On April 17,
1996, the PBS series Frontline aired "Shtetl," a documentary by
Marian Marzynski about Polish-Jewish relations. The PBS website for
"Shtetl" is here.
I shared my
response with the director of Indiana University's Polish Studies Center, Prof.
Tim Wiles. Prof. Wiles encouraged me to publish my essay.
Prof. Wiles
was at a loss, though, in recommending to me an appropriate venue. He couldn't
think of any nationally known publications that would be interested in a Polish
American perspective on PBS's skewed take on WW II and the Holocaust in Poland.
Prof. Wiles'
quandary should give concerned Polonians food for thought. Consider: Poles and
Polish Americans are grotesquely stereotyped and misrepresented in treatments
of WW II and the Holocaust. This stereotyping distorts Holocaust and WW II
history. No nationally known publication would be interested in publishing a
response by a Polish-American scholar to such stereotyping.
Would something
similar ever be said about stereotyping of African Americans or Muslim
Americans? Why are Polish-Americans so unsuccessful at making their voices
heard on this key issue?
Further, why
do Polish-American poets like John Guzlowski and Christina Pacosz, essayists,
fiction writers, etc, find it so hard to reach audiences with their work?
Polonia would
benefit from founding and supporting appropriate publications.
In my search,
I contacted Jewish publications. One I contacted was Tikkun Magazine.
Tikkun's Rabbi
Michael Lerner sent me an interesting response, which I hope to address in
a subsequent blog post.
For now, I'd
like to republish, here, my almost two-decade-old response to
"Shtetl."
By the way,
in the essay, below, I mention that Poles confronted armored German cars with
cavalry. This is true. On the first day of World War II, Polish cavalry did
confront armored German cars.
Internet
sites point out that Germans and Russians used the idea that Polish cavalry
charged German tanks as proof that Poles were stupid. See Wikipedia here.
It goes
without saying that I do not mention the Polish cavalry to demean Poles. Rather,
I mention it because Poland was indeed a post-colonial nation, poor and ill-equipped,
and it fought the Germans with everything it had. It simply didn't have enough
military hardware. I honor those Poles who fought Nazi Germany and Soviet
Russia.
Below I give
three million as the number of non-Jewish Poles killed during WW II. Since
1996, that number has been revised downward.
Below is the
full text of my response to "Shtetl."
***
On April 17,
1996, PBS aired Marian Marzynski's documentary of Jewish life in Poland, "Shtetl."
Letters to the PBS web page revealed that Poles, Jews, and non-Polish or Jewish
Americans reacted to the film very differently. Typical letters included one
from a Jewish viewer who said: "This film clearly illustrates the basis
for my prejudice toward the Polish People (sic). For many years, I harbored
feelings of guilt concerning my opinions of the Polish People. Upon viewing the
film, I feel completely absolved … "
An American
viewer, neither Polish nor Jewish, wrote: "if the Poles really want to be
free … they must learn to admit their terrible contribution to the Holocaust."
A Polish
letter-writer voiced fear of "a lynch mob … The world vs Poland." Similar
expressions of Polish pain were taken as evidence of an "ingrained"
Polish anti-Semitism; that Poles "LIED" (sic).
Marzynski
claimed that "a running camera never changes the truth." "The
Eternal Jew," an anti-Jewish propaganda film, was also created with a
running camera. Can a running camera lie?
Polish Peasants as Other
Marzynski
enters homes and farmyards, pointing his camera at peasants who may have never
seen such a contraption before. His exhibits have not been prepped for their
fifteen minutes of fame. They have lived their lives outside of any free
international conversation of academia and commerce. For most of their lives,
contact with that conversation would have resulted in severe punishment, even
death.
A few telling
scenes brought home differences between the observer and the observed. For
example: a Jewish American enters a house, unannounced. The inhabitant, a
Polish peasant, rises, embraces the man, kisses him, and then asks, "I beg
you, sir, who are you?"
Americans,
media drenched, formally educated, and multi-cultural, intuitively know when
and how to alter their speech. An American will vary, in tone, style, and
vocabulary, what he says to a police officer after being read Miranda rights,
or to a joke told in a locker room. Whether listening to a politician in
campaign season or a fisherman talking about the one that got away, Americans
know to factor in context when deciding the truth or appropriateness of
discourse produced in their own culture.
Without
adequate contextualization, Americans could never know one driving force that
informs peasant discourse: a religious resignation to powerlessness and lack of
personal consequence. These peasants' words have never been attended to; their
very body language of hunched shoulders reminds the attentive viewer that they
have never had powers regarded by Americans as basic. The viewer is not
introduced to the adaptive quality of peasant resignation; Marzynski and his
viewers are not there to learn. These "people with no education" "must
be taught," he has said. First, they must be made spectacles before an
international audience.
Marzynski
recorded alien peasants reciting formulaic responses to questions about Jews. Jews
were good with money; Jews have distinctive noses; Jews talk a lot. These
scenes precede Holocaust survivor accounts. A cause and effect relationship is
created. The Polish peasant is placed on a narrative trajectory whose telos we
know to be the Holocaust. Letters to PBS reveal that viewers were shocked –
shocked! – by these formulaic expressions of ethnic stereotypes, and concluded
that Polish peasants were responsible for the Holocaust.
As a
folklorist who has lived and worked among peasants in Africa, Asia, and Eastern
Europe, I was not shocked. However modern Americans may feel about it, old
people who have mastered the jokes and proverbs that reinforce ethnic
stereotypes are the peasant community's version of an anthropology Ph.D. Had
Marzynski run his camera in any traditional village in the world, he could have
recorded similar and even more outlandish stereotypes, expressed in equally
ready formulas. In Nepal I was told by a Chhetri woman that Gurungs "have
no noses, keep large dogs, and will eat you for dinner after boiling you in a
big pot!"
Had Marzynski
kept his camera running in Poland, he could have gathered many, to us,
outlandish and formulaic expressions about non-Jews. Jews are smarter than
Poles, a Polish proverb runs, but Armenians are smarter than Jews, and Greeks
are smarter than Armenians. Too, Polish Catholics tell many bitter and painful
jokes about Polish Catholics – jokes in which Poles are stupid, Poles betray
each other, and Poles lose.
Marzynski
could have provided a vital bit of context by turning his camera the other way.
A Jewish UC Berkeley anthropologist once assured me that I could not possibly
be a Polish Catholic because I can read. My advisor, a world famous professor
and a Polish-American Jew, told a Polak joke to a class of three hundred
applauding undergraduates. During a funding interview a professor suggested
that since I was Polish I was probably anti-Semitic and therefore, perhaps, not
to be funded. Recently, a lovely young Jewish woman told me, completely
unselfconsciously, that she teaches her Sabbath school students about Polish
people by telling them Polak jokes.
Recording
incidents like these on film and interweaving them in any discussion of
Jewish-Polish relations would serve a key need. Seeing modern, obviously "good"
and highly educated Americans utilizing currently acceptable stereotypes might
bring the viewer to a more immediate and intimate understanding of the vexed
human condition he or she shares with those very foreign Polish peasants. Instead,
stereotyping was located in the bodies of old men and women who speak an alien
tongue and have caked dirt under cracked fingernails – shown in lingering
close-up.
We need a
careful analysis of the role stereotypes played in the Holocaust. This film is
not that study. Instead, "Shtetl" is the deployment of another
stereotype: that of the ignorant, morally retarded, brutal Pole. The qualities
of peasant life the camera lingers over in "Shtetl": earth –
underfoot, on faces and clothing; livestock; roughly hewn speech; can be
embraced by a film maker who wishes to help the modern viewer penetrate this
alien world and gain intimacy in discoveries of shared humanity. Sometimes, as
in an Aer Lingus commercial, a glossy post card from Nepal, or the illustration
on a box of Celestial Seasonings tea, these very aspects of peasantry are
marketed to represent mystical virtues sadly lacking in modern society. In "Shtetl,"
the viewers' visit to a Polish peasant village is, as Marzynski put it, "a
trip into the darkness of the human soul." Polish peasantry is a
receptacle of primitive evil – something wholly other from the viewer, that
must be accused, in the name of a virtue which the evolved viewer represents
and which the primitive and alien peasant lacks.
This
stereotype is an old one. U.S. immigration law was based on it. In the 1920's,
detailed ethnographic descriptions of Eastern European peasants were read into
the Congressional record. Proof of their racially inferior status was provided
by the dirt on their bodies, their lack of shoes and teeth, their simple
abodes, their flaxen and woolen clothing. Franz Boas, the father of American
anthropology, deputized a team to measure heads in Galicia. These measurements
would clarify the otherwise inexplicable inferiority of the Polish immigrant. Like
Marzynski, Boas was applying currently acceptable theory and method. Boas did
not factor in to his calculations the mass starvation in Galicia, or that his
subjects had been freed from serfdom only sixty years before.
The view of
Eastern European peasants as evolutionary primitives who must be geographically
quarantined cut short immigration, and informed U.S. policy towards Eastern
Europe when it was under attack by both Fascism and Communism. It is, of
course, the root of the Polak joke. Reflection on this history of exploitation
of stereotypes, not by peasants, but by highly educated and very powerful
people, might help the Jewish viewer to understand the pain Polish gentiles
feel when watching "Shtetl."
"Anti-Semitic Poles"
In academic
and journalistic circles, the words "Pole" and "Anti-Semite"
have become synonymous. In a headline, The
New York Times characterized "Shtetl" as a film about "Polish
Anti-Semites" in spite of its inclusion of Poles who rescued Jews. In that
same issue, the Times wrote of the
popularity of swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti in our nation's capital
without using the words: "American Anti-Semites."
When Poles
express pain at this stereotype, as they have in reaction to "Shtetl,"
their pain is taken as further incrimination. Some Polish letter writers to PBS
apparently felt pressure to denounce fellow Poles in order to gain respect and
credibility; many protested that the "child-like" "stupid" "disheveled"
peasants of "Shtetl" were not appropriate representatives of Poland.
A wider focus
on the history of anti-Semitism provides other interpretations of Polish pain. Poles
ask, for example, why it is that the Inquisition and the continued existence of
crypto-Jews throughout the Spanish speaking world, why the embrace in Latin
America of men like Mengele, has not given us the stereotype of the
anti-Semitic Spaniard. Blood libel was an English invention, canonized in
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare gave us Shylock. Disraeli, though a
Christian, never stopped being "the Jew." During the relatively
benign German occupation of the Channel Islands, Britons, both civilians and
government authorities, cooperated extensively with the Nazis, and exported
British Jews to their death in Auschwitz. Still, we cling to our Mrs. Miniver
stereotype, and see no headlines about "anti-Semitic Britons." The
Simon Wiesenthal Center has repeatedly protested Japanese claims of a Jewish
conspiracy to destroy Japan, a country with no significant history of Jewish
settlement. There is no formula: "anti-Semitic Japanese."
Stereotypes
are created through strategically narrow focus and lack of context. Anyone
combing pages of Polish history searching for incidents of Polish-Jewish
violence will find them. They may find more incidences of anti-Semitism in
Poland because, before World War II, the largest Jewish community in the world
lived in the territory of the old Polish Commonwealth. Poles read the existence
of this large and vibrant community as proof of relative tolerance.
Widen the
focus, attempt a deductive study of Poles as human beings rather an inductive
gathering of evidence to support a pre-conceived stereotype, and you will find
violent struggle to be a staple of life in Poland. Poles have fought vicious
ethnic battles with Ukrainians, Germans, and Russians. In this country, street
gangs of immigrant Poles fought the hated "Johnny Bulls," Americans
of British ancestry. In The Polish
Peasant in Europe and America, the authors report that any policeman who
entered a Polish immigrant saloon risked being killed. Poles have not only
fought with other ethnic groups, but among themselves. In the Massacre of 1846,
Austrian colonizers exploited class tensions and offered Polish peasants ten
florins for the heads of Polish noblemen. So many were brought that the bounty
was reduced to two florins. In 1970's America, a Polish-American anthropologist
who wanted to study a Polish community in Detroit found it difficult to get
housing, because he was seen as an outsider.
An analysis
of whom Poles have fought and why might deconstruct the apparently needful
stereotype of the anti-Semitic Pole and introduce us to the embattled Pole who
fights everywhere, and feels safe nowhere. It should not surprise us to
discover that a poor and disempowered people have often lashed out at whomever
was nearest and whomever was seen as threatening whatever scratch of earth they
had temporarily secured.
Recently a
professor at my campus, who was neither Polish nor Jewish, made passing
comments about "Polish anti-Semites." I objected to her typification
and suggested she might want to learn more about the region. She was
dismissive. "Poland? Czech Republic? Ukraine? They weren't even countries!
I don't know about them because I don't care about them." The anti-Semitic
Pole stereotype is regarded as a pertinent nugget of wisdom – rather than a
potentially damaging stereotype that needs deconstruction – by academics who
know nothing else about Eastern Europe.
In "Shtetl,"
Romaniuk, an historian interested in Jewish issues, complains that villagers
have scratched the word "Jew" on his office wall. I knew how
Americans and Jews would read that scene. The filmmaker never introduced
viewers to the reading that sprang to my mind, given my familiarity with the
wider cultural context.
In Poland I
attended a party for a boy named Witek. He was going to Germany. The party was
a kind of wake. To acquire his visa, Witek had to sign a piece of paper
denouncing any Polish identity. Everyone at the party was sad and conflicted. They
had to express regret that Witek had denounced his Polishness. In their heart
of hearts, though, I knew many were envious. Witek would have a superior
material existence in Germany, and, given the pollution of his native Slask, he
would probably enjoy a longer life.
Having a
despised and embattled identity, and knowing that one must disavow that identity
to grasp a decent life, does wound Poles. When a Pole says, "Are you one
of them now?" and the "them"
in question can be Germans or Americans or Jews – the question may mean, "Have
you abandoned the communal work we do of protecting and maintaining an identity
that has caused us so much pain, but brought us the only real pride we can lay
claim to?" "Are you one of them
now?" As an aspiring academic, I have heard this very question from my own
parents. Without context, no American listening would understand.
Information
about Poles as Poles, especially Polish peasants, is not readily available. As
Marzynski says: "Nobody could follow a story of an obscure little town in
Poland." Most Poles were peasants, many illiterate, right up to the end of
World War II. Most Polish immigrants in this country have been of peasant
stock, and have been shunted into work in heavy industry. These are poor
people, just getting by, only now completing B.A. and Ph.D. programs. They find
relatively little money for or interest in study of Eastern European peasantry.
The material Polish-Americans or anyone else encounters about Polish peasants
is likely to be like "Shtetl:" a treatment in which Eastern European
peasants appear only long enough to provide the target for a pointing finger. Unlike
the Spanish, British, Germans, French – all nations whose histories are stained
with anti-Semitism – the view of Polish peasants as anti-Semitic goons is not
countered by the fame of a Mozart or a Shakespeare or a Napoleon. These
peasants have their moments of transcendence, too, of art and wisdom,
compassion and beauty, but foreign cameramen do not arrive to record and market
those.
Context v. Revision
I approached
a Jewish friend. I wanted to discuss "Shtetl" with her. Her responses
were clipped and tinged with atypical hostility. She mentioned the low rate of
Nazi collaboration among the Danes. I asked her to remember that unique laws
obtained in Poland; that in Poland alone, anyone who helped a Jew in even the
smallest way would be killed, as would their whole family for three
generations. My friend looked shocked. Apparently she did not know this. And
she teaches Holocaust studies.
In "Shtetl,"
a Polish peasant regales Jack Rubin, a Holocaust survivor, with an account of
being cheated by his father. Rubin cannot listen. He turns away. "Do not
speak ill of the dead," our culture commands. How much more unseemly to
speak ill of Europe's Jews, who died tragically while the world only watched. In
any popular narrative of the Holocaust, Jews cannot play bad or even ambiguous
characters.
As historian
Romaniuk pointed out, Marzynski downplayed the danger posed by Nazis. With the
Nazis removed from the stage, a narrative vacuum drafts as villain the only
other character present. When we mention Polish collaborators, we fill our
narrative demand for a villain. If we mention that there were Jewish
collaborators in every ghetto, we blaspheme. The historian must jump in immediately
to provide insight into the pressures that drove some Jews to collaborate. Any
analysis of pressures and tensions faced by Christian Poles would be an act of
perversion. A Polish writer to PBS claimed that during the 1939-1941 Soviet
occupation, one million Poles were arrested, deported, and/or killed, without
organized aid from Jews. To include this in the narrative would defame the
hallowed dead. The Pole must emerge as an unmotivated ethnic Iago.
Poles have
abundant historical bases for regarding World War II as their unparalleled national
tragedy. Poland suffered more than any other country during the war. Nazism was
not only an expression of a long standing anti-Semitism, but a German Drang nach Osten that preceded
Christianity. Poles honor the immeasurably tragic, and immeasurably heroic
sacrifices of this era with the same kind of rhetorical reverence Jack Rubin,
and most Americans, observe when discussing the Holocaust. Haranguing Poles
with accounts of collaborators violates sacred narrative ground, and cannot
lead to dialogue.
When American
students are provided with the "Anti-Semitic Pole" stereotype as an
academically respectable historic axiom, they tend to fill in their own
cultural and historical ignorance by applying models with which they are
familiar. One young American assured me that life in Poland was like life in
the ante-bellum south, with Poles playing the role of the masters, and Jews the
African Americans. In this scenario, Poles were required to acknowledge their
power, privilege, and guilt. That they had not yet done so was proof of their
continued moral retardation. The solution, in my friend's assessment, was for
concerned outsiders to harangue Poles until they confessed.
Again, Jewish
and Polish historians know that most Poles were serfs through most of the
nineteenth century. Jews who worked for the serfs' masters had rights and
privileges that many Poles did not have, including, at one point, the right of
life or death over the master's peasants. When Poles attempt to speak of the
fears they felt of, for example, perceived Jewish dominance in the professions,
or the relation Jews had with Poland's occupying powers, their words are not
met as efforts to understand a complex historical relationship. Instead, those
who lack cultural or historical context automatically label Polish fears as the
paranoid or fascist ravings of "ingrained" anti-Semites.
Here's a
scene I would like to see in the next "Shtetl," the next "Shoah."
The crusading cameraman asks a Polish peasant: "What is the first
invasion, famine, plague, exile, slavery, that you remember?" The peasant
might refer to the famines of early in this century that starved tens of
thousands every year, and prompted an exodus "for bread." Or World
War One, in which Poland was a colonized battleground between warring powers,
and the plagues that followed. He might know some history and, then, he could
recount an endless cycle of one invasion or uprising per generation, followed
by mass arrests, public executions, watching thousands of his fellow Poles
driven to exile.
Then the
researcher might ask: "Tell me about the German occupation." Many old
timers cannot speak about this time. They don't like to remember being starved
and tortured and shot at random. If they do speak, you may see weathered faces
assuming childlike expressions. It is the helplessness of childhood, not its
innocence or joy. Seeing this expression on faces battered by time and harsh
lives, in conjunction with narratives of irrational, agonized experience, can
be profoundly terrifying and sickening.
Then the
researcher must ask: "Were you a hero? Or did you succumb to terror? Were
you scared when suddenly confronted with the technology of modern warfare in a
newly post-colonial nation that sent cavalry against armored German cars? Tell
me why you didn't save the Jews." The researcher might know that three
million Polish gentiles died, also, if so, he could throw in: "Why didn't
you save your mother, your son, your wife, your best friend?" Of course,
this Pole himself was under occupation, slated for extinction, allowed only
starvation rations. It would perhaps confuse things too much to ask why he didn't
save himself.
Then the
Polish peasant will have his opportunity to make his confession of moral
failure to the American television viewers, who are sitting at home with their
chips and dip, poised to give thumbs up or thumbs down. When the Pole does not
confess to this camera which has suddenly appeared amidst his cows and pigs,
Americans can write his intransigence off as further evidence of guilt.
"Shtetl": The
Audience
Who are
Americans, the presumed father confessors for the sinful Poles? Many Poles know
that America closed the door to Polish immigrants, both Jew and Gentile, in
1924, on the basis of their presumed racial inferiority. These racist American
laws were inspiring to and studied by Adolf Hitler. In 1942, shortly after the
extermination of Europe's Jews was reported on page ten of the New York Times,
(and not covered in other mainstream media) Americans identified Jews as the
third greatest threat to national security, after the Germans and Japanese. When
Jewish children sought refuge in America, Laura Franklin Delano, cousin of the
president, said that these "twenty thousand charming children would all
too soon grow into twenty thousand ugly adults." The American government
denied entry. Jan Karski, a Polish gentile, at great risk to his own life, made
an eyewitness report of the Holocaust to the president. America, with this
information and all its power – and under no foreign occupation – did nothing
to directly stop the destruction of Poland or the genocide of the Jews.
Poles know of
Yalta, though perhaps many letter writers to PBS do not. Polish soldiers made
significant contributions to the allied cause in battles across Europe and
Asia; the allies delivered their nation to Stalin. Stalin's human victims will
eventually be forgotten. Stalinism's damage to Polish soil, water, and air, can
never be. Lead, mercury, cadmium, aluminum; the percentage of oxygen in the
air: words I heard from some young Polish women who told me they wanted to
leave Poland before conceiving and giving birth.
Marzynski in "Shtetl",
Lanzmann in "Shoah," and western television viewers, do not arrive in
their clean clothes and well fed tummies to celebrate the peasant's endurance,
to learn the secrets of undiscovered lives. They arrive to demand from the
Polish peasant a confession of his cowardice, stupidity and defeat. Polish
intellectuals must confess the diagnostically flawed nature of Polish culture
and Polish history. It is unlikely that this ritual of shaming, this weird
morality play worked with video cams and Polish peasants, will provide the
American television audience with the satisfaction it demands.
Modern
American discourse flows with the daytime talk show ethos of therapeutic public
confession. Blessed with a security so abundant they needn't be aware of it,
Americans can take their place on the assembly line, process their story
publicly, and hear others' tales, in a warm and teary environment of embraces
and forgiveness, something like a public bath. No such safe, multi-vocalic
atmosphere has ever existed in Poland. There an ethos of epic and heroism still
reigns. At a recent discussion of Polish-Jewish relations, a Polish professor
began to cry. "I'm sorry," she began, in English, not quite the "I
beg you, sir," of her native Polish. "But people in my family were
slaves during World War II. Many Polish Catholics were enslaved." Not a
long statement, and something that everyone knew, but it obviously pained her
to say it. It wasn't just the remembered pain that hurt her, but the agony of
announcing this publicly: We weren't all heroes; some Poles were slaves.
God, honor,
country: values Poles are socialized to defend above all. Polish history has
many proud moments of inviting Jews when, elsewhere, they were persecuted. Those
are the moments Poles chose to speak of when they have their brief and awkward
moments in the American public eye. That is the appropriate, heroic story. They
choose these stories because anti-Semitism is a shame, a crime. When "they"
– outsiders – paint Poles, Poland, and Polish culture as diagnostically
anti-Semitic, the embattled motherland is defamed once again. And the
appropriately socialized Pole feels constrained to rise to her defense.
***
That's the
end of my "Shtetl" essay from 1996. I'm sorry more Polish-Americans
never got a chance to read it.
As mentioned,
above, my plan is to post a reply to Rabbi Lerner's letter to me. He explained
why he chose not to publish my essay, above, in Tikkun Magazine.
Shtetl's, and PBS' dehumanization and stereotypification
of Poles is exemplified in the photograph, above. I found it on the linked WGBH
webpage page. It is clearly a photograph of two human beings. One looks to be
Zbigniew Romaniuk, a Polish man. The photo's caption identifies only one man,
Marian Marzynski. I am viewing this photo on February 8, 2014. I hope WGBH will
feel duty bound to alter their caption.
There is a follow-up blog post here with an excerpt from "Bieganski"'s discussion of "Shtetl" and mention of the priests that died in Bransk aiding Jews.
There is a follow-up blog post here discussing Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun and his response to this essay.
A follow-up post asking if there really is a double standard appears here.
Rabbi Michael Lerner's response from February, 2014 is here.
