The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

In his review of Hanna Krall’s Shielding the Flame and of the Czas interview with Dr. Marek Edelman [NYR, November 20, 1986], Professor Davies puts forward a bizarre version of Polish-Jewish relations before and during World War II. The “professors of anti-Semitic studies, whose courses proliferate on American campuses,” he says (what courses? what professors?) have got it all wrong. Before the war, anti-Semitism in Poland was something of a fringe phenomenon: “The great mass of Poles and Jews…wanted nothing more than to live together in peace in the land of their birth.” Unhappily, this commendable desire was opposed by their respective “zealots” and “right-wing extremists”—the National Democrats and the Falanga on the Polish side, the followers of Jabotinsky and Begin on the Jewish side. The only Jewish party that fought the extremists (Davies’s variant of the “good Jews”) was the Bund, which cooperated closely with the Polish Socialist Party (PPS); all others (above all “the Zionists”) were steeped in “nationalism” and “chauvinism.” In 1939 things took a nasty turn, what with “many” Jews siding with the “Soviet invaders,” thus confirming in Polish eyes the “rooted Jewish hostility to the Polish cause.” During the war, the Jews and the Poles, “common victims of the Nazis,” regarded each other with “mistrust.” When the killings were over, “Begin’s group” achieved power, but the Bund was not so lucky, since its “entire constituency was destroyed by the Holocaust.” However, it’s good to have Dr. Edelman to set the record straight.

Professor Davies’s version is sustained neither by the evidence (which he mangles and distorts), nor by logical argument. As someone who comes from a Bundist background, and has written about the Bund; as someone, too, who knows and admires Marek Edelman, I naturally welcome Davies’s tribute to a remarkable movement and to one of its remarkable survivors. But I can assure him that the Bund, while subscribing to the orthodox Marxist notion that “anti-Semitism can be defeated only and exclusively by the abolition of the capitalist system” (Wiktor Alter, O Zydach i Antysemityzmie, Warsaw, 1936, p. 18), never underestimated its virulence and its magnitude. The Bund did cooperate with the PPS, but this cooperation was sorely tested in the 1930s by the rising tide of anti-Jewish bigotry within the ranks of the PPS, as leaders of both parties openly acknowledged (see J. Zarnowski, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna w latach 1935–1939, Warsaw, 1965, p. 245). Nor did the Bund, for all its detestation of the Revisionists and the Betar (a loathing shared by other, Zionist, parties), equate them with the cutthroats of the ONR and the Falanga, as does Davies. The Betar did take on some fascist characteristics, such as unabashed militarism and the cult of the leader. But neither the Betar nor the Revisionists ever preached racial hatred, or organized armed bands (bojówkas) to beat up Polish students, or incited Jews to reach for the axe and split Polish heads.

To prove Edelman’s lack of “rancor,” and to illustrate the ostensible symmetry between Polish and Jewish “extremists,” Davies resorts to outright textual falsification. Not only that, he misses the irony. To cite two examples:

Davies: “He [Edelman] calls the Poles ‘a tolerant people.”’

Edelman: “The Polish people, as you well know, is a tolerant people. Nothing bad has ever happened here to national minorities…. Casimir the Great [a Polish fourteenth-century king] welcomed the Jews, became fond of them, and loves them to this day. And that’s the long and the short of it.”

(Czas, December 1985, p. 36)

And:

Davies: “When [Edelman] talks of a beating he took before the war on Nowy Swiat in Warsaw at the hands of an ONR gang, he mentions that gentiles who strayed into the Jewish quarter could also risk a beating.”

Poppycock. Edelman does not speak of “gentiles,” but specifically of the ONR-Falanga gangs which were afraid to stray into a specific area (Plac Handlowy) lest they get a thrashing from the rugged Jewish porters who worked there (Czas, p. 29). In other words, one group attacked defenseless Jews, and the other would beat up the attackers. Some symmetry! Incidentally, Edelman speaks wistfully of those stevedores “who were no more after the war.” As well he might, since it was one of the Bund’s proudest achievements to enlist them into its “self-defense” units, organized for the purpose of protecting innocent Jews not from innocent Jews not from innocent gentiles, but from anti-Semitic thugs.

The same contempt for the elementary tools of historical scholarship marks Davies’s treatment of the war period. He refers to the collaboration of “many” Jews with the invading Soviet forces in organizing “mass deportations to the gulag” as a reason for the “widespread Polish anti-Semitism in the Nazi-occupied zone between 1941 and 1944.” Note, first, the logic: We are asked to believe that “the great mass of Poles,” hitherto untouched by anti-Semitism, now became infected with it just because “many” Jews cooperated with the Soviet forces in 1939; and we are also asked to believe that the “great mass of Jews,” who hitherto “wanted to live in peace” with their neighbors, had actually all the time harbored a “rooted…hostility to the Polish cause.” Then note Davies’s evidence (or lack of it): Exactly how many Jews collaborated with the Soviets? How large a percentage of the Jewish population in the eastern parts of Poland did they represent? Was it really only the Jews (as he suggests) who collaborated? How many Poles did—and for that matter Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Lithuanians? And how many Jews were deported to the gulag? None of this is of the slightest concern to Professor Davies, who seems to be more interested in tarring the Jews with the brush of either pro-communism or anti-Polishness than in getting his facts straight.

A few words about Davies’s equation of Jewish and Polish “mistrust” during the German occupation. The sad fact is that the Jews didn’t mistrust the Poles: they were, by and large, afraid of them (even though many Poles risked their lives to help Jews). The Poles didn’t “mistrust” the Jews: they were, by and large, indifferent if not hostile to them. It was this hostility that the Home Army reported on—and not, as Davies would have it, “the deteriorating moods” on both sides. (See The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943, by Yisrael Gutman, Bloomington, Indiana, 1982, p. 252.) And it was this hostility, too, that Edelman, in his Czas interview, ascribes to the Home Army as a whole (p. 33). He joined the People’s Army not, as Davies suggests, because of his “Bundist upbringing,” but because the Home Army was suffused with anti-Semitism, and the People’s Army was not. Edelman does indeed speak with “fierce honesty,” but the kind of spurious “evenhandedness” attributed to him by Davies is altogether foreign to him.

In conclusion, I suggest that Professor Davies would be well advised, next time he wishes to settle his private scores with either some (unnamed) “American professors” or (it would seem) with Claude Lanzmann, not to invoke the authority of either Dr. Edelman or the Bund. Neither has ever been an apologist for anti-Semitism; neither, in striving for “a future where ethnic divisions would not matter” (Davies, p. 21), ever deliberately ignored or obfuscated reality. In addition, the Bund, almost fanatically committed to maintaining its ideological purity, vastly preferred open enemies to counterfeit friends.

Abraham Brumberg

Chevy Chase, Maryland

Norman Davies replies:

Abraham Brumberg’s rather desperate letter well illustrates an important part of the prejudices that continue to obstruct any sensible discussion of Polish–Jewish history. His intemperate reaction to a few ideas floated in my review, “A Survivor’s Voice,” about Marek Edelman is hardly conducive to a fruitful exchange of views. Perhaps he is rattled because the argument has at last stumbled onto the right track.

It is revealing, I think, that my appeal for fairness and balance should be dismissed as “bizarre.” That says a lot about Mr. Brumberg’s own position. If fairness and balance are to be judged bizarre, it follows that the conventional view of Polish–Jewish affairs, as propagated in America by people of Mr. Brumberg’s persuasion, must be suspected of being unfair and unbalanced. Which I believe it to be.

And to be clear, I was not appealing for some sort of phony balance of sympathies as between the Nazis and the Nazis’ victims. I was calling for an evenhanded approach to all the victims of the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and for an end to the practice of discussing the subject exclusively in ethnic categories. I know only too well that anyone who dissents from the conventional view has to risk being branded as an apologist for Heinrich Himmler. But it is in no sense demeaning to the unique case of the five to six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in 1939–1945 for various aspects of their fate to be examined within the framework of the twenty to thirty million other human beings who lost their lives in Eastern Europe at the same time.

On Polish–Jewish questions, my position is straightforward. I think that they can best be understood by taking a critical stance toward the claims of both interested parties, and by treating the problems of prewar Poland’s divided society in terms of the mutual experiences and mutual antagonisms of both sides. I see no virtue in limiting oneself to the recriminations of one side against the other. As a result, I must resign myself to being denounced as “anti-Polish” by the zealots of the Polish camp, and as a distorter and falsifier of the truth by their counterparts in Mr. Brumberg’s camp. They can’t both be right. Generally speaking, though I can make mistakes like anyone else, I feel cheerfully confident that my attempts at impartiality are well justified.

In that regard, I am happy to subscribe to a sentiment concisely expressed by Adam Michnik in his Letters from Prison. “When bombast replaces reflection,” he writes, “and accusations of anti-Semitism abound,…one should remember that common sense is not the same as philo-Semitism. Poignant declarations against anti-Semitism can be no substitute for sober analyses of the roots of this frightening illness. The cause does not lie only in the faults of the Polish people. It is also necessary to recognize negative phenomena on the Jewish side as well.” No doubt, Michnik’s fairness will be classed in some circles as self-hatred; but it is no less fair for that, and it is a pity that this fine quotation was editorially excised from my recent review of his book.¹

As for Mr Brumberg’s attempt to discredit my piece on Edelman, the careful reader will see immediately that his précis of my alleged views is packed with assertions that were never made. Where, for example, did he find the idea that “anti-Semitism in Poland was something of a fringe phenomenon”? Not in my review. Where did he find the contention that “all Jewish parties” other than the Bund “were steeped in nationalism and chauvinism”? Not in my review. Where did he find the quotation that the professors of anti-Semitic studies “got it all wrong”? Not in my review. Yet Mr. Brumberg complains that the evidence is being “mangled” and “distorted.”