Poland Diary 3

8 July 2010

Poland drowns murmurs of anti Semitism in festivals of Jewish Culture, and a Museum to Schindler’s List

From John Dayal
Krakow, Poland

The fat lady sang her heart out, and then collapsed on stage. But Kurdish-Jewish singer Ilana Eliya, singing with Jabalayo Ensamble, was made of sterner stuff. After ministrations from a concerned audience in the historic Temple Synagogue, now alas just a tourist attraction and packed to the rafters, she had a sip of water, got on her feet, and completed her song of love and patriotism. She got a standing ovation with what seemed most of Krakow’s remaining Jewish population and the rest strapping young Poles with their girl friends.

There was much that was familiar in her song and music to anyone from west or south Asia. Her voice shifted the octaves between Pakistani singer Reshma and our own Shobha Mudgal singing Sufi song, and the music, part Turkish and with the Kashmiri looking Saaz, seemed nostalgically familiar to the solitary Indian in the audience – this correspondent.

Elia, a child prodigy was on her first visit to Poland, her explanatory speeches interspersing her ballads reminding audiences of what her people had to bear when Iraqi dictators bombed them with poison gas. She had the audience hanging by her lips, for many of the tourists had earlier in the day been to there see the poison gas chambers at Auschwitz in the town nearby, where a million Jews, and thousands of Poles, were industrially murdered by Hitler in World War II.

Ilya’s was one of a series of performances during a weeklong Festival of Jewish Culture, now in its 20th year, which Poland has used artfully to apply some salve to a guilty conscience. The annual festival, together with a massive conservation of the three concentration camps, gas chambers and cremation factories at Auschwitz, and a brand new museum in what was the factory of former Nazi businessman, Oskar Schindler – remember the film Schindler’s List which played in India some years ago -- are but thee of the many social-psychological instruments that the government uses to caution its youth against anti Semitism. An underground current of anti-Semitism, and the occasional crop of neo Nazi and skin head groups rising in an otherwise prosperous Poland is cause of grave worry to the authorities, the intelligentsia, and the people at large.

Not that Poland is alone in Europe in this. Germany itself, and many of the countries it conquered seventy years ago showed repeated signs of anti Semitism, the worse five years ago, but some as recent as late last year and early this year. So much so that when some thieves in December last year stole the sign at the concentration camp, the ironical slogan “Work will make you Free”, there was a national sensation which sent ripples from Moscow in the East to London in the West. There was a collective sigh of relief when police said the thieves were not Nazis, just young men out for a lark. But the controversy has by no means ended.

Former Canadian minister and long-time member of Parliament David Kilgour, who was with us in Krakow and who had also visited the camps, noted that the two large camps, about four kilometres apart and preserved by the Polish Parliament in 1947 as monuments to the Holocaust - Shoah, are “undoubtedly the most inhuman scenes we visitors from around the world have ever seen,” and last year alone about 1.2 million visited the place. Russian soldiers on Jan. 27, 1945, who freed approximately 7000 surviving inmates, including 400 children-many of them barely alive from starvation, said the “perfectly organized” facilities were “the most shocking thing seen and filmed”.

Prisoners came in train cattle cars at Birkenau after 1942, the year Hitler ordered the ‘Final Solution’ for Europe’s Jewry. Healthy men were separated from the others to work in the fields and factories, the rest, including 230,000 children and babies, were taken immediately for “showers”, of cyanide gas in concrete bunkers. A million and more were murdered at these two facilities alone. The rooms of the barracks in the concentration camp now house exhibits which include 800,000 women’s, dresses, 348,000 men’s suits, millions of pairs of shoes, pots and pans, which the victims brought with them because they had been told they were being relocated. The guide told me these grim reminders were carefully preserved. “Care was taken to ensure that anti Jew lobbies could not say the camps had been constructed later to stigmatise Hitler.”

This is required.. As an official of the foreign ministry told me, current Europe politics even has parties which openly call for anti Semitism among their members and supporters as they seek votes to the European Parliament.

The Museum in Schindler's factory, opened just a few weeks ago, carries the education into the Nazi phenomenon further. Only the office block remains of the WWII enamel products factory. But this has been lovingly preserved, its interiors converted into a multi media exposition with a chilling display of Nazi flags, uniforms and guns, the lives of the ordinary people under a world war. With intent, the huge Swastika flags loom over flooring made of Swastika flags on which the visitors have to walk, something which would have been impossible in real life of the times.

The museum also reopens the debate on this German businessman who was a top Nazi but eventually helped save more than one thousand Jews by telling the government they were needed in the war effort, and then helping many of them escape. A grateful Jewish community ensured that his body was buried in Jerusalem., the only non Jew with a Nazi past to be so honoured in death. And yet, many say he was a mere opportunist who played both sides to prosper himself. The Museum does not make him out to be a hero – just tells us in multi media what it meant to be living under murderous and racist military regimes.

Poland, like Germany, has made it a crime to display Swastikas or Nazi flags in public, but it is no crime to buy a copy of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, in German or a Polish translation. And it does sell, it seems.