Queen Gertrude Visits the Sejm

When Queen Gertrude famously tells Hamlet that “the lady doth protest too much, methinks” she thinks (or rather, shethinks) she is innocently commenting on a plot twist in the play-within-a-play that Hamlet has produced to see how his Uncle Claudius—whom Hamlet suspects of having murdered his own brother, Hamlet’s father, before marrying Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother—to see how his uncle responds to seeing a fratricide openly and brutally depicted on stage. Or, at any rate, that’s what we are meant to think that Gertrude thinks she’s doing. But, of course, the audience knows better, seeing easily that her response clearly (if surely also unintentionally) confirms the worst of Hamlet’s fears. And, so, although everybody knows melancholy Jaques’ line in As You Like It to the effect that “all the world’s a stage,” here the tables are effectively turned and it’s the stage that’s the world…and in Gertrude’s remark lies the truth depicted on that stage that Shakespeare wishes to impart to the audience through the medium of his great talent: that our words towards others almost always reveal more about our inner selves than we can perceive. We think we’re taunting someone else…but we are really revealing our inmost insecurities. We think we’re castigating someone else’s poor behavior, but what we are really doing is attempting to deflect the world’s attention away from ourselves and our own poor behavior. We think we are attacking our enemies with clever, biting insults, but what we are really doing is showing the world precisely which part of ourselves is the most vulnerable…and the most in need of defending from other people’s clever, biting insults. And that latter point is made even more acutely when the enemies against who we purport to be defending ourselves so vigorously are nowhere actually to be seen and appear to exist entirely, or at least mostly, within our own heads.

These were the thoughts that came to me as I read the reports of the controversy stirred up both in the Jewish and the non-Jewish world by the vote of both houses of the Polish parliament, the Sejm and the Senate, last week making it a criminal offense to refer to the concentration and extermination camps built and maintained by Germany on Polish soil after conquering Poland in 1939 as “Polish death camps” or to suggest, apparently in any way at all including as part of scholarly research or even en passant orally, that “the Polish nation or the Polish state [was in any way] responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” The bill hasn’t become law yet. Having passed the Sejm and the Senate, to become the law of the land it must now be signed into law by the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda.

Reading the initial news reports brought Queen Gertrude right to mind and prompted me to wonder why they were protesting so much over an issue that, at least as far as I can see, doesn’t exist at all. The Shoah is the backdrop to my life in every imaginable way. No one, if I may be permitted a bit of hyperbole, has read more books, including specifically memoirs by survivors and non-survivors, than I have. (In that latter category, I should mention that I’ve just finished Sam Solasz’s book, Angel of the Ghetto, which I liked very much and recommend.) It’s the rare day that I do not have some contact either with a survivor of the Shoah or with someone who self-identifies as a second- or third-generation descendant of such a person. I haven’t attended Shabbat services, maybe ever, in a room in which there were no survivors of the Holocaust, and I include in that thought both the synagogue of my youth, the shul we frequent in Jerusalem, and all three congregations that I have served over my almost forty years in the rabbinate. And yet I don’t believe I have ever heard anyone refer to Treblinka or Auschwitz as “Polish death camps.” For one thing, why would anyone shift the blame from the perpetrator nation to one of its slave states? For another, is there anyone in the world who actually thinks the Poles built and managed the camps on its soil while millions were slaughtered there in the course of the Second World War? So, if no one talks that way and no one thinks that, what are the Poles so exercised about?

There are, of course, people who place at least part of the blame for the slaughter on the heads of the citizens of occupied Europe who collaborated with the Nazis by assisting in the roundups or, in some cases, in the actual hands-on execution of Jewish innocents. But the bottom line has to be that the Polish government itself did not participate in the annihilation of Polish Jewry. In other words, unlike in France or Hungary (or Norway—don’t tell the President), there was no collaborationist government in Poland assisting the Germans in the occupation of their own country. Yes, there were individual Poles who participated in the genocide. Estimates vary as to how many Jews died at the hands of their former neighbors—certainly thousands, including the victims of the infamous Jedwabne pogrom in the course of which the Polish citizens of that little town in eastern Poland locked hundreds of their Jewish neighbors in a barn and set it ablaze, intentionally murdering the town’s entire Jewish population on one single day in July of 1941—but there were also instances of great heroism by Poles who saved Jews (more than 6700 of whom are acknowledged as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, more than any other nation: click here) and it is also true that Poland was one of only two occupied countries (the other was Holland) in which resistance activists set up a special organization dedicated to saving Jews. (Interestingly, the second most well represented on that Yad Vashem list is, in fact, Holland. France is third; Ukraine, fourth. Of course, these are countries of vastly different sizes.)

So what’s the real story with this bill? Introducing this legislation in the Sejm on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, was a nice touch. But to be that sensitive about the mere suggestion of Polish complicity in the Shoah this many years after the fact really is, methinks, an example of protesting way too much and, in so doing, revealing something deep and painful that yet gnaws at the soul of Poland. What Poland needs is not a law forbidding honest dialogue regarding the past (let alone barring artistic expression if it seems inconsonant with Poland’s sense of itself as a victim nation), but just the opposite—one requiring people to come to terms with history, to face the demons in the closet, to accept the burden of the past and, shouldering it in a forthright manner, facing the future honestly and bravely. As my mother would have said, that is how grown-ups behave!

Amazingly, my thoughts on the matter were echoed in a particularly straightforward way just last week in a letter sent by, of all people, the secretary-general of the Muslim World League, Dr. Mohammed Al Issa, to Sara Bloomfeld, the director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  The whole letter, which you can read by clicking here, is exceptional, but I would like to cite verbatim a few lines in particular because they stand in such remarkably stark contrast to the Polish effort last week not only not to confront the past but to criminalize any honest effort to do so.

Dr. Al Issa, a Saudi national, wrote as follows:
History is indeed impartial no matter how hard forgers tried to tamper with or manipulate it. Hence, we consider any denial of the Holocaust or minimizing of its effect a crime to distort history and an insult to the dignity of those innocent souls who have perished. It is also an affront to us all since we share the same human soul and spiritual bonds.

In the end, what more is there to say? Dr. Al Issa writes as a Muslim and his letter makes no effort to hide that. I imagine Dr. Al Issa and I disagree about many things (in fact, I’m sure we do), but, at least based on what he wrote in his letter to Sara Bloomfeld, I suspect that we are very likely in perfect agreement that the only way to deal honorably with a horror on the magnitude of the Shoah is to face it square on, to accept what it has to say about the depths of depravity to which human beings can sink, to learn both from the larger story and its countless details that neither ethnicity nor religion is a guarantee of virtue (and that certainly nationality also isn’t), and to internalize the truth that there is no limit to the depravity that inevitably ensues when a nation falls under the sway of the demonic and repudiates the scriptural mandate to consider every human being—and with no exceptions at all—to be created in the image of God.

If Poland wants to adopt a law that will lead to reconciliation and conciliation, they should take Dr. Al Issa’s words to heart and invite true, unbiased historians to write a definitive study of the role of Poland and the Poles in the Shoah, then move on to atone for the bad, to celebrate the good…and to use the experience as a powerful platform on which to stand while joining the descendants of the few Polish Jews who  escaped the Nazis’ clutches in saying, simply and without recrimination, “Never Again.”