Bieganski the Blog

Heroic Rabbi Beaten, Imprisoned in Backward, Anti-Semitic Poland and Ukraine

2012-02-25T12:37:00.000-05:00

Photo by Brendan Hoffman. Source: New York Times.

Menachem Youlus is a peaceful, learned, heroic rabbi and Torah scribe. Rabbi Youlus "exudes honesty and integrity," as one of his supporters and major donors, a lawyer, told the Washington Post. Along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Rabbi Youlus is a recipient of the Olender Peacemaker Award.

Rabbi Youlus rescues Torah scrolls from Eastern European countries like Poland and Ukraine – what PBS, America's public television station, called "dangerous places." In these backward, anti-Semitic regions, "Torahs are hidden in walls, buried in the ground, piled in basements of monasteries." Former Nazis and still hidden Jews populate Eastern Europe. Jewish sacred items are put to profane use by Eastern Europe's many anti-Semites.

"In Ukraine, [Rabbi Youlus] bought [a Torah scroll] from a former Nazi sergeant who said he confiscated it from a man entering Auschwitz. Youlus discovered another being sold in pieces to artists who were using the sacred parchment as canvas. Some he smuggled out of then-Communist countries, two panels at a time, in the lining of luggage." Rabbi Youlus has been beaten and imprisoned and "threatened with jail in Siberia."

His "expeditions," as he calls his trips to Eastern Europe, in distant, exotic lands, among the primitive Bohunks, are fraught with peril. Rabbi Youlus has been called "The Jewish Indiana Jones." "'He's an intrepid Jewish 007,' said Rabbi Moshe D. Shualy, ritual director for Chizuk Amuno, a Baltimore synagogue that has two of Youlus's rescued Torahs. 'He puts himself in such impossible situations to find, retrieve and resurrect these scrolls.'" Rabbi Youlus has gone into $170,000 worth of debt to finance his work.

In Ukraine, as reported in the Washington Post, Rabbi Youlus was swindled by a typically crafty and venal Bohunk peasant who used Jewish gravestones to build – what else – a pigsty. In Oswiecim, Poland, Youlus discovered that the town priest was secretly Jewish and had secret information about hidden Torah scrolls, as described below by the Philadelphia Jewish Voice:

Rabbi Youlus "took out an ad in the local [Oswiecim] newspaper and asked if anyone had panels of a Torah from before the war. The next day he received a call from a priest who said he had four panels. The panels were an exact match in pagination, style and content. Obviously they were originally from the Torah he had found buried in the cemetery. Rabbi Youlus learned that the Priest was born a Jew – named Zeev – and was sent to Auschwitz.

Before the Torah had been buried in the Oswiecim cemetery these four panels had been removed and smuggled through Auscwitz (sic) by four different people. As each person who had a panel was about to die they passed along the panels. Eventually the four panels made it into the hands of Zeev who guarded them as a Priest for over 60 years. Rabbi Youlus lovingly restored the Torah and made it kosher once again." This very Torah scroll would be used by the March of the Living on its annual, controversial marches through Poland. "And every other year it will be taken by 10,000 students as they march through Auschwitz on March of the Living."

Rabbi Menachem Youlus' work is so important that it has been featured on numerous Jewish-themed websites, in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and on PBS, America's prestigious public broadcasting television station. Rabbi Youlus has been honored in synagogue ceremonies. Video of one such ceremony is visible on the PBS "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" website. It was televised nationally in the United States.

From the Washington Post, "with great fanfare, the Torah from Auschwitz was dedicated in New York on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2008. Months later, on the Jewish New Year, the congregation again took the Torah down from its imposing two-tiered ark. In his sermon, Rabbi Rubinstein repeated the story of the Torah's wondrous rescue from the killing fields of Oswiecim [Please note the use here of the name of the Polish town – Oswiecim – rather than the name of the German, Nazi concentration camp – Auschwitz.] Reflecting back on that homily, he says: 'Remember, this was two days after the market dropped 700 points, and I was trying to talk about retrenching, not financial retrenching, [but] what are the things that are the anchors of our lives.'"

As the Washington Post put it, "The stories Youlus has told over the years resonate so powerfully because they meld this centerpiece of the Jewish religion with the cataclysm of the Holocaust, providing a reassuring sense of continuity and hope. As survivors, Youlus's Torahs are brought out for Holocaust Remembrance Day, they're used to teach lessons in religious schools, and for many people, such as Robert Kushner, they have become part of a deeply personal family narrative. Youlus says in a video on the Save-a-Torah Web site: 'Every single Torah that I rescued has a story.'"

The Rabbi's "fundraising video describes Youlus's rescue operation in dramatic fashion. While a violin plays a mournful tune, supporters give testimonials. The screen flashes archival photos of concentration camp barracks and piles of desecrated Torah scrolls. The message is clear: Make a donation so Youlus can parachute in, rescue these fragile survivors and breathe new life into the ancient text known as the Tree of Life."

Note the phrase: "Youlus can parachute in." into what kind of geography does one "parachute in"? One "parachutes in" to chaotic danger zones in which more conventional transportation is not possible. Into what does Rabbi Youlus parachute? Into a scene of concentration camps and desecrated Jewish ritual objects, also known as Eastern Europe. In this Bieganski worldview, that is all that Eastern Europe is.

Shouldn't Eastern European countries be troubled by the removal of cultural items like Torah scrolls? No, says Save-a-Torah's president, investment banker Rick Zitelman of Rockville, Maryland.

"These Torahs do not belong to the people / organizations / museums / churches that hold them. They belonged to synagogues or Jewish communities or families that were destroyed or killed during the Holocaust … These stolen Torahs are no different than art that was stolen from Jews by the Nazis and others, and is now being returned to its rightful owners."

"Many state museums and archives in Eastern Europe – including some in former monasteries – do hold hundreds of scrolls. And half a dozen major Jewish organizations, backed by the U.S. State Department, have been pressing governments in the region to return them to Jewish hands in an orderly fashion.

Wesley Fisher, director of research for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, is working on the issue. He acknowledges that the slow pace of negotiations 'leads many people to think, 'Well, they should just be taken.' 'But he says he believes the Jewish people should not 'repeat theft,' and with the revival of Jewish life in the region, it's 'not a matter for individuals to decide in cowboy-like fashion' who should have these scrolls. Such decisions should be made in consultation with local communities, he says. Fisher adds: 'I'm not aware that Save-a-Torah is actually trying to deal with Torahs that are held in government hands in the countries of Eastern Europe.'"

Rabbi Youlus' supporters include billionaire David Rubenstein, 60, co-founder and managing director of the Carlyle Group and "Leila Gal Berner – a historian who has taught at leading universities – [who] stands by Youlus even after being informed of [conflicting] facts and of Youlus's denial. In an e-mail, she skirts the question of what the scribe told her about the Torah's origins. "I believe that Rabbi Youlus is an honest man who is doing holy work," she says. "I believe that he must navigate complicated territory in order to find and rescue the Torah scrolls he finds." "For Gal Berner, rescuing a scroll like hers means 'that community didn't die when Hitler tried to kill it.'"

***

Now for the truth. Rabbi Menachem Youlus is a liar and a con artist who defrauded donors for his own personal gain. He may have stolen as much as one million dollars.

Rabbi Youlus never went to Eastern Europe. The only overseas trip he had ever taken was a two-week visit to Israel.

None of the Torahs Rabbi Youlus sold were, in fact, from Eastern Europe at all.

When confronted with the truth of what Youlus was doing, many continued to support him.

Rabbi Shoshana Hantman said, "'I hope you've read 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' At the end, a truth is concealed for the better good of the community … If there is any deception going on ... also think about what he's done that's good." She wrestles with what she has heard. "Destroying this man, if he is guilty of what you suspect, may very well be in service of the truth but in disservice of a greater truth," Hantman says. What, for Hantman, is the greater truth? "The Jewish reverence for the past, for heritage and for those who suffered and died because of the Nazis."

"Perhaps, as sociologist Samuel Heilman says: 'There's a sensitivity because of Holocaust denial. If you say some stories aren't true, you may have to say that all stories are not true. So best not to touch on a sensitive topic.' Heilman – who has written numerous books about Jewish communities and is a professor at City University of New York – suggests that some American Jews feel guilty: 'They didn't manage to rescue the people, so they rescue the Torahs.' Clark University professor Deborah Dwork, co-author of a history of Auschwitz, has her own theory: 'The loss was so devastating that we crave tales of survival.'"

More defenses of Rabbi Youlus can be found at vosizneias site 47758 and The Jewish Channel's article "Leading Open Orthodox Rabbi Defends Alleged Fraudster."

***

The saga of Rabbi Youlus invokes many dark themes: gullibility, betrayal, pathological liars and those who enable them. Compounding all this is Youlus' shameless exploitation of the Holocaust. In turn, neo-Nazi websites exploit the Rabbi Youlus story for their own sick, nefarious ends: smearing all Jews and Holocaust denial.

***

This blog post will not address any of these themes. Rather, this blog post's main idea is already obvious to anyone who has read "Bieganski": The Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype is such a given, such a constant, in American and Western culture that it played an essential role facilitating Rabbi Youlus' lucrative scam.

The pinnacle, the crème-de-la-crème, of American university scholars, and attorneys, and financiers, and journalists, and television personalities, and religious leaders, are so imbued with, so steeped through, so marinated in the Bieganski stereotype, Bieganski is so firmly nestled in their limbic systems and the marrow of their bones, Bieganski is so much the canonical text, the bread and butter, of the Ivory Tower and television and film and scholarly publications and the mainstream press, that when a pathological con artist like Youlus, through whom they should have seen as if he were a pane of glass, comes along to sell them a bridge, they buy it, because it fits into their stereotypical view of Eastern Europe as a land populated by still-living Nazis and crafty, venal peasants who build their pigsties out of Jewish gravestones and Catholic priests who hide their true, Jewish identity for sixty years under counterfeit cassocks and concentration camps and border guards who threaten heroic rabbis with exile to Siberia.

Those who believe in and promote the racist and revisionist Bieganski stereotype call the shots on all fronts in American and Western culture. Those who challenge Bieganski are not hired and are demonized and silenced.

And Polonia, Poles and other Bohunks do not do one thing about this abysmal state of affairs, and they aren't going to begin to do anything about this until they address the crisis in Polonian leadership, organization, and vision, described here.

Hey, folks, If you're not going to do anything about the Bieganski stereotype, I'm going to use it.

Holland: Anti-Polish & Anti-Bohunk Immigrant Website

2012-02-18T16:32:00.000-05:00

Source.

A Dutch political party has launched a website opposing Polish and other Bohunk immigration. Below please find Google's translation of the text on this website:

"REPORTING CENTRAL and EASTERN EUROPEANS

Since May 1, 2007 there is free movement of workers between the Netherlands and eight countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries. At present the estimates to the number of people from these countries, which resides in the Netherlands, apart from 200,000 to 350,000 people. As one of the few parties, the Freedom Party from the beginning against the opening of the labor market to Poland and other CEE nationals. Given all the problems associated with the massive arrival of especially Poland, is that attitude materialized. Recently, the PVV whatsoever against further opening of the labor market for Romanians and Bulgarians voted.

This massive labor migration leads to many problems, nuisance, pollution, displacement and integration in the labor and housing problems. For many people, these things a serious problem. Complaints are often not reported, because the idea that nothing is done.

Do you have trouble of CEE nationals? Or have you lost your job on a Pole, Bulgarian, Romanian or other Central or Eastern European? We would like to hear. The Freedom Party has a platform on this website to your symptoms to report. These complaints, we will identify and offer the results to the Minister of Social Affairs and Employment.

Submit your story here"

The website is here.

Many thanks to Otto for this story. Otto's previous posts can be found here and here.

The Tim Burton School of Polish-Jewish Relations. By a Guest Author.

2012-02-14T11:30:00.001-05:00

Since Danusha's accident will make it hard for her to post for the next little while, Don Freidkin has kindly offered the following guest blog entry.

Don Freidkin is a Texan of Russian- and Georgian-Jewish descent. His great-grandparents migrated from the Black Sea to Anniston, Alabama. His extended family includes director William Friedkin and character actor Joel Friedkin.

Don Freidkin is a writer, producer, and director. He has taught at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, and has managed two Webby award-winning online communities.

Freidkin has been generously and enthusiastically boosting his friend Danusha Goska's writing for over fifteen years. Freidkin's contribution to Bieganski the Blog is below.

***

The Tim Burton School of Polish-Jewish Relations

I am a huge fan of film director Tim Burton. In his 1996 film "Mars Attacks!", Burton created an homage to 1950s science-fiction films. In "Mars Attacks!", President James Dale (Jack Nicholson) makes a moving speech to the Martian ambassador after the invading Martians have destroyed much of human civilization. Nicholson is so impassioned that when he utters the cliché line, "Can't we all just get along?" it seems fresh and new, and moves even the tearful Martian ambassador to offer his hand in friendship.

Except that Burton will not let the screenplay get away with that, so the Martian ambassador's hand turns out to be a murder device that stabs the president through the back.

Burton, the cynical director who manages to force fantasy and reality into an uneasy marriage that somehow works at least until the end credits, may well be right most of the time. But now and again, we humans manage to rise above the muck in which we prefer to wallow, and to do something magnificent.

Now and again has rolled around yet once more, and if we need a clue how to behave, I suggest the text from Matthew 8:22: "let the dead bury their dead."

We've fought the battles of World War II long enough. We've shoveled over the traces of Jewish pogroms in Poland – real or propagandized – long enough. We've bickered and drenched the ground in Israel with blood and argued over ancient history long enough.

What's done is done, and short of taking care never again to allow any of that to happen, let's just, as a species, unilaterally declare that enough is enough, the past is gone, and nothing we can do will change that.

So, "let the dead bury their dead."

Eleven million corpses – Jews, Gypsies, communists, dissidents, Eastern European partisans – are quite enough, thank you. They make that which was once human beings with hopes, dreams, aspirations, hungers, loves and hates, a great reeking pile of meat rotting in the sun, because we will not let them be buried.

And the stench of history is warping our perceptions of who we are and who we could be, so the world we could make for one another to live in with love and joy recedes even further as we become more like the Nazis we loathe and fear.

And the answer, I think, is simplicity itself: "let the dead bury their dead."

Those who know me will be surprised – appalled, perhaps – to see me quoting scripture like some West Texas Bible thumper, but having done it once to bolster my case, I'll do it again; this time Romans 12:19. The apostle Paul, quoting Deuteronomy 32:35, says, "for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, said the Lord."

So what it boils down to is that whatever wrongs may have been done, whatever evil people have visited upon their fellow humans, our only business is to do our best to avoid a repeat performance, especially if we ourselves are in danger of becoming the performers, and let God take care of the rest.

I don't have a direct line to the mind of God, and in fact, I'm none too sure whether there's anyone on the other end of that line, but I'm tired of waiting on God, and I suggest we take it upon ourselves to leave the dirty work to the Lord, who seems to want it, and get on with building a paradise here for all of us.

Building paradise is not only within our grasp, it is in our job description.

So in answer to Burton's question, "Can't we all just get along?" I say, "Damned straight we can."

Enough is enough. Let's just do it.

***

The "Mars Attacks!" scene Don mentions is very good and can be seen here.

Enigma: The Real Ultra Secret or "Sekret Enigmy." By a Guest Author.

2012-02-07T08:53:00.002-05:00

A Nazi Enigma machine. Source

Marian Rejewski. Source.

Jerzy Rozycki. Source.

Henryk Zygalski. Source.

Since Danusha's accident will make it difficult for her to post for the next little while, I thought I'd attempt to keep the dialog – and the pride in Polish heritage – flowing.

There are many unsung heroes from World War Two. I'm a World War Two devotee, and in researching a book on a mystery from that period, I have come across many stories that I've never heard before. Some stories are forgotten. Some of the stories morph into half-truths designed to suit the storyteller's purpose. Repeat the lie enough – including lies of omission – and it becomes the popular notion of history. Make the lie into a movie and the truth doesn't stand a chance.

Anyone who has looked at World War Two history will have heard about the importance of Ultra. "Ultra" was the British code name for, inter alia, the British breaking of the German cipher machine, Enigma. It is arguably the most important secret of the war – the other contender would be radar. Both of these helped turn the tide of the war. The Manhattan Project which created the atomic bomb, also important, had a number of Polish scientists contributing to its success, but this was late in the war. It may make another good topic to discuss for another blog. But I digress!

So, as I was saying, The British broke the German Enigma code…There, I just perpetuated the lie. It is that easy.

Now before everyone starts sending notes saying that I wasn't lying and that the Brits really did break Enigma at Bletchley Park, please read on.

One of the critical factors in the Allied victory and the Nazi defeat during World War Two was the Allies' ability to read Axis secret messages. Enigma was the device used to protect those secret messages. Breaking it became a project called Ultra. The ability to read these messages gave the Allies first-hand knowledge of Axis military plans. This allowed the Allies to take back control of the Atlantic from the marauding U-boat packs, to create tactics to maximize the Allies' efforts with a minimum of resources, and to assure that the Axis battle was costly in resources and men. Many other benefits resulted from breaking Enigma.

This history played a role in my own life.

I was working at a camera store in 1980 with a guy named Pete who was studying math and cryptography at a college in New Jersey. He and his professor, Cipher or Cy for short, were my introduction into codes, ciphers and cryptography. Cy's father had worked on breaking the Japanese equivalent cipher machine, PURPLE, as part of the Magic program run by the Americans.

One day, Cy showed up in the camera store with a wooden box and plopped the box down on the counter. It was a little bigger than an old manual portable typewriter.

It was a three-rotor Enigma! I was in the presence of history.

Cy had purchased the machine in Britain. Unfortunately, the purchase was illegal. It caused Cy years of legal difficulties. Eventually he would have to return the Enigma to Britain.

Years later, I was sitting in a library researching cryptography. I came across references to broken Enigma coded messages. These particular messages allowed the Allies to select among the Axis ships that were headed out of North Africa towards Italy. The Allies would sink some of these ships; other ships were allowed safe passage. Ships carrying military supplies were targeted for sinking, while ships with wounded soldiers were allowed safe passage. This was not for humanitarian reasons, but because one wounded, captured enemy soldier tied up approximately ten support staff and diverted money and supplies to keep them alive – money and supplies that would otherwise go towards bombs and bullets.

My dad was a wounded Nazi soldier. He was on one of those ships out of North Africa that had been allowed safe passage by the Allies.

My dad's ship was saved from being sunk by the Allies because Enigma had told them which ships were which. I wouldn't be here now, most likely, if it weren't for Poles breaking Enigma. A real OMG moment.

***

Enciphering changes plain text messages into unreadable gibberish through an algorithm for conversion along with an agreed upon key. The encrypted message is then transmitted and decrypted back into the original message using the key on the receiving end. Anyone intercepting the secret, encrypted text without the keys and the device used will have a lot of guesses before they can puzzle out the message. For messages concerning military operations where time is essential, this may make breaking the messages impractical.

The Enigma machine was invented by a German engineer early in the twentieth century. The simpler three-rotor version of the Enigma would allow for something like 10^22^nd possible solutions.

Another way of thinking about that number would be to imagine something like a Rubik's Cube with a message written on each mini-cube surface. By twisting and turning the facets we encrypt the message. If we know the magic key – in this case the twists and turns used to encrypt – we can undo encryption easily. If we don't we need a way of recreating the message or figuring the key. Brute force guesses are one way.

The Rubik's Cube example is much simpler than the 10 followed by 22 zeroes of possible combinations to guess for Enigma messages.

The five-rotor version increased the theoretical number of possible solutions dramatically and its messages were considered unbreakable by many experts, with something on the order of 10^92^ndpossibilities.

For perspective on how big a number that is there were about 10^16^th seconds between the Big Bang and WW2.

Before the Enigma could be used, the rotors were set to an agreed on sequence, changing the path of the electrical circuit. A cable is plugged into the front of the keypad, further randomizing the path of the circuit. Once this is done, pressing a key on the keyboard sends a signal through the rotors, lighting up the enciphered character on a display above the keyboard. The electromechanical device rotates and changes the path each time a key is pressed. Typing an 'A' one time may give an encrypted 'U' one time and another letter the next time it is pressed.

***

Movies and books, both fiction and non-fiction, have created popular impressions about Enigma that just aren't true.

The 2001 film "Enigma" is one of my favorites. It stars Academy-Award-winner Kate Winslet, it was produced by Rolling Stone Mick Jagger and Saturday-Night-Live creator Lorne Michaels, and written by multiple Academy-Award- and Tony-Award-winning Tom Stoppard.

"Enigma" is an entertaining, fictional account of how the British, working with some foreign nationals, figure out how to break Enigma messages.

There is an opening scene with German soldiers uncovering the unmarked mass grave of slaughtered Polish soldiers.

The film then moves to Bletchley Park in England, where cryptographers are at work breaking Enigma's coded messages.

The protagonist is a character named Jericho, a genius responsible for figuring out how to tackle Enigma messages through flaws in how the encryption occurs. His love interest is Claire, who may or may not be a Nazi spy.

A convoy of essential goods is sailing from America to England. The convoy is at risk from a U-boat wolf pack sitting in the Atlantic waiting to pounce. Jericho and a helpful, female clerk named Hester, who has a crush on the clueless Jericho, weave through a maze of intrigue and eventually figure out that there is a spy, but that the spy is not who the film's characters, nor the audience, suspect.

The real spy is a Polish cryptographer. He wants to disclose to the world that the Russian allies, not the Nazis, had killed the Polish soldiers buried in the mass grave shown in the opening scenes of the movie. This disclosure would reveal to the world that the British have broken Enigma. The disclosure would do serious damage to the Allied war effort.

Jericho saves the day, the Pole is blown up and the secret that the British have broken Enigma is kept safe. The Nazis continue unwittingly to reveal their battle plans.

Why do I like this cheesy film? There aren't many movies with cryptography at the heart of the story.

Since this is fiction, a little literary license and suspension of disbelief are in order and acceptable. But I worry that so many people "learn" history through movies. "It must be true. I saw it in a movie."

It is odd that they picked a Pole as the traitor though, don't you think?

In non-fiction, there should be no such freedom, right? Factual unadulterated truth, right?

Well, not so much.

Let's look at two canonical, authoritative, non-fiction books about Ultra.

One is "The Ultra Secret" by F.W. Winterbotham. The other, written by Ronald Lewin, is entitled "Ultra Goes to War". Enigma was a state secret until the 70's, and these two books were some of the first to deal with the subject.

Winterbotham's book tells the story of how the Brits broke Enigma, repeating the popular half-truth. Polish contributions and breakthroughs are never mentioned. The lie of omission.

Lewin's book tells the story of how Polish cryptographers, from 1928, started to work on breaking the Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine ciphers. In 1929, coded messages were picked up by electronic intelligence listening posts, also known as ELINT, at stations located in Warsaw, Starogard near Danzig, Poznan and Krzeslawice near Cracow. Attempts at breaking the messages were fruitless and the Cipher Office, or Biuro Szyfrow of the Polish Army's General Staff, reached out for academic help. That help came from the Dean of the Mathematics Department at the University of Poznan, Professor Zdzislaw Krygowski. He made up a list of his students who would be the best candidates for the Ciphers Office. These candidates then went through a cryptography course developed by the Cipher Office.

Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski would reverse engineer replicas of the German Enigma machine, develop early electromechanical computers called the Bomba, or bomba kryptologiczna, which exploit weaknesses in the starting positions of the Enigma messages, allowing them to break Enigma.

They did all this without the fanfare they deserved.

That's the real Ultra secret!

Slowly bits and pieces came out, but "history" is more or less set in stone that the British did it all!

Machines were developed to test potential guesses of the key used for that day's messages. These devices were called Bombes. The attempts at guesses were based on weak hints or cheats called, cribs. A Bombe was set to try and break the message with a crib, until a word might appear and give the cryptographers an idea that a solution was found. The Bombe was a precursor to the modern computer. The British scientist, Alan Turing, the head of Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, is credited with inventing the Bombe. While he did do the groundwork for modern computing, giving Turing credit for the Bombe is another fallacy.

While Turing's Bombe used a different methodology for attacking Enigma, conceptually it originates with the Pole's Bomba created by Rejewski in 1938. Clearly, Turing is every bit of the genius history credits him, maybe more, but the Poles were just as amazing. To put it into perspective, think of trying to recreate television without a working model of a TV set. All you have is rough, second-hand knowledge of what TV looks like and how it operates. Further, imagine that the frequencies change daily.

In the book "British Intelligence," it is suggested that the Poles decided to share their Enigma-breaking techniques and equipment with the French and British because they had encountered technical difficulties. Rejewski refuted this, saying "No, it was not cryptologic difficulties that prompted us to work with the British and French, but only the deteriorating political situation."

Using a weaker, commercial version of the Enigma the team was able to start working on mathematical attacks towards breaking the code. With the help of the French Deuxieme Bureau, a Reichswehr cipher clerk handed over old keys, and in December of 1932, Rejewski was able to reverse engineer the military grade Enigma machine's internal connections of rotors. Between 1933 and 1939, the Poles were able to decode 100,000 transmissions. AVA Radio Workshops in Warsaw built replicas and by August 1939, seventy units were produced.

In 1938 the Germans upgraded to a new version of the Enigma with five rotors, inhibiting the Poles from reading messages, with sixty Bombas necessary instead of six.

Chief-of-Staff Lt. General Waclaw Stachiewicz authorized the Cipher Office to share everything they had learned about Enigma with the Allies in July of 1939. Poland gave the Allies Enigma replicas during a meeting in Warsaw July 24-26, 1939, enabling the British to start reading messages in August of 1939.

With the fall of Poland in September of 1939, the Cipher Office moved to Romania. Towards the end of September of 1939, Rejewski, Zygalski, and Rozycki escaped to France and in October, set up a French-Polish radio intelligence center, codenamed "Bruno," with links feeding the British Government Code and Ciphers School.

In June, 1940 the unit deciphered preparations by the Germans to attack France and were evacuated to Algiers, with the Poles enrolled into the Polish Armed Forces, Branch 300 of the II Directorate.

They would return to France in October, 1940 working for an underground unit named "Cadix" in the city of Fouzes.

Tragically, Jerzy Rozycki died January 9, 1942 when the ship he was traveling on, the Lamoriciere, was sunk.

Henryk Zygalski passed away in Liss, England August 30, 1978.

In November, 1942, due to the threat that ELINT efforts by the Germans might capture the cryptographic unit, Rejewski and Zygalski were sent to Spain, then Gibraltar, and finally England.

All the while they were breaking key messages from campaigns in North Africa and European fronts!

The British refused to allow the Poles access to the full suite of British efforts for security reasons.

More than a slap in the face of the true inventors! Stupid pride that most likely hobbled Allied efforts.

Marion Rejewski passed away at the age of 74 on February 13, 1980. A year and half before, he gave a tape-recorded interview with Richard Woytak. The text was transcribed and published in a book entitled, "Cryptology: Machines, History and Methods" by Deavours, Kahn, Kruh, Melen and Winke.

Small rewards for such a giant contribution to the world and humanity.

It is my hope that we can give these heroes the tributes they so richly deserve.

We should broadcast the real story of how Polish efforts broke Enigma and helped save the day. For those of you who are religious, keep these men in your prayers. The rest can thank their lucky stars for these guys!

Slowly, people are telling the truth. In newer editions, "The Code Breakers" – the Bible of everything crypto – added corrections telling the true story of Poland's contribution. Be forewarned through, this is not a book to curl up with on the couch in front of a fire; it's almost 1200 pages long – and every bit a great crypto-geek read!

There is a 1979 Polish film, "Sekret Enigmy", directed by Roman Wionczek, written by Stanislaw Strumph-Wojtkiewicz and Roman Wionczek. I haven't seen it yet. I'll let you know how it is, once I do – but let's be frank, it's a war movie about cryptography!!! It's going to be great and I'm going to love it!

I don't begrudge the British and American efforts in cryptography during the war. There are many more unsung heroes – sadly too many. My own work is attempting to bring light to a group most have never heard of, and each time we can we should all make sure the whole story sees the light of day.

The dedication for Lewin's book, "Ultra Goes to War" reads:

"To the Poles who sowed the seed and to those who reaped the harvest."

I hope you've found the truth about Enigma enlightening and inspiring. Tell others about this and the other proud moments in Polish history. Don't let your heritage be subverted or ignored and do your part to make sure this story is no longer secret.

Otto

***

Otto's previous contribution to the blog, "Ripples of Sin," can be read here.

"What We Sign Up For" Poems by Lisa L. Siedlarz

2012-01-31T09:32:00.000-05:00

Buy at Amazon.

I strongly encourage readers to buy and read "What We Sign Up For," Poems by Lisa L. Siedlarz. These poems are moving and pertinent. Siedlarz's brother served with the US military in Afghanistan. Her sisterly love for him inspires these poems that bring home to the reader the average soldier's, and the military family's, experience.

Siedlarz's style is accessible. People who don't normally read poetry will respond to these poems, and find much of worth in them. Siedlarz uses everyday language to talk about war experiences, experiences from which most of us are sheltered.

Siedlarz's concrete, everyday vocabulary does not equate a disinterest in creating art. Her hard-hitting, merciless style serves her subject matter. In an Amazon review, Michelle B. Buhr wrote, "The rhythm of the poems is uneven and staccato – almost like gunfire – and you're never quite sure what is going to happen next." That's exactly right.

While reading the poems, I felt as if I were overhearing bits of passing conversations in a public place, like a supermarket, where most of the shoppers were sisters and mothers and fathers and brothers of American active-duty military personnel. These discontinuous bits of conversation offer a warm-blooded, politically incorrect, grittily realistic take on war.

You can't help but think, while reading this book, how sheltered we Americans are to the realities and consequences of America's military adventures in the age of the drone assassination and the volunteer military. I live most of my life never giving a thought to the soldiers fighting and dying in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Without the draft, we all know that neither we nor our loved ones will be sent by force to Iraq or Afghanistan. So, we can just ignore the whole thing. We can ignore the vets coming home with brain trauma from improvised explosive devices. We can ignore the mourning families. I'm personally grateful to Lisa Siedlarz for doing her part to put these realities in front of readers' eyes.

Siedlarz's brief poems, in a short book, span the military experience: a sister learns that her brother has enlisted; he is in a training camp with cockroaches so large one is a "pet," in derelict buildings that had been slated for demolition but recruited back into service for soldiers; soldiers have intimate encounters with host country nationals, some of whom provide the warmest hospitality they can under Third World conditions, including cleaning a drinking glass with spit, and begging the Americans to stay; dead and dying bodies; casualty notification officers, military personnel whose job it is to inform families of their loved one's deaths.

In the first poem, "Song of War," Siedlarz's brother, a GI plumber, "looks up from a clogged toilet during live feed of a second plane." She's referring to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, but does not say so explicitly. Subsequent poems follow this style. World historical events are seen through the details of average people's day to day experiences.

Siedlarz's details are the details that would only be found only in a book by someone intimate with the military experience, including vivid details about wounds, slang, and camels. "Soldiers write home for queen-sized pantyhose to stave off sand fleas and sores." "Moisture-wick clothes melt to skin from the heat transfer of bullets." Of a hospitalized bombing victim, Siedlarz writes, "Where's his foot? … Still in the traffic circle." Exposed human flesh can resemble tenderloin. "Anti-Taliban forces are the most macho fighters we know, and the gayest … women are for children, men for love." Newspaper headlines take on a new, ridiculous tone to someone whose brother is in uniform: "Marines trade gunfire with Taliban." Is this like trading baseball cards? The most beautiful line in the book: "Bury me in the sand and I will envy how clouds move on like breath."

Lisa Siedlarz. Source.

Bieganski and NPR's "This American Life."

2012-01-22T15:14:00.000-05:00

Ira Glass, host of "This American Life." Source.

Erin Einhorn. Source.

The National Public Radio Show "This American Life" has been hugely successful. Here's their self-description, from their webpage:

"This American Life is a weekly public radio show broadcast on more than 500 stations to about 1.8 million listeners. It … has won all of the major broadcasting awards. It is also often the most popular podcast in the country, with around 700,000 people downloading each week. [A televised version] won three Emmys … a half dozen stories from the radio show are being developed into films."

In September, 2002, in the episode, "Fake ID: Pole Vault," "This American Life" broadcast the Bieganski stereotype.

New York Daily News reporter Erin Einhorn traveled to Krakow, Poland's Festival of Jewish Culture.

This American Life's host, Ira Glass (cousin of prize-winning composer Philip Glass) and Einhorn told their audience the following:

Jews were wiped out in Poland. By using the passive voice and never mentioning the Nazis or the Germans (a rhetorical tactic similar to that used in Pier 21's Holocaust revisionist film "Oceans of Hope"), and through false analogies equating Poles to European settlers and Jews to Native Americans, and Poles to slaveholders and Jews to slaves, Ira Glass and Erin Einhorn communicate that Poles committed a genocide against Poland's Jews.

An example of the use of passive voice: Poland is "where the Jewish population had been exterminated." If we change this sentence to active voice, we get, "where Nazis exterminated Jews." That's not what "This American Life" says, though – again, they never mention either Nazis or Germans, as a search of their transcript reveals.

An example of a false analogy: Poles listening to Jewish music is comparable to white Americans listening to African American music. Poles = white Americans; Jews = slaves. Not so. Jews were not slaves in Poland; Polish Christians were enserfed, and at times Jewish arendars had the power of life and death over Polish, Christian serfs.

In another false analogy, Poles = European settlers and Jews = Native Americans. Poles listening to Jewish music is comparable to Americans listening to Native American music "after we've driven them off the land." There is so much wrong with this analogy I don't know where to start.

Another: Poles reported to Einhorn that their grandparents remembered Jewish friends. This is denounced; Glass and Einhorn decide that this is comparable to Americans saying, "some of my best friends are Jewish," a clichéd American phrase meant to indicate prejudice.

In short, no matter what Poles do or say, in the privacy of their radio studio, with no Poles present, Einhorn and Glass present Poles' words and actions in the worst possible light, with the worst possible spin, to an American audience who will have no idea of the historical inaccuracies.

Poles, out of psychotic guilt and a desire to appropriate the Jewish essence, now carry out Krakow's Festival of Jewish Culture, which is really "creepy and disturbing," because, after all, it was Poles who committed the Holocaust.

There is "actually," "This American Life" reports, a Polish woman who reads Isaac Bashevis Singer. How dare she!

Krakow's Festival of Jewish Culture is "kitschy and funny" because it is located so close to Auschwitz, where, "This American Life" implies, Poles killed Jews.

Here's a very interesting, ironic aspect of this broadcast.

Glass and Einhorn insist that it is a very bad thing that Poles play Jewish music, buy and read Jewish books, and study Jewish history. Poles are Jews' "enemy" and they "dress as" Jews "only for their own pleasure and amusement" and as part of an effort to erase Jews.

Here's the ironic part: Glass and Einhorn are the only ones allowed to define Polish people and Polish culture. Glass and Einhorn are the only ones allowed to inform the audience as to why Poles are interested in Jewish culture. Glass and Einhorn tell the audience what Krakow's Festival of Jewish Culture is all about.

Glass and Einhorn speak. Poles are silenced.

It is, in fact, Glass and Einhorn who are "dressed as Poles," "for their own pleasure and amusement."

That is what is known as appropriation.

Appropriation is exactly what Glass and Einhorn accuse Poles of doing – Glass and Einhorn insist that Poles are stealing Jewish culture, but it is Einhorn and Glass who are committing this crime of appropriation. And they show zero awareness of it.

This is bigotry, and irony, par excellence.

Key quotes from the show's transcript, which, again, never mentions either Nazis or Germans, but purports to tell the truth of the Holocaust in Poland:

"Erin went to live in Poland … She was Jewish, and she was scared of anti-Semitism. Now, many Poles will tell you that this prejudice is completely unfair. But Erin lost Polish family members in the Holocaust. And Poland's where some of the most infamous concentration camps operated, Auschwitz and Birkenau and Treblinka."

Einhorn: "I'd only heard one thing about Poland my entire life, from my mother, from my grandparents, that they [Poles] had always hated Jews. And they had always wanted to see Jews killed. And then, when the Holocaust started to happen, they were happy to see it happen, and they were collaborators. Even though my mother was saved by a Pole, that was always told to me as, well, she only did it for the money."

The cherry on the sundae: "This American Life" misspelled "Krakow" on their webpage. (They've since corrected their misspelling.)

"Krakow" is really not all that hard to spell. In English, it's "Cracow." In Polish, it's "Krakow." Glass and Einhorn defined Poles and Poland for their listeners, and they could not even spell the name of the city about which they wrote.

***

Back in 2002 I wrote a letter to "This American Life" about "Fake ID: Pole Vault." Of course the letter did no good, any more than individual letters that unorganized Poles send today do any good. We need to change our tactics.

Here are some snips from my letter to "This American Life."

No, as the September 22 segment of "This American Life" suggested, the Holocaust was not invented nor perpetrated by Poles. The Holocaust was a Nazi project that victimized Poles. Millions of Poles, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were murdered by the Nazis, millions more were enslaved. Auschwitz was first built, and functioned, for almost the first two years of its existence, as a concentration camp for Poles incarcerated and murdered as Poles. The country also suffered tremendous material damage. Nazi teams were dispatched with instructions to destroy Polish museums, churches, and monuments.

The victimization of Polish Jews, a literal genocide, was greater than that of Polish non-Jews; that fact does not countenance "This American Life"'s ideology-driven erasure of the suffering of tortured, murdered, and enslaved Polish non-Jews.

By comparing Polish non-Jews' appreciation of Jewish cultural productions with American whites appropriation of Native American or African American forms, Einhorn and Glass all but stated, "The Polaks murdered all the Jews in the Holocaust, and then they stole the Jews' culture and started making money at it."

There are at least two things wrong with "This American Life's" logic here.

First, no, as Ira Glass and Erin Einhorn insisted, Poles are not stealing "Our" American, Jewish culture, when they sing Polish-Jewish songs, read authors like Isaac Bashevis Singer or eat at Jewish restaurants. Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example, did not write much about modern Americans like Ira Glass or Erin Einhorn. He wrote, mostly, about Poland, about a life and a culture and a cuisine that Poles and Jews created together and significantly shared.

Long before the Holocaust, Poles, Jewish and non-Jewish, were sharing cultural productions, not to mention, given intermarriage, gene pools. In the classic Polish play, "The Wedding," a menorah decorates a Christian home. Scholar Anna Maria Orla Bukowska has described how the Polish Christians she studied knew, respected, and incorporated much of Jewish culture. Functioning for their neighbors as "Sabbath goys," or even merely as friends, they learned Yiddish words and Jewish customs and adopted those they admired. Influences flowed both ways. David Buxton has written of how Eastern European folk architecture influenced Jewish synagogues.

Polish-Jewish sociologists like Aleksander Hertz, authors like Eva Hoffman, and children of Polish Jews like Ralph Slovenko wrote of how Polish cultural features, such as disputativeness and humor, found their way into Jewish culture, and eventually came to be thought of as typically Jewish. Slovenko wrote that, as a Jew, he feels culturally at home with Eastern Europeans in a way that he does not with Israelis or American Jews.

Klezmer music didn't spring from Ira Glass' or Erin Einhorn's American world. It is not related to the music of American or Canadian Jews like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Neil Diamond. Klezmer sprang from the musical traditions of Eastern Europe. As even the most cursory of hearings would reveal, it is comparable to non-Jewish musical traditions among Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, and Rom peasants.

Second, no, as the September 22 edition of "This American Life" insisted, Poles did not first begin to show appreciation for Jewish culture after the Holocaust. According to scholars of Polish-Jewish relations, including Jewish ones like Harold B. Segel, Poland has long been unique among European nations for its philo-semitism, expressed, for example, in Polish art literature. Polish authors like Eliza Orzeszkowa plunged into Jewish culture and life, learned Yiddish, and wrote of Jewish life with great intimacy, sympathy and detail. They did this long before the Nazi Holocaust was even imagined.

No, Poles did not sit idly by while Ira Glass and Erin Einhorn's grandmothers were being persecuted in the Holocaust. Poland produced Zegota, the only underground group devoted exclusively to the rescue of Jews, and the largest number of national rescuers honored at Yad Vashem. This in spite of their being, as historian Michael Steinlauf, himself the child of Holocaust survivors, wrote, after Jews and Gypsies, the third most persecuted national group in Hitler's Europe. Yes, there were Polish traitors and collaborators. Sadly, there were also Jewish ones. To hold these failures up as representatives of either group is a stance that neither group should accept.

My research has shown that as young American Jews know less and less about Poland, they adopt, more and more, bigoted anti-Polish attitudes. I have interviewed college-educated young adults who are completely unaware of the presence of any non-Jews at Auschwitz, completely unaware of Zegota, completely unaware of people like Jan Karski, and who insist that all Poles were Nazis.

***

As ever, I repeat: Don't blame the Jews. Polonia has many Jewish allies. We need, rather, to look to ourselves, to our own self-sabotage. We are responsible for the Bieganski stereotype, because we could work to change it, and we are not doing that work. We could start here.

In a subsequent post, I hope to write about a recent "This American Life" program that got Poland very right.

Rye Bread, Kielbasa, and Kraut. Healing and Heartbreak, Of Course.

2012-01-15T16:27:00.000-05:00

source

Confession: I almost never eat what most Americans, including most Polish-Americans, think of as "Polish food": pierogies, kielbasa, "bigos" – hunter's stew, or "kotlet schabowy" – breaded, fried pork cutlet.

As I'll detail below, though, what most Polish-Americans think of as Polish food really wasn't authentic Polish food at all.

Another confession: I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal and I fell in love with my dream cuisine in the Himalayan Mountains of the Indian subcontinent. From the poorest peasant homes in the shadow of Mount Everest, to street stalls in Bombay, I never had bad food. Well, some of the food was tainted, yes, and I did get every intestinal parasite you can imagine, but that was a small price to pay to discover this cuisine. It's low-fat, satisfying, nutritious, and easy to digest (when it's not tainted).

Indian-Nepali meals are based on combinations of legumes and grains or other starches that produce complete protein. A meal is typically rice plus lentils, or wheat chapattis plus chickpeas, or chickpeas plus potatoes, or, if you are really lucky, some dairy product like raita – yogurt with some spices and maybe a bit of shredded cucumber. How we would yearn, up in the hills, how we would talk about it for days, if we hit the trifecta – rice AND lentils AND yogurt. Rounding out the meal are vegetables and hot, spicy, maddeningly flavorful achars. One of my favorite achars is made from unripe mangos, garlic, salt, hot pepper, spices like fenugreek, and mustard oil. Mouth-watering. My mouth, right now, is watering.

In a tiny, isolated, Himalayan settlement – can't really call it a village – an illiterate and barefoot woman with soot perpetually blackening her fingernails served me an achar made from "lapsi" – hog plum. I've never had this lapsi achar, or anything like it, anywhere else. The lapsi had a liquid, seductively elusive texture. Though surrounded by heat, it was cool. You'd catch it on your tongue and it would elude you – always tempting, never letting you feel secure of its taste or texture. As coy as a flirt at a dance. And this in a tiny mountain hamlet populated by subsistence farmers without electricity or running water who would never travel more than fifty miles in their entire lives. You've got to respect a cuisine that can produce moments like that.

I used to trek for weeks, up and down thousands of feet a day, saluting the sunrise under parrots winging overhead across sweltering river valleys and through fat rice paddies up to thigh-deep, snow-choked ten-thousand-foot passes, and do all that on a Nepali staple: roasted corn and soybeans. I felt strong and well fed. Never a hunger pang, never an upset stomach.

After my first Nepali meal of daal-bhaat-tarkari (lentils, rice, and vegetables) I never looked back. To this day, food to me is, primarily, rice and beans, lovingly handled fresh vegetables, and judiciously applied spices – always with something exotic and surprising in there to keep the tongue engaged, after yet another meal of rice and vegetables. But, alas, never anything as good as that long-ago lapsi achar.

Neither the Nazis nor Soviets ever reduced us to this. Source.

The harshest confession of all: Gastronomic Poles make me want to scream. Gastronomic Polonians are convinced that Polishness is something fatty and starchy that you put in your mouth. If you post a photo of a pierogi on your facebook page, that makes you REALLY Polish.

I wish the pierogi-brains would come to recognize, cherish, and respect Polish thought, Polish writing, Polish scholarship, the heroism of Polish minds and hearts, their fellow, living, Polonians. Someday, maybe. Someday. Meanwhile, I filter their facebook posts. Starch? Fat? The essence of Polishness? No. Please. No. Not the Nazis, nor the Soviets, ever reduced Polish identity to the triviality so beloved of gastronomic Polonians.

***

When I was living in Poland for a year, I bitterly wrote a Polish cookbook. Here it is, in its entirety: "Shoot it and fry it. Dig it up and boil it."

Admittedly, 1988-1989 was a bad year for Polish cuisine. Communism was dying and the comrades were really tightening the screws. I remember days spent just walking around Krakow, looking for something I might want to eat. If you saw people standing in line, you didn't ask. You just joined the queue, and bought whatever they were selling from the back of the truck, from oranges to carp.

After we, in an Orange Alternative protest, threw cartons of yogurt at a statue dedicated to the Soviet "liberation" of Poland, you couldn't buy yogurt in Krakow for love or money. Smalec – lard – seemed always to be available, and it amazed me that people actually wanted to eat it. In America eating lard would sound like a category of dementia. "Doctor, he's going mad. He insists on eating lard!" Or a form of slow-motion suicide. "He's trying to kill himself slowly. He keeps eating lard. Closing off one heart valve, and one taste bud, at a time."

Jacek, a Jagiellonian University student, was offered a scholarship to go to England. He sat me down and asked me to provide him with key sentences he'd need as soon as he got off the plane. His very first request: "How do you say, 'I want lard?'"

I gazed at Jacek with compassion. "Jacek, when you get to England, you won't have to eat lard." He could only look puzzled.

England was probably grateful to Soviet-era Poland for being one country that could, by comparison, make English cuisine appear appetizingly superior.

Communist Poland's dreadful food situation was encapsulated in jokes. Poland was the rebellious Soviet-bloc nation. After the crushing of the Prague Spring, the Czechs were seen as more obedient. Chronic food shortages were Poland's punishment for its refusal of the communist yoke. Czechoslovakia was rewarded with better consumer goods. Thus the joke:

Two dogs meet at the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Czech dog says, incredulously, to the Polish dog, "Why on earth are you trying to enter Czechoslovakia?"

The Polish dog responds, "I want to taste your meat." He, in turn, incredulous, asks the Czech dog, "Why on earth are you trying to enter Poland?"

The Czech dog responds, "I want to bark."

***

I did achieve gastronomic nirvana in Communist-era Poland, though: in spring, when the berries come into season, and flood the farmer's markets. You could step into any ramshackle stall on any side street and buy enough blueberries, at cheap enough a price, to dye your tongue purple.

zurek

I also loved zurek, fermented rye soup. Thick, sour, and hot – on overcast days, the soul craves it. Salad made from finely shredded cabbage, carrots, vinegar, salt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar: perfect. Zapiekanki: a split baguette, buttered mushrooms, mild, melted cheese. Nothing else. As yummy as anything you will eat anywhere, ever. And I love my kiszka, aka kaszanka, all the naysayers be damned. Buckwheat groats and blood stuffed into a pig's intestines: what's not to like? And headcheese.

I remember asking an ex-boyfriend, very American, if he wanted to meet my family. He said, "As long as they don't feed me anything made out of the head, intestines, or feet of a pig."

I was astounded. It was early in the relationship; I had not yet revealed to Captain America my closeted passion for kiszka or headcheese. And this guy had grown up in Ridgewood, N.J., an exclusive suburb of assimilated achievers, not at all a center of Polish butchers. Where did he get this idea of Poles as eating pig heads, feet, and intestines? Anyway, we do. Glad when that relationship ended. I've forgotten his name.

My mother told me that her first memory was the sound of a pig being slaughtered. Later a Croatian-born friend, Bruno Zovich, would tell me the same thing. I've since heard the sound of a pig being slaughtered, and I now understand.

My Slovak mother used to make a Slovak specialty: cow lungs. Slovak peasants made use of animal parts that others might ignore, including cow lungs. In 1971, the U.S. Wholesale Meat Act declared lungs unfit for human consumption. How do I know this? I remember it. It was a black day in our kitchen.
My mother announced to the family, in the kitchen, with great sadness, frustration, and grief, that the butcher told her that the American government had passed some kind of law outlawing human consumption of cow lungs, and the butcher wouldn't let her have them anymore. To her it was just further proof, along with Yalta, coal mines and American passivity during the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, that America was a perfidious nation bent on making the lives of Bohunks miserable. As good a theory as any.

My mother used to rhapsodize about a childhood treat in Slovakia: cakes made from beets. My mother and I finally returned to Slovakia, and our gold-toothed, black-clad relatives there, as part of immediately and thoroughly satisfying my mother's every whim, whims stored in mothballs since her tearful, forced departure decades before, cooked up some of these legendary beet cakes, cakes whose unique deliciousness I had heard heralded in praise songs all my life.
I ate one of the moist, hot, gritty, dirt-flavored, barely sweet, very heavy cakes and instantly barfed. I can still taste it, going down and coming back up again. I felt a surge of compassion for my mother. *This* was your special treat? The highlight of your childhood? No wonder you are the way you are. Beet cake and the squeals of slaughtered pigs. And the slivovice. Don't get me started on the slivovice. Do a blind taste test of slivovice and kerosene; see if you can detect a difference.

Goat milk. My mother always insisted that she had been raised on goat milk, not cow milk, like Americans, and that's why Slovaks were superior to Americans in every way – that early infusion of goat milk, and avoidance of cow milk. As good a theory as any.

***

One of the many things that gastronomic Poles don't get is that their idea of Polish food is not their ancestors' idea of Polish food. Most of us Poles descend from peasants. As Wyspianski put it in "The Wedding":

"There are people who despise me
Just because I'm peasant born.
When they see a scythe, they scoff.
How it makes me sad at heart.
We're all in this Polish stable
and we've all got peasant blood."

Polish peasants did not eat a lot of breaded pork cutlets. Probably not even a lot of pierogi.

In his beautifully written and invaluable memoir, "From Serfdom to Self-Government," Jan Slomka described the Polish peasant menu. It was painfully simple and there wasn't much meat. Food was potatoes, peas, beans, buckwheat, cabbage, bread, fish and eels, and maybe a pig a year. Wincenty Witos wrote, "There were months when we did not see a piece of bread." Sugar, citrus fruit, cucumbers, and tomatoes were inaccessible. "There would be every year with rare exceptions pre-harvest famine."

I experienced something like this menu when I went to visit my mother's village in Slovakia.

A big, immediate surprise: hunger. My Uncle John (Jan) did not even own a refrigerator. Why should he? If he wanted to eat something, he went into his field and harvested it, or to his stock animals and killed it. He went down to his cellar and sliced off some pig fat. He did purchase bread and yogurt at the store.

We visiting Americans were quickly hungry, and we really didn't know what to do about it. My mother, so aggressively Slovak in America, realized how American she was in Slovakia. These people were pulling out all the stops for us, but we weren't used to their ways. We weren't used to going hours without eating, and eating only what grew in the backyard.

Finally my mother pulled my Aunt Jolana aside and explained that I was hungry. My aunt immediately went into the backyard and killed a chicken.

I cried.

But I ate the damn chicken.

Chickens are often quite disgusting in their behavior. They like to eat luggies, something I saw too much of in Nepal. Some village guys, without other entertainments, would really get into feeding the chickens their spit. Also, chickens peck their fellows to death. This makes chickens easier to eat. Easier than, say, puppies. Well, you can dislike the chickens, but then you realize you are eating previously digested luggies and fellow chicken, and then you turn to the rice. At least until hunger and time cause you to forget the mental images of chickens eating spit and each other.

Slovakia was the first place I ate visible bugs in food. I'm something of a clean freak and had a real problem with bugs when I was a kid. My beloved Aunt Jolana served me chicken broth with bugs floating on top. I was so hungry, and I loved her so much, I spooned it all down. I wasn't so hungry, and I did not love her enough, to erase this memory of my self-sacrifice for my aunt. I can still see that bowl of chicken broth in front of me, the fat forming iridescent rings on the surface, and the little floating bugs I dare not even pick out with my fingertips while my aunt's back was turned.

I remember my Uncle John sitting down to his own meal, while I was served the guest's meal of chicken broth. He ate a slice of pig fat and a fistful of hot, raw chilis for lunch. "Strycko!" I protested. "Uncle! That pig fat is bad for your heart!"

"Your great grandfather Gregor Cerno ate this for lunch every day, and slivovice, too, and he lived to be 93!"

You can't argue with these people. How do you argue with people who are still vertical after being flattened by both Nazi and Soviet tanks?

Pig fat, bread: dense, heavy.

Whenever I return to America after a long time away, I go to a produce store, and a salad bar. I crave lightness, including light food: California lettuce, Florida oranges. And it's all there, and cheap. We Americans are so damn lucky, and we don't realize it.

But there were cherries in Slovakia. I remember walking under a tree and a boy hanging upside down by his knees and offering us his hat full of cherries. And the yogurt was so thick and so good, and it had a skin of cream on top.

***

What was I saying?

That I don't eat much Polish food.

But, really, this is what I was saying: It's been a tough few months. After I got back from Poland, in August, 2011, my computer died.

And then, in September, 2011, we had the flood. See here. That footage was taken a few hundred feet from my front door.

After the river entered our building, brusque and unsmiling authorities insisted that we leave, immediately, no questions asked.

I tried to explain that I am Polish, and we can handle any kind of an invasion, even one by water. The authorities evacuating us were scarier than the flood. I think someone told them, "You are evacuating Paterson. A tough town. Be as rough as possible." I left.

I was wearing a shirt, shorts, and sneakers. I threw my sleeping bag onto my back and headed out into the night, unsure if I'd see any of my stuff again.

Charlene Lovegrove is a saint; she put me up for the duration.

I came back, and I saw my stuff again. :-) I was much luckier than my neighbors who live lower down in the building. They learned the lessons that loss teaches.

I bought another computer from Office Depot. It arrived with a broken on/off switch. I bought another computer from Office Depot. It arrived with a broken DVD player. I tried to buy a computer from Dell. Kafka himself could not imagine the tortures to which Dell subjected me. Over the course of a week, by email, facebook, and telephone, Dell operatives in Pakistan approved, and then canceled, my order ten times. Why? They wouldn't tell me, but I do live in a low-income, high-minority neighborhood, which even Dell operatives in Pakistan may know. Still no computer.

But, really, the worst thing is this.

I spent every free second of fall, 2011, applying for full-time teaching jobs.

I really thought this might be my year.

I published "Bieganski," a prize-winning, scholarly book. It has been praised by big names and it won an award. I've spoken about it at Brandeis and Georgetown and universities and museums in Poland.

I will publish a literary book soon, "Save Send Delete," and it has received advance praise from bestselling authors like Robert Ellsberg and Larry Dossey.

My bosses and students continue to give me evaluations that warm my heart and make me blush.

And, after all those job applications this fall, nothing. Not even an interview. I can't overcome the fate of too many of the ethnically incorrect working class in the Ivory Tower.

I'm sad about leaving teaching. What next? Any work I can get.

I wish there were something out there for me where I could make use of my passionate commitment to Polonia. I wish I did not have to go to waste. Polonia, I wish you cared. I wish you supported your scholars.

The New Year was not a time of popping champagne corks around the Goska household.

***

A friend showed up the other day with a brown paper grocery bag from Schwind's Pork Store. Someone bringing me groceries? On what planet? No matter what is going on, I have always managed to stock my own pantry, and other people's, as well, by hook or by crook. Food is primary, baby. All Bohunks know that.

Harvesting rye. Source.

The contents of this brown paper grocery bag shocked and awed me: the biggest kielbasa I have ever seen. I measured it – two and a half feet. (Enough with the snickering! This was actual sausage, not a euphemism for some naughty something else.) A loaf of rye bread that I can only describe using terms usually reserved for heroic feats, historical eras, and tracts of geography: this rye bread was vast, this rye bread was imposing. This rye bread was monumental! And a tub of sauerkraut saturated with pork fat, studded with little bits of crackling.

I just did not know how to respond.

First of all, as a Bohunk American woman, of course I felt affronted, castrated even. (We are a pretty manly bunch.) How dare anyone bring food into MY kitchen! Bohunk food no less! I CAN ACQUIRE MY OWN FOOD THANK YOU VERY MUCH! I give YOU food, YOU do not give food TO ME! Thems the rules!

But this person was obviously trying to be nice. "In Poland there are no women, only ladies," as the saying goes. So, I accepted the bag graciously, with feigned gratitude, wondering how I'd dispose of its contents.

After this person left … I took a little bite, just a little bite, of the kielbasa.

Oh

My

God.

Paging Grand Duke Witold, Wanda, Pilsudski, my late father! But that kielbasa tasted so good. So amazingly good. Beyond good. It was waking up areas in my limbic system that have not been so much as tickled for years. I wanted to give the maker of this kielbasa an NEH grant. This was an art form!

I went further. I approached the mountain range of rye bread. Really, I wish I could introduce you to this loaf of rye bread. If it were a human being, I would marry it. If it would only have me! It is so earnest, macho, unyielding. This is serious bread!

I dug out my special bread-slicing knife. No wimpy serrated pseudo-steak knife or butter knife. This bread demanded a knife at least a foot long and designed to slice very serious bread.

Approaching this bread, I flashed on an otherwise long-forgotten memory.

My Aunt Jolana. My Uncle John's partner. The woman I lived with when we visited my mother's natal village in Slovakia so many years ago.

Aunt Jolana was the single most beautiful ugly woman you'd ever see. Jet black hair, pale, pale skin, bulbous nose, deep eyes, pools of kindness and ready sentiment and laughter and tears. Loose, abundant flesh and loose, flowing dresses. She was a human candle. She radiated love. Healing, warm, endless, generous love.

Jolana was a witch. Through an elaborate ritual involving muttered incantations and the measuring, pouring, and re-measuring of water she had poured onto my prostrate form, she removed an evil eye curse from me that one of the villagers had put on me in church. Of course I am grateful to her for that. On sturdy legs, Jolana rode her bicycle all over neighboring villages, ministering to those in need of beneficent witchcraft.

Uncle John and Aunt Jolana's union was not blessed by the church. My uncle had a "real" wife in the village. "I was tired of a skinny woman dressed all in black and I wanted a fat woman in colorful clothes who laughs." What could I say? It's hard to argue with an uncle who has killed a man. (Yes, he did. But it was justifiable! At least as he told it. I never heard the other guy's side.) My uncle condemned the priests as "blazons" – lunatics. My Aunt Pavlina, Uncle John's sister, bought the church an expensive golden monstrance. My family.

This is what I suddenly remembered the other day, after my friend brought the groceries, including the epic rye bread: Aunt Jolana would pick up a loaf of rye bread, one as imposing as this one my friend had brought over on Friday, and hold it against her bosom, and, long knife in other hand, she would saw through the bread, toward her breast. She never even looked at the bread, never so much as glanced at the knife rapidly approaching her breast. The whole time, she would be gazing at me, smiling, as if I were a miracle baby she had found in the field of rye out the window. And then she would hand me a slab of perfectly cut bread. And the knife never so much as nicked the loose cloth of her dress. That long ago slice that Jolana handed me in Slovakia tasted just like the bread my friend brought over the other day.

I couldn't get the same payoff from even the best Indian meal as I got from this kielbasa, rye bread, and sauerkraut.

Eating these foods, very well made kielbasa, and sauerkraut, and rye bread, I remembered the best times in my family. The old folks would get together. They would speak in their own languages: Polish or Slovak and sometimes Yiddish, depending on who was there.

These people were not perfect. But this can't be denied: they survived. They survived so much. And sometimes, sometimes, they laughed, and danced, and sang, and managed a humanity that taught me about how deep and complex and untameable life can be. I used to feel so good, as a kid, just being in the background, maybe washing dishes or drifting off to sleep, hearing all the stories, the stories about how much they survived.

***

The cabbage saturated with pork fat is almost gone. The kielbasa is still floating my boat out to sea. The bread now dominates my kitchen.

So, no, I don't eat a lot of Polish food. But this food that my friend brought over the other day did a lot for me, reminded me of a lot, knitted a few things together, present and past, dreams and reality, muscle and bone, memories of my family and me, gave me the strength to go on for another day, in a way that only Bohunk food could.

Below is an excerpt from the very excellent book, Jan Slomka's "From Serfdom to Self-Government." Slomka describes the cuisine of average Polish peasants.

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As for articles of food, only salt and beverages were bought in the shops. Village folk lived mostly on what they themselves sowed and planted on their own land. Potatoes, peas, beans, buckwheat, cabbage, soup, and, of course, bread – these were the regular eatables at breakfast, dinner, and supper. Special breads or cakes were made for the yearly festivals from home flour, ground by hand or at the mill. People never bought flour at the village store. Beef was never eaten the year through, unless by the well-to-do, who would buy it for Christmas or Easter. It was used in case of sickness. Yet meat was cheap, only a few cents a pound.

Nor was it the habit to kill chickens or fry eggs for home use. Both were rarely done. Eggs were used almost exclusively at Easter time, or for sick folk. The housewife might fry some for a guest, e.g. the village priest, when he came for the Christmas offering. This was thought to e the highest mark of respect for him. The women preferred to turn these things into money to buy salt with. The saying was that if you have salt in the house, you have everything. They begrudged both the expense and the time involved getting ready fancy foods, and the saying was: 'Am I to wrack my head, and make faces, and lose time!' The fact was that apart from the simplest things, they did not know how to make anything.

Fish was used a good deal, more than nowadays. They were caught in the ponds on the pasture and meadowland. Most common were carp and jackfish. They were eaten boiled.

Most common were the eels, and especially in the forest areas, where there were marshlands. They could be caught during the whole year, but best in winter. One set a trap under the ice, a so-called 'funnel' woven of wild vetches, with a bait of pea-straw inside. Eels were caught in heaps. When caught they would be nailed alive to stakes or rods, and smoked in order to keep them from spoiling. In this condition the peasants would sell them at the fairs, carrying them in bundles or baskets. They cost a few cents a pound, and were used chiefly cut up in soup instead of bits of sausage. They tasted good and were nourishing. One could eat one's fill of this broth, just as of porridge.

People used to gather wild mushrooms more than they do nowadays. There were many kinds, and they were stewed with buckwheat meal. When dried they were used in soup during Lent. For frying things bacon or tallow tht had stood a while was used, since then there was a 'flavor' to it, and a little sufficed. Every farmer, poor as well as better placed, took care to have a pig to kill in time of need, since in this way he was sure of fat for home use. The well-to-do killed two or three times a year, others only once – mostly in winter-time. Aside from this, butter was used, and during Lent the practice was to use only oil – mostly linseed.

For seasoning the commonest means in use were: mint, dried and crushed into tiny pieces; caraway, which was sprinkled into sauerkraut, and into the dough before the loaves were made, or scattered on top of the loaves; sage cut up, used in summer together with beet leaves in soup or for sausages; parsley in potato soup or with mashed potatoes, and finally pepper, used in vodka, sausages, cottage cheese, as well as in bouillon or broth.

For breakfast, there was soup, and with it rye bread. If there were potatoes enough, then as a second course we had fried potatoes, or boiled ones with salt. When bread was scarce, potatoes were used instead with the soup. For dinner we had two courses: cabbage with buckwheat or other meal to thicken the sauerkraut, while the second was a sort of milk pudding. At times for a change we had dumplings, made like doughnuts of coarse wheat or rye meal, ground at home. They were either done with milk or in fat. Again we might have little patties with cottage cheese, but during Lent instead of curds linseed was used, from which the oil had been pressed out. Supper was just another breakfast.

The head of the house, the children and the servants ate from one dish. The dish stood on a talbe, or bench, or the stump of a tree in the middle of the room, and all sat about it, or, rather, the elders sat while the children stood. Where the family was large some would have to reach by the othrs to get their food. Before the meal there was a tussle to get the biggest spoon. Only the housewife could not eat with the rest, since she was constantly bringing more food. While the soup was being eaten either the father or the eldest hired man was in trouble, for he had to cut bread for the rest, and only then had he a chance to eat. He would cut it in large slices, so that they would last longer for others and he himself would have time to eat.

In those days, folk had pretty good appetites. When soup was prepared the housewife had to reckon at least on a quart for each two persons, while each week the baking used half a sack of rye flour. As for potatoes or sauerkraut, what one man ate then would do for five nowadays.

Coffee, tea, sugar, rice, raisins, almonds, oranges, lemons – things sold today in every store with other articles of food – were virtually unknown in the village. One could find them only in one of the shops in Tarnobrzeg. If coffee or tea were used it was only on great occasions, such as at Christmas or Easter. In case a few coffee beans were left over, they were wrapped up with care and kept till next time.

Poland Is the Most Anti-Semitic Country in the World

2012-01-15T15:23:00.000-05:00

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People constantly let me know that Poles are the world's worst anti-Semites. They let me know that anti-Semitism is not a problem, rather Polish identity is.

By extension, of course, all Bohunks are the world's worst anti-Semites: Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Slovaks, etc.

We started the Holocaust. We are the hotbed of anti-Semitism in the world today. We must be punished for being who we are. Our identity must be obliterated, and a superior identity installed.

I am told this by tenured faculty on university campuses, including Indiana University, where I was a graduate student, and the campus where I work now. I was told this the other day by a library employee in New Jersey.

I receive emails letting me know this, as well. Often the emails are obscene, so obscene I've consciously chosen not to share their contents except with a trusted few. The email, below, from an author identifying himself as Victor Lapides, is exceptional, in that he is polite and well-spoken and he identifies himself by name.

I googled him, using his email address. All I could find was a message about restoring antique furniture. He appears to be a nice, normal guy. I admire his correct use of the English language, and his aesthetic and conservative approach to good furniture. I'm sure if I met him in person, we'd get along well.

I don't think it's Mr. Lapides' fault that he is certain that Poles are the world's worst anti-Semites. After all, that is common knowledge.

Rather, I look to Polonia to begin to take effective action. If you are a Polonian and you want to take action on these matters, buy and read "Bieganski." Then go here.

Mr. Lapides' email:

"Wandered across this [this blog] by chance. Sure wish it were the whole truth and not just one side. Unfortunately, one scene in Shoah tells a very different story. All dressed up in their Sunday best and standing on the steps of the Catholic church in their town in Poland (I forget which), contemporaneous to the making of the movie (1970's, I think), a group of townspeople told Lanzmann (the filmmaker and interviewer) how fitting and necessary it was for all (or most) of the Jews of Europe to have been killed. A riveting scene, unforgettable. I have been told by East European Jews that Poland is one of most antisemitic countries in the world, possibly the most."

Bohunk Names in a New Jersey Graveyard

2011-12-31T15:05:00.000-05:00

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During a recent visit to Rockaway, New Jersey, I was wandering around town and I came across a graveyard. This graveyard was chock full of Bohunk names. I tried to find out how these Bohunks made their way to Rockaway.

This isn't easy to confess: I find the lure of cemeteries impossible to resist.

No, I don't wear black fingernail polish, and I don't perform misguided rituals that exploit innocent and unsuspecting cats.

I love graveyards at least partly because I love names. Rows of tombstones are treasure troves of names: Salvatore Pagnano, Casimir Budzinski, Clementine Butternut. These names encapsulate discreet worlds. Salvatore and Casimir were both Catholic but I bet they never said more than a few words to each other. John Guzlowski, who married an Italian, said that Italians are wine; Poles are vodka. And Clementine? How did she get in there?

The birth and death dates – did he witness World War One? What's it like to die at five years old? Why did they give an infant who lived only a few days a name? Did the name change how they mourned her? The chosen identifications: mother, daughter, soldier, believer.

With inspiration on every tombstone, how can you resist animating deftly-plotted stories, peopling richly populated histories?

There is a Paterson, New Jersey graveyard that is the final resting place of Jews whose ancestors came from Lodz, Poland. Five tombstones in a row there proceed from the surname "Arnowitz" to "Arnold." That nominal journey is a saga in itself, pregnant with nuance, drama, economics, religion, maybe even some tears.

I also love the trees, the birds, the hush to be encountered in graveyards, even in the midst of bustling cities.

But I really love graveyards for this reason: their tenants have done it all. No matter what else you say about their lives, you must grant them this: they succeeded. They ran the course from birth to death. They know more than we can know, till we stop being who we are, and join them. Why not pause to shoot the breeze with such an experienced crew?

So, during a recent visit to Rockaway, I could not resist this graveyard, tucked away on a small, wooded hill. The avenue in front of the graveyard was quite busy, but no one walked among the tombstones just a few feet from the road.

Rockaway is a perfect little town. It is cute and attractive and neat. There's money. I think it might be called a "bedroom community."

Rockaway. source

Rockaway is very different from where I live. I live in one of New Jersey's notorious slums.

Because New Jersey is so small and so densely populated, our slums can be steps away from wealth. Recently someone was shot to death right outside my front door. On my daily commute I pass people who, year after year, spend all day on the street, people who haven't so much given up as never even had a clue as to how to try, and I walk, in just a few steps, over a town border and past a ritzy restaurant that is featured on the reality TV show "The Real Housewives of New Jersey."

In a few steps, I proceed from sidewalks where everyone I pass is black, to sidewalks where I pass no one, because all the white people here have cars, and they do not walk, and they do not spend their days inhabiting streets, porches, and sidewalks.

Whenever I visit perfect little New Jersey towns like Rockaway, the thought occurs to me: when will the have-nots rise up like a tsunami and invade, smashing and taking and evening the score?

As part of my work, I visit elementary schools. Little kids who attend the slum school less than a mile from my apartment walk past piles of garbage, abandoned buildings, and encampments of homeless men to get to class. Their school library is empty and locked. Their windows are scored with wire. The state comes in frequently and shakes things up; the students can't even relax into the slim comfort of routine.

When will these tots rise up in a Children's Crusade?

Some say Nature, Darwin, Evolution, rightly locates us losers in the slum, and the winners in the cute, neat, moneyed towns with so much stuff they choke on it.

But Nature also dictates homeostasis: where's there's more of something, it moves toward where there is less of something.

Mind: I'm not saying that that should happen. I really don't think that it should. I'm just wondering when it will happen, or, rather, why it does not happen. The glass walls of some of the finer homes make such a semi-permeable membrane.

Wait – I do have a point. I'm not just ranting about class.

I know exactly whom I will pass on the sidewalk, buy from, chat with, ask directions from, see on gravestones, here in my slum: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Bohunks, in that order. I shop at a miraculous produce store, Corrado's. Corrado's is always crowded. You hear many different languages from the shoppers: first Spanish, then Arabic or Turkish, then Polish; shoppers buying yucca, plantains, halvah, tahini, halal, makowiec, and kiszka.

I know everybody's story. We all do. Everyone in New Jersey knows the significance of a last name, of a shade of skin, of an address.

Jews and Italians arrived over one hundred years ago and worked textiles: thus the Paterson cemetery for Jews from Lodz. Lodz was a textile manufacturing center in Poland; Paterson was a textile manufacturing center in the US. Italians and Jews made their money and left Paterson, but if you look high up on older buildings, you can still see their names carved into many an antique facade.

The mills closed. Blacks came up from the south and were assigned to government housing and government cheese and now constitute the bulk of the underclass, a bulk that expert engineers operating government-approved levers cannot budge. Hispanics and Muslims are still arriving and have created enclaves, often clashing ones. On one street in Paterson, there is one business named "Andalus." "Andalus" is a Muslim irredentist name for Spain. Another business on that same street is named "Matamoros," after St. James, who gained fame killing Muslims during the Reconquista in Spain. And on that same street there is an Hispanic, Christian Synagogue. Don't even ask – it's a long story!

Paterson's Bohunks are much smaller in number and don't call attention to themselves. The parents clean offices, do construction, work as guards and in what factories are left; the kids attend state schools and keep a low profile. I wasn't even aware of Paterson's Serbs until recently.

Everybody knows what ethnicities, what last names, to expect in cute and perfect little towns like Rockaway. One does not expect congregations of Bohunk names.

The New Jersey joke map located New Jersey's "Russians and Polacks" with "toxic fumes." With very good reason. When Bohunks, Eastern Europeans of Christian, peasant ancestry, arrived in this country in large numbers,c. 1880-1924, they were shunted by overwhelming forces into dirty, unsafe, industrial labor: coal, steel, petroleum, slaughterhouses. Thus you have "Out of this Furnace," Thomas Bell's book about Slovaks in steel, "The Jungle" about Lithuanians in slaughterhouses, and "The Deer Hunter" about Lemkos.

When I'm in towns like Rockaway, I feel the wall of separation between me and the town's residents. When they get sick, they go to a doctor. They take vacations. They do not need to strategize security considerations when walking out their front door; they do not triangulate speed, strength, trajectory, intention, eye contact, when passing a neighbor on the street. We occupy mutually exclusive universes.

So, stepping off the road of expensive cars and women in fluorescent spandex work-out gear power-walking with weights in their hands – they wouldn't last a minute in that gear on my street – and stepping into a cemetery full of Bohunk names knocked me for a loop.

I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote down the names:

Kulawiec, Klocek, Dudys, Novak, Ketcherick, Kocur, Ternosky, Hruska, Kapitulez, Bartek, Petonak, Hornyock, Hriszt…, Mak, Chipko, Knapik, Smehi, Sloskie, Grivalsky, Simuradik, Stefanak, Hritz, Moskal, Sopchak, Vrabel.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to encounter these names in a cemetery in, say, Bayonne, site of Bohunk settlement and petroleum refining. During the 1915-16 Bayonne refinery strikes, Standard Oil's manager announced, "I want to march up East 22nd street through the guts of Polaks."

But this enclave of Bohunk names seemed out of place in Rockaway.

I emailed the list to the Rockaway Township Public Library. Alex Tretiak, a librarian, wrote back.

He introduced me to this record, page six of which announces a meeting by the local Rockaway Slavic Society in November, 1933.

He also informed me of Stuart M. Lefkowitz's "Mining in Northwest New Jersey: An Oral History."Apparently there had been a small mine in Rockaway, one no longer in use. Workers arrived from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other countries to work the mine. Lefkowitz interviewed descendents of mine workers.

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Lefkowitz focused on the Kovach family, from Czechoslovakia. They lived in a house without electricity or running water. They had an outhouse and the father ran a pipe from a stream into the home. They kept animals; the children sometimes slept in haystacks.

The work was dangerous, of course. The Kovach home was destroyed in an explosion and the family patriarch, Frank Kovach, was killed in a mine accident. Other miners contracted silicosis, or white lung, from particles of silicon in the granite rock.

Overall, though, Lefkowitz's informants reported good relations between mine owners and workers, and a positive environment in town.

"The mine for many years represented an enclosed community of employees and their families who were born, lived, and sometimes died, while a part of this aboveground or underground world…There was reportedly a great deal of camaraderie among the mining community and the community was a very tight-knit one even though the community consisted of many distinct cultures and languages."

In 1944, the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers unionized the mine. Informants report that John L. Lewis had more interest in his own welfare than in the welfare of the miners.

Eventually, the mine closed.

Lefkowitz's study is online here.

I'm grateful to Stuart M. Lefkowitz for recording the history of the Rockaway miners for me to read, and to librarian Alex Tretiak for introducing me to Lefkowitz's work.

Jewish Renewal in Poland: Rabbi Beliak's New Website

2011-12-30T13:24:00.000-05:00

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I met Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak at the Georgetown / Lazarski University conference. He gave a very impressive talk at the conference, summarized at this blog post.

Rabbi Beliak now has a webpage that celebrates Jewish renewal in Poland. That webpage is http://www.jewishrenewalinpoland.org/

John McWhorter Uses the Term "Bohunk" in a Derogatory Way. Should We Care?

2011-12-27T09:06:00.000-05:00

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I received an email from Alison Dvorak expressing concern that Manhattan Institute public intellectual and African American John McWhorter used the term "Bohunk" in a derogatory way in a Forbes article published December 30, 2008.

McWhorter was assessing whether or not Barack Obama's election meant that white supremacy was dead in America. Some low class whites are still white supremacists, McWhorter acknowledged. These low class whites hang nooses and use the n-word. He called these "backward" people "bohunks." He didn't bother to capitalize the word.

McWhorter is in good company. Elites have, since the Civil Rights Movement, attributed white supremacy to low class, ethically incorrect people – Bohunks – Americans of Eastern European, Christian, peasant ancestry. Apparently it was we who built and manned the slave ships, ran plantations, invented and maintained Jim Crow.

Chapter four of "Bieganski" talks about this revisionist process in detail.

Obama himself participated in this, in his infamous statement about bitter working class people in Pennsylvania – a big Bohunk state – clinging to white supremacy, guns, and bibles.

In going through my emails, I wondered if I should devote a blog entry to McWhorter's use of "Bohunk." It's not such a big deal, and his article is three years old. I'm mentioning it, though, for the same reason I mentioned the New Jersey joke map that talks about Polacks and toxic fumes in New Jersey. Bieganski is everywhere. He is in popular culture, like the joke map; he is in elite culture, like John McWhorter's high-rent musings.

Bieganski is an unavoidable aspect of American culture. Those concerned about this issue would do well to prepare themselves to confront this reality by buying, reading, and reviewing "Bieganski" and by reading this series of blog posts.

Vaclav Havel 1936-2011

2011-12-24T07:58:00.000-05:00

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Here's a short account of the demonstrations in Krakow, Poland, 1988-89. These demonstrations and others like them throughout the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe signaled the end of communism. The full account is here.

"Wednesday I was sitting in a tram, basking in Stalinist glee – I'd actually found a seat – and during rush hour! Around four. But the tram stopped and refused to start up again. Suddenly a voice called out, 'Everybody off! Demonstration!'

I got off and could barely find the demo. It turned out to be maybe ten kids from 9 to 14, one holding a Czechoslovak flag, another two holding a sign that said, 'Free Vaclav Havel.' Kids. Skinny, small girls in net stockings and sneakers and hennaed hair and khaki jackets. Some boys: fat, horribly skinny and dorky, pimply, fresh-faced with that skin that looks like it has never been touched. Moving the way kids move – loping, giggling, punching each other, self conscious of their bodies. We marched to the square, where the crowd grew thicker. We marched to a lovely old house on the Maly Rynek where we chanted against General Fatty. We marched to perhaps a police headquarters? Where suddenly everyone ran."

Vaclav Havel had been arrested in January, 1989, for attempting to lay flowers in Prague's Wenceslas Square. He went to the site where, twenty years before, Czech student Jan Palach had set himself on fire to protest the Soviet Bloc crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring.

I love those Polish kids from 1989 who understood, and who acted.

Those Polish kids understood – this isn't just about Poland, or Poles. We are part of a bigger story. When the police arrest the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, that is a skirmish in our struggle; that is something we must respond to.

Those Polish kids understood – we must take action. We must be the ones to make the change. We can't sit back whining and complaining and waiting for someone else to act.

Those Polish kids understood – we aren't just about celebrating famous dead generals. We must champion intellectuals – writers – playwrights! And people who aren't yet celebrities on the world stage. (Back then, most people didn't know who Vaclav Havel was. NPR broadcasters regularly mispronounced his name.)

Those Polish kids, with their dedication to a Czech playwright who wasn't particularly famous, and others liked them, brought down a system – Soviet Communism – that many thought unconquerable.

***

I mention Vaclav Havel in the essay, "The Illusion of Protection: Two Travelers Speak of Home." In this essay, I use the work of two Czech writers, Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera, to understand my life as a traveler.

"In 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,' Milan Kundera talks about 'poetic memory.' It's a precious commodity. Poetic memory is made up of the memories that touch us—and—here's the essence of it, its gift, its challenge—these memories must be shared. My home is built of poetic memory; physically homeless, I am hostage to its fate. I'm more careful, certainly more anxious, about with whom I build up stores of poetic memory than with whom I share bodily fluids. You can get the divorce, take the Twelve Steps, never call again, throw away the reject's letters, but no matter how thorough the split, the closure, the final decree, if you are human, someday you'll find yourself laughing over a joke that only he would understand, or crying over something that she once shared with you. No lawyer nor daytime talk show shrink can rescue you from poetic memory.

The other day I was reading Vaclav Havel's letters from prison. There was a line that compelled me, after years of awkward silence, to call Eric, who had once been my closest American neighbor in Peace Corps Nepal. The village where I taught English and the one where he taught math were, on sunny days, visible to each other; we were only a day's walk, and about ten thousand feet, apart.

Eric and I had inhabited an exquisitely endangered ecosystem: a tiny bubble in the Himalaya, which we created because we were the only speakers of English. Not only was he not in his culture and I not in mine, we weren't of each other's. Puget Sound Eric was Nordic, majestic, blonde, a high school and college swim team star. I'd come from a coast much closer to Ellis Island, and had worked my way through school as a nurse's aid.

Quarantined by shared affliction, besieged by language, Eric and I frantically invented a new culture for our nation of two. We became zealots at using poetic memory with each other, to bind, to wound, to raise a laugh, to drive home a point; he could deploy it as other men, jealous, resort to physical strength. If a man were flirting with me, all Eric had to do was sidle behind and recite an excerpt from our canon of poetic memory and I was his, irrevocably; the flirt before me transformed into an interloper. Dinners, proposals, even another man's love poems, could not survive one strategic reference from Eric. 'Goska, remember that time that you and...'

At our posts in Nepal, the only pens available to us had been Chinese ballpoint pens. Halfway through each of our letters to each other there was always a big blob of ink, or a disappearing line, an apology, and a curse. 'Damn these Chinese pens!'

The other day, I was reading imprisoned Vaclav Havel pleading with his wife Olga to send him more Chinese ballpoint pens, so much better than the Soviet ones. I laughed out loud. No one in the room understood. Who would understand but Eric, terribly distant in space and class, terribly intimate in my poetic memory?"

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Bieganski Lives. In New Jersey. With Toxic Fumes.

2011-12-24T07:11:00.000-05:00

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The above joke map of New Jersey identifies one portion of north-eastern New Jersey as the abode of "Russians, Polacks, and Toxic Fumes."
The joke map targets other ethnic groups as well, including, significantly, Jews and African Americans. Slurs associated with Jews and African Americans are not used, however; there are no "Kikes" nor "Niggers" on this joke map.
It is okay, though, to insult Polish-Americans and poor whites with slurs. Thus, the map features "Polacks" and "Rednecks."
Do something about your status as a joke in America, Polonia. Start here.

Ripples of Sin

2011-12-15T13:27:00.002-05:00

Hansel and Gretel by Sofie73. Source.

Ripples of Sin

There's a part of me that died as a child. I look at old photos of myself and see a hard look that's still there every morning staring back at me as I shave. I grew up poor and life was hard, but the story of where that edge came from has taken a lifetime to uncover.

My parents are of German decent, though the wide array of countries, some long gone, filter into the various documents I've come across trying to chronicle "who" I am. The foundation of my family's story is turmoil. While German has been the most convenient definition, I find that my family has been defined as German, Russian, Polish, Prussian, and Wolhynien. I may have some French and other nationalities in there somewhere, but I'm not sure how I'll ever untangle it all.

Lots of countries come and go. My family is originally German and one of the founding families that formed the Germanic states. Through genealogy, I've made connections back to the late ninth century. Our history is a long and proud one. Over the years we migrated places, building and developing.

In the tug-of-war we call history, people evolve for good and ill. To say you're fill-in-the-blank is a little odd. Irish? Maybe a little Viking DNA. Spanish? Maybe some Arab Moorish blood. Polish? The list is a little long. It gets to the point where I wonder if anyone really understands their real background.

Genetics aside, this confusion of national identity qualifies our family as typical of the American melting pot. I have cousins who list themselves as Polish, others as German. These days, if asked, I align myself as German in both culture and genetics.

My mother's lineage is less well known, but seems to have started in Germany also, though she always told us that we were half German, half Polish. I find that our "Polish" side is more the effect of land grabs that happened throughout European history.

My parents' stories are similar. They grew up in what is now Poland. My father's family was wealthy, while my mother's were subsistence farmers. Both sides were uprooted in post-WW1 land grabs. Both families were put in Russian refugee camps because of their German, Lutheran ancestry. They were told that their property and homes were forfeit. They were forced to march to a displaced persons camp in Siberia. All they could bring was what they could carry. Neither finished much schooling.

"German Refugees Stranded in Eastern Europe." Wikipedia.

My mother turned 90 this year and still talks about having the officials and neighbors taking away what little they were attempting to save as they were marched out of town. The look in her eyes when she talks about this shows that she's been transported back to her childhood and that painful time. What nationality were these neighbors? Polish definitely. Jewish likely; but my parents attributed things against stereotypes, and not necessarily facts. My dad was cheated at one point, and that became The Story of the Jew that Cheated Me. Cheated – a fact, but nothing to indicate the guy was or was not Jewish. Money was involved, ipso facto, Jewish.

My father's stories of displacement and dispossession were similar to my mother's. His adjustment was a bit rougher as he'd come from a very wealthy family. He had farther to fall. Both attributed their troubles to Poles, Jews, and Russians. It's hard to filter through rage and find the truth at this point, though.

I lost three of my four grandparents in the Russian camps to typhoid. My paternal grandfather finally decided to leave. He simply walked out of the gate. He assumed that the guards wouldn't bother wasting a bullet on him since he was old and he'd never survive a walk across Siberia. They didn't shoot him, and he made it back to Germany some months later.

I've only seen my father cry twice. Once was when we visited my grandfather's grave in a small rural town in West Germany. My father was a hard man, not given to moments of emotion, but I still have a vivid memory of the look in his eyes and the stories that must have been replaying in his mind. This moment wasn't about the tears. I'd heard many of the family stories from my earliest years. It was about the suffering and pain that was behind it all, still fresh after all those years. Above all, you could see the hate stirred up.

My father was on his own at sixteen after leaving the camps, wandering and surviving. He found refuge, food, and purpose in the SA, or Sturmabteilung, better known as the Brown Shirts. I'm not sure of the timing but he survived the Depression with what, under the circumstances, would be a benevolent organization if you were alone and starving. Not so much, if you were a victim of Kristallnacht or the subsequent acts of violence leading up to the Final Solution. It's easy for me to see that his past made the latter possible.

SA stormtroopers, Nuremberg, 1928. Source.

I'm not sure whether he believed in Hitler because of brainwashing or because of his past, but he was, for all purposes, a Nazi. He ended up in the Wehrmacht after spending five years in prison for beating up two soldiers.

He spent the war as a corporal in the Afrika Korps, eventually getting shot six times in battles in Libya between Rommel and Montgomery. He was taken to an aide station. His doctor told him that he would have to have his arm cut off because the bullet damage was so bad. He knocked the doctor out, who quickly agreed the arm could stay. He was sent to Italy either to live or die. He survived. He went to the Russian Front during the end of the war.

German soldier in Afrika Korps. Source.

He was captured by the Russians and put in a prisoner-of-war camp where he was beaten and starved by his old nemesis, the Russians. He spoke Polish and Russian, so they put him with a group of Russians who interrogated prisoners. My father was his captors' translator.

One of the few funny stories my Dad would tell about his war years: The group of three men who abused and starved him where Russian peasants. They didn't share what little food they had with my father and they beat him up regularly. They moved into a town and were searching for food. The residents of the town had fled as the Russians approached. The townspeople feared rape and murder. The Russians found some potatoes in an abandoned home. There they also saw a flush toilet – something they'd never seen before. They asked my father what it was. He replied, "Potato washer."

Gulag for German prisoners. From "I Did Nothing Wrong."

My mother's war story starts on September 1, 1939. The woman she was working for sent her to Warsaw to pick something up. That very day, the Germans invaded Poland. When the Poles realized she was of German decent they beat her up badly. It would take her three weeks to get back home. She misdirected Polish soldiers she encountered, and helped German soldiers along the way to find the enemy Poles. To this day she describes having to wander among corpses while trying to stay low to the ground, avoiding being shot. She survived but the story of those years will die with her.

Polish girl mourning her sister, September, 1939.

After the war ended, my father and my mother wandered and ended up close to where they were born.

They met at a dance and married three weeks later. They had two children in Germany, but struggling to survive, they decided to come to America. The US Army had a program that let Germans work their way across the ocean to earn passage and become farm laborers in America. Many former American farmers had died as soldiers or didn't want to go back to rural living after seeing the world. My father signed up, and was investigated by the US Army. Passing the background check, they came to America, my father working in the ship's engine room shoveling coal and as a machinist.

They were sent to a farm in Minnesota with another family. They had nothing and were barely getting enough to eat. They lived in a one room, dirt-floored shed with a wood stove. My parents were indentured, supposed to stay for two years, but the farmer was angry, cruel, and went out of his way to get even with the Germans. He unfortunately decided to dictate that my father was not allowed to smoke – period. That's right; my father knocked him out.

My mother borrowed money from a relative living in New Jersey so they could leave Minnesota. They weren't educated and didn't know what would happen if they broke the agreement. They were willing to be deported rather than put up with slow starvation and abuse.

Paterson, NJ. Source.

They came to New Jersey where my brother and I were born. They didn't know about public assistance and we quietly starved until my father found a job working with asbestos. Even after he found a job as an iron worker and was working steadily, my family's dynamic was to act as though the world would collapse again at any moment. They both worked and scrimped and saved, but when I was young we were malnourished. I grew up in poverty and was hospitalized for malnutrition and pneumonia at age seven. We didn't spend a dollar we didn't need to. We would buy day-old bread because it was cheaper; meals might consist of milk and bread. Later on it got better in quantity, but my parents never left the time in their lives when they went without. We continued to starve, live in poverty, and live a brutal existence even after circumstances were better.

Socially, Germans weren't popular. When kids played soldiers, we automatically became the Nazis. Goethe, Gutenberg, Charlemagne and other German contributions are gone. Suddenly our identity is only about Hitler. I'm not saying it wasn't horrible, but I had nothing to do with any of it, so I never knew what I was supposed to apologize for. The Italian kids didn't get it, or the pro-German French, Danes, Japanese, etc.

Those were my formative years and I got it from both sides.

Years later as my father lay in a hospital dying of cancer, we talked about things.

My story starts in a cold apartment in Paterson, NJ. So cold I can remember frozen water inside the house as a very young child. I recall that we had to wear winter cloths and hats inside the house. Food was a luxury, good food rare. Needless to say there were no luxuries like entertainment. Anything other than necessities would not be allowed since they were a waste of money. We were also expected to be independent from a very early age. As the youngest of four, I wore only well-worn hand-me-downs that had clothed at least two previous siblings.

We all had to eat whatever was put on our plates. We had to do chores. That's not a bad thing, but playtime was frowned upon. Christmas was usually nonexistent. I remember lying about what presents I had received to the other kids. Even before me and my siblings worked for money, we worked to provide for ourselves, knowing that our parents wouldn't help or would get mad at us for being frivolous. You could never tell where that would end.

Discipline meant getting beat. For clarity of terms, I mean beat and not spanked. Spanking did occur but it usually crossed the line.

Buckle reads "Gott Mit Uns."
There are entire discussion forums on the web devoted to Nazi belts and buckles. Source.

My father had hands that were as hard as the labor he did. He was the hardest-working guy I ever met, and well-muscled. They hit us with an old army belt my father had kept. Fists, brooms, anything convenient. Getting hit by my father was of course worse than getting hit by my mother. Verbal abuse and denigration were always present. All their pain, suffering and frustration were in every blow. All the things that my parents had gone through became the fabric of family life.

My father finished the eighth grade and my mother finished far less than that. They could offer us no help in school. Notes sent from a teacher would be one of the worst things that could ever happen. I was left-handed when I started go to school and a teacher sent a note home discouraging that. She didn't know I would get an incredible beating for that. I quickly became a righty.

Another world-class beating came from a note from a teacher saying I was having a problem with arithmetic. I was confused by a couple of things in the times table. I got hit so hard, the belt marks were still visible a few days later when I had to return the signed note and the teacher asked if my parents understood I needed help and I lifted my shirt a little.

I grew up knowing that I was on my own and that I had to take care of myself. I cannot remember not working. Paper routes, snow shoveling, running errands, baby sitting, collecting bottles for spare change. I started working for a paycheck a few weeks after it was legal. I would get into trouble for working more hours than I was supposed to by law. I also worked with my father.

I grew up hearing how lazy and stupid I was. It took me years to realize that that soundtrack drove me incessantly. I am a workaholic and still feel like I don't achieve enough. "If I'm breathing, I'm working." I have worked more than eighty hours a week at my primary job and used my spare time on other projects. For example, I have worked four days straight, gotten on a plane to Seoul, and worked the next four days straight there, only sleeping on the flight. I have driven myself to near death in order to gain approval that will never come, self-worth that's always countermanded by echoes of being called stupid and lazy. "Good enough," is not good enough and neither am I.

Being a family of immigrants, extremely poor, and Germans to boot, we never fit in. Strangers in strange land. For me it was always being the skinny kid, dressed funny, not able to fit in. My social skills never developed properly. I grew up feeling rejected by others and maybe more importantly by my family. I now know that they were frustrated and desperate to overcome poverty by working hard and gaining the American Dream. Failure was not an option, so if it meant a kick in the pants, figuratively and physically, well it was supposed to be for our own good. I could take a punch. Practice makes perfect.

I grew up expressing myself through rage and fighting. By the time I was sixteen I'd been stabbed, broken my nose four times, broken all of my fingers at least once, both wrists, dislocated my shoulders and hips, broke some ribs, and an assortment of other injuries too numerous to recall. The roots of this violence were to be found in events that preceded my birth.

The point of this is not a lesson in comparative misery. It's about observations and lessons learned.

How does it all stop?

At a young age I realized that the baggage was there. I also realized that there were some good lessons to learn. It took a long time to figure out how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Some things were better forgotten and some things important to hold on to. I think people believe I should have some inherent guilt about what happened during World War Two. They try and use it as leverage during discussions on the topic, as though winning an argument is more important than facts and finding the truth. (Truths.) It's a complex topic, but the short answer is, I pick through my history and see what is good and what is harmful. I drop the baggage by understanding how it occurred.

My view of history is that it's not as simple as A is true, or A leads to B. I think it's an intersection of Chaos Theory and historical facts, rather than just taking a slice of dates and facts that suits one's purpose. Life is complicated, and if we're to really prevent future events we need to be able to look at the wider picture, openly and honestly, if the aim is an evolution in human thinking rather than the gratification that comes from scoring points in a debate. If we're to "never forget", it will be based on real understanding so we don't repeat the same mistakes of the past.

For me it's about enduring things and being a better person for it. For example, my great-grandfather was a sheriff killed in "Poland," defending his property from a thief. I could be an idiot and say something stupid about how Poles are thieves, or I could focus on my great-grandfather as a man of character, honest and strong, and he helped people.

When it's cold and dark, when I'm scared and things are going wrong, I think about the life-threatening hard times my ancestors lived through so that I could be born in Paterson, NJ. Kind of a Jersey equivalent to " What doesn't kill us, makes us...eeeehhh...stronger, ya know."

Bieganski at Georgetown University

2011-12-09T12:50:00.005-05:00

Georgetown Above the Potomac. Source: Wikipedia.

On Wednesday, December 7, 2011, I participated in the "Polish-Jewish Dialogue: A New Opening" Conference at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Lazarski University of Warsaw, Georgetown's BMW Center for German and European Studies, and The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland were our gracious and generous hosts.

The conference was an inspiration. Participants included dynamic, intelligent, charming and passionate contributors to productive Polish-Jewish cooperation on the economic, cultural, scholarly and military fronts. The positive energy I encountered at this conference was an antidote to Polonia's crisis in leadership, organization, and vision. It was also an antidote to the Bieganski image in media, scholarship, and folk culture.

The problems we face are real. The solutions are also very real, and those solutions were abundantly evident at the Georgetown Conference. The solutions are the indomitable faith, hope, and love in human hearts. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it," declares the New Testament. The Old Testament reports, "Compared to light, wisdom takes precedence; for that, indeed, night supplants, but wickedness prevails not over Wisdom."

The energetic, caring, involved participants in the Georgetown conference are proof that, in the end, the bad guys won't win. In the long run, good will triumph. That is as natural as water flowing downhill.

Conference Welcoming Remarks: Prof. Jeffrey Anderson, Graf Goltz Professor and Director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies, stressed the importance of educating the next generation of transatlantic leaders. As part of this, historical memory and reconciliation are key. I liked Prof. Anderson's comments, and I wish I had had more time to talk to him. I'm grateful that he understands that "historical memory" is a product that must be cultivated.

Formal statements were read by members of the diplomatic corps: Polish Ambassador to the US Robert Kupiecki, Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren, and Wojciech Piekarski, former Polish ambassador to the US. Of course the Polish ambassador talked about Polish righteous among the nations, Jan Karski, and the Jewish cultural festival in Krakow. Of course the Israeli ambassador talked about the long history of Jews in Poland, anti-Semitism at Polish sporting events, and good things Poles have done to combat anti-Semitism. Someone talked about restitution of Jewish properties.

Georgetown Prof. Robert J. Lieber knew Jan Karski personally and offered a talk about their relationship.

Conference Panel One: Overcoming the Past with the Politics of Today: Is Strategic Partnership between Poland and Israel Possible? Reality or Political Fiction?

Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, of Beith Warsaw. "World War Two Ended in Poland in 1989: Understanding the Implications of that Statement for the Last Twenty Years." I very much liked Rabbi Beliak's talk. As the title of his talk suggests, Rabbi Beliak went out of his way to acknowledge Polish feelings, perspectives, and priorities. I found his compassionate and selfless awareness of the Polish worldview, and his willingness to devote his limited time during this conference to expressing the Polish worldview, to be quite moving.

I often emphasize to readers of my book: Jews are among those working to decommission the Bieganski stereotype. Rabbi Beliak's talk was exemplary of this.

Rabbi Beliak stated, "History does not have inevitabilities." Readers of chapter seven of "Bieganski" will understand the profound importance of that statement.

Rabbi Beliak posited a though experiment: A Jewish Rip van Winkle falls asleep in September, 1939 and is awakened in 1945 and is told that most of the Jews of Europe have been murdered. His response: "The French are capable of anything!"

Rabbi Beliak also made it a point to mention the number of Polish, non-Jewish casualties during World War Two. He mentioned that there was every reason to believe that the Polish people would disappear. "Yet they survived." He sees a parallel between Poles and Jews. "There are echoes for me in many attempts to destroy Jewish culture" and Jewish survival in spite of those genocidal efforts. "It is difficult for people to see suffering from the other side," he said. Rabbi Beliak demonstrated that his soul is large enough to feel compassion for "the other side," and I was very moved by this.

Rabbi Beliak spoke of the roots of Judaism's major movements in Poland. "I end," he said, "more with a prayer than with an historical observation." Amen, I say.

Brigade Commander General Uri Agmon. Israeli liaison officer to the US army. "Poland and Israel as Strategic Allies." General Agmon began with an anecdote about sharing a cab with his Polish non-Jewish fellow conference attendees. The cab was driven by a Muslim. General Agmon wondered what each of the people sitting in that cab thought of the other. "Everything is possible" he said. "The past and future are combined…We can overcome the nightmare of the past." Israel and Poland can be and are allies, he said, at least partly because both share a Western orientation.

States have no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests, he said, paraphrasing Lord Palmerston.

General Agmon closed with a poignant comment about how "Some Iranian, some worker or shopkeeper, who has never met me, hates me. People are funny."

I've met many Iranians, and I know they are thoroughly brainwashed by their government. I mentioned this to General Agmon, and he said "We are all brainwashed." Not to the extent that Iranians are, I would argue. There is no freedom of conscience in a country where, today, Yousef Nadarkhani faces the state-sanctioned death penalty for being a Christian.

Dr. Pawel Grzabka, CEO of CEE Property Group, Head of Supervisory Board of Sun and Snow Group. "Opportunities for Expanding Polish-Israeli Business Cooperation into Strategic Partnership in the Eyes of the World Economic Fluctuation and European Union Financial Troubles."

Dr. Grzabka's rather long talk title sums up his talk rather well. "The future is bright," he reported.

Maciej Jachimczyk: "The Last Thirty Years of Polish-Jewish Relations from the Perspective of a Muslim." I was an innocent little boy in Poland and my classmates said something mean about Jews, Jachimczyk began. Perhaps one is to conclude from his personal anecdote that Poles really are the world's worst anti-Semites, as is so often accepted as fact.

Jachimczyk went on to depict himself as a lone seeker of truth. This ascetic image was undermined by Jachimczyk's constantly mentioning how many famous people he knows: Father Jozef Tischner, Leszek Kolakowski, Timothy Garton Ash, Rafael Scharf, and the famous venues where he carried out his quest, including Tyniec Monastery, Jagiellonian University, and Oxford.

Jachimczyk's quest forced him to conclude that "Anti-Semitism is a Christian sickness which kills Jews," that anti-Semitism is a "product of Christianity," that "Jesus and his followers had no idea of starting a new religion;" that they were and remained faithful Jews, that Christianity is a big lie, that "There is no place for me in Christianity … Christianity is responsible for the death of six million Jews."

Further, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is just another apologist for Polish Anti-Semitism. There were many rabbis at the Georgetown conference, but no priests. That was proof that priests are anti-Semitic, Jachimczyk charged. (The conference organizer admitted that he had invited no priests.)

Jachimczyk converted to Islam. Islam is not anti-Semitic. The Koran's version of Jesus is historically accurate.

The war on terror is really a war on Islamism. The war on terror is really a state-sponsored distraction for the populace. Americans are confused about Muslims. In conclusion, Jachimczyk said, "Poland must purify itself from the ghosts of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism."

***

Jachimczyk's talk was not only the worst of the conference, it was the single worst conference talk I've ever heard. Jachimczyk made sweeping, bigoted, false, and unsupported generalizations in a rambling, unfocused, emotional and personal rant.

Scholarship uses accepted and proven facts to, through a rigorous process, reach new truths. Real scholarship requires fearless interrogation and dispassionate testing of each assertion. It moves slowly and carefully and tests every step, every assertion. This testing is slow and painful, but if you start out with faulty assertions, you will end not at the destination of truth, but at the destination of reaffirming your own solipsistic bigotry.

Hate is built on undisciplined personal anecdotes, and an over-investment in one's own feelings.

Jachimczyk recounted his own biography, his own life story. This is an interesting rhetorical ploy. "I lived this! You can't tell me that my own experience is wrong!" is an assertion one frequently encounters in the screeds of bigots. "A Jew cheated me! A Pole beat me up! I know that Jews are all Shylock from my own life experience! I know that Poles are all Bieganski from my own life experience! You can't take my biography away from me!"

Well, no one wants to take anyone's biography away from anyone. Rather, what scholarly conferences need is scholarship, and scholarship is not rambling, unedited and unexamined personal rant.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that school children around the world say bad things about Jews, Poles, women, Catholics, black people, fat people, retarded people, homosexuals, handicapped people and every other group on earth every day. That rather simple degree of scholarly interrogation had no place in Jachimczyk's talk.

Jachimczyk is wrong about a more important matter. Nazism, not Christianity, is responsible for the death of six million Jews.

Six million Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis. The first and last group Nazis mass-murdered were handicapped people. Polish Catholics, Polish priests, Soviet prisoners of war, and others were victims of mass death. This is entirely consistent with Nazism's intellectual foundations, which were not only not Christian, they were genocidally anti-Christian. Nazism's utterly non-Christian foundations are outlined in a few previous blog posts, including this one and this one.

People with some power, like Jachimczyk, are allowed to distort history.

Jachimczyk's conversion to Islam, and his dawa – proselytizing – for Islam during his talk at a scholarly conference – renders Jachimczyk's talk hypocritical and ridiculous.

Blatant, unapologetic, genocidal, Anti-Semitism is epidemic in the Muslim world. Mohammed, the founder of Islam, mass murdered and enslaved Jews, significantly, the Banu Qurayza. Mohammed ordered the exile of Jews and Christians from what is now Saudi Arabia. The Koran describes Allah turning Christians and Jews into monkeys and pigs, and describes Jews as the worst enemies of Muslims. Mohammed declared that even rocks and trees will, on some blessed future day, tell Muslims to kill Jews.

Islam's treatment of Jews throughout the centuries and in various Muslim countries includes forcing Jews to wear a shoulder patch in the shape of monkey and other humiliations inherent in dhimmi status. There were massacres, such as the 1066 Grenada massacre.

Hitler's friend, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, stated, "According to the Muslim religion, the defense of your life is a duty which can only be fulfilled by annihilating the Jews." SS chief Himmler greeted the Mufti thus, "To the Grand Mufti: The National Socialist movement of Greater Germany has, since its inception, inscribed upon its flag the fight against the world Jewry. It has therefore followed with particular sympathy the struggle of freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against Jewish interlopers. In the recognition of this enemy and of the common struggle against it lies the firm foundation of the natural alliance that exists between the National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the whole world."

One of many sources on Islam's problem with Jews: "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History" by Andrew G. Bostom.

Jachimczyk's insistence that the Koran records the "real" Jesus is also ridiculous. The Jesus of the Gospels is the single best-attested personage from the Ancient Mediterranean world; this is a matter of fact, not opinion. We have better proof that Jesus existed than that Alexander the Great existed. The Gospels were written within decades of his life. Jesus' biographers came from his milieu and spoke his language. One does not have to be a Christian to acknowledge these facts; the historical consensus is that the Jesus of the Gospels was a real person.

The Koran was written at least six hundred and fifty years after Jesus' death, in Arabic, a language Jesus did not speak, by moon-and-star worshipping Arabs who were not part of the Judeo-Christian tradition and did not understand it. Mohammed received a garbled version of Jesus' life from Waraqa, the cousin of Mohammed's wife and employer. Mohammed thought that Moses was Jesus' uncle. Moahmmed included local children's fairytales about Jesus in the Koran, for example, Jesus turning clay birds into real ones. Mohammed uses Jesus to enhance his own status: Jesus did not die on the cross; rather, Allah sent a mannequin to be crucified in Jesus' place. Mohammed reports that Jesus will return someday to destroy all worship of Jesus, condemn Christians to hell, and help Islam triumph.

This is a tangent; I just want to emphasize how out of place Jachimczyk's talk was. He made one bizarre statement after another. His only support was "this is my real life" and "I know famous people." Polish-Jewish relations deserve a higher standard of proof than this.

No one challenged Jachimczyk. Of course no one challenged him. He was speaking in a protected environment, where his point of view is empowered, and the truth is imperiled. Christophobia is rampant on American university campuses. At the same time, the thought police are so thorough in their shielding of Islam from any criticism that when Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, showed a powerpoint to his fellow officers explaining why Muslims must kill infidels, no one did anything. Hasan went on to murder thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas. Yes, this shielding of Islam from any criticism is the rule even on Catholic campuses like Georgetown.

Panel Two: Personal Impressions of Jews Living in Poland and Poles Living in Israel.

Rabbi Shalom Stambler talked about being a rabbi in Warsaw. He said that he knew that Poland "didn't have such a good image" and he was worried about how he'd be received. He's since changed his mind. "I wish Jews were as interested in Yiddishkeit as Poles are!" The Jewish presence in Poland is not just about museums and cemeteries but living culture, he said, culture supported by Poles.

Alon Simhayoff, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, former Cultural Attaché of Israel in Poland: "Three Years in Warsaw as an Israeli Diplomat: Personal Impressions."
Alon Simhayoff said that all doors were opened for him in Poland, and that there is much cooperation. There are at least six universities that offer Jewish studies. We have good friends within the church, in spite of anti-Semitic voices like Radio Maria. "I feel this openness in my everyday life," he said. He mentioned a Polish taxi driver telling him, with enthusiasm, that he had a CD by an Israeli singer. Who might this be, Mr. Simhayoff wondered. It turned out to be a CD by Barbara Streisand.

In the Jewish Festival in Cracow Poles cheered the Israeli ambassador - how many places in Europe would that happen? Mr. Simhayoff reported. People do still harbor old stereotypes, though, including the fallacy that "Jews control the media." People repeat this even while repeating that the media is unfair to Israel. There are positive people in every generation and every social class. I very much applaud Alon for saying this. It defies the fallacy of "universal human progress" that I condemn in "Bieganski."

Mr. Simhayoff mentioned the positive changes in the field of education for tolerance in Poland and commended the Polish authorities for that, but also mentioned that if it is not combined with enforcements efforts, then it is not enough, since the result is events such as the attack on the house of the Director of Teatr NN in Lublin, performed by Neo-Nazis, who were never caught. This is one example. Other cases of hate crimes are closed either by the police or by the prosecutor's office.

Jacek Olejnik: Perceptions of Polish-Jewish Relations from the Perspective of the Polish Diplomat Living in Israel."

Mr. Olejnik quoted Sheva Weiss, "Relations between Poland and Israel can be excellent or none." Right now these relations are excellent, he said. He said that there is a mirror phenomenon to anti-Semitism in Poland; anti-Polish feelings in Israel.

Eran Huppert: "Between Real and Surreal: The Voice of the Son of a Holocaust Survivor from Israel, Holding Dual Polish and Israeli Citizenship, Living Now in Poland." Mr. Huppert talked about how his grandfather, who had fought with Pilsudski in 1920, was forced to retire from the army because of his Jewish identity. He reported feeling victorious as a Jew living in Poland "five minutes walk from where my grandfather was executed" during the Holocaust. He reported seeing hundreds of anti-Semitic graffiti, and no anti-German or anti-Russian graffiti in Poland. In Wroclaw, he saw, in a very public place, in very large letters, "Juden Raus." He also sees a picture of an old Jewish man holding a gold coin. This racist image is hung in businesses and homes as a good luck charm. At the same time, Mr. Huppert says that his personal experiences living as a Jew in Poland have been good, and he has had almost no negative experiences. If he had to pick anywhere to live in Europe today, it would be Warsaw.

Rabbi Simcha Krakowski, President of the Chasidic Foundation in Tel Aviv: "History of the Chasidic Movement in Poland."

Rabbi Krakowski offered a history of Hasidism in Poland. He reported that there are many accounts of Polish non-Jews (in his speech he used the word "goyim") helped by Jewish Hasidic saints. Poles enjoy the jobs and income that come from Jewish tourism to Poland.

Hannah Rosenthal: Greetings from the Secretary of State

Mrs. Rosenthal's father is a Holocaust survivor. She monitors anti-Semitism in 193 countries. She chooses to focus on Poland. "There's a maturity in the reconciliation between the world Polish population and the world Jewish population." Young people may ask their grandparents, "What were you doing during the war? What guilt do I need to feel?" There are disgusting anti-Semitic events in sports. Tadeusz Pieronek, a Polish bishop, engaged in Holocaust denial. Rosenthal quoted the Talmud, "We are not required to finish the task, but neither are we allowed to desist from it."

Panel Three: The Nature of Change in the Perception of Polish-Jewish Relations in Recent Times.

Rabbi Michael Schudrich: "How Polish-Jewish Relations Practically Function in Today's Poland: An Analysis of Successes and Failures. What has Caused the Change in Polish-Jewish Relations in the Past Twenty Years." Rabbi Schudrich and I were on the same panel. I asked him where in the states he is from. The Bronx. I once lived on Moshulu Parkway, and worked in the Bronx Zoo, I said. I've been a fan of Rabbi Schudrich's since seeing him in Mishael Porembski's film "Burning Questions." In that film he says that it is Poles' obligation to tell their own story. I could not agree more.

Rabbi Schudrich mentioned a previous, Jewish name for Poland, one that could be translated "here lives God." He said that Polish democracy is a "miracle."

Rabbi Schudrich asked the key question: "Which is the real Poland? The szmalcowniks or the righteous? Which is the real Poland? The many Jewish festivals or Radio Maria?" Of course I think he can find the answer in "Bieganski." His answer is "both." "Poland has good guys and bad guys. The good guys are growing in number."

Pope John Paul II contributed to the growth in the number of good guys. He fought Christian anti-Semitism more than anyone else in the past 2,000 years. The fall of Communism resulted in a tremendous release of energy. The discussion of the Jedwabne massacre was a watershed moment. The good guys on both sides found each other. This discussion deepened Rabbi Schudrich's affection and respect for Poland. "We need to feel each other's pain." Nowadays, perhaps, relations are too normal – we need to remain alert, and pay attention to fighting xenophobia.

Dr. Danusha Goska: Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype.

I spoke next, and, as the only invited female scholarly speaker, I focused on fashions and recipes.

I mean, seriously. I haven't been in such an androcentric environment since I was among the first to stand in line for the first local showing of "Jurassic Park." At times I was the only woman in the room.

There should have been more women at this conference. Too much of Polish-Jewish relations is, to use a technical term, a pissing contest, a testosterone-fueled, zero-sum competition whose goal is domination, even the domination of others' narratives, of others' ethical self-definition: "We suffered more than you! Your hate for us was worse than our hate for you!" Our conferences will be at their best when they reflect the real world, which is fifty percent female, and when they reflect women's ways of understanding diversity and coexistence.

Mr. Sebastian Rejak, Department of Africa and the Middle East, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Poland. "The Myth of Polish Death Camps v. the Myth of Polish Innocence."

Mr. Rejak was the first conference speaker to mention the involvement of Jews in the post-war Communist security apparatus. As he said, as Dr. Stanislaw Krajewski has pointed out in his book, that was and is part of the history of Polish Jews.

Mr. Rejak also mentioned the 1941 Jedwabne massacre of Jews by Poles and the 1946 Kielce pogrom of Jews by Poles. He also mentioned szmalcowniks, or Poles who betrayed Jews for money during the Nazi occupation.

Mr. Rejak reported that every year, hundreds of sources, all over the world, use the term "Polish concentration camps" or other terms like it. This term is a distortion. These concentration camps were Nazi institutions, not Polish. They were placed in Poland occupied by Nazis. "Poland has too many actual stains on its collective conscience for it to willingly accept responsibility for crimes committed for someone else."

Mr. Rejak also stressed the need for "partnership" in dialogue not in terms of "equality of suffering or victimhood or participation in atrocities" but in terms of approach. "There should be no 'inferior' and 'superior' parties in a dialogue."

Mr. Rejak also mentioned Dabru Emet. I really appreciated this placement of Polish-Jewish relations in the wider context of Christian-Jewish dialogue.

***

I'll add this comment for readers unfamiliar with this history. There was a disproportionate participation of Jews in the post-war Communist security apparatus, notorious for its torture and murder of Polish World War Two heroes like General Nil and Witold Pilecki, and for defaming these men in the press as "spit-flecked dwarves."

***

I sincerely thank those who contributed to bringing this conference about: Artur Wroblewski of Lararski University, and his sister, Joanna Wroblewska. Artur cited Eran Huppert as a co-planner, so I thank him, too. I thank Jeffrey Anderson of Georgetown University.

This conference was a terrifically impressive feat. It may have been the first time that representatives of all the branches of Judaism in Poland were present at one conference.

The speakers were dynamic people who are actively doing things to make the world a better place. Their best selves will triumph.

I would like to see a few differences between this conference and the next conference like it.

We had very few attendees. The conference was held at the wrong time. December 7, especially on college campuses, is part of Christmas crunch. Next time: Better timing!

There should have been more publicity, and it should have been more broadly based.

All too often, those involved in Polish-Jewish relations see the entire universe through that narrow pinhole. They don't understand that many other people love to hear our story.

I speak at libraries and churches to the general public. Irish and Italian and African American audiences become passionate about my talks. Polonia! Understand that you are part of the world, and your story is part of the world's story. For conferences like this, invite anyone interested in Christian-Jewish relations, multiculturalism, World War Two history, narrative, official and subaltern histories, racism, forgiveness and reconciliation – that's everybody, people!

And more women. Really.

There's Hope! What You Can Do about The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision

2011-11-25T15:54:00.003-05:00

Green Jean. Source.

There's Hope! What You Can Do about The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision

This post is part of a three part series.

Part One: The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

Part Two: Possible Causes for The Crisis in PolonianLeadership, Organization and Vision.

Part Three: There's Hope! What You Can Do about The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision

This is what Polonia needs: an organization, networked internationally and with deep grassroots support, dedicated to eliminating the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype. It will disseminate the truth of Polonia. Not an exclusive, airbrushed, chauvinist version, but the entire, rich, complex and vibrant story.

This organization will be staffed by committed, professional, activists. They will be consistent, courteous, reliable, humble, and rational. They will treat each other and the wider world with professionalism and respect. They will establish their leadership not by making others feel small, excluded, and not good enough, but by making others feel big, included, and essential members of the team. They will show up day after day. They will keep their eyes on the prize: telling the Polish story and supporting Polonian authors and scholars.

This organization will not attack, blame, scapegoat, or demonize Jews, liberals, television, Hollywood, the New York Times, or anybody else. Its members will take responsibility for their own actions.

This group will not be confused or unfocused. They will not think that the problem is one scholar – not Jan Tomasz Gross – one phrase "Polish Concentration camps" – or one film – "Shoah." This group will do what Saul Alinsky instructed activists to do: pick a target, freeze it, and name it: Bieganski, the brute Polak stereotype, in all its manifestations.

This organization will ensure that the Polish-American story is told in elementary schools, high schools, on and university campuses. It will work to make that story known in popular and elite media.

Classic Bohunk texts like "The Jungle" and "Out of this Furnace" and The Poetry of Anton Piotrowski will appear on syllabi. Newer authors like Christina Pacosz will appear on syllabi, as well.

Oskar Kolberg will finally be translated and his key scholarship will be rescued from oblivion.

Revisionist histories will be corrected. No, African Americans are not the only group to face racism. Yes, "white" people have faced murderous racism, as well. No, Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon. Yes, Polish Catholic priests were targeted, tortured, and murdered. No, the Holocaust was not the product of primitive peasants, but of modern people and the world's best science. No, we can't make evil go away by becoming more modern.

This organization will work for the hiring of Bohunk faculty and the funding of Bohunk students.

If a world-class scholar like Norman Davies is offered a job and then rejected, and it looks like his support for Polonia is playing a role in his rejection, this organization will coordinate grassroots, watchdog activity and legal supervision of the case.

This organization will embrace Polish cleaning women as well as Kosciuszko on a white horse. This organization will celebrate Polish coal miners as well as celebrities. This organization will unite with other Bohunks – Slovak-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans, Lithuanian-Americans – who tell part of our own story. This organization will embrace not just pianists and the authors who write about World War Two, but will also ask, what do figures like Andy Warhol, a Rusyn-American, and David Wojnarowicz, a Polish-American, say about our experience?

This organization will honor the past and focus on the present and the future. Young people will be a big chunk of its staff and membership.

The Activist members of this organization will think globally and act locally.

Think Globally and act locally: Polish activists have always done this; their slogan was "For your freedom and ours."

Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, organized a Jewish legion, the Hussars of Israel.

Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish military hero, wanted to buy the freedom of African American slaves, and worked for full inclusion of Poland's peasants and Jews.

In Poland in 1989, I joined other Poles in protesting the arrest of Vaclav Havel. Vaclav Havel was not Polish, but Czech. He had been arrested for the crime of laying flowers in Wenceslas Square in the memory of Jan Palach. Poles who "think globally and act locally" noticed, cared about, and protested this arrest.

In 1989, in Krakow, while protesting Soviet domination, we also marched in support of Chinese in Tiananmen Square.

Polonia will benefit from remembering and reinvigorating its tradition of thinking globally and acting locally.

This organization will recognize that Jews are Polonians' "older brothers in faith" and among our best allies. The work we will do to eliminate the Bieganski stereotype, we will do together.

This organization will not be merely reactive. It will not wait for assault, insult and revision only to respond with random, disorganized flurries of letters, but, rather, with commitment, coordination, and discipline.

This organization will be proactive. It will create a powerful, synergistic, cooperative and strategic network of those disseminating art and writing and film and speakers about Poland and Polonia and its rich, loving, vibrant, full voice will not be overcome – because we are an essential part of the wider human story.

Getting Polonians to unite, support each other, and act in a committed, disciplined, coordinated fashion will be the A-1 priority of this organization. It will organize activist retreats and workshops, where average Polonians overcome their atomization and learn to work together.

Rosa Parks was a product of this kind of workshop for early Civil Rights activists. As Paul Loeb describes in "The Real Rosa Parks," Parks didn't just one day decide not to sit in the back of the bus. Parks trained for twelve long years to be an activist.

Similarly, KOR – Komitet Obrony Robotników or the Workers' Defense Committee – organized a Flying University that trained people on attitudes and techniques that helped to bring about the Solidarity Revolution.

Poles – including Polish Jews like Konstanty Gebert and Adam Michnik – were able to bring about these activist workshops even while living under Communism's constant surveillance and deadly threat. African Americans could do the same under Jim Crow. There is no reason for today's Polonians, living in comfort and ease in the West, to think that they cannot do the same.

Prominent and wealthy Polonians will be proud funders and sponsors of this organization. This organization will reach out to them and honor them.

The staff and membership of this organization will be diverse. Some will be Catholics, some atheists. Some Democrat, some Republican. Some gay, some straight. Some will support this or that war or invasion or candidate, others will oppose.

They won't talk about abortion or war or gay marriage or other issues, though, because bringing up what divides them will distract them from their goal. They will keep the group united and focused. They will keep their eyes on the prize. They will get things done.

This organization does not yet exist.

This organization does not yet exist because Polonia does not yet want it.

When Polonia wants it, this organization will come into existence. And it will be great.

Ann75. "Colours in the Snow." Source.

Meanwhile, what can you do?

If you want to change things for the better, you can.

How?

Make that decision. "I have decided to do this. I will not complain. I will not blame. I will not look back. I will not quit. With the higher power of my understanding as my rock, I will do this."

That's it, really.

The pyramids? The result of human will.

The Great Wall of China? The result of human will.

The Civil Rights Movement? The result of human will.

Solidarnosc? The result of human will.

People more articulate than I have made this point.

"For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith." - Mark, 11:23

"Give me where to stand and I will move the world." - Archimedes.

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau

"What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness, concerning all acts of initiative and creation. The moment one definitely commits oneself, Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." - Attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Children, if you are tired, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going." - Attributed to Harriet Tubman.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." - Marianne Williamson

Are you going to build a pyramid or move a mountain?

How much more important is a human being than a pile of stones?

If you can develop your own mind, body, and soul enough that you stop being a complainer and a blamer and start being an activist – hey. Moving a human soul and a human life is as impressive as moving a mountain.

The longest journey really does begin with a single step, and it really is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

"We can do no great things. Only small things with great love." - Attributed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

***

Where do you start?

Do the work that is right in front of you.

If you have to confess your ignorance on Polonian matters, start buying, reading, and reviewing books on Amazon.

Do read about the heroes on white horses: Kosciuszko, Curie, Karski, Copernicus. And learn about and honor your peasant ancestry, as well. And – if you are Polish – no matter how white your collar is now – you have peasant ancestry.

Read Jan Slomka's priceless depiction of the Polish peasant experience, "From Serfdom to Self Government."

Read Olga Narkiewicz's "Green Flag: Polish Populist Politics" about life for peasants in 20^th century Poland.

If you really want to strip the wool from your eyes and get rid, once and for all, of any romantic notions you may have about what it was like to be a Polish peasant, read "Four Russian Serf Narratives" edited by John MacKay.

Read about Bohunks in the US: "The Jungle," of course, and "Out of this Furnace."

***

If you want to be an activist but you've never marched or petitioned or organized, inform yourself.

Google "how to be an activist" or "activism 101."

Read "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky got his start organizing Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, and other Bohunks in the "Back of the Yards" neighborhood in Chicago. Their group was the "Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council." When Alinsky arrived, Polish-Americans had a higher infant mortality rate than African-Americans. Alinsky wanted to help Polish-American babies to survive. He eventually became the world's most famous organizer.

Read Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience."

Read my own "Political Paralysis."

Watch "Man of Marble," about an indomitable Polish woman, and "Man of Iron" about an indomitable Polish man. Watch this video clip.

Read and watch movies about Gandhi, one of the most brilliant and successful organizers in history, about Mother Teresa. Watch "Eyes on the Prize."

Pray.

And act.

Be the change you want to see.

Don't mourn. Organize.

The winter is yours. The spring is ours. Source.

Possible Causes for The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision

2011-11-25T15:54:00.002-05:00

"Tangled Roots" by Eli Van Zoeren. Source.

Possible Causes for The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

This post is part of a three part series.

Part One: TheCrisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

Part Two: Possible Causes for The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

Part Three: There's Hope! What You Can Do aboutThe Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

***

Possible Causes for The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.
Foreign powers attempted political, biological and cultural genocides against Poles and Poland for two hundred years.

Poland's own social structure: aristocrats on the top, Jews occupying the Middleman Minority position, and peasants on the bottom, created an oppressive model of power which echoes today.

Most post-colonial nations are the neighbors of other post-colonial nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. They developed a discourse that championed their own populations. They produced authors like Frantz Fanon. Fanon told colonized people to stop looking at themselves through the eyes of people who colonized them.

Poles' neighbors are their colonizers. Without realizing it, too many Poles adopted the worldview of the colonizer and the oppressor.

What is the psycho-social legacy of Poland's history, and how does it affect Polonia's failure to respond to Bieganski, the Brute Polak stereotype?

***

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

She was blonde, beautiful, poised. She was sitting on a bus in an ancient, foreign city. She was not Polish or Polish-American.

I asked her why she had come to Krakow, when she could have taken her vacation anywhere: the South of France, the Caribbean, the pyramids…

She told me. "I've been a nurse in a metropolitan hospital for twenty years. As you can imagine, I've dealt with patients from every ethnic group. I've been next to them at their worst moments: their own deaths, the death of loved ones, finding out that they have major disease. In nursing school, I learned the universal language. Touch. I've touched them, stroked their backs, to calm them, to make them feel connected and warm. And you can feel it – their muscles relaxing, their breathing becoming more regular. Except with one group of people. When I touch them, they tense up. I can feel them preparing for fight or flight. The Poles. For a long time, I've wanted to come here to find out exactly what kind of history could produce such a people."

***

I was talking to a successful scholar and author, a woman I knew to be Irish-American. I'd known her for ten years.

In the course of one afternoon's conversation, she revealed that she had Polish ancestry and culture in her home, something she'd always kept hidden. In fact, her Polish grandfather played a prominent role in the historic 1936-37 Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike.

Why didn't she own and celebrate her Polish identity?

Her grandfather, she reported, had abused alcohol and was physically violent to her mother.

My friend had no idea of Polish history. She had no idea what her grandfather faced in the Old Country. She just saw him as a violent drunk, wrote him off, and forgot him.

I wish Polonia had educated her. Not with cardboard cut-outs of Kosciuszko on a white horse, or rosy-cheeked peasants dancing a mazurka. With an honest, rich picture of all the forces that forged her Polish peasant grandfather: what sparked in him a passion for justice for the common worker; what steeled him with the determination to make history; what made him brave enough to face off with his social betters, and what crippled him such that he was a flawed parent to his own children.

***

Mishael Porembski's Emmy-Award winning 2000 film, "Burning Questions," records her own effort to understand her own Polish-born father, a man who "wasn't altogether happy." For those wanting to understand the impact of trauma on Polish parents or grandparents, Porembski's film is a good place to start.

Christina Pacosz's essay "A Great Deal of Doing" is another good resource. "A Great Deal of Doing" details the riot that drove Polish immigrants out of a Missouri town. Pacosz's Polish father was one of the victims of this riot. Christina, an American-born woman, grew up with the trauma that this riot caused her Polish father.

John Guzlowski depicts his Polish mother, Tekla, beating his father, Jan, and his sister, Danuta.

Guzlowski places Tekla Hanczarek Guzlowska's domestic violence in the context of Tekla's own history of trauma. Tekla was horribly traumatized by invading Nazis and Ukrainians. That had an impact on her, a complex impact that she wrestled with all her life.

Self-hatred
I've already posted about Polish self-hatred, here.

In Poland, summer, 2011, I heard again and again, from Poles: "Bieganski is no stereotype. Poles really are slobs, bigots, and pigs. Especially the peasants. Especially the workers. I'm not like that, but most Poles are."

People who experience self-hatred will find it difficult to support other members of their group.

Self-hatred is the result of seeing oneself through the eyes on one's oppressor. Polonian organizations often respond to the Brute Polak stereotype by insisting that only recognized heroes like Kosciuszko and Curie have value. Polonians often respond to the Brute Polak stereotype by quarantining peasants and working class Poles, their history and culture.

When they do so, they unwittingly and inadvertently express self-hatred. They are seeing themselves through the eyes of those who have contempt for them. They are saying, "Yes, you bigots are correct. Polish peasants and Polish workers are not worth any positive attention."

Social Atomization
"Divide and Conquer" was policy for every one of Poland's occupiers for the past two hundred years. Russia, Germany, and Austria conquered and controlled Poles by turning Christians against Jews, Catholics against Orthodox, believers against atheists, peasants against aristocrats, flatlanders against highlanders, workers against university students, Poles against Lemkos, urbanites against rural people, and neighbor against neighbor.

Jakub Szela was a Polish peasant who had been cheated and whipped by his Polish lord. Austria, the colonizing power in Poland, encouraged Szela to lead an uprising that killed over a thousand Polish nobles. Austrians paid Polish peasants money for every decapitated Polish noble head. So many peasants brought in so many heads that Austrians lowered the price for a head to salt.

During WW II, Szmalcowniks did not betray only Jews to the Nazis. They betrayed their fellow Poles. Stefan Grot-Rowecki, the first commander of the Home Army, was betrayed by Polish traitors.

Lustration provided an opportunity for Poles to turn on each other. Other opportunities: gay rights, concepts of Catholicism, concepts of nation.

In November 2011, one of my Polish-American facebook friends posted a painting a Poles sharpening sabers. Under the painting he placed this caption: "Polish nobles sharpening weapons against domestic traitors." He went on to say that he was ready for "war" with his fellow Poles.

The result of divide-and-conquer was social atomization: society was divided up into tiny parts. Few trusted, or worked well with, anyone else. People trusted and cooperated with their own families, if that.

Nowadays, in America, when Polonians refuse to unite, they give excuses like this one: "I wrote a letter on my own" to protest this or that Bieganski-Brute-Polak incident.

Sustained, effective action requires community. Polonians who are atomized from their fellow Polonians choose to write individual letters rather than unite in groups because they find uniting with their fellow Polonians and acting in a disciplined, mutually supporting manner too difficult. This may be the legacy of divide-and-conquer policies.

In November, 2011, a Facebook poster posted this image with a caption about Polish Nobles sharpening blades to kill domestic enemies.

An artist's depiction of the Szela uprising. Note Austrian colonizers purchasing Polish nobles' heads from Polish peasant sellers. Source.

Siege Mentality and Displaced Aggression

My American students are familiar with Jews as victims of Nazism. My students often don't know that the Nazis persecuted any other group. My students often conclude from this, and are encouraged by Christophobic professors to conclude from this, that Nazism was a Christian phenomenon.

One day in class I was addressing this misconception. I mentioned that Nazis had enslaved Polish Catholics during World War Two.

Most of my students got the point – the Nazis didn't persecute only Jews.

One student reacted with outrage. "I am from Poland! My grandparents lived through World War Two! The Nazis never enslaved Poles! What you are saying is not true!"

After class, I emailed documentation to this student. The Nazis did, indeed, persecute and enslave Polish Catholics.

The student responded. He said that he had known all along that I was telling the truth.

His complaint: By saying that Nazis had enslaved Poles, I made Poles look bad. He accused me of "degrading" Poles.

Siege mentality interprets every touch as an assault, every word as an insult, every stimulus as an attack.

Siege mentality turns every potential ally into an enemy, every conversation into a fight.

Displaced aggression is a related phenomenon. From Wikipedia: "aggression may be displaced onto people with little or no connection with what is causing anger. Displacement can act in a chain-reaction, with people unwittingly becoming both victims and perpetrators of displacement. For example, a man is angry with his boss, but he cannot express this so he hits his wife. The wife hits one of the children, possibly disguising this as punishment."

***

George Foster's Limited Good
George Foster's Limited Good is one of the key insights to understanding the Polish penchant for sabotaging other Poles. It is also a key insight for understanding Polish-Jewish relations.

George Foster was a twentieth-century American anthropologist. He did fieldwork among peasants in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico.

Foster wrote,

"Broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic, and natural universes—their total environment—as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply.

Not only do these and all other good things exist in finite and limited quantities, but in addition, there is no way directly within peasant power to increase the available quantities. It is as if the obvious fact of land shortage in a densely populated area applied to all other desired things: not enough to go around."

Here's an example of limited good at work:

I lived in a small, remote village in Africa. One peasant, a respected, well-beloved, senior man, adopted advanced agricultural techniques. His farm produced much larger yields than his neighbors' farms.

His neighbors burned his farm to the ground.

Why?

Limited Good. There is only so much good in the world. If my next-door-neighbor's farm produces more manioc, my farm will produce less manioc.

Does this concept apply to modern, educated Poles, who are no longer peasants?

Yes.

I had just published a work about Poles.

A Polish-American scholar made false and libelous charges against my work and me.

This astounded me – We were Polish-Americans, working in the same field. We were on the same team. He should support me, and I should support him. We could proceed to victory with each other's support.

But no. Why? This man had also just published a work about Poles – one with a theme similar to mine. In fact, he quoted me (without a citation – a big no-no in scholarship.)

The concept of limited good: if my publication did well, there would not be enough "good" left over for this scholar's publication. For his publication to advance, he had to downgrade a publication by another Polish-American scholar on the same topic.

Limited Good is also at work in the dark side of Polish-Jewish relations. Chauvinist Poles and chauvinist Jews believe that there is not enough "good" available for both Poles AND Jews. They believe that people will know of Polish suffering under the Nazis OR they will know about Jewish suffering under the Nazis. They believe that people will know of Poles who betrayed Jews OR they will know of heroic Poles who rescued Jews.

Limited Good insists that people can't have knowledge of both.

A related concept: the zero sum game. People who adopt this worldview see life as a game, with only one winner, who takes all.

They cannot conceive of a world with multiple winners. They cannot conceive of a world where my victory contributes to your success. They cannot conceive of other people as their fellow team members, only as their competitors.

A joke from the Soviet era:

A peasant complains: "Comrade Party Secretary! I must protest! My neighbor has two cows and I have none!"

The Party Secretary replies: "Don't worry, little father. We will rectify this. We will take one of your neighbor's cows and give it to you."

The peasant responds: "No! Comrade Party Secretary, you don't understand! I want you to kill BOTH my neighbor's cows!"

***

Defeatism. Learned Helplessness. The Romance of Defeatism. Conspiracy Theories. Poverty Consciousness.
Defeatism and Learned Helplessness: We are doomed. Nothing we do can have any positive impact.

The weirdest, saddest, most recent example of this appeared in an internet post. A woman said that she could not do anything to contribute to fighting the Bieganski stereotype, because Jan Tomasz Gross was all powerful, and her efforts against him were futile.

So, Jan Tomasz Gross is Godzilla, and she is helpless Tokyo.

For some, defeatism exerts a romantic allure. They like to cite the Warsaw Uprising. They feel that Poles, to be real Poles, must not win.

Conspiracy Theories are related to defeatism: "They are out to get us and there is nothing we can do about it."

Conspiracy theorists see dark plots in the most mundane events.

After I wrote a mildly critical review of a fellow Polonian's book, an officer in a Polonian organization, a man with whom I'd previously enjoyed collegial cooperation on Polish matters, sent me an email accusing me of having sold out to the Jews. A similar conspiracy theory appeared in a Polish publication. A reader of this very blog sent me an email suggesting that I had posted a pro-Israel post as part of selling out to Jews or being manipulated or bullied by Jews.

In all these fantasies, the message is clear: unseen hands control our fates. We are merely puppets. There is nothing we can do. In other words, conspiracy theories are the perfect excuse for doing nothing.

Poverty Consciousness also relieves believers from doing anything. "We Poles can't do anything about negative stereotyping because we are poor and the bad guys are rich."

A facebook post asks me, "Can you please offer me a reduced price on 'Bieganski?'? I am poor and I can't afford to buy books."

I don't have a problem with that. It's no shame to be poor. Unfortunately, I can't offer a reduced price; I don't control book prices.

Here's the interesting thing – the same facebook poster who asks for a reduced price on the book will go on to post messages like this, "Hey! Check out the speedboat I just bought … here's a slideshow of my trip to Paris … here are some snapshots of our snorkeling tour of the Maldive islands!"

Of course there are many poor Polish people. There are, though, in the West, certainly, lots and lots of Polonians who are quite comfortable – and yet still talk as if they are penniless serfs – when it comes to their contributing in any way to Polonian matters. When it comes to purchasing consumer goods, suddenly they remember where they keep their plastic.

Ironically, in my experience, people who really are poor peasants can be among the most generous people on earth.

Poverty consciousness insists to its believers that they are poor and powerless when in fact they have money and they use that money to purchase the consumer goods that they value. When significant number of Polonians remembers where the wallet is when it comes to scholarships, publishing, and culture, things will change for the better.

For now, Poverty Consciousness, Conspiracy Theories, and Defeatism reassure their believers that their passivity is A-OK. After all, nothing can be done. The romance of defeatism insists that it is somehow more authentically Polish to lose than it is to win.

***

Oppressive models of power
Oppressed people see power at its ugliest. Many of those who held power in Poland were bullies or snobs.

Even today, too many Polonians understand bullying or snobbery as power. Selecting such people as our leaders has not advanced our cause.

***

Indifference
The Bieganski stereotype insists that Poles are all crazed nationalists, devoting their passions to promoting Poland. That's just not true.

Polish chauvinists insist that all Polonians are passionate patriots kept down by powerful forces beyond their control. That's just not true.

The Bieganski stereotype insists that Poles are the world's worst anti-Semites, and that anti-Semitism is the foundation of Polish culture, and that Polish culture must be condemned and jettisoned, root and branch.

That's just not true.

What is true?

Most Poles and especially most Polish-Americans do not care about any of this – in fact they aren't even aware of it.

***

In my wildly diverse classes, I've taught a fair number of Polish-American students, both those who were born in the US and descended from forgotten great-grandparents who were Polish, and students born in Poland. I've also taught classes of only Poles.

None of these students ever expressed any desire to be identified with Poland or Polish identity or any activism associated with Poland.

A couple of these students told me that they wanted to be identified as something else, and had gone so far as to change their names to alter their identification.

I know several who have been "Wiggers," an ugly word, a combination of "white" and "nigger." Wiggers adopt clothing and postures popular in Black Gangsta culture – the pants down over the buttocks, the gold chains, the backwards baseball cap.

I know a Polish-American scholar who has no interest in his Polish ancestry; he studies Jamaican Dub Poetry. Another Polish-American named his child after Bob Marley. Another married a black man and spends her social time with his family, not her own.

Why would Polish-Americans become Wiggers? Because they crave an identity, a history, roots, a family, heroes and role models, a culture.

Bob Marley provides a sense of identity to "wiggers."

My other students often voice great pride in their ethnicity. Hispanic, Muslim, Irish, Italian, African American, Japanese – "This is what I am and I'm proud of it!" My students publicly announce this in class; they create in-depth scholarly projects; they reach out to their fellow students. Irish students pursue research on famous Irish authors or stereotypes of Irish Americans or Irish folk music. An Italian American student did a research paper on the impact of the television show "The Jersey Shore" on images of Italian Americans.

Several of my Muslim students have done projects on Islam or what it means to be Muslim American. They do this eagerly, proudly, and publicly, in spite of often open hostility from their fellow students. African American students mention their ethnicity and their culture on an almost daily basis. A Japanese student gave a speech insisting on the peaceful nature of Japanese culture (this did not go over well with the Chinese students).

Poles? Never. Not once. Not ever.

It's true of my entire Bohunk cohort of students: Polish-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans, Slovak-Americans, Croatian-Americans. They just don't talk about it, not even if asked.

There is one exception. My student Azur. I talk about Azur in this blog post.

Azur was a Slav, and proud of it. He came from Bosnia, an Eastern European country. Azur did talk about his country, in detail: Sarajevo, the Bosnian dragon, the Bosnian fleur-de-lis. He talked about his father and his uncles and their experience in the wars of the break-up of Yugoslavia. He presented his research to his fellow students.

Azur was a Muslim.

Why was a Muslim Slav so eager to talk about his culture, and my Christian Bohunk students have not been? The answer to that question might help us to understand The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

***

There is a small percentage of Polish-Americans who do devote some energy to their heritage.

For the most part, these folks' activities are self-limiting. They draw a border around their identity and their energy. That border prevents them from ever becoming activists.Self-limiting Polonian identities, below:

Tribalists. They have a tribe. They limit themselves to their tribe's territory and their tribe's rituals.

Perhaps their tribe's territory is a small Polish neighborhood and its Catholic Church. Their rituals: Catholic mass in Polish, eating pierogies in the church basement, and occasionally dressing up in folk costumes.

They like and trust their tribe members, who are all people of the same immigration wave, age, income, and educational level as themselves.

They are suspicious of and uncomfortable with outsiders, including Polish-Americans from the next town, Polish-Americans who have a different educational level than their own, Polish-Americans of a different immigration wave, or Polish-Americans who are younger or older or richer or poorer or more right-wing or more left-wing or more religious or less religious than themselves. They will not unite with these "alien" Poles to accomplish any wider goal that serves all Polonia.

New rituals – organizing to demand a college course on their history, raising money for a scholarship, joining a national or international protest with people they have not met, purchasing a scholarly book, or even a poetry book on Polish topics from Amazon – cause them anxiety and discomfort. They will not perform these alien rituals. They have no desire to have an impact on any territory beyond the borders of their self-limited world.

An example of a hardcore tribalist: A handsome, macho, blond, Polish-born, Polish-American boy was the leader of the pack during the 2011 Jagiellonian University summer school. He sparked parties; the university guides deferred to him.

He lives in Wallington, NJ, a heavily Polish-American town.

On the bus during our daytrip to Zakopane, I overheard him say that he stockpiles weapons, and that if any trouble began, he would be ready to shoot bad people from Paterson, NJ, who might attack Wallington.

Gently, quietly, I approached this lad. He looked about twenty years old. I told him that I live in Paterson. I told him that I am active in Polish issues. I told him that he should drive the seven miles that separate Wallington from Paterson. I said that he and I could be active in Polish issues together.

This was a very muscular young man. I know because he often walked around bare-chested. This young Hercules had nothing to fear from a little old lady like me.

As I spoke to him, he looked terrified.

His socialization had prepared him to be the alpha male of a crew of young Polish-Americans in Poland. Nothing in his socialization had prepared him to communicate coherently, never mind organize politically or culturally, with a Polish-American from a different immigration wave, from a different age group and gender, from a different town. A stranger inviting him to participate in Polish-American issues overwhelmed him, discombobulated him, wiped his brain clean and froze it up.

Among members of his tribe, he is a fearless leader. When encountering someone he defines as alien, the tribalist cannot function.

Hobbyists. The women dabble in genealogy. The men collect military insignia. Like all hobbyists, their hobbies allow them to escape the stresses of day-to-day demands. The last thing they want to do is get involved in controversial, real-life issues; thus, the route from hobbyist to activist is a difficult one.

Celebrity worshippers. When Czeslaw Milosz wins a Nobel Prize, or Andrzej Wajda wins an Academy Award, or Izabella Skorupko is chosen to be a Bond girl, they pay attention. Activism is a nitty-gritty activity, demanding contact with unglamorous people. Polonians without celebrity status, humble goals that aren't broadcast via the TV show "Entertainment Tonight" or via the front page of the newspaper, offer them nothing they value.

Celebrity worshippers notice when a Polish actress like Isabella Skorupko becomes a Bond girl.

Audience Members. They catch performances of Mazowsze or the latest Polish film. Polishness is something they buy tickets for and observe. It is not something that they do.

Seasonal Polonians. They are Polish in their kitchen on Wigilia – Christmas Eve – and on Easter Sunday.

Snobs. The Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype is contagious. If the snobs were to associate with Bohunks, they would risk losing their own hard-won status as self-created Polonian princes and princesses.

The only Poles they will own up to have received an imprimatur of approval from certifiably superior people, i.e., non-Poles.

The snobs never shut up about Copernicus, Kosciuszko, Karski, Chopin, Curie or Milosz. The snobs are religiously rude to any Pole who has ever cleaned anyone else's home. Their rudeness establishes their superiority. They are NOT Bieganski, they want you to know.

Sunshine soldiers and summer patriots. "Convenience" is their keyword. If it is convenient for them to do so, they will toss off a letter protesting this or that incident. Theirs is ADHD activism.

Chauvinists. A consistent netizen of online Polish groups is the Chauvinist.

He makes a lot of noise: "Rah, rah, Poland! Boo, hiss Jews!" He makes a white eagle on a red field, or a photo of Pilsudski, his Facebook photo.

He complains a lot, very vehemently. "How scandalous! There's been another Polish joke on TV! We must do something! Doesn't anyone here care about this EXCEPT ME!!!!!"

All his noise and bluster might convince you that he loves Poland.

Love allows growth, and he isn't interested in any Poland that isn't his rigid fantasy of Poland: one where the men are manly, the women know their place, no one is gay or an atheist, and Lwow and Wilno are Polish cities.

The chauvinist's denial and defensiveness demand that, in public, we speak of Poles only as heroes and heroines. Every Polish woman is Princess Wanda, bravely fighting for Poland. Every Polish man is brave Knight Konrad Wallenrod.

We must always blame the Jews. Or the WASPs. Or the liberals. Or Jan Tomasz Gross. Or the big conspiracy against Poles.

The chauvinist's denial and defensiveness demand that we never diagnose our own failings, address them, and improve our tactics.

Drama Queens Superficially, Drama Queens may appear to be perfect activists. With their short, sharp bursts of energy, they shock and awe.

In the long run, Drama Queens cause more harm than good.

They are in it for the backstage gossip, in which they always play the leading role. These dramatics, in which the Drama Queen uses other people as props in his or her psychodrama, suck people's focus and undermine unity.

Drama Queens like the bright lights and admiration that they imagine activists enjoy.

In fact, 75% of the time, activists are ignored. 15% of the time, they are misunderstood. The rest of the time they are condemned, marginalized, and forgotten. Admiration constitutes, at best, 1% of the average activist's life. No one is applauded for stuffing envelopes. Thus, one cannot count on the Drama Queen.

"Tangled Roots" by Senex Prime. Source.

The Walking Wounded I teach African Americans, and, as one might expect, there is much trauma in that population. Today, one hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the wounds of slavery and Jim Crow display themselves daily in the lives of my black students.

Polonians also show trauma.

I remember a Polish-born student approaching me at the end of the semester to say, "I like you, professor, because you understand what hurts me." I find it hard to imagine a student of any other ethnicity paying me just that compliment.

Twenty years ago I knew an Australian Polonian. He had a picture of Pilsudski on his bedroom wall. I know because I still have a photo that I took of him grinning proudly in front of the Pilsudski portrait. In our long talks, he unreeled both the considerable pride he drew from his Polish identity, and the considerable pain.

Now, twenty years later, he aggressively insults me for still being involved. "Polishness is a big waste of time! It's a pointless, soul-destroying energy suck! Get out while you can!"

He has moved to Thailand, married a Thai woman, and speaks Thai every day. Thais are nice to him and smile at him, he reports. No more tension, no more grief, over identity.

What causes the pain of the walking wounded?

I can only guess.

Members of the c. 1880-1924 immigration were obsessed with their experiences in the Old Country as peasants. They were hungry, they were cold, they were without contact with the sophisticated, they had the powerless peasant's conflicted relationship with power – power in the form of a boss or power in the form of a printed book or contract or financial investment – they had limited contact with the wider world outside the village, and they were physically strong.

They wanted housing, they wanted food, they wanted stability, and they unquestioningly believed that their hard work could earn them these things. Peasants, they lacked the cards to do anything fancy – they would not become journalists or financiers. They were blessed with the strong backs and the iron wills to work very hard jobs. They stuck with those jobs in spite of every obstacle, they bought houses, they put down roots, they married, they stayed married, and they did not waver in their determination.

That's the average Polish-American from that immigration. They had little to nothing to do with Chopin or Curie, and everything to do with very clean houses, very full refrigerators and very reliable employees.

These people were not verbal about their identity. They didn't talk.

Such lives can be horribly stifling and frustrating and they dealt with those frustrations through displaced aggression – by getting drunk and beating their spouses or kids. I don't know that I've ever met anyone from that generation who did not mention the silence – "They never talked about it" – the excessive alcohol consumption and the domestic violence.

***

Younger Poles today who were born in Poland and came to the US also have a distinctive identity. It is secret. Springing from generations of struggle and horror, knowing that cataclysmic forces can overturn lives, they have knowledge that those around them just don't have. Their narrative runs counter to the currently dominant American narrative of Political Correctness. They know that white people can be slaves. They know that Stalin's face does not belong on a t-shirt. They know that the left can mass murder as efficiently as the right.

They keep their counter narrative secret, though. They adopt a shiny surface of American consumer goods and eye others warily. They know that if they spoke too frankly about what they know, what their people have seen, they would be different, and they don't want to be assessed as different, though in their hearts they know they are. They know about the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype, and they resent it. They are unwilling to take any action to change it, though, because of the crisis in leadership and organizing. They have made it in The West, and they do not want to be associated with any Bohunks who have not made it. They are snobs. Their snobbishness renders them useless as activists.

This secret identity of many Polonians, especially young ones, can lead to a brittle smugness. "We Poles have suffered and we know the world's dark secrets and we have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good." This stance alienates them from the wider world, and from their truest selves. The can begin to feel like imposters.

***

The next post in this series: PartThree: There's Hope! What You Can Do about The Crisis in Polonian Leadership,Organization and Vision.

The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision

2011-11-25T15:53:00.001-05:00

"Barren" by Gary Bagshawe. Source.

The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision

This post is part of a three-part series.

Part One: The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

PartTwo: Possible Causes for The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

Part Three: There's Hope! What You Can Do about The Crisis inPolonian Leadership, Organization and Vision.

***

The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision

1.) Polonians complain about the misrepresentation of Poles.

Google "Polish slander" or "Polish defamation" or "unknown Polish history" or "Polish concentration camps" or anti-Polonism or Antypolonizm or polonophobia and you find website after website, petition after petition, letter after letter, facebook page after facebook page.

Titles like Richard C. Lukas' "Forgotten Survivors: Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation" and "Waiting to be Heard: The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955" reflect this complaint: someone is forgetting Polish victims. Someone is not hearing Polish victims.

2.) As "Bieganski" and this blog demonstrate, misrepresentation of Poles and Poland is real. The Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype is standard in schools, museums, media, and scholarship. Immigration, race, class, Holocaust and World War Two history, Catholicism and Christian-Jewish relations are rewritten in a manner that is false and unethical.

3.) A minority of Polonians openly scapegoat Jews, or even just one man – Jan Tomasz Gross – for this misrepresentation of Poles.

"Jews don't like Poles and Jews lie about Poles. Jews have much money. Jews have much power. Jews control the media. Jews control the government. Jews control schools. As long as Jews control things, Poles are helpless. We can never have as much money or power or control as Jews."

Sometimes Polonians blame African Americans, Liberals, Feminists, Gays. "This or that group controls the schools! Controls the media! Controls the culture! Controls the politicians! We poor, helpless, Polish people can't get our story told, because others control everything! We are helpless bystanders!"

4.) As long as Polonians blame "the Jews" – or Jan Tomasz Gross – for Polonians' failures, Polonia fails to grow up. Polonia fails to take responsibility for its own behavior. Polonia fails to act in its own interests.

5.) The organizing strategies that work for Jews and African Americans and Liberals and Feminists and everybody else the blamers blame would work for Poles and Polonians.

6.) Polonians do not make use of these strategies because of a crisis in Polonian leadership, organization, and vision.

7.) YOU can do something about this.

***

I've been observing ethnic politics all my life. I grew up in a very diverse town in a very diverse state. In my small town, my neighbors had been born in China, India, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Spain, Lebanon, Italy, Ukraine. There were African Americans, Native Americans, and Yiddish speakers.

I've lived in Africa, Asia, Europe, on both coasts, and in the heartland, of the United States.

I've taught students from every major and many of the minor ethnic groups on earth.

My father helped me write my first letter to the president when I was eight. My mother took me to my first march on Washington when I was in my early teens. I've politically organized with Serbs, Muslims, Tibetans, Nepalis, African Americans, the United Auto Workers, feminists, homosexuals, environmentalists, Catholics, Peace Corps Volunteers, etc.

I've been part of many successful organizing efforts, including to open a food bank, a controversial support center for GLBT students, to elect politicians, to get propositions on ballets. I've arranged multi-day conferences, written successful grant proposals, stuffed envelopes, staffed phone banks, attended city council meetings, and made hundreds of cold calls to voters and consumers. I've gone door to door with clipboards soliciting donations for worthy causes. I've registered voters. I've hung posters.

I've published and broadcast. "Political Paralysis" appeared in "The Impossible Will Take a Little While," an activist handbook featuring work by people like Nelson Mandela, Marian Wright Edelman, Henri Nouwen, and Vaclav Havel.

I've had ample opportunity to observe and compare how various groups play politics.

Polish-Americans are the single most self-sabotaging, and the least politically, culturally, academically and economically effective group with whom I have worked.

***

Why I care about the crisis in Polonian leadership and organizing.
I've seen Mount Everest and the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, the Dome of the Rock, the Grand Canyon and the Louvre. I've lived in New York City and California's San Francisco Bay Area, visited Paris and London.

Poland offers something you can get no place else. It's not the Wawel palace; Versailles dwarfs it. It's not Chopin; you can hear his music anywhere. It's not big, flat, fields of rye or poppy or potatoes. I mean, come on.

Hell came to earth in Poland, and Poland produced heroes. Poland offers the best of humanity, in the midst of the worst of humanity.

During the Nazi occupation, Warsaw Mayor Stefan Starzynski said, "Through where there were fine orphanages is now rubble; though where there were parks, there are today barricades, covered with dead; though our libraries burn, and our hospitals, it will not be in one hundred years, but today, that Warsaw, by defending the honor of Poland, stands at the pinnacle of its greatness and glory."

Warsaw, by showing its courage and determination in the hellish conditions of the Nazi occupation, revealed Warsaw's – and humanity's – truest, and best face.

source

Polonia's squandering of this heritage is a tragedy.

***

What do leaders do?

Leaders are role models. Leaders have done admirable things, and others look up to them.

Leaders acquire resources and distribute them to the community. The head lioness in the pride is the head lioness because she's the one who kills the game and brings it back for the rest of the pride to eat.

Leaders cultivate team spirit. Leaders make sure team members cooperate with, and are loyal to each team member.

Leaders establish the status and power of the group among other groups in the wider world.

Leaders recognize talent and cultivate it.

Leaders nurture, and pass the work on to, the next generation. Leaders are as much about the future as the past and the present.

***

A remarkable leader in my own life was UC Berkeley Prof. Alan Dundes.

My first year at Berkeley, Prof. Dundes told me I was "the wrong minority" to receive funding.

Prof. Dundes "pulled strings he didn't know existed" in order to get me funding for my second year.

Prof. Dundes told me I was talented. He selected which of my works I should focus on publishing, told me exactly what I needed to do to improve them for publication, and exactly what journals to submit them to.

I moved away from Berkeley. I wrote to Prof. Dundes often.

Prof. Dundes was the most important scholar in his field anywhere on planet earth. He made regular media appearances and hobnobbed with the rich and powerful.

Prof. Dundes never indicated I was unworthy of his time. Prof. Dundes never let one of my questions slip by. He responded as if my most casual observation were fascinating and worthy of his focused attention.

More than ten years after I was his student, Alan Dundes went over my CV with a fine-toothed comb and made suggestions on how to improve it. He told me what jobs to apply for, at what schools. He wrote me stellar letters of recommendation.

In March of 2005, I received a long personal email from Prof. Dundes, one I found so moving I found it hard to reply to. A few days later, he was gone. Now, six years after his death, when I introduce my own students to Alan Dundes' work, I do so with joy and pride. I am passing his work on to the next generation.

I work to build team spirit among my students. I make sure they bond to each other as much as to me. Dundes taught me that: We're all in this together.

Prof. Dundes' and I fought like cats and dogs. We came from dramatically different social classes and we disagreed violently on money, sex, gender, social class, religion, theory – everything. We were not friends. Prof. Dundes didn't do all he did for me because he liked me.

Prof. Dundes did all he did for me because he was an excellent teacher, scholar, and leader. He knew how to fulfill his role in life, and he did so, brilliantly.

Prof. Dundes' ancestors came from Łódź, which he pronounced, as Polish Jews do, "L O D Z," to rhyme with "clods," not "W O O D J" to rhyme with "huge" as Polish Catholics do.

I have never had a relationship anything like I had with Prof. Dundes with a member of my own demographic, an American of Polish Catholic descent. Nor anything like the relationships I had with Rabbi Laurence Skopitz, Prof. Antony Polonsky, Robin Schaffer, Arno Lowi, or Simon Stern. Or Stuart Balcomb – of Anglo-Saxon and Finnish descent.

When I was an unpublished house-cleaner, the daughter of an immigrant who also cleaned houses for a living, these Jewish people, and Stuart, told me that I was talented, and that I should publish. They nurtured my writing for years before I did publish.

The message I got from my own milieu, my fellow Polish Catholics, was that the most important thing for a woman to be is pretty, and since I was not pretty and I was blue collar, I should spend my life cleaning other women's houses.

Polonians don't need to learn how to like each other.

Polonians need better to function as mentors, leaders and activists. They need better to nurture and cultivate their own future.

***

We can use stories like those below to diagnose our flaws and to act to improve.

It is right and necessary to tell these stories now to you, the readers of this blog – you are people who care about Polonia. It is right and necessary for you to act in response to these realities.

***

I was a teenager. I was fascinated by all things Polish. While attending high school full time, I worked full time as a nurse's aid. I saved every penny, and entered an academic program about Poland. I met my very first Polish-American leader. The leader of this academic program was well known among Polish-Americans. I deeply admired this man's work, and I still do. It is essential to me.

He had an affair with one of my fellow students. The grapevine reported that this went on every session – that he always picked a student to make his lover.

What if we ran into his wife? No doubt he expected us to protect his lie. And were female Polish-Americans eagerly exploring their ancestry really nothing more than a stable of potential lovers for this famous Polish-American man? How could he regard any of us with any respect?

Years later, my work on Polish-American issues required me to contact prominent Polish-Americans. This man was one. He never responded to any of my communications to him, thus handicapping my work.

***

In 1981, General Jaruzelski declared Martial Law. Solidarity was crushed and Poland was in need. My friend Lauren and I went to a Polish-American organization in New York City.

We walked up to the Polish-American head of the organization and said we wanted to help support Poland.

The Polish-American leader said, "You are just two silly little girls who don't speak Polish. There is nothing you can do. Get out."

Lauren and I protested outside the NYC Polish Consulate ourselves. We made our own signs.

There we met a large number of other people who were protesting, including two young men who would later become our boyfriends: Mitch and Steve.

Mitch, Steve, Lauren, me, and dozens of others protested outside the Polish Consulate regularly. We got up before dawn and walked up and down the streets of Manhattan hanging fliers exhorting people to join our protest. We held meetings at night in a Greenwich Village union hall, planning our actions. We sold buttons and t-shirts saying, "Teach Yourself Polish: Strajk!"

There were tensions in the group. There was a loudmouth named N. whom no one liked. A man, his ex-wife, and her new husband were all group members.

We didn't focus on tensions. We didn't waste our time gossiping, backstabbing or settling personal scores over imagined slights. We kept our eyes on the prize: showing our support for oppressed Poles and Poland.

We were persistent enough, and dramatic enough in our protests, that film of our protests made it to the nightly news broadcasts.

Mitch, Steve, and most of the dozens of others involved in these NYC protests against the crushing of Solidarity were not Polish Catholics. They were Jews.

I asked Mitch, a native New Yorker, why he got up before dawn, went to meetings after work, and stayed up late organizing to help Poland. "My haht is wid de woikas," he replied, in his heavy New York accent. "My heart is with the workers."

***

My friend's luminous beauty stopped men in their tracks on the street. She, like me, was on fire with a passion for Poland. Her life's goal was to publish a book that honored her immigrant ancestors' story.

She came into contact with a prominent, older, Polish-American leader who promised to help her. The promises of this Polish-American man who had made it to the top in America looked like the stairway to heaven to my friend. When she arrived at the meeting, "He threw me up against the wall and fondled my breasts." He swore that she was especially talented, that he could help her, that they could do great things together for Polish culture. He would divorce his wife for her.

Eventually he dropped her, telling her that their affair posed a threat to his professional advancement.

She had a nervous breakdown. She never published her manuscript.

I know my friend should not have succumbed to this powerful, older man's blandishments.

I also know she was young, vulnerable, and emotionally burdened by the "Dumb Polak" image. She was on fire with a romantic dedication to create a lasting work of art for Polish-Americans like her own grandmother.

***

Recently, I was approached by an older, established, financially comfortable Polish-American professional woman with an advanced degree. She's at a point in her life when she is thinking about charitable giving to significant causes, and about passing on her values to future generations.

She had recently encountered a book that identified Poles and Poland as responsible for the Holocaust. She wanted to do something.

She attended a social event with a prominent Polish-American leader. She shared biographical details with this man – they were roughly the same age, from the same neighborhood, and the same immigration wave.

She approached him to touch base, to see if they knew any of the same people, and to see what she could contribute to matters of value to them both. She wanted to donate money, to volunteer, to advance Polish-American culture. She was in a position to do all of these things; her own children were grown, and she had more money than she knew what to do with. She had the time to devote to honoring her heritage.

This was a social and cultural event – the very kind of event where this kind of networking and schmoozing can take place to achieve concrete goals.

She approached the Polish-American leader, ready to shake his hand. Smiling.

The Polish-American leader would not make eye contact with her. Aggressively, he ignored her. She tried; he moved away. She followed; he moved farther away. He was working very hard at meeting with others at the event who had higher social status than she.

The woman was insulted and enraged. Her desire to become economically, culturally and politically active in service to Polish-American issues was thwarted.

***

I attended a formal dinner for Polish-American leaders. The dinner was funded by a concerned and generous Polish-American who wanted to contribute to Polonia. The food and setting were expensive. Almost all those at the dinner were Polish-Americans. Throughout the two-hour event, the Polish-Americans present shouted at each other: insults, statements of personal aggrandizement, denunciations. They yelled about matters that had nothing to do with the Polish-American issues that were on the agenda. Words like "idiot" and "fool" were used.

I silently shrank into myself, counting the minutes until this farce ended. I had been naïve enough to bring a guest, someone not interested in Polish matters. I peeked across the table at this person, mortified and heartbroken.

Here we were, all of us Polish-Americans who had done something in our fields for Polonia, and the only conversation we could have was an incoherent shouting match as if at the table of a family whose father is a bullying drunk.

***

A Polish-American leader told me, "There is so much our group would like to do, but we can't, because we don't have any funds."

"Why don't you have any funds?" I asked.

"Because we all sued each other, and that depleted our treasury."

***

I had not been published by Polish-American publishers, or in Polish-American publications.

I wrote to a Polish-American leader. By that point, I'd earned thousands of dollars from my writing, won prizes, and been well-reviewed. I asked how I could bring my writing to the attention of Polish-American readers and Polish-American publications – since I so often wrote and published on Polish-American topics.

This Polish-American leader wrote back to me, paraphrase, "Keep your day job. You just don't have what it takes. No one will ever publish you. You stink."

Editors who have published me receive similar denunciations from Polish-Americans. They often bring these missives to my attention, with a puzzled question, "Why is this Polish-American person writing to us to denounce you in this way: 'Her writing stinks! You should not publish her!'"

These communications are so bizarre, so irrational, I didn't know, at first, how to process them. Over time, I began to see a pattern.

I was talking to a Polish-American writer whose work I'd come to admire. This author got to the heart of Polish-American issues in a way that no other Polish-American writer's work did. I told this writer how much I admired her literary output.

The writer wrote back. I was shocked to discover that this author, over and over again, had sent work to Polish-American publications. These publications not only did not publish her, they didn't even bother to respond at all. This writer's output, which I admired so much for telling the heart of the Polish-American story, was published by non-Polish-American presses.

Further, this Polish-American woman writer had encountered resistance from Americans who harbored anti-Polish prejudices. She was stuck between Polish American presses and editors who wouldn't respond to her submissions, and non-Polish Americans who resisted her because of their anti-Polish bigotry.

Then I heard from yet another author. He was not Polish himself, but he wrote about Polish themes. He had struggled for years to get his work published. "Polish-Americans don't buy books," publishers told him. They liked his work, but feared that publishing it would be too great a financial risk.

Then I heard from another writer. She had been flagrantly and publicly insulted at a reading … by a Polish-American cultural leader.

And then yet another Polish-American writer. His prize-winning work had been memorably insulted … by a Polish-American editor.

***

In July, 2007, Rabbi Joseph Polak published "Silence Lifts on Poland's Jews" in the Boston Globe. The essay promulgated the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype.

In November, 2007, Fox TV broadcast this joke on its "Back to You" sitcom: "Bowling is in your Polish blood, like kielbasa and collaborating with the Nazis."

I wanted to respond.

After decades of work on Polish issues, of interacting with Polonians in real life and on the internet, I had no contacts, none, who would respond in an organized way.

No organizations. Not even an ad-hoc group. No networks.

On my own, I sent a response to the Boston Globe. Not only did they refuse to publish it, they didn't even respond to my submission till my Jewish ally, Rabbi Michael Herzbrun, wrote to them. The Boston Globe's response was curt and contemptuous. You can read my unpublished response to Rabbi Polak here.

The Boston Globe can do this. All American media outlets can do this. They can promote the Bieganski stereotype without fear because they know that there are no effective groups who will respond in any organized way that has any economic, political, or cultural impact.

Sure, they'll receive random letters from random individuals. So what?

In November, 2007, without any effective network, I sent a letter, as an individual, to Fox TV. You can see that letter here. How much more impact that letter would have had on Fox TV had there been a national, or better, an international presence of mutually supportive Polonians, organized at the grassroots level and committed to consistent, effective action, behind it.

***

"Bieganski" was close to publication. I needed to check thousands of facts. Given the controversial nature of the book, I knew it was imperative that I get every fact scrupulously correct.

I tracked down phone numbers and email addresses and contacted historical players directly.

I had to contact many Jews, many of whom I have publicly criticized. Three notable names: Art Spiegelman, author of "Maus," a book I have repeatedly and publicly condemned in the harshest terms possible, Rabbi Avi Weiss, who planned and carried out the controversial protest at the convent near Auschwitz, which I criticized harshly, and Steven Pinker, a prominent scientist, then at Harvard.

In response to queries from me, a complete nobody, these Jewish men were courteous and professional. They answered my questions. They gave me permission to quote them. Not one negative word was exchanged between us.

I often had very different experiences when contacting Polish sources. Often, I received no response. On one memorable occasion, after I'd dialed a Polish-American professor at an Ivy League university, during normal business hours, I had to hold the phone away from my ear. The general message of his tirade: "I am a very important person, and you are nobody. Don't bother me."

***

"Bieganski" was finally published. It had been covered in front-page stories in the US and Poland, and won an award. The jacket included strong endorsements from world-class scholars. I had just returned from Poland, where I spoke about the book at a couple of museums and a university.

I sent out emails to American schools and cultural institutions offering to speak.

A US Jewish university immediately responded, courteously, with an invitation and an honorarium.

A Polish-American cultural leader to whom I sent the exact same email responded by denigrating me, my work, and my peasant ancestry.

***

I've been poring over academic job listings for ten years. Painstakingly reviewing these job announcements in the vain search for a tenure-track job has taught me much. Academic job announcements in the humanities value some ethnicities more than others. African American and Hispanic American identities and/or areas of research and publication are most frequently cited as making a candidate attractive, or even as the bare minimum requirement, for academic employment.

After that, one earns points for Native American, Asian, Gay, Arab, Pacific Islander, Jewish, and, in a few rare cases, Italian, Irish, and even Basque identities and research and publication focus.

Never, not once, in ten years of looking at thousands of job announcements in a wide variety of humanities jobs, including teaching freshman composition, film, creative writing, folklore, world literature, and gender studies, have I seen any Bohunk ethnicity or focus listed as having any appeal to any employer.

Bravo to African American, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, Arab, Gay, Jewish, Italian, Irish and Basque activists for making themselves visible and valuable in academia. For making their scholars employable. For making their stories known. For endowing their worldview with authority and respect.

Bohunks – Polish-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans, Slovak-Americans, etc, have not done the same work, and they suffer for it. Their literature, film, experience, worldview, are disrespected, misrepresented, stuffed down the memory hole, trashed.

Drought. Altrendo Nature. Source.

Here's a secret: EVERY Polonian I've discussed these matters with one-on-one has said the same things I'm saying here.

Every last one.

"We don't know how to lead."

"We don't know how to organize."

"We don't support our own."

"We devote more energy to fighting among ourselves than to accomplishing concrete goals."

"Polish snobbery is still a problem."

"Polish self-hatred is still a problem."

***
Members of other groups recognize each other publicly, reach out, form bonds, and support each other. That reaching out and bonding are their source of strength.

Because I live in New Jersey, a very diverse state, I witness this on a daily basis.

***
Friday, November 4, I was standing in line at a supermarket. I'd met my cashier once before. He has bright blond hair and pale skin, but his nametag identified him as "Abdul." He was Muslim, but Circassian, a European Muslim group.

As I waited in line, the cashier from the next aisle called over to Abdul. "You're new?"

"Yes," Abdul replied.

"From the Middle East?"

"Yes," Abdul replied.

"Me, too. My name is Mo. I'm from Syria." He reached across me and shook Abdul's hand. "I've been here for a while," Mo said. "If you need help with anything, look for me."

It's a small moment. Through such small moments, in spite of resistance, Muslims have become successful political players, as evidenced by Governor Christie's controversial appointment of Sohail Mohammed to New Jersey's superior court.

***

I regularly attend faculty training sessions. Semester after semester, senior African American faculty reach out to newly hired African American faculty. They take them out of the meeting, welcome them to campus, and offer to be guides, mentors, and friends.

My Hispanic colleague and fellow professor spends her weekends helping undocumented Hispanic immigrants.

At Indiana University there was an older gay professor who regularly mentored and guided young gay students. There was a gay Lutheran minister who went out of his way to make himself available to gay kids on campus. This minister saved my friend David's life when David was feeling suicidal.

I know of hiring committees who decide that a job, whether it is stated in the job announcement or not, will go to an African American or a Hispanic American.

Mind: Poor, white Christians – a group Bohunks are likely to belong to – are among the most underrepresented groups on elite college campuses. I've never heard any Bohunk professor make any supportive comment, ever, about his or her fellow Bohunks, certainly not as regards hiring or admissions.

***

Zora Neale Hurston was a very good writer, but lost. Few people read her.

She was an African American woman.

Television celebrity Oprah Winfrey resurrected Zora Neale Hurston. She championed her work, and brought it to a new generation of readers.

***

Indiana University scholar Henry Glassie inspired me to discover Anton Piotrowski, a Polish-American coal miner and poet. Glassie had encountered Piotrowski's poetry in an archive in Pennsylvania. Glassie spoke with passion about the power of Piotrowski's poetry to convey the Polish-American experience. Henry Glassie is not Polish. I think he is Irish-American.

I put a call out: "Where is Anton Piotrowski's poetry?" I asked reference librarians. I asked Polish-American organizations. I asked Polish-American scholars.

No one had heard of Anton Piotrowski.

One night, I received a phone call.

"Are you the person seeking Anton Piotrwoski's poetry?"

"Yes."

"I have his poetry."

"Great! Please share it with me!"

"No."

"Why?"

"I don't know what you plan to do with it."

"How can you be so suspicious?" I asked, exasperated. "I'm a Polish-American scholar. My father mined coal as a little boy in Pennsylvania. This is unknown Polish-American poetry. I just want to read it."

"Maybe the poetry is not good enough," she said.

"Please!" I begged.The poems were finally published in 1998.

They are excellent.

Are Anton Piotrowski's poems on any syllabi anywhere?

Is anybody reading these priceless records of Polonian experience?The book has no Amazon reviews, and it is now out of print.

***

You've heard of the Brothers Grimm and you think their name synonymous with folklore. In fact, the Grimm Brothers were phonies. They were German nationalists, not real folklorists; the Nazis easily exploited their work.

Still, Germany profits from and promotes the Grimms. You can take "Brothers Grimm" tours in Germany.

Alan Dundes introduced me to Oskar Kolberg, a real folklorist, and a Pole. Kolberg amassed one of the largest and most important folklore collections in the world. Dundes wanted to see Kolberg's work introduced to Americans. Have Poles even managed to translate Kolberg's work into English?

This uniquely important scholar is lost to the English-speaking world. Because no one has bothered to translate his work.

***Jan Peczkis is an Amazon reviewer who seeks out books and other media by and about Poles and doggedly reviews them on Amazon. Bravo Jan Peczkis.

***

Are Polish people just plain cheap, uncaring, and vicious?

No, that's not the point.

In fact, Polish people are warm, caring, and generous.

Is the problem, then, that Poles cannot organize?

Poles can organize. Poles brought down the Soviet Empire. They did this, not through melodramatic internet posts. They did this the way that Mitch and Steve and others protested against Martial Law in New York City back in 1981. Poles brought down communism through committed organizing.

I was in Poland 1988-89. I protested. I attended Solidarity meetings with recognizable figures like Jacek Kuron. I protested with the KPN, Konfederacja Polski Niepodległej, or Confederation of Independent Poland, a nationalistic and irredentist group. I protested with the Pomarańczowa Alternatywa, or Orange Alternative, an anarchic and absurdist group. I protested with random punks with safety pins in their pierced nostrils. I protested with grandmothers. I was lucky enough to meet Lech Walesa, and to ask him face-to-face questions about activism in Poland.

When things got tense, Polish men I didn't even know reached out to me, asking, "Are you okay? Do you have friends? Do you know what to do if they start breaking heads?" I saw Polish priests protect protestors from Zomo riot police. When the Zomo tear-gassed us, unseen hands shepherded us into a medieval Krakow courtyard, where ministering angels – teen girls – held rags soaked with vinegar under our noses and advised us not to touch our eyes.

Poles can organize.

***

In 1994, I arrived at Indiana University to pursue a PhD. My first semester at IU, I received word that my father was dying.

I was working for a professor at IU. She said that I could not leave to say goodbye to my dying father because she would soon be hosting a conference and she needed me to type up the program. I left anyway. I lost four workdays to attending my father's funeral, who died just as my train from Indiana was pulling in to New York's Penn Station.

I returned to IU and the professor for whom I worked did some very bad things.

An IU dean told me that this professor had a history of abusive behavior, that she was, in fact, a "sociopath," but that no one would stop her, because they were afraid of being called "racist" or "sexist." She was a minority female.

I was a Bohunk. Bohunks have no status on university campuses, so I was an easy target.

I was asked to testify against the professor, and I did, throughout the entirety of the spring semester.

My inner ear burst, perhaps in response to the stress of these events, and I became crippled. I was poor and could not get medical care – in any case, vestibular disorders are "orphan diseases" and no one has devoted research to discovering fool-proof treatment.

I wrote to Polish-American organizations. I received no reply.

No reply. Not "keep your chin up." Not "we are in your corner." Not "we wish you the best."

Certainly not: "We think globally and act locally. We recognize that these events constitute a statement about the value of Bohunk students on American campuses, and we will advise you through the legal, medical, cultural, ethical, and academic ramifications of these events."

Nothing. No reply.

Had I been an African American student who had been harassed by a white professor? I would have been supported by a number of African American groups. The story would have been covered in the newspaper.

***

A Polish-American official on the IU campus learned what happened to me.

I can't provide any details about this person. This person prefers to remain anonymous.

This official summoned me to her spacious – intimidating – office, with its spectacular view, and told me that she would help.

This official told me that the reason she was helping me was that she was also Polish-American. One, she wanted to help a fellow Polish-American in whose life she saw some of her own story, and, two, her Polish-American background caused her to be committed to struggles against injustice.

She defied university directives, contributed significantly to my ability to complete my PhD at IU, to research, write, and eventually publish "Bieganski."

She helped me in ways that were extraordinarily generous, brave, and strong. This is simply one of the most powerful, admirable people I've ever met.

She told me, in no uncertain terms, "I don't want to be publicly identified as Polish-American. I changed my name early in life."

In fact, she had an "adopted family" of a completely different ethnicity. She spent holidays, weddings and funerals, not with her natal Polish-American family, but with this other family, of a very different ethnicity.

She had grown up in very difficult conditions. There was drinking and extreme domestic violence in the family. Her family was culturally backward: no books or music in the house. The family was closed off to the wider world. She craved an intellectually, politically, and culturally active life.

She left home, never to look back. Outside the home, she experienced anti-Polish bigotry.

She adopted a WASP name, and dropped any public association with Polishness.

In short: when a Polish-American graduate student was being crushed on a university campus, Polish-American organizations sat passively by, as they would later when I was told by a potential publisher for "Bieganski," "You can't say this because you are Polish and Catholic."

In this vacuum of leadership, organization, and vision, a Polish-American individual was heroically brave and generous and made my completing a PhD, writing and publishing
"Bieganski" possible.

And this person does not want to be publicly identified as Polish-American. And wants nothing to do with Polish-American organizations, which strike her as nationalistic and narrow – too much like the family she worked to escape.

We need to stop blaming the Jews.

Without denial or defensiveness, we need to look honestly at our own behavior, and adopt behaviors that result in the elusive success and power we all seek to eliminate the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype.

***

Next: PartTwo: Possible Causes for The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization andVision.

The Bay View Massacre

2011-11-22T08:19:00.000-05:00

You can see National Guardsmen ready to fire on Polish workers. Source.

A Reenactment of the Bay View Massacre. Source: Nickolas Nikolic's blog.

University of Wisconsin scholar James P. Leary's is an Irish American who is a very good friend to Polonia.

I recently shared with him a link to a previous post about Christina Pacosz's essay on the Missouri Leadbelt riot that drove Polish immigrants out of the lead mining region of Missouri.

Jim responded by introducing me to the Wisconsin Bay View Massacre.

On Saturday, May 1, 1886, Polish-American workers and others demanded an eight-hour day. Under orders, National Guardsmen shot to kill. Kill they did.

It's interesting to me that before Jim introduced me to it, I've never heard of the Bay View Massacre. Before reading Christina Pacosz's excellent essay, I'd never heard of the Leadbelt Riot.

Of course I was not taught about any of these events in school. Polish American and other Bohunk workers never played any role in my formal education. Sure, we read "The Jungle." We read it for the gross-out scenes of rats pooping in sausage, not for its vivid and accurate picture of the life of Jurgis Rudkus, one Bohunk worker very like my own ancestors, and probably very like your ancestors, as well.

But it's interesting that in all the many internet facebook and online discussion posts by and about Polish Americans I've read, I'd never heard of the Bay View Massacre.

I wonder if that is because Polonia tends to prefer heroes on horseback to Bohunks on picket lines? I'm just asking. Or maybe we tend to be so anti-Communist that we don't want to acknowledge how large a role our people played in labor organizing, and how labor organizing helped our ancestors to survive. Again, I'm just asking. You tell me.

Milwaukee County's detailed account of the Massacre is here.

Nickolas Nikolic's blog post dedicated to the massacre is here. Nickolas' blog post includes a wonderful slide show depicting a reenactment of the protest and the massacre.

The Wikipedia page on the Bay View Massacre is here.

My Offer to Speak

2011-11-17T12:56:00.000-05:00

My standard offer to speak is below.

I am writing to ask you to consider inviting me to speak about my book, "Bieganski, The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture."

An African American woman at the UU Church of the Palisades told me that my talk there helped her to understand racism for the first time. Librarian Regina A. Bohn told me that patrons continued to give her positive feedback days after my talk. Prof. Jay Bergman, biographer of Andrei Sakharov, said, "My wife and I liked your talk immensely and learned a great deal from it. It took guts … the audience was as interested in what you had to say as I was. Your students are very fortunate to have you as a teacher!"

The hate the Holocaust engendered challenges the human mind and heart. "Bieganski" honors this challenge by addressing the foundational structures of hate. I have been invited to speak not just by Polish or Jewish groups, but also by other groups addressing hate, for example a Bruderhof and a PFLAG chapter.

I have spoken about "Bieganski' in Krakow's Galicia Jewish Museum as part of the world famous Jewish Culture Festival, and in American synagogues, churches, libraries and universities. I have also spoken in Markowa, Poland, as an invited guest of a researcher for the IPN, the Polish governmental body responsible for cataloguing Holocaust crimes, at the site of the Nazi murder of the righteous Ulma family. I've broadcast via WFIU, an NPR affiliate.

"Bieganski" won the 2010 PAHA Halecki Award. Published chapters have been well reviewed. The Shofar Journal of Jewish Studies called it "Groundbreaking." American Jewish History said that Bieganski points out that the Brute Polak stereotype "gives the illusion of absolving those who failed in their own test of humanity" during the Holocaust. The book has been the subject of cover stories in the highly respected "Tygodnik Powszechny" and the "Polish American Journal."

John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, said that ''Bieganski is a truly important book. Goska does a first-rate job. Let's hope that this book is widely read.''

James P. Leary, folklorist, University of Wisconsin, said that Bieganski is "A powerful, provocative, ultimately profound work of scholarship … for anyone wishing to fathom the interworkings of class and ethnicity in an America that has all too often fallen short of its promise."

US Holocaust Memorial Council member Father John T. Pawlikowski, award-winning poet John Guzlowski, who has documented his parents' experiences as Nazi slave laborers, and Rabbi Michael Herzbrun have also provided enthusiastic endorsements of "Bieganski."

My blog devoted to "Bieganksi" has been the springboard for protests against distortions of WW II and Holocaust history.

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

2011-11-15T06:37:00.000-05:00

John Guzlowski has posted, at his Lightning and Ashes blog, my essay on "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust." You can read that essay here.

Good News! New Book by Christina Pacosz

2011-11-14T13:28:00.000-05:00

Christina Pacosz is a gutsy, passionate, utterly frank Polish-American poet. The first time I read her work, I felt as if I were reading Kerouac, if he were a Bohunk woman.

In 2012, Seven Kitchens Press will be publishing "How to Measure the Darkness," a new book by Christina Pacosz, and you should buy it, read it, review it on Amazon, and share it with your friends.

More information on "How to Measure the Darkness" here.

A previous blog post about Christina's work on the Missouri Leadbelt Riot, that drove Poles out of the lead mining region of Missouri, can be found here.

The Amazon page for Christina's book "This Is Not a Place to Sing" can be found here.

Below please find a video of Christina reading about her 1986 visit to the Jagiellonian University to study Polish-Jewish relations, about mak, or poppy seed, about women, about women's worth, and about women and aging.

Bieganski on Fox TV Sitcom, "Back to You"

2011-11-13T06:51:00.000-05:00

In November, 2007, Fox TV broadcast an episode of the Steven Levitan sitcom, "Back to You" that included this joke: "Bowling is in your Polish blood, like kielbasa, and collaborating with the Nazis."

In response, I sent the letter, below, to Fox.

I will refer to this letter in a future blog post. I'm posting the text here in order to link back.

There is reaction to this letter at a Jewish news site, Vos iz Neias, Yiddish for "What's News?" That reaction can be found here. These posts do not reflect the best in Polish-Jewish relations.

Dear Fox TV,

According to internet reports, the November 14, 2007, episode of the Steven Levitan, Fox TV sitcom "Back to You" contained a "joke" accusing Poles of collaborating with the Nazis. If these reports are true, it is Fox TV's responsibility to eliminate that "joke" from any further broadcasts of that episode, and it is Fox TV's responsibility to publish a retraction.

A "joke" about Polish Nazi collaborators is comparable to a "joke" about Jews orchestrating the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks. It is comparable to a "joke" that denies the reality of the Holocaust. It is no less.

There are rumors and urban legends that do accuse Jews of orchestrating the 9-11 attacks. These rumors and urban legends are factually false. They have currency because they are part of an invidious campaign of anti-Semitic bigotry and hatred. Just so, there are understandings of Poles as Nazis. These understandings, too, are factually false, and are part of vile and dangerous campaigns of bigotry and hatred.

The facts: Poles fought the Nazis first, fought the Nazis longest, and fought them, per capita, the hardest. An abundance of statistics evidences Poles' heroism and sacrifice. Poland had the largest underground resistance army during World War Two; Polish soldiers fought, not just in Poland, but far afield, making significant contributions, for example in the RAF during the Battle of Britain, and in Italy at Monte Cassino. Poles were essential to one of the key factors in the defeat of the Nazis and the Allies' victory, the breaking of the Enigma code. More Poles than members of any other nation rescued Jews; count the trees dedicated to Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem.

Poles suffered worse, under the Nazis, than any other national group except for Jews and Gypsies, reports historian Michael C. Steinlauf. Poles were gassed with Zyklon B; Poles were tortured in concentration camps and a special school set up to teach Nazis how to torture; Poles were shot down en masse by Einsatzgruppen; Poles were deported in cattle cars, sterilized, burned alive. Polish churches, museums, and historic monuments were methodically destroyed by German soldiers, even as Germany was losing ground for lack of those soldiers at the front. Poles were denied education; Poles, like the late Pope John Paul II, studied secretly in "flying universities." Poles were executed for crimes like owning a radio, or offering a glass of water to a Jew. Poles were murdered merely to terrorize other Poles.

Given this history, one may ask why "jokes" about Polish collaborators exist. This is why: these jokes are lies concocted to support an alternative history that is no less heinous than Holocaust Denial.

America and Britain did nothing after Jan Karski, a Polish agent, brought, firsthand, eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the West. America and Britain betrayed Poland at Yalta. Negative images of Poles assuage that guilt. The West has not been able to confront, morally, the guilt of the Holocaust. Germany, the world's most scientific nation, the world's most modern and secular nation, using Darwinism and Scientific Racism as guides, descended to diabolical depths of insane cruelty and destruction. We, modern, secular, scientific people cannot accept that persons so like ourselves, operating under systems we value, committed such crimes. So, we assign the guilt of that crime to persons unlike ourselves - ethnically distant, and disempowered, Poles. Finally, there is a push, typified by superstar scholars like James Carroll and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, to equate Nazism with Christianity, specifically, Catholicism. Poland is a Catholic country, and it is the best target for this effort.

"Back to You"'s "joke" about Polish Nazi collaborators is as funny as a "joke" about Jews planning 9-11, or a "joke" that denies the reality of the Holocaust. It is a truly evil fabrication with a disgusting intellectual history and a morally corrupt agenda.

Polish Americans and persons of conscience who do not wish the truth of World War Two or the Nazi era to be erased by lies demand that Fox TV eliminate this "joke" from any further broadcast of the episode in question, and demand that Fox TV publish a retraction. Further, we demand that Steven Levitan receive education in the true history of World War Two.

Thank you,

Danusha V. Goska, PhD

Correction: In the past, I had read that that Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, was the largest resistance army in Nazi occupied Europe. New estimates say that it was the second or third largest.

Bieganski on Saturday Night Live

2011-11-12T13:58:00.002-05:00

Watch This Space

2011-11-10T13:44:00.000-05:00

source: www.cartoonstock.com

I'm preparing a long blog post.

Tentative title: "Bieganski and the Crisis in Polonian Leadership: What You Can Do About Both."

If anyone reads this blog post, it will be controversial.

I keep going over every word, every anecdote, every conclusion.

Should I really say this?

I'm telling true stories about my real life experience, and yours and yours and yours.

I'm disguising details – who, what, when, why, where, how – so that no one can identify the specific people I'm talking about.

These stories should be told, I think, because they clearly indicate obstacles we need to overcome. We should stop allowing these obstacles to continually trip us up and thwart our progress toward desired goals we all say we want to achieve.

I'm suggesting roadmaps for action toward a better future.

If anyone reads this blog post, it will be controversial.

Is there anything I should not say?

Is there anything I should be sure to say?

ADL Poll: Anti-Semitic Attitudes on Rise in America

2011-11-06T07:06:00.000-05:00

source

I've been feeling for a while now that anti-Semitism is increasing. "Feeling" is a terribly imprecise measure. I wondered if I were being alarmist, for example in my reaction to the Occupy Wall Street / Patricia MacAllister video.

On November 3, The Anti-Defamation League released the The 2011 Survey of American Attitudes Toward Jews in America. The ADL argues that anti-Semitic attitudes are on the rise in America.

Here is an excerpt on the ADL page:

"Among the more disturbing findings, the ADL survey shows that at a time of high unemployment and economic uncertainty, age-old myths about Jews and money and Jewish power in business endure.

Nineteen percent (19%) of Americans answered 'probably true' to the statement 'Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street,' an increase from 14 percent in 2009.

'The sterotypes about Jews and money endure, and the fact that more Americans are now accepting these statements about Jews as true suggests that the downturn in the economy, along with the changing demographics of our society, may have contributed to the rise in anti-Semitic sentiments,' said Mr. Foxman. 'Once again the old anti-Semitic standbys about Jewish loyalty, the death of Jesus and Jewish power remain strong.'"

The most depressing excerpt, for me, is below:

"A surprisingly large number of Americans continue to believe that 'Jews were responsible for the death of Christ.' Thirty-one percent (31%) of Americans agreed with that statement. One-quarter of Americans believe that Jews 'still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.'"

Many people falsely believe that it wasn't until Vatican Two that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church taught that the entire human race, not Jews, was responsible for Jesus' crucifixion. In fact, that's not true. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church announced as early as the Council of Trent in 1566 that humanity, not Jews, is responsible for Jesus' crucifixion. That people persist in believing that Jews are responsible for Jesus' death is very depressing to me, and a sign that Christians need to work harder on eliminating this toxic heresy and lie.

One aspect of the poll is naïve. The ADL reports:

"According to the ADL poll, the most educated Americans are largely free of prejudicial views. Less educated Americans are more likely to hold anti-Semitic views. The poll found that 22 percent of [those] who graduated high school or completed some high school harbor strongly anti-Semitic views, as compared to 13 percent among those who completed some college, and 9 percent among those who graduated from college."

This is the fallacy that formal education improves people morally. In fact, it is probably simply true that those with a more sophisticated education know how to respond to polls in an expected manner.

Hispanic Americans born outside the US are more likely to be anti-Semitic. African Americans are more anti-Semitic than the population at large.

From the ADL:

"The steady growth of the Hispanic population, now at 15 percent of the adult population, means that Hispanics and African-Americans together now comprise 27 percent of the American population, a number that is sure to grow in the coming years. This population increase of the cohorts with a substantially higher percentage of anti-Semitic beliefs than the total population also means that anti-Semitic propensities in the coming years will be a challenge, according to the ADL poll.

'At a time when you have conflicting trends in American society – on the one hand the rise of an African-American president, on the other hand a rise in anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim sentiment – the question is whether this uptick in anti-Semitic sentiments signals a broader trend in attitudes toward Jews or not. Only time will tell.'"

Those who care about the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype will care about this.

"Bieganski" argues that Polish identity is not the problem. Rather, anti-Semitism is the problem.

"Bieganski" argues further that many commentators attempt to make Polish identity the problem, for various narratological, political, cultural, and ideological reasons.

Further, "Bieganski" argues against all stereotyping. It argues against Shylock as well as Bieganski. The arguments in the introduction of "Bieganski" could be used by activists who work against anti-Semitism as well as prejudices against Poles and other Bohunks.

Full coverage can be found here.

Bieganski at Brandeis University

2011-11-04T09:41:00.002-04:00

View of Boston from Brandeis campus. Source.

How many times can a writer use words like "wonderful," "delightful" and "lovely" before losing her audience? I face that challenge now because accepting Prof. Antony Polonsky's invitation and speaking about "Bieganski" at Brandeis University on Thursday, November 3 was a wonderful, lovely, and delightful experience.

My traveling companion, Robin Richman Schaffer, took time off from work – sort of. She brought along her blackberry, which is actually white, and hammered away on its tiny keyboard as I drove, and even sometimes while she was driving.

We were blessed with sunny and cool weather. There was none of the apocalyptic special effects that Mother Nature has been generously distributing throughout the northeast in recent months. No floods, no freak snowstorms, no locusts. We did see evidence of the damage done by the October 29^th snowstorm, an unseasonable, heavy, wet snow that fell on trees that kept their leaves unseasonably late into a very mild fall. Those leaves, which stayed on too late, trapped snow, which arrived too early, and broken branches and split trees were visible everywhere from New Jersey to Boston.

I became an admirer of Prof. Polonsky's work long before I met him. Now, many years later, life experience has made me realize what a unique treasure he is.

Too many commentators on Polish-Jewish relations have exploited that relationship, and even the Holocaust itself, in order to reduce life to a zero-sum game of two mutually exclusive sides. One side must lose and the other side must win. This is a mistake. The proper lesson to draw from atrocity is this: we can't change the past. We can't rescue the dead. Living our lives in anger, in vengeance, or in mourning, for those who were slaughtered accomplishes nothing.

That doesn't mean that our ancestral loved ones' deaths need be meaningless. We can honor their loss by humbling ourselves, and resolving never to take even one step toward the hate and bigotry that inspired their martyrdom. We honor our ancestors' pain when we allow ourselves to be affected by it to the point where we reject continuing the cycle of pain, and by insisting on Biblical values like justice, faith, and love. Humanity can never be split into two exclusive teams. We are all in the same boat, and the hole you drill in my side of the boat will drown you.

For me, the one author on Polish-Jewish relations who best exemplifies this approach is Antony Polonsky. I came to "know" him through his writing. In those early days, decades ago, it never occurred to me that I might meet him, any more than it occurred to me that I might meet other authors I admired, including Charlotte Bronte. We did meet, though, and through God's great blessing, we have kept in touch. Writing about Polish-Jewish relations has introduced many challenges into my life. That I've been lucky enough to call Prof. Polonsky a friend is one true blessing.

I was a bit nervous, as one is when one is traveling, and when one is in the company of a hero. I wasn't sure if Robin would be bored. When we stepped into Prof. Polonsky's Greek revival, Boston-area home, I felt immediately comfortable, happy, and secure. I could smell cabbage cooking! There is nothing that warms the cockles of this Bohunk's heart like the smell of cooking cabbage. Arlene Polonsky served up the best golabkis I've ever tasted, and that's saying a lot, because I've eaten a lot of stuffed cabbage.

After dinner we sat around the table and talked about how our families came from Eastern Europe to America. Every one of the four of us there had roots in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Our paths had taken us to Africa, Asia, and Israel. I wondered if our ancestors had ever crossed paths in the Old Country. I noticed, again, the physical resemblance between Prof. Polonsky and my late Polish father. It's a small world.

Brandeis University has a proud history. Its founding was part of an effort to resist anti-Semitism at other American institutions of higher education. I greatly admire this. Brandeis' founders did not respond to bigotry with empty hand-wringing, defeatism and hostility. Rather, they responded by creating a university that would accept and educate Jewish students and prepare them for high achievement. Their efforts have been very successful. Brandeis is highly ranked among US universities.

Though a young university, Brandeis can be proud of its highly accomplished faculty and alumni, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Abbie Hoffman, Deborah Messing and Thomas Freidman.

Prof. Polonsky's office is very near Boston Rock, the spot where Governor John Winthrop surveyed Boston back in 1631. Both the city and the university began with this sentiment: "We knew we were pilgrims." This spot affords a spectacular view.

My talk included a brief introduction to the Bieganski stereotype, and a concrete example of how it works. I emphasized that Poles, Polish-Americans, and Polonians must rouse themselves in order to address this stereotype through a national organization that effectively identifies Bieganski for what it is, and eliminates it through school syllabi, higher education hiring, strategic, nationally coordinated activism, and popular media, culture, and politics. I admitted that Polonia is not yet near reaching this level of activism. I will address this in a future post, tentatively titled, "Bieganski and the Crisis in Polonian Leadership – And What You Can Do About It." Watch this blog for that post.

During the question-and-answer period, I emphasized: "Please feel free to say anything you want. I've been working on this stuff for a long time, and I've heard everything. Speak your mind, and I'll respond as best as I can."

I said this because we must acknowledge the dark side of Polish-Jewish relations. We must acknowledge nightmarish events like Jedwabne and Kielce.

My audience was gracious and did not hit me with very tough questions. One audience member asked about Menachem Daum's "Hiding and Seeking," a documentary I liked a lot, with reservations. My Amazon review of it is here.

"The Deer Hunter" came up, a movie I talked about in "Bieganski." That chapter can be found here.

During the discussion period, I stopped myself while using the standard terms, "Poles" and "Jews." I pointed out that Prof. Polonsky would be identified, in this nomenclature, as a "Jew," and I would be identified as a "Pole," but Prof. Polonsky speaks Polish fluently, while I do not, and I am half Slovak and actually best identified for what I am – American.

I reminisced about a common event in my childhood. My mother's friend, Dave, would visit, and she and Dave would sit around the kitchen table telling stories about life in the Old Country. I remember Dave's stories in detail. These are very fond, warm, vivid memories. When I sat around that brightly lit table in our small, dark house, I felt what one feels when one feels connected and at home, one with a larger, loving, inclusive, community. During these evenings, I knew that my mother, Dave, and I were part of a group that was "us." The world outside, the world that didn't know about cabbage and poppy seed, villages and thatch roofs, chicken thieves and muddy roads, was "them." Dave was Jewish and my mother was Catholic.

My point was this: there is an authentic, Eastern European peasant, Catholic identity that is not at war with Judaism or Jewishness. I mentioned the scholarship of Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, who has documented this theme.

Robin told me an interesting story. In our recent apocalyptic weather events, Route 46 had become flooded. Robin was stopped dead. Her car, with hundreds of others, could not progress.

With nothing else to do, drivers got out of their cars and socialized with each other. They became comfortable and friendly.

After some time, maybe hours, the flooding receded enough so that police allowed vehicles through.

Robin reported that when people from "her" "group" – the people who had bonded by socializing – were finally allowed to move, they were courteous and helpful with each other. When "outsiders" who had not participated in the spontaneous bonding began to break into the stream of traffic, Robin felt violated and resentful – "Hey! You're cutting off my friend!"

Robin observed that this event taught her much about how the human mind creates communities of "us" and "them."

After the talk we had a long, enjoyable conversation with Miriam, a writer, Josh, interested in community work, and Drew, working on a fan of Celine. Prof. Polonsky talked about words one cannot translate from Polish into English, including "Zydek." The word could be translated as "Jew boy," he said, but that doesn't begin to cover the complexities of the word in Polish.

My only regret is that we didn't have more time.

While enjoying Brandeis' warm hospitality, I thought again of the truly remarkable experience I had in the relatively small and remote Polish town of Markowa.

The people I met in Markowa were profound, gracious, and insightful. Markowa is far away, though. It would be so wonderful if a Polish or Polish American leader with resources and expertise would arrange for a dialogue between the citizens of Markowa and, for example, students at Brandeis.

As I mentioned above, there are voices out there who want to exploit Polish-Jewish relations to prove that people can't get along, that Poles can't get along with Jews, to prove that Christians and Jews can't get along, to prove that the world is a horrible place.

My real life experiences utterly defy this dark view. Most people want to get along with their neighbors. Most people don't want to exploit differences. Most people choose peace over war. I say that not just about Poles and Jews, but about all my neighbors here in multi-culti New Jersey: rich and poor, black, white, Hispanic, Muslim.

Too often, those who insist on hostility have control of the microphone. Why not bring average, everyday Poles and Jews to the microphone, and let them have the spotlight?

Please, someone with resources, connections, and the technical expertise to make it happen, think about a videoconference between the citizens of Markowa and students at Brandeis.

"The Horror, The Horror": Hollywood Films or the Human Heart: Which is Scarier?

2011-10-29T12:34:00.000-04:00

From "Triumph of the Will," one of the scariest films ever made.

"The Haunting" 1963. It's even scarier when you realize it's not really about ghosts.

I love Halloween. I'll be wearing a costume while teaching class on Monday, and I've encouraged my students to wear costumes, as well.

I love movies.

I hate horror movies.

I try to watch them because I study popular culture, and because films, to me, are a pathway to understanding the human heart.

"The Haunting," 1963, starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, is widely considered the scariest movie ever made, including by Martin Scorcese. It's based on a novel by the brilliant Shirley Jackson, who also gave us "The Lottery."

"The Haunting" is, on one level, a ghost story. It is also a very profound exploration of The Dark Side in all its manifestations.

I walked out of "The Exorcist."

"Blair Witch Project" did not scare me, nor did "Psycho." The alleged scariest scene in "The Shining" seems, to me, to be a scene about how sissy girls are. I mean, come on, Shelley Duval.

1944's "The Uninvited," starring Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey, is a perfect film.

I find the original "Manchurian Candidate" and the first Bela Lugosi "Dracula" too scary to watch all the way through.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula.

Back in 1999, I was a graduate student at Indiana University. Evil had entered my life: I was attacked by an IU professor. I was then asked to testify against that professor, and I did so, for the end of my first semester at IU and the entirety of my second semester at IU. Probably from the stress, my inner ear burst. I was very sick, and intermittently paralyzed. I was poor, so I could not get health care. I struggled for SSDI, and a truly evil man, a judge, denied my claim. I was penniless and without any hope or friends or money or future. I was doomed.

At the same time, I was writing a dissertation that addressed the Holocaust.

I was reading and writing about great evil.

I was confronting real evil in my day to day life.

A friend asked what I think of horror films. The response I wrote to him back in 1999 is below.

***

The other day I was reading an article about the Kielce pogrom.

On July 4, 1946, citizens of Kielce stoned, bayoneted, and shot to death more than forty Jews living in their midst. I was reading a scholarly article about this event, an article meant to be cool-headed, and yet many sentences in it read like horror literature.

"They made rumor sound like truth and fanned the crowd's emotions ... when the crowd had swelled to about one hundred, people began gathering stones."

And more than forty Jews, who had survived the Holocaust, were murdered. Why? Someone spread the Blood Libel. Shirely Jackson's "The Lottery" comes to mind. As does "The horror, the horror," from Heart of Darkness.

When I experience horror while reading stuff like this, I think, why go to a horror movie? Why inject more of this feeling into my life?

I recently had a hearing in front of a judge.

The judge, in spite of my inches-thick file of medical records, and inches-thick file of medical journal articles, and corroborating testimony from a civil rights attorney and a nun, for heaven's sake, wrote, in his decision, that I was "faking bad" (sic).

I've been on the phone to lots of local lawyers who have appeared before this particular judge. I've been told by folks who interact with this guy professionally that he is an "evil" man who enjoys denying benefits, especially to women, and, most especially, to articulate women – and that he has been suspended from the bench for the unfairness of his decisions, and that he just recently returned from this suspension, and asked, specifically, to be assigned to this particular work – hearing SSDI cases, although it is notoriously low prestige and low pay.

In my confrontations with this man, and with the illness in general and with the experience of being poor and sick, I feel fear and horror all the time.

I really dislike feeling both fear and horror.

I much prefer the feelings I get from even a bad romantic comedy, and, most preferably, from a great romantic comedy like "It Happened One Night."

In trying to understand why some like horror, I've thought – who is the most likely audience for a really scary horror movie?

Certainly other cultures have had works of art that produce fear and horror, but often these couldn't best be compared to American horror movies. Usually, folk tales or dramas that incorporate fear and horror also contain humor, uplift, long, boring, exposition that emphasize the importance of tribal values. The concentration of fear and horror in American horror films is a diagnostic characteristic of the genre.

Who are the biggest audiences of such movies?

American teenagers, no? Why would this sheltered, protected audience choose to plunge into fear and horror? Is it a hunger for emotions that don't occur in sheltered, protected lives?

I think the stock answers are that teens are losing control of their bodies in ways that gross them out or intimidate them. Hair growths, wet dreams, bleeding, voices changing, etc. The lack of control over the material body, and the trajectory of one's life, is mirrored in the lack of control of the victims on the screen. And, the scare factor breaks down barriers to sex. The guy you are dating may seem most appealing when you can squeal and jump into his arms during a scary scene. And you may be most feminine at that moment.

Roman Polanski is a Holocaust survivor. He made a couple of highly praised, scary and horrible movies: "Knife in the Water" and "Rosemary's Baby."

My illness and encounters with individuals like this judge has hammered home to me at every turn, since I got sick, anyway, what I suspect people feel, and choose to feel, while watching horror movies: that the human body is not integral, that our convictions of our own autonomy are delusions – no, I've never quite turned into Linda Blair as a possessed kid, but, I can't, single handedly, hold back disease and keep my body from changing in ways I don't like.

I am constantly reminded that apparently innocent scenes and people can, without warning, erupt into terror and threat.

There is a mindlessly destructive, death-hungry, pain-hungry urge in the human make up, and that urge occasionally has its way, while rationality and compassion are made impotent and thrust to the sidelines.

If you're not a sheltered American teenager, and you feel you have quite enough fear and horror in your life, thank you, does a movie like "The Blair Witch Project" have something to offer? The movie advertises itself by announcing that all the protagonists are dead, or at least missing. There's no triumph of the human, the rational, the compassionate, over fear and horror. Fear and horror win. Why is there an attraction to that?

Or, is there a sense of triumph because the viewer assumes he'll be alive when the movie is over? Could it serve as does the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or even initiation rituals – this is how bad it gets. Let go of your attachment to the goodies of life. After you've completely let go, go back into life, acknowledging that all you love and rely on is an illusion, or, maybe, a choice, a product of your moment to moment choice making? And that very choice making makes you heroic and triumphant?

Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby." She sees something horrible -- literal or metaphorical?

What I'm trying to understand is this: after my encounters with the judge from hell, after reading about the Kielce pogrom, I don't understand why I would pay money to plunge into more horror.

And it is exactly the encounter with that particular judge, perhaps one of the most evil persons I will ever encounter in my mundane life, that has made this something I think about a lot.

Do horror movies, as an art form designating themselves as the art form that does the work of dealing with horror, offer me any tools in my interaction with this judge that other art forms, that do not address horror in such a head on fashion, do not offer me?

Or is there no connection at all between the horror on the screen and the horrors of real life?

I can say that Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" offers me tools to deal with the Kielce Pogrom.

A friend said that she liked horror movies because they desensitized her to the real horror in real life. I exactly don't want to become desensitized.

***

A choice scene from 1963's "The Haunting" may be viewed here.

Anyway, Happy Halloween!

"The Way" Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, The Camino de Santiago de Campostella. See It.

2011-10-24T13:17:00.001-04:00

"The Way" has just about nothing to do, directly, with Polish-Jewish relations.

It's a good movie. My imdb.com review is below:

My eyes were wet and I laughed out loud in the first fifteen minutes of "The Way," and I continued laughing and crying throughout. I left the theater feeling the generous glow that a good movie inspires. I'll now be telling everyone I know to see this film, on a big screen, and I'm already looking forward to seeing it again.

I was a bit anxious about "The Way." I anticipated so many ways a movie that features backpacking, pilgrimages, and religion could go wrong. Would it be excessively pious and maudlin? New Age-y and Christophobic? Simply a bad movie? There is a reason so many films focus on graphic, intimate scenes and explosions: those are easy to shoot and they arouse viewer interest. "The Way" rapidly calmed my anxiety. It's a honey of a movie.

Tom (Martin Sheen) is a sixty-something ophthalmologist. His son Dan (Emilio Estevez) dies in an accident. Tom travels to France to retrieve his son's body. Learning of his son's attempt to walk the camino, Tom decides to cremate his son's remains and carry them as he fulfills his son's plan.

Tom walks through picturesque, mountainous countryside and through the plazas of old towns. As happens when one is traveling, Tom encounters an assortment of eclectic characters. Joost (Yorick van Wageningen) is a corpulent, talkative, pot smoking Dutchman who is walking the trail to lose weight. Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger) is a sharp tongued, very angry Canadian blonde. Jack (James Nesbitt) is an Irish travel writer with the gift of gab – he didn't just kiss the Blarney Stone, he went steady with it. There is a priest with a brain tumor who distributes rosaries, and pilgrims debating the roles of the French, the Spanish and the Basque in ancient battles against invading Moors. Waiters take very strong stands on tapas. Gypsies defend their honor.

The pilgrims sleep in spare hostel dormitories with snoring, coughing, shooshing roommates. They visit churches and enact rituals.

There was a moment in this movie in which I, a traveler and backpacker, was one hundred percent engaged. In superhero movies, I don't really care if the superhero gets the dilithium crystals to the giant spider. In this movie, a backpacker drops his pack into a rushing river that rapidly sweeps it toward the sea. THAT scene commanded my full engagement. The backpacker's pack contains his entire world, his heart, his safety, his entertainment, his identity, his survival. I was on the edge of my seat.

What happens in the movie is what happens when you travel, and when you pray. The demands of travel bring forth bonding rituals – I'll listen to your rant; you'll bail me out of jail – that create intimacy with unexpected, and all too temporary, companions. There are sudden and heart-wrenching confessions that make two strangers more intimate than family members. There are little triumphs that make it all worthwhile – finding orange trees laden with fruit after a night of sleeping on cold ground, one night in a five-star hotel after punishing weeks of self-denial.

Martin Sheen is so convincing as Tom I really lost the sense of watching a movie. Tom is a man of few words or gestures, and Sheen's every subdued facial expression carries weight and feeling. I had the sense of those who interacted with Tom that I would appreciate a mere word from him more than a paragraph from someone less grounded and sincere.

I really disliked Joost at first, and, come to think of it, many of the other characters, as well, but the film, without any visible effort, brought me to appreciate them the way you can come to appreciate someone you've shared the road with. When Joost is asked why he is walking the trail and he finally tells why, it is a very poignant, precious moment, so utterly believable it could have been in a well-made documentary. Van Wageningen will receive many love letters from women who cannot separate him from Joost, a fictional character so believable he makes you want to hug him. James Nesbitt could be extemporizing his lines, they feel so lived-in. Deborah Kara Unger gives new life to an ancient prayer.

I wish the movie had done a couple of things it did not. I just did not believe that Tom could immediately begin walking the camino in anything but a halting fashion. Many non-hiker friends have called me the day after a hike with me to tell me that their feet are so covered with blisters they can't put on shoes, and their muscles are so sore they can't move (the big babies.) I would have liked to have seen Tom breaking his body in to the demands of the trail. I also would have liked to have seen even just a brief scene where he purchased footwear. Very few ophthalmologists cross the Atlantic with the proper footwear for a walk hundreds of kilometers long, and footwear is a big deal for a walker. I would like to have seen the walkers interact with their packs, something that all hikers do – a tightening of the belt strap here, a loosening of the shoulder strap there. They become a part of your body.

I wish the direction and cinematography had done something more with the countryside and the historic plazas and churches, which are always shown in a way that is pretty, but not innovative. I wish we learned a bit about the keepers of the refugios, the hostels where pilgrims spend the night. To the pilgrims, the towns change every day. To the towns, the pilgrims change every day. How do these dovetailing experiences illuminate each other? And I wish more had been said about religion, although what little is said is intriguing and implies worlds of meaning. I wish more had been said about the alleged sacredness of some places.

Hitler's Mountain Home in Homes and Gardens, November, 1938

2011-10-22T16:19:00.000-04:00

The Bieganski stereotype rests on concepts of peasants as inferior and ideas of educated, rich, elites as superior. In the pre-war era, American Scientific Racism inspired Nazism. In the post-war era, film gave us Sexy Nazis.

And Hitler certainly had very impressive decor.

Issue of Homes and Gardens, November, 1938 (the time of Kristallnacht)

You can see this article celebrating Hitler's Mountain Home in greater detail here.

Interior of Berlin Synagogue after Kristallnacht, November, 1938, when the above article was published.

Yue Yue

2011-10-21T16:21:00.000-04:00

Yue Yue's last moments

Disney's It's a Small World After All

Yue Yue. Yue Yue.

I don't know her real name. On the internet, they are calling her "Yue Yue."

I just watched the video. I won't post a link because youtube keeps locking access to the video. If I post a link, youtube may block it and you won't be able to see it, anyway.

Here's what you see, if you watch the video: a market. A two year old girl wandering aimlessly. An oncoming truck.

The truck runs over the little girl. First his front wheels, then, with effort, his back wheels.

She lies there, bleeding, no doubt screaming.

Passersby approach. And – do nothing.

Another truck runs over the little girl again.

More passersby.

They say the person who finally took notice of the mangled, bleeding, dying child was a poor, old, scavenger – a nice word for someone who goes through trash and perhaps gets a few cents on recycled cans, or gets to eat someone's unfinished sandwich. A dumpster diver. Full disclosure: I've done that. Not a lot, but I've done it.

The scavenger is called a "Good Samaritan." News coverage says that China may pass "Good Samaritan" laws. I don't know if "Good Samaritan" is really the phrase used in China. Cause, of course, the teacher who gave us that phrase was a first century Jew. I don't know if the story is known in China.

***
TheBieganski, Brute Polak stereotype rests on a very provincial view of the world, a view I've never had. My mother was born in Czechoslovakia, a hard country to spell. In school, I was assessed as a kid with a funny name (by kids with names like "Palatucci" and "Gramegna"!)

I've always known that I am in the world, not just in NJ or the USA -- the world. My favorite thing, as a kid, was, "It's a Small World After All." It still is one of my favorite things.

I've always known that the provincialism that makes Bieganski make sense is without intellectual merit or truth, and that the only way to understand, say, the Polish szmalcownicy who betrayed Jews to Nazis, or those citizens of Warsaw – however many there were – who responded callously to the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto – the only way to understand alleged Polish indifference in the face of the Holocaust – was also to understand Kitty Genovese and Milgrim and Zimbardo and Tuol Sleng and the Interahamwe and Polish Jews – however many there were – who greeted invading Soviets with bread, salt, and flowers.

These unspeakable things – these are things WE do. And we won't understand them as long as we insist, "Well, Polish culture … " or "Urban culture…" or "Jewish culture … " We have to understand human beings. We can't be satisfied with demonizing one ethnic group, any ethnic group, not even the Germans.
***
Psychology Today published an article that talks about those who passed by Yue Yue as she was bleeding to death. It tries to explain their behavior in light of Chinese culture. Maybe that's right. But even if the indifferent find justification for their indifference in Chinese ideas, we have seen this kind of indifference elsewhere. Yes, even among members of our own ethnic groups.

The best thing I read about Yue Yue was an internet poster who wrote, after news broke of her death, "Yue Yue, you are now in a better place. Where people care."

Occupy Wall Street Protester Patricia McAllister: Zionist Jews Need to be Run Out of This Country

2011-10-18T16:45:00.002-04:00

The internet video of Occupy Wall Street protester Patricia McAllister, who freely gives her first and last name, and reports that she works for LA's public schools, is shocking and disturbing. She says that Zionist Jews should be run out of this country -- the US.

I don't know what to make of this. Are we entering a scary, new era in the US during which anti-Semitism will again become acceptable? Or is this just one person, not a straw in the wind?

How does this person maintain employment in public schools?

The introduction of "Bieganski" argues against any stereotyping, not just stereotyping of Bohunks. I hope that at some point some readers and online reviewers will remark on that. I hope that those who hope to combat prejudice make use of the book.

Last night I was listening to radio talk show host Michael Savage. I know -- Savage is an extremist. But I consume much media. I'm a current events junkie. Savage was ranting against anti-Semitism. A caller phoned in. The caller claimed to be Jewish. He said that he was troubled by the over-representation of Jews in banking.

Savage tried to debate the caller, but his arguments were weak. I wish Savage -- and anyone wishing to combat prejudice -- would read the introduction of "Bieganski."

The video referred to above can be seen here.

American Newspaper Story: Polish Soldiers Gassing Jews in 1939; Jews Rescued from Poles by Germans

2011-10-13T11:58:00.000-04:00

A reader of this blog sent in a news story that reports that in 1939, Polish soldiers were rounding up Jews with plans to gas them, and that advancing Germans rescued Jews from that fate.

It's a news story from an American newspaper, the Sun Gazette. Headline: "Surviving Horror as a Five-Year-Old. 'I Can't Get It Out of My Mind." Byline: Kristen Nuss. Date: October 3, 2011.

Key passage:

"'I remember a knock on the door at 4 in the morning,' Patz said. 'Two Polish soldiers ordered my dad to leave.' Patz said the Polish Army rounded up 70 men in the community with plans to gas them, but as the German Army advanced, they decided to let them go. His father reunited with the family a few weeks later."

This is the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype. It is the casting of Poles in the historical niche properly occupied by German Nazis, often accompanied by the exculpation of Nazis.

This is allowed to occur, not just in this news article, but in museums, on websites, in classrooms, in the press, etc, because Poles and Polonians are not doing what they should and could do to correct it. Those concerned about the Brute Polak stereotype will unite, support each other, organize, and act strategically.

A Film Fan's Flithiest Confession: Loving Jud Suss, The "Most Hateful" Film Ever Made

2011-10-11T12:38:00.010-04:00

Perhaps the most disturbing experience I've had in twenty years of reading, writing, interviewing, and publishing about the Holocaust occurred in Autumn, 2009. I fell in love with a Nazi propaganda film, a film personally overseen by one of the most despicable entities ever to draw breath, Joseph Goebbels. A film used to facilitate genocide.

It's been two years and I have still not completely assessed, or assimilated, this experience. I still question if my loving – not just liking but really loving – this film is immoral.

Shortly after I watched the film, TheScreamOnline published my tormented essay, "A Film Fan's Filthiest Confession: Loving "Jud Süss," the 'Most Hateful' Movie Ever Made." You can read that essay here.

"Synagogues, Jewish Schoolhouses, and Jewish Homes: All Laid to Waste and Looted by Nazis and Poles": Bieganski in a Popular, Inspirational Book

2011-10-02T12:30:00.000-04:00

Typical Polish, Catholic Peasant in his Traditional Costume -- No, wait ... ???
source

Small Miracles of the Holocaust by Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal
A Genuinely Well-Meaning Book

Bieganski, the Brute Polak stereotype, is now found in a very well-reviewed inspirational book about the Holocaust, a book written and published by an influential author whose work has been featured on hundreds of television and radio programs and taught in universities. Details below.

***

First, a brief introduction: What is the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype?

In the use of the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype described below, Poles, especially Polish Catholic peasants, including Polish, Catholic, peasant rescuers of Jews, are located in the historical niche properly occupied by German Nazis.

Many are shocked by this assertion and insist that it is so absurd it is not even worth considering. They write it off as some deluded Polish chauvinist's fantasy.

Others say, well, aren't Poles the world's worst anti-Semites, and weren't they the Nazis' favorite allies?

A minority of people express concern and stick around to see the evidence.

The evidence is everywhere.

"Bieganski" contains much evidence. This blog contains even more.

Bieganski, the Brute Polak is found in films, museums, popular, paperback novels, college curricula, and peer-reviewed books. Those who bring the stereotype to public attention meet sanction and condemnation.

This isn't just a concern for Poles or the other Eastern Europeans like Lithuanians similarly disparaged and ultimately demonized. This is a concern for all ethical human beings.

Holocaust and World War Two history could not be more important. We need to teach them correctly.

Experience has shown that random, one-off letters of protest to this or that institution or person who is disseminating the Bieganski stereotype accomplish nothing.

There needs to be a focused effort to eliminate this stereotype.

***

THE SMALL MIRACLES SERIES OF BOOKS are inspirational and beautiful. That is why I read them. Here are some of the titles in the series:

Small miracles : extraordinary coincidences from everyday life (1997)
Small miracles II : heartwarming gifts of extraordinary coincidences (1998)
Small miracles of love & friendship : remarkable coincidences of warmth and devotion (1999)
Small miracles for women : extraordinary coincidences of heart and spirit (2000)
Small miracles for the Jewish heart : extraordinary coincidences from yesterday and today (2002)
Small miracles for families : extraordinary coincidences that reaffirm our deepest ties (2003)
Changing course : women's inspiring stories of menopause, midlife, and moving forward (2004)

I very much admire Yitta Halberstam, one of the co-authors of the series of books. I've read a few of the "Small Miracles" books now, and it is obvious that Ms. Halberstam treats these books as her ministry, as her mitzvah.

Halberstam's father, a Holocaust survivor, encouraged this: "My father was thrilled to find that I was a writer, too, and he encouraged me to utilize my skills for the common good." They both wanted to make the world a better place. There could be no better response to the Holocaust. We can't save those who died in the past, but we can work to make the world we inhabit now a better, more ethical one.

That earnest, humanitarian drive shines from every page of every "Small Miracle" book I've read. It's especially remarkable given Halberstam's personal history as the child of a Holocaust survivor. She could have become bitter and hateful and exploitative. She didn't. She has dedicated her writing life to making the world a more loving, faithful, hopeful place. According to Jewsweek.com, Yitta Halberstam is one of the fifty most influential Jews in America. She has taught the Holocaust at Baruch College. Her work has been featured on hundreds of radio and television programs.

***

I was reading "Small Miracles of Love and Friendship" when I came across Halberstam's father's story. He was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland. That story is here.

I am now reading "Small Miracles of the Holocaust": Extraordinary Coincidences of Faith, Hope, and Survival.

The book was well-reviewed by Publishers Weekly, Newsday, People, Belle, the Toronto Star, and a senior minister of Marble Collegiate Church.

The most helpful Amazon costumer review is headlined, "Masterpiece! One of the greatest books ever written on the Holocaust!" and reports, "For those who are educators who want to educate students about the Holocaust, this book is the best book to begin with."

The New York Daily News covered the book in its September 22, 2008 article, "New Book Highlights Holocaust Miracles," here.

The Small Miracles books treat synchronicity, beyond-chance moments when it feels like the hand of God, or a Guardian Angel, or fate, or Providence, or whatever you want to call it, reaches into a human life and alters destiny for the better.

Synchronicity: You find yourself thinking of an old friend, someone you hadn't thought of in years, and, within hours, that friend phones.

World War Two and the Holocaust are so nightmarish that one might conclude that their overwhelming, diabolical evil would obliterate any beam of light.

But if you meet enough survivors and hear their stories, or read them in print, you soon realize that synchronicity occurs even in hell-on-earth.

My own father experienced it. My dad was one of those American GIs who really did save the world. He saw heavy combat in the Pacific Theater. He had a dream that his brother, half a world away, had died. In fact, his brother had unexpectedly died.

My favorite account of Holocaust synchronicity is that of Stefanie Podgorska. Podgorska was a poor, Polish Catholic teenage villager. Her mother and brother had been taken to Nazi Germany for slave labor. Under the impossible conditions of Nazi-occupied Poland, she was taking care of a six year old sister. And she rescued thirteen Jews. At a key point, a disembodied voice told her what to do to foil Nazi plans. You can't scoff at the story of a teenage girl who singlehandedly managed to defy the Nazis. She tells you a disembodied voice told her what to do, you believe her.

"Small Miracles of the Holocaust" contains many such stories. Beyond chance events that, even in hell, seem to evidence a God, a meaning, a something beyond that which we can understand. Jewish families are reunited. Jewish men, women, and children survive. Jewish artifacts are rescued.

For that reason, I have to admire this book.

What's not to like?

***

"Small Miracles of the Holocaust", while recounting the most uplifting of stories, stories that everyone might benefit from reading, disseminates the Bieganski stereotype. It contributes to a revision of Holocaust and World War Two history.

In "Small Miracles" Poles and German Nazis become virtually indistinguishable. Example: "synagogues, Jewish schoolhouses and Jewish homes had all been laid waste and looted by the Nazis and the Poles" (132).

A Jewish survivor tells his story. Before the war started, this Jewish survivor, Rabbi Shapira, had encounters with a rabidly anti-Semitic Polish Catholic peasant, who later saves him. The story, below, as copied from the book:

"Rabbi Shapira often encountered a Polish peasant named Herr Mueller, a rabid anti-Semite. Whenever he would chance upon Herr Mueller tilling the soil or planting new crops, he would sing out, 'Good morning, Herr Mueller!' Stony face and grim, Herr Mueller never answered. He would turn his back on the rabbi, pretending he hadn't heard the greeting.

Rabbi Shapira was undaunted by Herr Mueller's hostile behavior. He continued to greet him effusively, every time he passed him on the road. The Nazis' rise to power sparked and inflamed the simmering hatred of other Polish peasants much like Herr Mueller…the Nazis capitalized on this hatred, counted on it, manipulating it toward their own evil ends. In Eastern Europe, the Jews of Poland were the first group to be rounded up and deported" (135).

Rabbi Shapira is rounded up. He disembarks from a cattle car. He witnesses a selection: a uniformed Nazi officer flicking a baton to the right, to the left, to determine which Jew will live and which will die."Who is this man who could so easily and dispassionately send a human being to his death for no other reason than the fact that he was Jewish?" Rabbi Shapira wonders.

"He watched as the people at the beginning of the line approached the man for inspection. Some of them averted their gaze, avoiding eye contact with the Nazi … Rabbi Shapira determined to look boldly into the Nazi's eyes, pin him with his stare, and try to make him see the human being standing before him. The line moved forward. It seemed to take only a second to condemn a man to the chimneys.

The rabbi's turn came. He started into the officer's eyes… 'Good morning, Herr Mueller,' said the Rabbi. A muscle twitched on the Nazi's face, the only hint that he had heard the rabbi speak. He paused for a heartbeat before responding, 'Good Morning Herr Rabbiner!'"

The uniformed Nazi officer, a "rabidly anti-semitic Polish peasant" named Herr Mueller, sent Rabbi Shapira to the line of those saved to do slave labor (135-6).

How even to begin to detail everything wrong with the above account?

How about with the above sentence: "In Eastern Europe, the Jews of Poland were the first group to be rounded up and deported."

Jews were not the first rounded up. The first – and last – victims of Nazi mass murder were handicapped people. "First, they came for the Jews"? No, first they came for the halt and the lame. And they were still mass killing them after they retreated from other final solutions: "The Euthanasia Program continued until the last days of World War II, expanding to include an ever wider range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers," as the USHMM museum records on its website, linked above.

In Poland, a Nazi genocide of Polish Catholics preceded the implementation of the final solution against Jews. Auschwitz was a concentration camp for Poles before it focused on Jews.

"Herr" is a German word, not Polish. The Polish word for "sir" or "mister" is "Pan." The two words aren't even close.

"Mueller" is a German name, not a Polish one.

Nazis didn't "count on" Polish peasants – Nazis mass murdered, tortured, and ruined Polish peasants.

SS officers carried out selections. I am unaware of any Polish peasant becoming an SS officer entrusted to carry out a selection after the Nazi invasion. If I am mistaken on this, I hope someone will inform me.

Finally, this passage's insistence on associating typical peasant activities – tilling and planting – with anti-Semitism and genocide is entirely consistent with the Bieganski worldview, and utterly disgusting in its complete moral bankruptcy.

Nazis did not "count on" Polish peasants; Nazis enslaved and murdered Polish peasants.
They are doing so, here, for fun. See here.

German Nazis: Killing. Poles: Being killed. See? Different. Source
Many more photos of Nazis' treatment of Poles here.

The passage cited above is not alone in this 272-page, inspirational book. It is part of a pattern.

Not all the passages are so egregious. In all, though, the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype is pervasive.

One of the weirdest, saddest, most predictable (to anyone who has read "Bieganski") and most telling features of this book is its treatment of Polish rescuers of Jews.

There are more Polish rescuers of Jews honored at Yad Vashem than there are from any other national group. Yet Poles faced the most impossible conditions. They themselves were targeted for enslavement and eventual genocide, as Hitler plainly stated: "I have placed my death-head formation in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language."

Rescuing Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland put the rescuer's and the rescuer's entire family at risk. Rescuers needed to, daily, feed their Jews from their own starvation rations, and not arouse suspicion by doing so. They had to dispose of waste, cover tracks in snow in winter and odors in summer. Their job was impossible, and yet they did it.

Further, no Jew was saved by just one person. Jews were saved by one person after another, by casual encounters, by organized networks. Behind every saved Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland, behind every Polish rescuer at Yad Vashem, are untold numbers of heroic individuals who did the right thing, and did so with a gun to their heads. Excellent books that document this include "Samaritans," "Secret City," and "In the Lion's Den."

"Small Miracles" doesn't much care about Polish rescuers of Jews. For the most part, they have no names. They have no personalities. They don't do anything ingenious, heroic, or creative. They have no lives outside of, at a key moment in a Jewish survivor's narrative, serving as "a peasant" who – at the risk of his or her own life – gave food, shelter, documents, or information that allowed the Jewish survivor's narrative to continue. They are only mentioned at moments in the plot when they are needed to advance the narrative.

Helen Fein gave us the famous phrase, "universe of obligation." You can find the phrase on thousands of webpages designed to teach about ethics in a post-Holocaust world. Why didn't more people save Jews? Because, this argument goes, they did not see Jews as part of their "universe of obligation."

There is also a "universe of humanization": The people one decides are fully human, fully three dimensional, fully worthy of engagement.

Polish Catholic peasants are very much not a part of many Jewish Holocaust authors "universe of humanization." We are two dimensional to them. We have no names. We are "the peasant who gave Shlomo food at just that moment so that G-d's glory could be proven."

This is just so sad. One would think that one of the primary lessons of the Holocaust for ethical people – and I have no doubt that Yitta Halberstam is someone deeply committed to ethics – would be "people are people." People have names. People have life stories. People are individual – not cardboard cut-outs.

This disregard of Polish Catholic people's full humanity and complexity is especially evident in "Small Miracles of the Holocaust" because Halberstam devotes so much energy to developing her Jewish characters in full, even in very short anecdotes – the stories in the book average between two and three pages each. In these very brief stories, we learn Jewish characters' names, favorite pastimes, strengths, successes. Halberstam follows her characters far into their futures, closing stories with the names of their future spouses, children, and grandchildren. No such attention is lavished on Polish rescuers.

An example. A Polish Catholic stood ready to rescue an entire Jewish family that planned to escape from a Nazi labor camp. At a key moment, this Pole "stepped out of the dark" (8-9) in order to take the Jews.

And … that is it.

Yup.

That is the entire story, reference to, mention of, characterization of, honoring of, this Pole.

No mention of his or her name … hometown … favorite color … wife or kids or husband or grandkids or … anything.

Universe of Humanization. The people to whom you give names. The people whose feelings matter to you. The people who are more than cardboard cutouts, outlines. The people with depth, with histories, with futures.

Yitta, look at us Poles again, and invite yourself to see all these features of a full human being, that you describe so lovingly when you are talking about Jewish characters, when you look at Poles.

This dehumanization of non-Jewish characters turns up in words used for non-Jews. Gentile, the translation of the Hebrew word "goy," is, of course, a problematic term. Enough so that one website, for the Jewish Outreach Institute, includes this pledge:

"I do solemnly swear never to use the g word again - singular or plural [goy, goyim] - or any of its derivatives [goyishe] and to banish from my vocabulary shagetz and shiksa as well. Furthermore, I promise to stop and correct anyone who does so in my presence."

It's more than hypersensitivity about terms of exclusion that might cause one to object to how Halberstam uses "Christian" and "Gentile" in "Small Miracles of the Holocaust." Given how Halberstam uses these words, one would get the impression from this book that Nazism was a Christian phenomenon, and that all Gentiles were united in oppressing all Jews.

That's just not true.

Nazism was not Christian.

Non-Jews (like my father, who volunteered), who could have been innocent bystanders, gave up their comfortable lives to fight and die to defeat fascism.

Millions of non-Jews were murdered by the Nazis, including the handicapped people and Polish Catholics mentioned above. There were others, as well: Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, aka Rom, Soviet POWs, etc.

When non-Jews do something bad, though, often, the word "Christian" or "Gentile" is not used. Rather, then the word "Pole" is often used.

But, it could be worse. Poles could be experience a fate worse than being ignored. In fact, in "Small Miracles of the Holocaust," they do experience a worse fate than being ignored. They become props, pawns.

"Small Miracles of the Holocaust" is probably the most popular telling of the story of Leopold Socha, an almost unbelievably heroic man. I'm not even going to attempt to summarize Socha's heroism – just read his story. Yad Vashem tells Socha's breathtaking story here.

In "Small Miracles," Polish Catholic Leopold Socha's superhuman heroism is reduced to a bombastic jerk's boast, to Socha's being a pawn in the decidedly Jewish God's hands, to a freak occurrence among the always and eternally anti-Semitic Poles.

Halberstam depicts Socha as a braggart who saved Jews only so he could brag about it (43). This is utterly implausible – no one is that desperate for praise. In any case, Socha is dead and can't refute what Halberstam felt it necessary to write about him in order to denigrate this Polish Catholic's heroism.

Halberstam devotes little ink to detailing how Polish Catholic rescuers kept Jews alive, but she devotes almost all of one page – a lot in a book of two- and three-page anecdotes – to putting words in Socha's mouth, using actual quotations marks to have Socha say, paraphrase, "I once robbed Jews, and I felt guilty about it, and I'm making up for it now, because the God of Israel is making me do so."

Agency is removed from the Polish Catholic who went above and beyond the call of the heroic in a way that you or I probably never will, and located agency in the God of Israel's grudge match with Polish Catholics. Just as God forced the Pharaoh to release the slaves, God forced Socha, against his own craven Polish, Jewish-victimizing nature – to rescue Jews.

Finally, the Socha account ends, not as with accounts of Jewish survivors, with an update on his child or grandchildren or any efforts to honor Socha, but with a Polish anti-Semite making an obnoxious comment at Socha's funeral. That Polish anti-Semite quite literally gets the last word. The moral is clear: Polish, Catholic Leopold Socha's heroism and love of Jewish victims of Nazism is not the main point here. The main point here is that Socha was a bad man who stole from Jews and our God made him make up for it, and they're all a bunch of stinking anti-Semites, as you can see from this one comment made at Socha's funeral. So much for inspiration.

Leopold Socha: Polish Catholic sewer worker and heroic rescuer of Jews.
He deserves better than to be reduced to a guilty, boastful pawn in the hands of God.

Poles are not the only ones depicted as virtually indistinguishable from Nazis here; Lithuanians, Hungarians and Ukrainians are similarly treated.

***
What can be done? This: concerned people can unite, support each other, organize, and act strategically. Yitta Halberstam can't be blamed. She's a good person, working to make the world a better place. She deploys the Brute Eastern European stereotype innocently. She thinks it's true. She thinks it's true because it is so all-pervasive.

We need to do what Saul Alinsky said to do: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." The target is Bieganski, a stereotype of Brute Polish and other Eastern European Christian peasants as the world's worst people. When we decide to change it, it will change. It's up to us. Other ethnic groups – African Americans, Jews, Muslims – have organized against stereotypes of their ethnicities with great success.

The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 Continues to Disseminate the Brute Polak Stereotype

2011-09-30T10:10:00.001-04:00

Tanya Bouchard, who has designed backpacks for children,
decides what is "representational" of Poles during World War Two.

Ever design one of these?
Then YOU may be qualified to teach Immigration, Holocaust, and World-War-Two History!

The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 shows a film called "Oceans of Hope" that is an archetypal example of the "Bieganski" stereotype. It locates Polish, Christian, rescuers of Jews in the historical niche properly occupied by German Nazis. It sets up that historical revision by beginning with a false and stereotyped depiction of Slavic immigrants to Canada as fat, dumb, happy, without history, and laughable.

One can read a previous blog post about this film here.

Pier 21's revision is not the result of casual or isolated error. It is part of a strategic revision of Holocaust and World War Two history, concomitant strategic revision of immigration history and a pernicious stereotypification of Eastern European peasantry as only slightly more sophisticated than animals.

One may ask – why would anyone want to place Polish, Christian rescuers of Jews in the historical niche properly occupied by German Nazis? Why would anyone want to disseminate false images of Eastern European peasantry and immigrants?

The answer is complex, and best mastered through a reading of "Bieganski."

An activist, Malgorzata Tarchala, has been writing letters to Pier 21 politely requesting that they reconsider the film.

Needless to say, given that she is just one person, Pier 21 has found it easy to dismiss her polite requests.

The Polish Embassy also wrote to Pier 21.

On September 7, 2011, Pier 21 Chief Curator Tanya Bouchard, whose previous museum experience includes designing backpacks for children, wrote to Ambassador Kosiniak-Kamysz of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Ottawa, Canada regarding "Oceans of Hope."

She wrote that "Oceans of Hope" is, and this is a quote from her letter, "acceptable as it is a representation of facts of the time."

Her letter addresses none of the points found here. It doesn't have to. She has power; Polonia has yet to exercise any power in relation to its own stereotypification; she can say whatever she wants. She could say that Hitler was born in Warsaw and that the Nazis loved Poles; no Polonian would or could take any significant action to address any absurdity.

Bouchard's letter is false, of course. There is nothing representational about "Oceans of Hope."

What Bouchard and Pier 21 believe to be true, though, is this: Poles, Polish-Americans, Polish-Canadians, and Polonians worldwide will do nothing to remove this film.

I fear that Pier 21 is correct. Polonia has yet to unite, engage in mutual support, and act strategically in response to the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype.

In response to Pier 21 alone, I've seen several letters sent by various Polonians. None acted in unison with anyone else. I approached one previous letter-writer and he declined to participate in any new action. I approached a man who saw the film with his father. Both were outraged by it. Neither offered to participate in any response to the film. No letter I saw cited "Bieganski," the one scholarly book that addresses the brute Polak stereotype. Writers make vague statements about how the film upset them. One particularly bad letter focused on how the film made someone cry.

This isn't about a vague sense of unease this or that Pole felt walking out of the film with teary eyes. This isn't about "dishonoring the Polish nation," whatever that means. This isn't an issue that only a handful of disgruntled Poles might care about for about five minutes before forgetting about it and moving on to something more entertaining.

This is one incidence of a culture-wide systematic historical revision, documented in a scholarly book. This is something that anyone who cares about truth might care about. This is something that right-thinking Jews that I know personally care deeply about – and have taken action in response to. The Bieganski, brute Polak stereotype requires informed, educated, unified, cool-headed, professional, strategic action by activists who are willing to work with others over the long haul and who have committed themselves to not stopping until the film is gone.

As long as Polonians decline to do what is necessary, the Brute Polak stereotype will continue to dominate, including in immigration history, World War Two history, and Holocaust history. Not because it is true. But because Polonians declined to take appropriate action. And people who design backpacks for children will decide what constitutes "representational" histories of World War Two, the Holocaust, Immigration, and Eastern European peasantry.