Kielce Pogrom Soviet Staged Irwin Zarecka

Neutralizing Memory: Jew in Contemporary Poland, by Iwona Irwin-Zarecka (Editor). 1990

Loaded Title. Kielce Soviet-Staged. Poles and June 1967 War

The title of this book is biased. It implies that a neutralization of Jewish memory had taken place. This is nonsense. Neutralization is not the same as neglect, and the neglect of once-relevant events, with the passage of time, is completely normal. Moreover, it does not happen only to Jews.

The author was born of a Polish Catholic mother and a secular Jewish father. (p. 4). She focuses on the revival of Judaism in Poland in the 1980’s, notably in the context of the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

This book follows the standard narrative of Jews as victims and Poles insufficiently deferential to the (presumed) special-ness of the Jewish experience. However, the author is not strident in promoting this Judeocentric construct. In addition, she points out that, “Unless everyone, and especially the Jews, recognizes that being Polish is NOT equivalent to being anti-Semitic and recognizes that Poles too suffered greatly during the Nazi occupation, there can be no true reconciliation.” (p. 146). (Emphasis hers). No kidding. But, decades later, it has not happened.

INTERESTING INFORMATION

There are varying estimates for Jewish survival in German-occupied Poland: 100-120,000 (Plichowski 1979), and 200,000 (Korbonski 1978). (p. 69).

Author Iwona Irwin-Zarecka claims to have unpublished testimonies that support the accusation of the Kielce Pogrom being a skillful Soviet provocation. (p. 49; See also p. 161).

Now consider the June 1967 War. Irwin-Zarecka describes the Polish reaction, “Poles, perceiving a great similarity between Israel’s struggle for survival and their own history of fighting for independence, also felt a degree of pride, or more properly patronage, towards the Israeli fighters–these were, after all, mainly Polish Jews, often trained in the Polish military. There was much joy then over the victories of ‘our Jews’ over ‘Soviet Arabs’.” (p. 60).

YES, VIRGINIA. JEWISH COMMUNISTS ARE JEWS

According to an exculpatory line of thinking, Jewish Communists (Zydokomuna) were not really Jews. The author inadvertently pokes a hole in that silly argument.

It was Simhat Torah, September 29, 1983, in a small, newly restored synagogue at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. 150 Jews came. Irwin-Zarecka comments, “There are here a few Orthodox Jews. But, for the most part, people here belong to a sizeable group of old-Communists-now-disillusioned returnees-to-Judaism…” (p. 2). In another context, the author adds that, “Who ARE these new-old Jews? For the most part, they are disillusioned ex-Communists and ex-fellow travelers, longing for the lost warmth of their childhood after their whole world collapsed in 1968.” (p. 77). (Emphasis hers).

The informed reader probably realizes that a nonobservant Jew is still a Jew. In addition, being Jewish is not something that can be turned on, off, and on again like water from a tap. These “new-old” Communist Jews had been Jews all along.