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Friday February 1, 2008

Poland vilifies historian for exposé

by dinah spritzer
jta

Being tagged the Britney Spears of historians is among the many tribulations Jan Tomasz Gross has endured since debuting his latest book in his native Poland this year.

Gross, the author of “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz,” also was dubbed a “vampire of Polish history” by a prominent Polish historian, investigated for slandering the state, accused of “anti-Polishness” in the Polish press and chastised by a Polish cardinal for “awakening demons” with “selective historical data.”

“I think the vampire bit would work well for my next book jacket,” said Gross, whose father was Jewish.

Gross, who in 2000 wrote the groundbreaking book “Neighbors,” which revealed that Poles murdered up to 1,600 Jews in the Polish village of Jedwabne in 1941, had just concluded a three-city book tour in Poland marked by overwhelming crowds, angry hecklers and penetrating discussions on Jewish-Catholic relations.

The reaction is a sign of the great level of discomfort some Poles have when it comes to revisiting ugly episodes in Polish history involving Jews.

Poles long have seen themselves as the chief victim of the Nazis, alongside Jews, and the frequent suggestion that Poles are anti-Semites or were surrogates for the Nazis disturbs them as much as Jews are angered by anti-Semitism.

The fiery debate over “Fear” in Poland revolves around Gross’ insistence that “the general mood in Poland after World War II was most certainly anti-Semitic,” Gross, a professor at Princeton University, said.

Despite the controversy, “Fear” sold 25,000 copies in its first week in bookstores and another 25,000 later, more than doubling the total sales projections of its publisher, Znak.

Sales may be brisk, but the Polish media’s criticism of the book’s accuracy prompted the Polish prosecutor’s office to open an investigation of Gross this month for committing “slander against the Polish nation.”

Gross posits that perhaps up to 2,000 Jews were killed in anti-Jewish violence shortly after World War II ended. However, most Polish historians say the violence, often banditry, was part of the general postwar lawlessness that afflicted the country.

Gross disagrees.

“Men were going into trains and searching specifically for Jews to rob and beat,” he said.

Gross also presents evidence of a strong anti-Semitic strain within the Communist Party and the Catholic Church.

All across the former communist bloc, it has taken more than a decade to confront historical truths covered up by past totalitarian regimes eager to foster national pride and gloss over problematic episodes regarding Jews.

In Poland, the debate about the past has been particularly sharp because Poland is both the country that suffered most under Hitler and the place where the most Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.

Yet Gross argues that the Polish perception of seeing war suffering among Jews and non-Jewish Poles as equal shows “that Poles are still in denial” about the nature of the Holocaust.

In the United States, “Fear” received rave reviews when it was published in 2006.

The book recounts through gripping anecdotes the assaults sustained by Jews who returned home half starved from concentration camps, including the infamous 1946 pogrom in Kielce in which 37 Jews were murdered.

The somewhat predictable reactions to “Fear” in Poland’s more nationalistic media include a commentary in the daily newspaper Nasz Dziennik stating “the conspiracy of Gross is part of a conspiracy against Poland.”

The head of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance labeled Gross a vampire, and the Washington-based Polish historian Marek Chodakiewicz of the Institute of World Politics compared the ambition of Gross to that of Spears, the ultimate lowbrow celebrity.

“There is nothing wrong if Professor Gross wants to be a pop culture icon,” a la Spears, Chodakiewic said, “but anecdotes that have not been checked and cross-checked should not be treated as a serious academic effort.”

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