} Holocaust became particularly pronounced by 1960 when the Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację, or ZBoWiD) took over the task of designing, organizing, and implementing the commemoration, severely limiting the role that the

99 _{Franciszek Łęczycki, “W dziesiątą rocznicę powstania w getcie warszawskim,” Nowe Drogi no. 4} (1953): 56.

100 _{Aleksiun, “Polish Historiography.”} 101_{Łęczycki, “W dziesiątą,” 57.}

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TSKŻ had played in the 1950s.102 ZBoWiD was the most important veteran organization in postwar Poland that cultivated an interpretation of World War II around Polish resistance and victimization.103

In 1963, ZBoWiD transformed the twentieth anniversary of the ghetto uprising into a tragically heroic moment of Polish opposition, sacrifice, and martyrdom.104 _{If before the ghetto} uprising represented the progressiveness of Polish communism, now it reflected the general benevolence of Polish society as a whole. This Polonization of the ghetto rebellion reflected not only the nationalization of Polish communism in the 1960s, but also the growing anxiety among some in the PZPR and ZBoWiD about Jews. The twentieth-anniversary of the uprising was celebrated across parts of the world. Some in the party feared that its growing internationalization challenged the image of the past it wished to fashion. In an interestingly worded letter to the PZPR, ZBoWiD noted that “in West Berlin a large exhibition on the issue of Jewish martyrology is being planned. … Converting the commemorations into a demonstration against West-German neo-fascism and militarism is not the intention of the organizers in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany. Rather they want to use the matter of celebrating the memory of the ghetto victims for their own benefit, masking the true face of the West German government.”105

The cold war Manichean division of the world into the militaristic, fascist west and the peaceful, anti-fascist east is less notable here than is the significant, if oblique reference to the “memory of the ghetto victims.” ZBoWiD feared that remembering the Jewish victims would

102 _{Michał Mirski and Hersz Smolar, “Commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Reminiscences,”}

Soviet Jewish Affairs no. 1 (1973): 99.

103 _{On ZBoWiD, see Joanna Wawrzyniak, “Związek Bojowników Wolność i Demokrację — ewolucja} ideologii a więź grupowa,” in Dariusz Stola and Marcin Zaremba, eds., PRL: trwanie i zmiana (Warsaw: Wyższa Szkoła Przedsiębiorczości i Zarządzania im. Leona Koźmińskiego, 2003).

104 _{AAN, KC PZPR, Wydział Propagandy i Agitacji, 237/VIII/726, “W sprawie XX rocznicy powstania w} getcie warszawskim,” March 1, 1962.

105 _{AAN, KC PZPR, Wydział Propagandy i Agitacji, 237/VIII/726, Letter from ZBoWiD to KC PZPR,} October 27, 1962.

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directly challenge its narrative about Polish martyrdom and resistance. The growing discussion about the Holocaust in the “West” became worrisome to ZBoWiD because it threatened its interpretation of the past. The only way to counteract this challenge was to erase virtually any connection between the ghetto uprising and the Jews: “The struggle and extermination of the Warsaw ghetto is one of the most tragic moments in the history of the Second World War … The German racists directed their blade of extermination against millions of people just because of their origins.”106 _{Jews had in fact been deleted so much from the history of the ghetto during the} twentieth anniversary that Jewish leaders in and outside Poland complained to the PZPR. In a meeting with party officials, the board of the TSKŻ indicated that “certain shortcomings and errors” concerning the anniversary resulted in “inappropriate repercussions.” The TZKŻ regretted the “diminishing” of the “specificity of the Jewish martyrology during the Nazi occupation and attempts to equalize it with the general Nazi politics of extermination.” “We believe,” the board continued, “that by clearly exposing the full truth about the total extermination of the Jews in the context of the Nazi campaign to destroy [other] nations we can show the deepest viciousness of German fascism …”107

The World Jewish Congress expressed similar concerns in a meeting with the PPR’s Deputy Foreign Minister. “I described,” the WJC official noted, “the feelings of profound disappointment and even disquiet felt by Jewish delegations from abroad … that the various ceremonies in Poland to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt were being given a character and form which conveyed the impression that this was a Polish national event …” The Polish deputy foreign minister responded by citing two main considerations that had shaped the organization of the commemorative events. First, he explained that the PZPR wanted to avoid arousing “feelings of resentment and indignation” among the Polish population for emphasizing the ghetto uprising over the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

106 _{J. Ruszczyc, “Solidarność poprzez mury,” Trybuna Ludu April 16, 1963, 4.}

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Second, he indicated that a “Zionist aspect” and Israeli polices became “entangled” in the decision “against giving the Commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt an exclusively Jewish character.”108 This second reason is the most important one. In the 1960s, Gomułka’s regime became increasingly more nationalistic by both glorifying the Polish past and attacking Germans and Jews.109 _{In the face of internal party divisions and continued social unrest, it turned sharply to} national rhetoric to solidify its power. This move reached its apogee in the linguistic assault of 1968 that forced some 13,000 Jews to flee Poland.110 _{As an anticipation of the verbal hate that} was to come five years later, the discursive transformation of the ghetto uprising into a glorious moment of Polish martyrdom and resistance reveals how much this nationalization of Polish communism rested on a particularly exclusive notion of Polish identity. As the rebuilding of Muranów erased the particularity of the district’s history, the central physical marker of the area’s past –– the ghetto monument –– was itself Polonized.111