From Silence to Recognition

MORE than three and a half million Jews lived in Poland before the Second World War, constituting the country’s second largest minority. Most of them did not survive the Holocaust. After the war and throughout the communist period, students in Polish schools seldom explored Poland’s multi-ethnic traditions in the past and the destruction of the Jewish community in the years 1939–45. The Polish educational system promptly subsumed the Jewish victims of the Holocaust under the total number of six million Polish citizens killed during the war. In history lessons the Holocaust was treated as a peripheral phenomenon, often depicted as a part of the struggle and martyrology of the Polish nation. The authors of history textbooks discussed the fate of the Jews only within the framework of Polish national history. Chapter headings stressed the Polish ethnic character of the wartime struggle and suffering: ‘Polish National Struggle for Freedom’; ‘Poles Fight to Regain their Freedom’; ‘Polish Nation Resisted the Occupier’; ‘Polish Struggle for Freedom in 1939–1944’; ‘Nazi Extermination Policy towards the Polish Nation’; ‘Polish Lands during the Second World War’; and ‘The Situation of the Polish Nation after the Loss of Independence’. For several generations of graduates of the Polish school system, this contextualization impaired understanding of the fate of the Jews during the war—both Polish citizens and Jews from other countries who were deported to Nazi-occupied Poland and murdered in death camps, ghettos, and concentration camps....