The Holocaust Religion and Poland’s Identity
/Foreword
One day on an overcast, grey morning in late autumn I was listening to the radio. Someone in the broadcast was commenting on Jan Tomasz Gross’ article just published in the German paper Die Welt, in which Gross expatiated on the Poles not wanting to take in Muslim immigrants because they had always been xenophobes, nationalists, and anti-Semitic. The studio guest was rabbiting on about how one should listen carefully to such opinions and accept them with humility, that instead of objecting and protesting one should beat one’s breast. And he added, “We all have blood on our hands.” Yes, that’s exactly what he said, going on about how we Poles, we Europeans have to appreciate other sensitivities, we must accept that the lack of a reaction and not offering assistance to the Jews who were being murdered by the Nazis (yes, that’s exactly what he said, “by the Nazis”) makes us accomplices, and if we don’t want to admit that, it’s because there is a dormant demon of nationalism and egoism in us, always ready to awake and pounce. More grandiloquent words poured out, the guy got himself wound up and started drivelling, fulminating louder and louder against us Poles (oh, how he would have loved to say “Polacks”), summoning us to confess and put on the sackcloth.
It’s rare for me to lose my cool, but I couldn’t take any more; furious, I went up to the radio and thumped the little set as hard as I could. It gave a groan and conked out. You old so-and-so, I thought, you think you’re going to call me to order, you ***, I don’t know who you are, but I’ve not got any blood on my hands. I can’t stand stories of long suffering and I hate moaning, I consider that womanish and unmanly, but in the circumstances, if someone wants to blackmail and bully me into taking the blame for blood spilled by others, to put me into the German shoes – I’d sooner spit in that someone’s face than humbly put up with him stigmatising me and my family. My uncle, my father’s brother, died in the Warsaw Uprising, he was thirteen, just a kid; as far back as I can remember, I have often paid my respects at his graveside in the Powązki cemetery. My granny on my father’s side – long since passed away – lost an arm in the Uprising, I remember her odd, ungainly figure, as she rolled along the bumpy streets of Warsaw, she was stocky, and the stump made her gauche and handicapped. One of the brothers of my grandmother on my mum’s side was killed in Bergen-Belsen with a phenol injection; another was shot by the Communist secret police in Częstochowa in 1947. Nothing to boast or be proud of. Just a typical Polish family history, call it banal if you like. I know lots of people who suffered much, much more because of the War and the killing. But when I heard that radio wise guy summoning me to do penance and rambling on about Jewish blood on myself and everyone else in Poland, and that we had to admit it, atone, and beat our breast, I got so furious it was lucky for him he wasn’t near me.
It came to me that we Poles don’t know how to put into words what we suffered and went through. Indeed, it had never occurred to me to blame Europe, the whole world, civilisation, for all those lost, forfeited and blighted lives. To accuse all around and keep telling them that they should acknowledge their guilt. But in the world we’re in you can’t afford not to. Behind the smokescreen of hugs and smiling faces, behind the clichés and greetings, the courtesies and words of mutual understanding, there’s a relentless battle for memory. We are losing that battle for various reasons. We don’t understand how the world around us has changed in the last decades. We think naïvely that everyone remembers how much we suffered, how much we accomplished, and the blood of millions of Polish lives lost. Not true. They remember the blood– the blood for which they want to pin the blame on us.
Ever since the mid-twentieth century the Jews have generally been regarded worldwide as the only victims of the War. The average American, Frenchman, or German thinks that the Second World War was the Holocaust and that was all. Oh, there were a few people who rescued Jews, but the rest, millions of them, stood passively by and watched, or actually took part in the murder. Surrounded by a swarming Christian mob eager to get rid of them and grab their property, the Jews died alone. In this story Hitler is transmogrified from a German, a Nazi German, into the mouthpiece and executor of the secret wishes and ambitions of the peoples he had trodden down. He rises well-nigh to the stature of a saviour, someone who instead of being just a conqueror and persecutor was more of an implementer of the craving for anti-Jewish atrocity that lay hidden in the sub-conscious of all the rest.
osef Stalin Signing the Non-Aggression Pact with
German Reich Foreign Minister, Moscow, August 23, 1939
This sick, obsessive story is gaining hold of more and more minds at a fast rate. It’s turning into a religion, a myth, an uncompromising and unrelenting dogma. Everything about it is getting warped and turned upside down. Hitler was not a criminal and murderer of many nations, but the slaughterer only of Jews; the peoples he conquered – Poles, Serbs, Russians, Belarusians – were not victims in their own right, just the irrelevant manure of history, a footnote to the great tragedy of the Holocaust. And what about Christianity? It is no longer a religion that raised spirits, nurtured and upheld love of one’s neighbour, called for dedication and encouraged self-sacrifice for the sake of others, strangers sometimes regarded as enemies; instead it is turning into an instrument of oppression, an instrument that helped criminals to kill. Worse still. It is becoming the medium many Jewish groups are using freely and without restraint to attribute blame to others and claim that all Gentiles have blood on their hands. Because they were baptised, because they were brought up in the shadow of churches and the Cross. The religion which once brought liberation has turned overnight into a sign of slavery. Thanks to Christianity, the story goes, evil and meanness, hatred and anti-Semitism were instilled in the sinews of whole nations.
Few in Poland appreciate this change. From time to time, whenever a celebrated wise guy from America, France, or some other enlightened country, says what everyone is saying, there is a torrent of opposition and anger. But later the voices of discontent die down. The fury disappears just as fast as it erupted. It is extinguished, unloaded. Some seem to think that that the protests proved effective, that others have finally learned that the Polish suffering is so self-evident and irrefutable that it could have been overlooked only due to ignorance. Not true. Ignorance does have a part in it, but alongside ill will.
The overwhelming majority of the Western intellectual elites have been infected by something which may be called the Holocaust religion. It is based on four dogmas. First – the Holocaust was an atrocity incomparable with any other in world history – crueller, more terrible, more disgusting than anything than has ever happened elsewhere. The Jews were more innocent victims than all the other people. Second, the whole of mankind participated in this atrocity – even if Nazi Germans organised the killings, they were only implementing the hidden dream of millions of ordinary people, the secret, sub-conscious wish to exterminate the Jews. Third, the source of this hideous, bloodthirsty craving was Christianity, the religion which from its very outset infected the peoples with hostility to the Jews. So Adolf Hitler was the inheritor of a tradition of hatred going back many centuries. The history of the Church is a story of escalating violence and enmity. And finally fourth – in consequence of the first three dogmas – all people, including those who suffered under German occupation, including the Poles, have blood on their hands. The Poles bear a double stigma: as Catholics, and because the atrocity was committed in their country. More and more of the university, intellectual, and political elites of the West are embracing the religion based on these four dogmas. Its adherents are professors of theology, history, and the other humanities in many renowned centres of scholarship in the USA, Canada, Britain, and France; it has also taken over the minds of many of the Church’s representatives.
Alas, the successful career of this religion is bringing dramatic consequences for the people of Poland and for Polish memory. Polish people can only be righteous if they saved Jews, but that is the privilege of a very few; or else co-perpetrators, passively or actively assisting in the atrocity, and that is the lot of the general majority, who could have either joined in the killing, stood idly by watching, pretended not to see, or benefited from the killing. In this narrative there is no room at all for a separate Polish memory, for Polish victims who died independently of the Jews.
In this book Blood on Our Hands? I try to tell the story of how things got to this state. I try to show how the crimes committed against one nation, the Jews, suddenly became the sole symbol of universal slaughter. Why the present-day Church reconciled itself to the role thrust upon it by the Holocaust religion; in practice the Church has admitted it is guilty of leading up to the atrocity, even if it is still reluctant to come out into the open with such a declaration. The Church has said it will stand up against anti-Semitism, which it has largely admitted to have propagated over the ages. This is one of the main points of my story: the change in the attitude of the Church has opened up the door to universal incrimination. If all Europeans were and to some extent still are associated with Christian culture, even if a long time has passed since they were Christians – nonetheless they have all been infected by the toxin.
Finally I will try to show why the Poles are losing the battle for memory. It’s only an attempt to communicate information and rouse awareness. That doesn’t alter the course of history, it doesn’t give grounds for hope that the cry of the Polish victims of cruel regimes – those who died in NKVD operations, in the murders committed by the Germans in Operation AB, or in the mass murders of Katyn, Ponary, Auschwitz, Volhynia, the Palmiry, the Zamość region, and the Wola district of Warsaw – will not be obscured and silenced by other cries of other innocent victims. That it will become a separate, important and autonomous part of the story of all the victims, told together in solidarity regardless of nationality, the story of the criminal madness started by the Bolsheviks and Nazis. Attempting to tell this story is better than anger taken out on a radio set. Perhaps it will stir someone’s conscience. Perhaps.
Part One
Poland’s painful memory. When James B. Comey, Jr., Director of the FBI, was delivering his address in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. in April 2015, he could not have known that it would cause so much indignation in Poland. There was a time lag before the people of Poland learned of it, but as soon as they did there were protests in the whole country. Some said Comey was ignorant, others accused him of ill will, want of education, or even stupidity. This time the voices of protest appear to have carried the day. Eventually Comey expressed his regrets and said something which, given the right amount of good will or alternatively – inattention – could be regarded as an apology. As usual, the incident was soon forgotten and the emotions died down. It shouldn’t have. I’m ready to wager that soon there’ll be more statements like Comey’s.
A new beginning
Comey might not be an intellectual, but in spite of what people in Poland think of him, he’s not simply an ignoramus. On the contrary. He’s a product of the American educational system on history. What he said is exactly what’s being taught more and more widely in American schools. He only put into words – presumably inadvertently, perhaps somewhat more brutally – the opinion which is becoming prevalent among the general mass of ordinary Americans. Putting it in a nutshell, Americans think (though “believe” would be a better word here) that the Holocaust, in other words the mass crime committed against the Jews, was an event which is absolutely incomparable with anything else, and that it was the outcome of centuries of evolution, one could almost say that it was the well-nigh inevitable and self-evident result of the earlier European Christian tradition, the ripe fruit of a plant which grew from a pristinely poisoned seed, the fruit that plant could not fail to produce. Put together, these two claims make up something like a profession of religious faith, a sort of quasi-religious utterance. The Holocaust is beyond comparison and at the same time the consequence of universal guilt, a singular sin, for which the whole of mankind matured for many centuries. In this sense Comey’s statement was not at all shocking. He only said something which is regarded in the USA as the generally accepted opinion. In a way it’s actually hard to understand why it was so startling and caused such an uproar in Poland. Perhaps that was due to the fact that people in Poland are ignorant of the path that discourse on anti-Jewish crimes has taken in the West. If that is so, then there are many more nasty surprises in store for the Poles. What Comey said was just the typical opinion, it was not extreme at all.
First of all, it entailed the characteristic profession of faith in the uniqueness and superiority of the Holocaust: “I believe that the Holocaust is the most significant event in human history.” Second, it expressed the belief that there is no other comparable atrocity: “the most horrific display in world history of inhumanity.” Third, it expressed the sacred nature of the Holocaust, or in fact its outright transcendence: the Holocaust “simply defies words and challenges meaning.” And finally there was the last characteristic feature of the Holocaust – the universal complicity of all humankind: “Good people helped murder millions. . . . In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. . . . That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.” The murderers are in a supranational category, from Germany, Poland, Hungary, and “many other places” – the whole world. Sadly, long gone are the times when the people of Poland could live in the naïve belief that they are considered joint victims of World War II. The sacralisation of the Holocaust has shuffled and redistributed the cards. Maybe not everyone is talking about it yet in the same way as Mr. Comey, but in principle his speech expresses what most Americans, as well as Western European elites, think and hold true. The Holocaust is no longer just another event in history, and the suffering of the Jews is not the same as the suffering of other peoples.
For the American Jewish writer Arthur A. Cohen the Holocaust is the tremendum, the ultimate experience, the point marking the absolute bound to human understanding. Clearly, contemporary writers who want to gain an understanding of the Holocaust as an event are using overtly religious language – according to the distinguished German theologian and expert on world religions Rudolf Ott, the tremendum, in other words awe, horror, trembling, was the characteristic feature of every genuine experience of transcendence, the sacred, and Divinity. The use of religious language to describe the death of the Jews in the Holocaust is now a ubiquitous phenomenon. Here is another example, the prominent American Jewish intellectual Harold Kaplan: “We are inclined to say that, as in a religious mystery, the Holocaust should remain unexplained or should be declared holy in its transcendent meaning.”[1] The American historian and sociologist Peter Novick admits outright that the Holocaust has been “sacralized” in popular American culture.[2] I could go on with more examples. George Steiner writes, “The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason,” [3] – just like transcendence. According to Elie Wiesel “Auschwitz negates all systems, destroys all doctrines.”[4] Thereby it becomes a numinosum – an unfathomable mystery full of horror.
German Nationals Killed in Bromberg/Bydgoszcz, Poland September 8, 1939
Yet another scholar, the Catholic ethicist John T. Pawlikowski, views the Holocaust “as inaugurating a new era in human self-awareness and human possibility,” [5] and the destruction of the Jews is “an assertion of human autonomy and freedom”[6] – as if there were anything about crimes against Jews which made them different from crimes against other innocent peoples. Sometimes the Holocaust is perceived as well-nigh a revelation; and at other times as the supreme form of a singular emancipation and the end-product of Western civilisation. In The Cunning of History (1972) Rabbi Richard Rubenstein wrote that the Holocaust should be seen as “an expression in the extreme of what was common to the mainstream of Western civilization.”[7] And the Polish writer Bożena Keff claims that the whole of the European anti-Semitic tradition was a necessary condition for the Shoah: one could say that Hitler and Nazism were the embodiment of the spirit of that tradition.[8] Be it an experience of the tremendum or a radical exceedance of freedom, the Holocaust is a singular turning point in history, an idiosyncratic, radical beginning which – say the Holocaustians – must bring an absolutely new understanding of the fundamental ideas regarding human awareness. Nothing has been left as it was, everything is new. God, religion, humankind, culture, the arts – are all new.
Uniqueness & ubiquity
Yet there is a simple question – what has made so many theologians and churchmen change their point of view so radically? How did this mental revolution come about within the space of just over a dozen or so years, or at most a few decades? Why is it that people who still in the 1950s considered it an individual’s moral duty to convert to Christianity now think that attempts to convert Jews are reprehensible? Why have those who for many years were proud of being Christian and believed their Church was the pillar of truth, sinless and spotless, suddenly started to accuse, blame and condemn it, to look for evil in its scriptures and its pristine community? John Connelly, who has closely examined the evolution of the new attitude to the Jews, has come to a rather startling and embarrassing conclusion. The radical change was actually caused by – meeting and encountering each other. The very fact of talking and being with each other was the root cause of the change, according to him. As soon as Christians started talking with the Jews after the War they discovered that “[s]uch conversations opened their minds to the possibility that anti-Judaism in Matthew or Thessalonians formed the deeper wellspring of contempt that made Auschwitz possible.”[9] The question is: could that opening up of their minds perhaps have been a form of emotional blackmail, an emotional infection? If we put aside the affected rhetoric for a moment and submit the utterances of those participating in the dialogue to a critical examination, it turns out that they have no grounds…
[…] This is just an excerpt from the February 2025 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
Articles:
Culture of Death Watch
The Holocaust Religion and Poland’s Identity by Pawel Lisicki
Features
Bishop Bambera Imposes Jewish Categories on the Catholic Mind by Dr. E. Michael Jones
Prophecy, the Jews, and the Antichrist by Dr. Robert Sungenis
Reviews
Fatal Flaws in Laurent Guyénot’s Yahweh to Zion and Other Works by Jonas E. Alexis
(Endnotes)
[1] Kaplan, Harold. Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 20. https://books.google.pl/books?id=wk_2PRyvmukC&pg=PP4&lpg=PP4&dq=Harold+Kaplan+Holocaust&source=bl&ots=dp1zpTjFU-&sig=3RmLMew70vWnb3THUoWOX8_0Mro&hl=pl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiwnPzulMvZAhUBkSwKHV-YBIgQ6AEIXjAH#v=onepage&q=religious%20mystery&f=false. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.
[2] Novick, Peter. The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience, Bloomsbury, 2000 (2nd edition 2001).
[3] Steiner, George. Language and Silence : Essays 1958-1966. New York: Atheneum, 1967 (1st edition), p. 123.
[4] Wiesel, Elie. “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration,” in Wiesel, Elie, Lucy S. Dawidowitz, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Robert McAfee Brown, Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University, Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1990, p.7. https://books.google.pl/books?id=OfGef0jm2l8C&printsec=frontcover&hl=pl&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false . Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.
[5] John T. Pawlikowski, Work as Key to the Social Question: The Great Social and Economic Transformations and the Subjective Dimension of Work A Creative Solution to the Challenge of Human Responsibility. Online: https://www.stthomas.edu/media/catholicstudies/center/ryan/conferences/pdf/JohnT.Pawlikowski.pdf . Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.
[6] https://www.theway.org.uk/back/37Cracknell.pdf Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.
[7] Quoted after http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rubenstein-richard-lowell . Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.
[8] Bożena Keff, Antysemityzm. Niezamknięta historia. Warszawa: Czarna Owca, 2013, p.173.
[9] John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother. The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, p. 176.
[10] Phyllis Chesler, Third Intifada or Third Reich? 8 Oct. 2015 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/17659 . Accessed 2 Mar. 2018
[11] David I. Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, 2nd edn., New York: Vintage Books, 2002, p.10. https://books.google.pl/books?id=fEhtoDa-aPEC&pg=PA269&lpg=PA269&dq=David++Israel+Kertzer+The+Popes+against+the+Jews&source=bl&ots=zNBYUq6PH9&sig=fenty446BOtcBthY6TCK63l7kcs&hl=pl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjT3pvyps3ZAhXMhaYKHTpjCVI4ChDoAQg7MAM#v=snippet&q=deep&f=false. Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.
[12] Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015, p.123 https://58freebook.com/Romance/Black_Earth/page_123.html . Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.
[13] Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939-1944, New York: Hippocrene Books, 2001, p. 13. https://books.google.pl/books?redir_esc=y&hl=pl&id=Lv1mAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=500+priests+from+that+territory+were+in+concentration+camps . Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.
[14] Ibid, p. 14.
[15] Timothy Snyder, Black Earth (…), p. 297.
[16] Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009, p. 64.
[17] István Deák, “Memories of Hell,” The New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997.
[18] Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust (…), p. 124.
