Double Standards on Jews and Poles Repudiated Hoffman

After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins, by Eva Hoffman. 2004

No Double Standard: Jews, Too, Must “Come to Terms With the Past”. [But, Here We Are 14 Years Later, and This is Not Happening]

The author was born in 1945, in a village near Lwow (Lviv). Following the confiscation of these territories by the USSR in the wake of Teheran and Yalta, the surviving members of her family moved to Poland in her postwar boundaries, and then eventually to Canada.

Eva Hoffman focuses on her experience growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors, and then she elaborates on some psychoanalytic works that have examined this second generation. She also discusses how different generations of Germans had reacted to the Nazi past. Her primary focus, however, was how the German-made Holocaust had been remembered in Poland over the generations.

NO “POLISH DEATH CAMPS”

The author dutifully informs the reader about the Nazi genocidal action against ethnic Poles. She also categorically repudiates the notion that the Germans had built their death camps on Polish soil owing to the presumed Polish willingness to collaborate with the Germans against the Jews. (pp. 16-17, 136).

HOLOCAUST PREEMINENCE LEADS TO HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM

Eva Hoffman realizes that the Shoah has widely been elevated above all other genocides, as she comments, (quote) On one level, the Holocaust in recent years has been transposed from an event in Jewish history into b>a sort of pan-memory, a global (or at least Western) heritage. In the United States, its incorporation into national consciousness is signaled in many ways. Outside the United States, to give one example of the past’s absorption into a universalizing narrative, at an international forum on the Holocaust held in Stockholm in 2000, political and government leaders from forty-six countries (according to one informed commentator, Ruth Ellen Gruber) in effect, “officially acknowledged the Holocaust as part of their countries’ national histories.” (unquote). (p. 174).

“COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST”: NOT ONLY POLES BUT ALSO JEWS

Hoffman adheres to the familiar template that attributes to Poles a “heroic narrative”, as well as a sense of “beleaguered patriotism”. However, in what rarely is seen, she holds her fellow Jews to the same standard as Poles!

She comments, (Quote) But if we Jews demand strenuous self-examination and full disclosure from the Other, then we also have to start looking at our role in the complex past, not only as victims but as actors. Perhaps most saliently, we have to be able to distinguish bad faith in others from authentic ambiguity. We cannot hold others to standards of conscience or honesty higher than those we demand from ourselves. In order for second-generation dialogue to achieve its reparative work, the recognition, when offered, needs to be recognized. That, too, requires a certain courage and a certain trust; that, too, is part of the moral test and task. (unquote). (p. 147). Do is Jewish moral reckoning taking place? Fat chance.

THE JEDWABNE MASSACRE

The author discusses the Jedwabne “revelation”, and how the Poles reacted to it. While she touches on the ambiguities about the massacre, she does not mention evidence that the Germans had been the ones primarily responsible, and that the Poles had been mostly-coerced accomplices. For a Jewish testimony on German culpability, please see my review of: The Warriors: My Life As A Jewish Soviet Partisan (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust).