According to a
newspaper debate, one of the participants at a meeting about
Anti-Semitism on
30th of August this year contends that there is very little
anti-Semitism in Norway.
Why? There aren’t that many Jews here.
Without Jews there
is no hate of Jews. Is this correct?
Jan T. Gross wrote
two books about the fate of the Polish Jews. That is a hard text to
read. The
first book, with the title Neighbour,
created a scandal in May 2000. The book shows how half of the
population in a
Polish town in July 1941 murdered the other half – 1600
individuals of all
ages. This is a story how ordinary Polish people killed their, through
generations, closest neighbours. How Polish people persuaded Gestapo
officers
to let them take things into their own hands, to make sure that none of
the
Jews could run away. How the head of the prettiest Jewish girl was used
as a
football after they have chopped it off with a huge enthusiasm in front
of the
crowed. How all those who were not killed with axes and different
kitchen
appliances ended up burned alive in a huge barn.
Recently, the
second book came out with title Fear.
In this book Gross tells a tale of a Polish town Kiecle from the July
1946, a
year after Nazis surrendered. An 8-year-old child reported to the
police that
he had been kidnapped by the “local Jews” and kept locked
up in a cellar, until
he managed to escape. The police went to the location, a meeting place
for all
local Jews. They found a huge crowed of people in front of it, a crowed
furious
about the kidnapping of the boy. Instead of protecting the Jews, the
police
turned on them with their weapons and a clear signal for lynching was
given.
The large-scale butchery went on for days: the biggest execution that
took
place on the European soil after the Second World War. These murders
were not
about an occupying power or a state ordering them to do so. These were
ordinary
people who volunteered as soon as there was an opportunity. The
ordinary nurses
refused to give medical assistance to those who were bleeding; they let
them
bleed to death.
The history of
Polish Anti-Semitism is complex and cannot be presented here. Gross
offers some
answers. “Judeo-communism” is one of them: an idea that
Jews supported (Soviet)
communism in Poland
before the war and that they were a privileged group in a power
apparatus. Jews
were also accused of performing rituals where they used blood from
Christian
children. Gross documents that none of this has any root in reality.
Jews did
not cooperate with The Red Army. The truth was that the Hitler’s
Wermacht was
met with enthusiasm in this Polish town, nevertheless because of the
Jew
extinction that was authorised. There was not a single case of a
“ritual
killing” of Christian child by Polish Jews documented, either
before, during or
after the war. It was however shown that the cellar where the Polish
boy
claimed to had had been kept, did not exist. This made no difference.
Today, there are only several thousands
of Jews in Poland,
in contrast to 3.5 millions before the Second World War. This makes no
difference to Anti-Semitism, which remains. The Polish people who hid
Jews
during the war received death threats; they are the shame and they
still remain
anonymous today. When their Jewish were taken to the extermination
camps, their
neighbours asked them to take off their nice shoes and jewellery, since
they
were going to die anyway. It would be nice to know that someone who
knew them
took over their goods. Someone’s death, others’ bread:
cooperation as the best
guarantee against future reconciliation (a general rule, according to Bosnia).
The
camps Treblinka and Belzec were dug up and ransacked in the summer of
1945; the
people were hunting for gold teeth that SS officers might have
overlooked. The
few that survived were not met with sympathy but with abuse. Grosse
quotes
Tacitus: “It belongs to human nature to hate the ones you went
along with
hurting”.
The British Guardian
sums up Blair’s anti-terror law
in form of the following advice to British Muslims: Never wear a long
coat.
Never travel for holiday to Pakistan.
Do not grow beard. Do not become a member of clubs. Do not wear the
veil. Do
not live in a big city ghetto. Do not be a leader. Do not have a
striking
success. To sum up: You are free to be a Muslim, but do not show it to
anyone.
This analogy is
lame but there is a resemblance: To demand from someone not to be who
he or she
is, is impossible. We know how bad this can go. Group thinking, even in
the
name of freedom has a deadly outcome.
