Children…

Witnesses to genocide
From the day Germany occupied Poland, violence,
brutality and cruelty were the rule. The devastation
inflicted on Poland by the Nazis was enormous and its
consequences continue to be felt today. Moreover, the
Poles were forced to witness the Holocaust directly.
Some responded by collaborating with the Nazis, for
instance by denouncing fugitive Jews or turning over
families they had been paid to hide. In contrast, thousands
of Poles put themselves in grave danger trying
to help Jewish friends and neighbours, risking not only
death, but also the lives of their families.
Before the war, Polish-Jewish relations were complicated.
Jews suffered discrimination, and relations
between the groups were often characterised by mutual
mistrust and enmity.Yet during the war even convinced
antisemites sometimes helped Jews. They may have
done so for religious reasons, or because they had been
neighbours. The Polish national resistance organised
a group (Zegota), whose only task was to save Jews.
The struggle against the Nazi enemy sometimes even
enabled the groups to work together. Few still realise
that apart from Jews and “Gypsies”, no group suffered
more at the hands of the Nazis than the Poles.
Many surviving Polish Jews (about 300,000 of some
3 million) returned home, where they were often met
by coldness and outright hostility. Pogroms and individual
attacks caused many to flee again.Today, many Poles
are taking a renewed interest in their nation’s Jewish
past, including abandoned prayer houses and cemeteries.
But the Jews are gone.
I thought of Campo dei Fiori
In Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall
and couples were flying
High in the blue sky.
At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in mid-air.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on the beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read a moral
that the people of Rome and Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by martyrs’ pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying.
FROM CAMPO DEI FIORI BY CZESLAW MILOSZ,
1943
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