Of human hearts

Of human hearts We struggle to imagine the kind of human being who would want such a thing in his private collection. For all the mass murder, enslavement and torture that has been perpetrated since, Auschwitz remains, for a European of my generation, the symbol of human evil in our time. This grotesque episode ends a year in which the relations between Christians and Jews in general, Christian Poles and Polish Jews in particular, have again been the subject of debate. The ghosts of a tortured east European past even howled through the corridors of Westminster, as the Conservatives announced their alliance in the European parliament with a group of right-wing parties, mainly from central and eastern Europe, and then put their MEPs under the leadership of Michal Kaminski, from Poland's Law and Justice party. In the ensuing controversy, the author and actor Stephen Fry said 'there's been a history of right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on'. A little history, indeed. To blame Catholic Poles for the Nazi extermination camp in German-annexed Polish territory, a camp in which Catholic Poles were also imprisoned and died, is so absurd that Fry's remark met with a torrent of criticism; and Fry, to his credit, swiftly apologised. Yet this is not just one Englishman's folly. Watching a German television news report on the trial of John Demjanjuk a few weeks ago, I was amazed to hear the announcer describe him as a guard in 'the Polish extermination camp Sobibor'. What times are these, when one of the main German television channels thinks it can describe Nazi camps as 'Polish'? In my experience, the automatic equation of Poland with Catholicism, nationalism and anti-semitism - and thence a slide to guilt by association with the holocaust - is still widespread. This collective stereotyping does no justice to the historical record. It has no place, for example, for the incredible story of Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer who in 1940 volunteered to get himself imprisoned in Auschwitz, in order to discover what was going on there. He remained as a prisoner in Auschwitz for two and a half years, smuggled out reports, organised resistance cells inside the camp, and then escaped. Having fought in the Warsaw rising against the Nazis, Pilecki survived the last months of the war in a German POW camp, only to be arrested and tortured by the communist secret police in Soviet-occupied Poland, and executed in 1948. Blanket stereotyping produces a defensive reaction among Poles, and therefore also hinders their coming to terms with a deeply troubling history of Polish and Catholic anti-semitism. (It is not confined to the right: the Polish communist party was convulsed by a notorious anti-semitic campaign in 1968.) Especially since Poland regained its freedom, that process of facing up to your own difficult past has been well underway. At the beginning of this decade, a historian's exposure of the horrific slaughter of the Jews of the small town of Jedwabne by their Polish Catholic fellow-villagers, in the summer of 1941, sparked off what the Polish Jewish writer Konstanty Gebert calls a 'stunningly profound and stunningly courageous' debate. In its wake, Gebert says, 'the country has undergone a serious moral transformation'. I yield to no-one in my criticism of the Conservatives' new alliance in the European parliament, but the political verdict must be kept separate from the historical and moral one. The language of today's party-politics, with its prefabricated phrases and glib half-truths, is so pathetically inadequate to the terrors of Auschwitz and the heroism of a Pilecki, that even to bring such synthetic verbiage close to them feels like a kind of sacrilege. There is a political judgement, for which the issue of what a right-wing opportunist like Kaminski said in Poland's Jedwabne debate a few years ago is a relevant though subsidiary consideration. There is a historical judgement, which scholars are enabling us to make with a growing appreciation of the complexity of east European and Jewish history. There is a legal judgement, which must apply to those who committed crimes against humanity. But beyond all these, there is a dimension of human understanding which perhaps only the language of art can fully encompass. To see what I mean, please buy, beg or steal yourself one of the last available tickets to the brilliant first production of a play called 'Our Class', by the Polish writer Tadeusz Slobodzianek, which is on at the National Theatre in London until mid-January. Or, if you live in another country (including Poland, where it has not yet been seen), start agitating for a production there. Drawing on the now extensive documentation of what happened in Jedwabne, 'Our Class' tells the tragically intertwined life stories of ten pre-war schoolmates, five of them Jewish, five Catholic. It spares you nothing of the horrors of one of the worst chapters in the history of Polish anti-semitism, showing a gang rape, a man beaten to death, and finally the Jews being burned alive in a barn. But it also shows you Wladek, the Catholic peasant farmer who shelters and then marries a Jewish girl - and kills a Polish schoolmate who is trying to arrest her. Then there's Menachem, the Jewish survivor who after the war becomes a communist secret police interrogator. And Zocha, the Polish Catholic woman who saved Menachem's life by hiding him in her barn, then emigrated to the US. Hearing an American Jewish couple banging on about Polish anti-semitism, she explodes: 'and what did the Americans do for the Jews during the war?' And Abram, the lucky one, who emigrated to America before the war, became an unctuous rabbi, and, sixty years after the fact, exacts from his former schoolmate Heniek, now a Catholic priest with a liking for little boys, endorsement of his entirely unfounded claim that back in 1941 the rabbi of Jedwabne led his flock into the barn with torah held high, glorifying God's name, Kiddush Hashem. No one's self-comforting myth is left intact. The historian's proper questions about strict historical accuracy, about what is typical or exceptional, cause and effect, are secondary here. For here is a deeper truth: this is what human beings are capable of when they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. (And to be a small town in eastern Poland occupied first by the Soviets, following the Hitler-Stalin Pact, then by the Nazis, then by a Polish communist regime under the tutelage of the Red Army, is almost a definition of wrong place, wrong time.) Anyone born in a luckier place and time must say: there, but for the grace of geography, go I. Except that we all walk that way, only without the extremes. It is not just that some people are villains, others heroes; it is that the very same man or woman can behave terribly at one moment, magnificently the next. We can be both lower than the apes and higher than the angels. We are weak; we are strong. We acquire a burden of guilt; we stake a claim to mercy. Then we grow old, sicken and die. timothygartonash.com A part of the retrieved inscription from the Auschwitz entrance (Beta/AP) Between Hanukkah and Christmas, the sign over the entrance to the Auschwitz extermination camp is stolen. Polish police recover it and catch the thieves, who were apparently carrying out a commission from abroad. Timothy Garton Ash "Blanket stereotyping produces a defensive reaction among Poles, and therefore also hinders their coming to terms with a deeply troubling history of Polish and Catholic anti-semitism."

Of human hearts

We struggle to imagine the kind of human being who would want such a thing in his private collection. For all the mass murder, enslavement and torture that has been perpetrated since, Auschwitz remains, for a European of my generation, the symbol of human evil in our time.

This grotesque episode ends a year in which the relations between Christians and Jews in general, Christian Poles and Polish Jews in particular, have again been the subject of debate. The ghosts of a tortured east European past even howled through the corridors of Westminster, as the Conservatives announced their alliance in the European parliament with a group of right-wing parties, mainly from central and eastern Europe, and then put their MEPs under the leadership of Michal Kaminski, from Poland's Law and Justice party.

In the ensuing controversy, the author and actor Stephen Fry said 'there's been a history of right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on'. A little history, indeed. To blame Catholic Poles for the Nazi extermination camp in German-annexed Polish territory, a camp in which Catholic Poles were also imprisoned and died, is so absurd that Fry's remark met with a torrent of criticism; and Fry, to his credit, swiftly apologised.

Yet this is not just one Englishman's folly. Watching a German television news report on the trial of John Demjanjuk a few weeks ago, I was amazed to hear the announcer describe him as a guard in 'the Polish extermination camp Sobibor'. What times are these, when one of the main German television channels thinks it can describe Nazi camps as 'Polish'?

In my experience, the automatic equation of Poland with Catholicism, nationalism and anti-semitism - and thence a slide to guilt by association with the holocaust - is still widespread. This collective stereotyping does no justice to the historical record. It has no place, for example, for the incredible story of Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer who in 1940 volunteered to get himself imprisoned in Auschwitz, in order to discover what was going on there.

He remained as a prisoner in Auschwitz for two and a half years, smuggled out reports, organised resistance cells inside the camp, and then escaped. Having fought in the Warsaw rising against the Nazis, Pilecki survived the last months of the war in a German POW camp, only to be arrested and tortured by the communist secret police in Soviet-occupied Poland, and executed in 1948.

Blanket stereotyping produces a defensive reaction among Poles, and therefore also hinders their coming to terms with a deeply troubling history of Polish and Catholic anti-semitism. (It is not confined to the right: the Polish communist party was convulsed by a notorious anti-semitic campaign in 1968.) Especially since Poland regained its freedom, that process of facing up to your own difficult past has been well underway.

At the beginning of this decade, a historian's exposure of the horrific slaughter of the Jews of the small town of Jedwabne by their Polish Catholic fellow-villagers, in the summer of 1941, sparked off what the Polish Jewish writer Konstanty Gebert calls a 'stunningly profound and stunningly courageous' debate. In its wake, Gebert says, 'the country has undergone a serious moral transformation'.

I yield to no-one in my criticism of the Conservatives' new alliance in the European parliament, but the political verdict must be kept separate from the historical and moral one. The language of today's party-politics, with its prefabricated phrases and glib half-truths, is so pathetically inadequate to the terrors of Auschwitz and the heroism of a Pilecki, that even to bring such synthetic verbiage close to them feels like a kind of sacrilege.

There is a political judgement, for which the issue of what a right-wing opportunist like Kaminski said in Poland's Jedwabne debate a few years ago is a relevant though subsidiary consideration. There is a historical judgement, which scholars are enabling us to make with a growing appreciation of the complexity of east European and Jewish history. There is a legal judgement, which must apply to those who committed crimes against humanity. But beyond all these, there is a dimension of human understanding which perhaps only the language of art can fully encompass.

To see what I mean, please buy, beg or steal yourself one of the last available tickets to the brilliant first production of a play called 'Our Class', by the Polish writer Tadeusz Slobodzianek, which is on at the National Theatre in London until mid-January. Or, if you live in another country (including Poland, where it has not yet been seen), start agitating for a production there. Drawing on the now extensive documentation of what happened in Jedwabne, 'Our Class' tells the tragically intertwined life stories of ten pre-war schoolmates, five of them Jewish, five Catholic.

It spares you nothing of the horrors of one of the worst chapters in the history of Polish anti-semitism, showing a gang rape, a man beaten to death, and finally the Jews being burned alive in a barn. But it also shows you Wladek, the Catholic peasant farmer who shelters and then marries a Jewish girl - and kills a Polish schoolmate who is trying to arrest her. Then there's Menachem, the Jewish survivor who after the war becomes a communist secret police interrogator.

And Zocha, the Polish Catholic woman who saved Menachem's life by hiding him in her barn, then emigrated to the US. Hearing an American Jewish couple banging on about Polish anti-semitism, she explodes: 'and what did the Americans do for the Jews during the war?' And Abram, the lucky one, who emigrated to America before the war, became an unctuous rabbi, and, sixty years after the fact, exacts from his former schoolmate Heniek, now a Catholic priest with a liking for little boys, endorsement of his entirely unfounded claim that back in 1941 the rabbi of Jedwabne led his flock into the barn with torah held high, glorifying God's name, Kiddush Hashem. No one's self-comforting myth is left intact.

The historian's proper questions about strict historical accuracy, about what is typical or exceptional, cause and effect, are secondary here. For here is a deeper truth: this is what human beings are capable of when they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. (And to be a small town in eastern Poland occupied first by the Soviets, following the Hitler-Stalin Pact, then by the Nazis, then by a Polish communist regime under the tutelage of the Red Army, is almost a definition of wrong place, wrong time.) Anyone born in a luckier place and time must say: there, but for the grace of geography, go I.

Except that we all walk that way, only without the extremes. It is not just that some people are villains, others heroes; it is that the very same man or woman can behave terribly at one moment, magnificently the next. We can be both lower than the apes and higher than the angels. We are weak; we are strong. We acquire a burden of guilt; we stake a claim to mercy. Then we grow old, sicken and die.

timothygartonash.com