The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Holocaust under Communism 427
approximately 40,000 Jews left the country. By the mid-1960s approximately
30,000 Jews remained in Poland, most of them ageing and demoralized.
Between 1968 and 1970 a government-sponsored campaign directed at ‘Zionist’
student rebels and at Jews, both real and imaginary, occasioned another wave
of emigration. Some 20,000 Jews or people of Jewish descent left the country
within two years, generally under coercion. As a result, the 1970s was a period
of silence regarding the ‘Jewish Question’, and it was not until the rise of
Solidarity, which was determined to reappropriate all Polish history, that public
discussion re-emerged.
The Stalinization of Polish memory generated some of the same phenomena
we have witnessed in the Soviet Union. In 1947, according to the mandate of
the Council for the Protection of Memorials to Struggle and Martyrdom, ratified
by the Polish Parliament in 1947, Auschwitz was one of the sites at which
‘Poles and citizens of other nationalities fought and died a martyr’s death’. 12
A pamphlet produced on the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising links it with the Polish uprising and with the anti-fascist struggle of
‘all the freedom- and peace-loving peoples’. 13 In 1964, the government created
a memorial at Treblinka, where only Jews were murdered. Although the memorial
makes use of Jewish symbolism, the press spoke of Treblinka’s victims as
‘800,000 citizens of European nations’. 14 Michael C. Steinlauf writes: ‘In consigning
the memory of the Jews to that of the “other nations” victimized by
the Nazis or to an official narrative woven around a small number of explicitly
“Jewish” sites and symbols, a narrative whose effect was to marginalize, or
“ghettoize”, its subject, official Polish commemorative activity doubtless reflected
a popular need.’ 15 Between the late 1960s and the 1980s general accounts of
the war show the fate of the Jews to be nearly indistinguishable from those of the
‘Polish nation’. The release in 1986 of Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary
Shoah, which was shown in part on Polish television, brought impassioned and
mostly negative responses. But by the late 1980s, in the aftermath of the discussion,
the notion that there had been no difference between the fate of the
Poles and the fate of the Jews appeared to vanish from public discourse. 16
In the 1980s numerous Polish publications treated the Holocaust and sensitive
questions of Polish–Jewish relations. Catholic or underground presses printed
some of them, but the majority appeared in state-owned presses. In 1983 the
first of several international conferences devoted to Polish–Jewish relations was
held in New York. That same year an unofficial delegation of Israeli historians
visited Poland. In 1985 Polin: a Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies began annual
publication in Oxford.
The Polish confrontation with the Holocaust, while it shared many aspects
in common with other countries of the Soviet Bloc, maintained certain
distinctly Polish characteristics as well. Chief among these was the attempt by
successive unpopular communist governments to legitimate themselves by