Bridging the gaps between Holocaust accounts: Fieldwork evidence for compromising forms of narrative

Abstract

This research discusses whether various educational approaches can bridge the wide gaps between national narratives of the Holocaust, augmented by the Act on the IPN: 44, and the reactions that followed it in Israel, Poland, and the West. We start with a brief account of the Polish narrative of the World War II experience, and the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust. We then give an account from the field: during January and February 2020, we visited the Majdanek Concentration Camp Museum, where we met and interviewed some of the local guides; we also went to the Grodzka Gate Centre in Lublin and discussed things with their guides. For the Israeli narrative, we referred to surveys and interviews of IDF reserves officers who participated in the “Witnesses in Uniform” project of commemoration delegations to Poland. Our analyses show that in each of the two societies one can find national narratives that can create paths of compromise and conciliation. The findings indicate the existence of a spirit that can enable each group to stick to its own heritage yet at the same time to respect the narratives of others.

Keywords:

• National narrative
• collective remembrance
• Holocaust memories
• Holocaust education
• Polish-Jewish relations

Public Interest Statement

This research discusses whether various educational approaches can bridge the wide gaps between national narratives of the Holocaust. We concentrate on the differences in national narratives between Israel and Poland, relying on fieldwork in both countries. Our findings are optimistic in essence, showing that in each of the two societies, one can find national narratives that are bound to create paths of compromise and conciliation. The findings indicate the existence of a spirit that can enable each group to stick to its own heritage yet at the same time respect the narratives of others. This fieldwork is part of a larger assignment that aims to decipher the various traits of a national narrative. In the framework of the broader project, we examine numerous national narratives of different countries all over the world and throughout various periods in history, to establish theoretical comprehensions of phenomena related to collective narrative.

1. Introduction

On 17 April 1985, two buses carrying a group of some 80 Jewish teenagers from all over the Western world entered the gates of the Majdanek Concentration Camp commemoration site. The busses went directly to the far end of the camp, parking as close as possible to the monument for the victims of the 3 November 1943, Aktion Erntefest, the Nazi code name for the notorious massacre of over 18,000 Jews in Majdanek alone in one day (Silberklang, 2013). The youngsters descended from the busses, held a short ceremony in which they sang “I believe in complete belief in the coming of the Messiah” to the tune that was sung by Jews as they marched to the gas chambers. Then, the boys and girls walked to some of the barracks, and within an hour or so were back on the buses on their way to another historical site.

These youngsters had only been informed that they were visiting a death-camp that had been erected there to execute Jews, and that was liberated by the Red Army at the end of the war. They could hardly have guessed that the historical facts told an altogether different story. In fact, the camp was originally constructed for the absorption of Russian POWs. More than half of its inhabitants at any given time were non-Jews of various European nationalities, and the Russian army had never liberated Majdanek. Rather, Red Army troops arrived after the Germans abandoned the place, and for the next several months the Soviets used it for, among other things, the headquarters of the NKVD, using methods of political repression in Poland that Stalin had taught them long before the establishment of the Third Reich (Albats, 1994).

Our research, however, is not about historical facts. Rather, our inquiries enter the realm of narrative, where truth is elusive, and chronicles are merely the stories that people tell themselves about themselves.

Noteworthy, there is something of a political phantom overshadowing this study. Discrepancies between Polish and Jewish narratives started when World War II was still in its midst and continued immediately once the war ended (Hansen, 2015). Relations between the two peoples had their ups and downs throughout the decades, with tight international political, economic, and cultural contacts, particularly in the post-communist era (Horowitz, 2011; Wróbel, 1997). However, in 2018, both houses of the Polish parliament adopted the Act on the IPN,¹ a law that effectively banned any accusations against Poles as collaborators with the Nazi crimes that were executed on Polish soil (Hattis-Rolef, 2018). Israeli reactions to the Polish legislation were fierce. Prime Minister Netanyahu and some of his ministers condemned the bill and claimed that it was a form of Holocaust denial. Yad Vashem² warned of the violation of free speech rights and a threat to Holocaust survivors as well as historians. Throughout the weeks that followed, negotiations between Israeli and Polish officials lowered the flames. It took months before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with his Polish counterpart Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki could distribute a joint declaration. However, the dispute was not settled; rather, it propelled a debate over the moral dimension of the concession that has been achieved by the two leaders. Yehuda Bauer, the prominent Holocaust researcher, went as far as referring to the declaration as an act of treason. The whole affair threatened to deteriorate relations between Poland and Israel. The diplomatic activities of officials on both sides were merely an attempt to maintain these positive interactions and to renormalize them. These attempts, however, have not entirely rendered success. Hence, our modest goal, in this study, was to shed light on themes of reconciliation between contradicting national narratives of the Holocaust.

We open this paper with a brief account of the Polish narrative of the World War II experience, and then—almost as the latter narrative’s mirror image—the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust. The collision of those two narratives in the framework of the Act on the IPN and the consequent international debate and diplomatic incidents led us to investigate whether, in practice, among people who are close to this topic, bridging over narratives is practically possible.

In Israel and in Poland, different narratives of the Holocaust developed, each concentrated, naturally, on its own victimhood and justifications for certain collective actions. This study opens with a review of them. The Holocaust narratives—the Polish one and the Jewish-Israeli one—are presented in detail.

We then describe our fieldwork. We chose to hold interviews in the framework of focus groups. Interviews, particularly—semi-structured ones, are the most common research tool in qualitative research in social sciences. They enable the researcher to reach inaccessible areas like people’s subjective attitudes (Brinkmann, 2018; Perakyla & Ruusuvuori, 2018). Focus groups can be practical as dialogic events where power relations between researchers and research participants are significantly diminished. Hence, focus groups encourage open conversations where the interviewer takes a non-directive approach and acts as the facilitator of the conversation (Kamberelis et al., 2018). The conversations that we held to collect testimonies took part at the Majdanek Concentration Camp Museum, at the Brama Grodzka—Teatr NN in Lublin, and in meetings in Israel with IDF³ officers who have visited Poland. In the interviews, as well as throughout the focus group sessions, the open questions that we posed referred to the way our interviewees constructed their perceptions of historical events. They were primarily invited to tell how they personally believed that things happened throughout WWII. Our questions were identical in both cases, the Israeli one and the Polish one, including questions regarding how each side viewed the other. Naturally, the interviews with the Polish guides in Majdanek Concentration Camp Museum and in the Grodzka Gate—NN Theatre were handled by Z [full name and affiliation will be posted here once the peer review process is completed]. His knowledge of the Polish language as well as his acquaintance with the problematic political contexts of our subject matter in Poland, enabled us to evade possible booby traps, so to speak, and yet to maintain our interviewers’ frankness.

Whether to apply audio recording or just to practice handwriting to document the interviews was also a dilemma where we had to make a methodological choice. Despite the advantages of advanced and technological methods, such as replayability (Tessier, 2012), we chose to rely on the practice of field notes. The cost of this choice should be pointed out clearly: potential bias, loss of information, and consequently possible lack of reliability (Tessier, 2012). However, we decided to put aside the many benefits of recording devices, because we suspected that the very act of recording was bound to influence the interaction between the reviewer and the respondent. One should bear in mind that the interviews and focus groups were held in challenging times when some political observers even asserted that under the rule of the Law and Justice Party, Poland’s legal framework no longer matched common Western democratic values (Davies, 2018). This situation could influence our interviewees, particularly considering the time of our fieldwork in Poland, immediately after the Act on the IPN: 44 legislation (Belavusau, 2018). Hence, to maintain the full trust of our interviewees and to assure them of confidentiality, we refrained from using a device that could be suspected of enabling any future identification of any of them (Rutakumwa et al., 2020).

We, therefore, relied on the advantage of being three researchers doing our fieldwork as a team, and at any point in time, two of us would always conduct the conversation, and one would do all the writing on a notepad.

The fact that we count on notes that we took during our conversations with Polish and Israeli interviewees matches a decades-old methodological tradition of reliability and validity in qualitative research (Gall et al., 1996; Hoffman, 1974; Rutakumwa et al., 2020; Wolfinger, 2002).

With the sensitivity to political matters in mind, we also guaranteed the interviewees that they would remain anonymous (although—they knew that the place and time of the interview would be known and would therefore enable the authorities to pinpoint them). Additionally, the participants of our conversations in Majdanek Concentration Camp Museum and in the Grodzka Gate—NN Theatre gave us permission to quote them provided that the publication is limited to academic journals and scholarly literature.

Noteworthy, our research strategy was deliberately to choose individuals who were not official representatives of any political entity, to maintain authenticity. This approach was also based on the perception that group narratives shape individual narratives in society and vice versa; they are intertwined and are ingrained into each other (Novac et al., 2021; Weegman, 2016, 2018).

Overall, then, we present various cases on both sides, the Polish as well as the Israeli, that can inspire others to form narratives that would eventually lead to conciliation between Polish and Israeli narratives on the Holocaust. Consequently, this work can establish grounds for improvement in Polish-Jewish relations.

2. Word of caution concerning narratives’ complexity

Narratives form cohesive sets of beliefs about groups’ collective pasts and futures (Ashplant et al., 2000; Verosek, 2016). National narratives, to this extent, can be viewed as the practice of political mediating through telling and receiving stories (Groth, 2019; Shenhav, 2006). However, complexity is an inherent trait of narratives. Stories are constantly circulated, and social agents get involved in shaping some of their repetitive versions (Bal, 2019; Tikka & Kaipainen, 2019).

This can be illustrated, for example, by the 2018 affair that started with a book co-edited by Grabowski and Engelking (2018). Their study concentrated on the question of Polish collaboration with the Germans. Grabowski claimed for Polish responsibility at a certain county he took as a case study. This was not the first time for Grabowski, a Canadian of Polish origin, to raise such accusations (Grabowski, 2013), but this time the publication led to an open colossal debate between historians, some of them accusing Grabowski of using unreliable sources and distorting facts. The Polish League Against Defamation funded a civil case against Grabowski and Engelking in Poland, brought by the 81-year-old niece of a Polish villager who was blamed in the book as having betrayed Jews to the Germans. In February 2021, a Warsaw court ruled that Grabowski and Engelking must apologize for their claims about the villager, yet they were not ordered to pay compensation. However, in August 2021, an appeals court overturned that ruling and dismissed the claims against the historians (AP and Times of Israel, 21 August 2021). This event portrays the struggle between narratives, led by historians and often fueled by group identities and national feelings. Hence, above all, narratives’ complexity is multi-dimensional since both historic reality as well as its narrated representation are inherently complex phenomena (Landa, 2019, p. 414).

3. The Polish narrative of the World War II experience

Polish narrations of World War II amount to tens of thousands of books and essays, with a complex of various attitudes (Alexiun, 2004; Pohl, 2004). However, according to scholarly literature, five major themes of self-justification in the Polish narrative can be recognized (Behr, 2021; Blonski, 1987; Gonzalez, 2017): (1) Jewish heritage in Poland; (2) The Polish people as victims; (3) Polish resistance; (4) The Polish church and its roles; and (5) the Polish righteous among the nations.

3.1. Jewish heritage and history in Poland

Jews have been dwelling in Poland for more than a thousand years, and most of this time was characterized by tolerance. Consequently, Jewish religious flourishing turned Poland into the cultural, political, moral and religious center, where the Enlightenment and Hassidic Jewish movements had developed (Davidovitch & Lewin, 2019; Karpalski, 2015; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2015; Lewin, 2018). With migration of Jewish communities and constant growth, Jewish culture enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, until Poland was frequently counted as the Paradisus Judaeorum [Jews’ Paradise] (Gromelski, 2003).

With the 1921 Polish victory over the Red Army and the Polish-Soviet peace treaty, thousands of Jews migrated to Poland. Many of them held occupations that were forbidden for them in the Soviet Union, but in Poland they were immediately granted with full citizenship. By the 1930s, Polish Jews who formed slightly above 10 percent of the population, formed about 50 percent of the lawyers in the country, over 30 percent of all the doctors in the Capital of Warsaw, and 25 percent of the university students in Poland. This historical review establishes the claim that the Poles incorporated Jews more than any other nation in Europe (Lewin, 2018).

3.2. The Polish people as victims

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. For two weeks, Poland resisted the German army’s Blitzkrieg, and 100,000 Polish soldiers died before the Polish army collapsed, locked between the Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army (Kochanski, 2012). Even then, the Polish people continued to fight individually; for example, residents of the city of Warsaw did not give up and defended the city even after Poland ceased to exist (Starzyński, in: Ben Arieh, 1987, p. 72).

With the German violation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and their invasion to Russia during Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, the Polish people came overnight under the murderous control of the Nazi regime. Their destiny for the rest of the war was life under conditions of cruel military occupation, fear and terror. Under the German occupation, the Polish people underwent agonizing experiences. Large numbers of Poles were exiled, and the areas they left behind became German residence. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported to Germany as forced labor for weapons production and for agricultural labor. Polish deportees often died of poor hygiene and reduced nutrition. Throughout the war, there was a significant increase of mortality rates in Poland due to the shortage of food, fuel, and medication. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of Poles fell victim to the Nazi atrocities typical for the German occupation (Lukacs, 1989; Noakes & Pridham, 1990).

The Polish elite suffered large-scale executions of landowners, traders, medical doctors, academics of all professions, not to mention former government officials. To annihilate any possible future Polish heritage, the Germans ruined every Polish culture institute. To prevent any revival of the Polish intelligentsia, all studies beyond elementary school were prohibited (Steinlauf, 1997). Eventually, three million non-Jewish Poles were killed in occupied Poland, which is about 10 percent of the non-Jewish Polish population (Lukacs, 1989; Noakes & Pridham, 1990).

The polish people did not cease to be victims even once the war ended. The admiration of the Polish fighters in the West did not stop the Western powers from deserting them at the end of the war. Stabbed in the back by the free world, Poland was handed straight into Stalin’s clutches at the Yalta Conference. Hence, despite their heroic struggle, the Polish people ended up victimized also after World War II (Michnik, 2014). It would not be untrue, then, to phrase that Poland was not only Hitler’s great victim, not only Stalin’s victim, but also the historical prey of the unfaithful West.

3.3. Polish resistance

This theme is connected not only to the Poles’ role in the war, but also, to a large extent, to the formation of a Polish framework for Jewish survival. Holocaust literature is rich with testimonies about Polish citizens who ignored the Jewish cries for help as well as accumulating evidence for the opposite phenomena of Polish people who facilitated support. Jewish Historian Emanuel Ringelblum wrote about it almost in real-time before he was executed (Ringelblum, 1992), yet testimonies that publicized Polish people who remained silent alongside revelations of Polish people who acted bravely have been gathered in various books throughout decades (see, for example, Turski, 2010). Whether or not the general claim that the Polish people assisted Jews is exaggerated is indeed a matter in debate (Feldhay Brenner, 2019; Kermish, 1969).

The theme of Polish resistance as part and parcel of saving Jews relies on the notion that the Polish underground organizations did not only fight Germany but also assisted Jews in saving themselves and their families. In an anthology of the Polish nationalist underground press from the years of Nazi occupation, written immediately after the war, Adam Doboszynski gathered journalistic testimonies of numerous cases where Jews were assisted by various Polish underground organizations (Doboszynski, 1993). Beyond those documents, blackmailing Jews and demanding ransoms from Poles who protected them, as well as voluntarily providing the Nazi administration with information about Jews who were hidden was treated by the underground judiciary system like other forms of treason, collaboration, and pro-Nazi espionage. Hence, on the individual level as well as in the eyes of the secret Polish authorities resisting Nazi occupation was connected many times with active involvement in sheltering Jews, defending them, and allowing their survival (Karbonski, 2004; Kochanski, 2012; Zimmerman, 2015).

In 1941, Wladyslaw Andres, a Polish General that was captured by the Soviets in 1939 and was now released, established the Armia Andersa, a Polish force loyal to the exile government in London. Armia Andersa joined the Western allies in the frontiers and fought successfully. Noteworthy, Armia Andersa recruited thousands of Jews who were eager to liberate themselves from Soviet labor camps. Consequently, their families joined them on the army’s journey to the Middle East; upon arriving in Israel many soldiers defected and became illegal immigrants (Kochanski, 2012; Koskodan, 2009; Redlich, 1971; Sarner, 1997).

Another platform for activity against the German occupation that went hand in hand with saving Jews was the Polish underground organization called Armia Krajowa. This organization fought against the German forces in Poland and helped the Jewish underground in its struggle against the Nazis by supplying weapons and ammunition. The Armia Krajowa supported the 1943 Jewish uprising of the Warsaw ghetto.

3.4. The Polish Church

The major activities taken by Polish pastors were hiding Jewish children in monasteries and assisting refugees who fled the ruins of the ghettos. Catholic Poles from Jewish origin who were trapped in ghettos kept their contacts with other Polish priests. In various cases church members hid Jewish refugees in the churches and helped them to manage life in the Arian side; they providing them, for that purpose, with food, fake certificates and identities. The church hid in secret places, buildings, and in the monasteries individual Jews as well as entire families. Foster families in Poland were organized to save Jewish children and babies.

In 1942 Żegota was founded with the help of Catholic associations as an underground organization, part of the Polish resistance movement. Żegota was a code name, that stood for the Polish Council to Aid Jews, and church members all over Poland joined its activities. The organization was established particularly to save Jews and Poland was the only country conquered by the Germans where such a government-supported underground organization existed. Estimates of the number of Jews that Żegota saved range from several thousands to tens of thousands. In wartime Poland, over 3,000 church members were suspected of aiding Jews and were therefore murdered. Additionally, one should bear in mind that due to the German use of collective punishment all members of the Catholic church were prey to suffering and persecutions (Bartoszewski, 1987; Kermish, 1977; Mazzeo, 2016).

When seeking the origins of the narrative of the Polish Church, developed after the war, one should bear in mind the changes that took place during the last decades. In the 1965 Second Vatican Council Pope Paul VI called for interfaith dialog with other religions and conciliation with Judaism (Horn, 2015; O’Mally, 2008).

In 1994 John Paul II hosted an unprecedented event: The Papal Concert to Commemorate the Holocaust, a public happening dedicated by the Vatican to the memory of the six million Jews murdered in World War II. Perhaps the highpoint of the efforts of John Paul II to share his compassion concerning the Holocaust was his 2000 visit to Yad Vashem and then his prayer at the Western Wall asking God to forgive the Christians for their crimes against the Chosen People throughout history (Bokenkotter, 2005; Kennedy, 2011).

3.5. Polish righteous among the nations

The Yad Vashem accounts prove that Poland held the largest number of righteous among the nations both in ultimate figures (6,992) as well as in comparison to other nations.⁴ It is true that there were more Jews in Poland in comparison to any other country; however, in Poland there was also the largest number of non-Jews who were executed for trying to save Jews and help them to survive (Bartoszewski & Lewin, 1969, 1970; Engelking & Michalowicz, 2016; Zubrycki, 2006, 2022). Additionally, as earlier mentioned, Poland was unique in comparison to other countries under Nazi Germany’s occupation by being the only Eastern European country where an underground organization – Żegota – acted with the clear aim of saving Jews. Noteworthy, there was an immediate, actually—almost an automatic death sentence for anyone who was caught hiding Jews.

Despite the numbers of righteous among the nations, Poland was never honored for its part in saving Jews. Since Poland was occupied by the USSR and trapped in the Warsaw Pact, its heroic history of resistance was practically erased from the Western narrative (Wóycicka, 2021).

4. The Israeli Holocaust narrative

The Holocaust is the central event of Jewish history that defines Israeli identity, replacing even the establishment of the State of Israel (Klar et al., 2013; Zertal, 1998, 2005). The volume of literature based on psychological and historical studies is immense; it constantly grows and develops (Gil, 2012; Kenan, 2003; Ofer, 2009, 2013).

The heritage of the Holocaust creates a sense of unity between Israeli Jews and the victims of the Holocaust because the link between both realities—the Holocaust and life in Israel—provides symbolic meaning to the hardship of life in Israel. Contrasting Jewish helplessness during the war with the possibility of Jewish self-defense guaranteed by a Jewish state mitigates the feeling of vulnerability and makes the risks and harshness of life in Israel seem negligible by comparison (Almog, 2000; Resnik, 2003).

According to the substantial scholarly literature, during the first decades of the State of Israel, three major intertwined lessons, differently stressed in the Israeli state-controlled educational system, developed the republican ethos, each logically leading to the other (Bar, 2005; Lustick, 2017; Porat, 2004; Stauber, 2007): (1) Jewish victimization by the whole world; (2) active resistance; and (3) justification of Zionism. In recent years, a liberal theme was added: (4) Universalism.

4.1. Jewish victimization by the whole world

The Nazis were the great initiators of Jewish genocide, but they certainly were not alone. They were aided by some enthusiastic collaborators, such as the Ukrainians and the Latvians who enlisted in the auxiliary units of the SS. The free world, however, proved no better in terms of moral virtue, and Jews got no help from any country. Even American and British political leaders turned down numerous requests for the absorption of Jewish refugees during the war (Wyman, 1984, 1998). These arguments have been challenged, some of them by notable researchers (Rubinstein, 1997), but scholarly literature notwithstanding—the feeling that Jews could have been saved but were eventually betrayed by Western civilization forms one of the important themes concerning the Holocaust, within the Israeli ethos (Goldberg, 2012; Nossek, 1994).

4.2. Active resistance

Well into the late 1970s, the Israeli education system viewed the extermination of entire Jewish communities as a historical background for the portrayal of the great courage of Jewish resistance and rebellion. The heroes of the Holocaust were the leaders of the uprisings in the ghettos, the conscripts of the Jewish Brigade, the many Jews who had joined the Allied forces to fight against the Wehrmacht, and the Jewish paratroopers who landed to meet their deaths in conquered Europe towards the end of the war. The Jews who were led passively to be slaughtered were the exilic antitheses of the proud Israeli Jew who would always struggle actively and win his wars (Almog, 2000; Porat, 2004).

4.3. Justification of Zionism

The connection between the Holocaust and the very foundation of the State of Israel, certainly its struggle for survival at any cost, is made clear in the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The massacre of millions of Jews in Europe is referred to as a clear demonstration of the urgency of establishing the Jewish State in the Land of Israel. It follows that the Holocaust is Israel’s raison d’être. The Zionist logic conjoins two historical events − the Holocaust and Israel’s establishment − and links them causally. According to this national logic, only a Jewish state can meet the personal security needs of each individual Jew (Gutwein, 2009; Lewin, 2014; Resnik, 2003).

The Holocaust justifies Zionism, but it also establishes the concept that unlike any other country, Israel is constantly at risk; if it is not strong enough, a possible military defeat might lead to another Holocaust. Thus, the State of Israel is at the same time an insurance policy against a future Holocaust and a vulnerable entity always under the existential threat of a second one (Zerubavel, 1995).

4.4. Universalism

Liberal ethos proponents see the Holocaust as an opportunity to consider universal moral implications that can be drawn from the event; to consider what it means to be human and humane. Studying the World War II events provides us with the lenses through which every society can examine its own values (Lewin, 2014).

5. Majdanek Concentration Camp Museum

5.1. A brief account

In October 1941, about 1,500 to 2,000 Soviet prisoners were sent to the camp, before it was even constructed. They were intended to serve as slave labor for SS economic enterprises, but in less than three months almost all of them died of terrible living conditions, lack of basic medical care, and murderous shootings by the camp garrison (Siwek-Ciupak & Brand, 2014).

The Camp was situated in the northeastern outskirts of Lublin, since the whole region was designated as a supply base for special SS facilities. Lublin was intended to undergo a Germanization process, and plans called for building SS housing along with a complex of SS factories and warehouses dedicated to supplying the army. Majdanek was planned to function as a labor reservoir. The total capacity of the barracks was 25,000 prisoners, with an average population usually lower, between 10,000 to 15,000 (Siwek-Ciupak & Brand, 2014).

In order to guard Majdanek, at first highly experienced SS soldiers were brought from other concentration camps. Over time, these were reinforced and replaced by Volksdeutsche,⁵ mostly from Romania and Yugoslavia. Other guards were Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians recruited from Soviet POWs and trained at the SS camp in Trawniki. At a certain point, a Lithuanian police battalion was brought to Majdanek to assist with watching over the camp (Siwek-Ciupak & Brand, 2014).

Altogether, approximately 150,000 people were sent to Majdanek to work from dawn to dusk in unhuman conditions—people of many faiths, nationalities, political convictions, social classes, and professions. About 80,000 of them perished as an outcome of the poor conditions: the primitive wooden barracks, lack of basic sanitary facilities, shortages of water, food, clothing, and medicine, and a monstrously punitive treatment. Jews made up the highest percentage of the mortal victims of Majdanek. Out of about 80,000 that arrived at the camp, almost 60,000 died (Siwek-Ciupak & Brand, 2014).

By mid-March 1944 Red Army units were on their way to Lublin, and Majdanek was evacuated. Once the Soviets arrived, the camp was organized to contain German POWs. The NKVD took over one of the barracks complexes to imprison and torture Polish social groups, and individuals who were regarded as hostile to the new communist order that the conquerors were about to impose. However, in November 1944 the museum in Majdanek started operating and thus became the world’s first institution dedicated to commemorating the victims of Nazi atrocities (Siwek-Ciupak & Brand, 2014).

5.2. Interviews at the museum

Five guides participated in the meeting and allowed us to take notes. One in his forties, one in his late twenties, and the three others in their mid-thirties. All five had been guiding tours of the museum for four to six years. Before we started, we took a long walk in the camp, where an informal talk developed. Our questions focused on the story of the Holocaust and the way it is told in Majdanek. The guides called what happened there Zagłada – the Polish word for annihilation. In general, the Zagłada was introduced in a somewhat universal manner, as one of the guides put it:

Our reference is not necessarily to Holocaust in its Jewish meaning. We deal with the history of people who have been here, suffered and died. They belonged to different groups from all over the world. Our message should be, therefore, universal. The Jewish topic is there, it is a part of the big story that we tell, but our point of view is one of equality.

As we were walking from the barracks back to the offices, where most of our conversation took place, one of the guides cited a description from a book written by one of the survivors. He quoted how on a certain night, the guards in the towers, cold and lonely, shouted to each other, in order to communicate. Hence suddenly the night was filled with shouts in numerous languages—German, Ukrainian, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovakian. This seemed to be the end of the story, because the guide paused for a while. “You did not mention Polish” I said. “Sure,” he answered, “this is my way to convey to our visitors that there were never any Polish auxiliary police forces that cooperated with the Nazis.”

The guides seem to strive for objectivity as a professional standard. One of them asserted:

We are a state museum, so it is our duty to tell the general story. Of course, even if we do not differentiate between Poles and Polish Jews – the numbers and the percentages of deaths in every group tell the story.

Things are also not necessarily expressed in the Jewish context:

We have to be unbiased, we have to transmit an objective story, with no hidden agenda. So, we try to tell everybody’s story. We do not stimulate any anti-German feelings, and we try to be as honest as we can. However, we use the full name of the phenomenon: this is a Nazi-German concentration camp!

Objectivity needs didactic tools, and the guides are well aware of that:

Our duty is to give facts, but obviously – you also have to involve emotions. In recent years we focus more on faces, names, personal stories – not just statistics. When there are groups of kids, they are unlikely to understand the meaning of numbers, so we are bound to tell them about children and their destinies in the camp.

Also, there is an awareness of a certain mission, a lifetime assignment, that the guides express. As one of them put it:

Today there are more and more groups from the West that know very little about life in Poland during World War II. They are almost ignorant about the suffering and death of Poles, and they know nothing about what Poland underwent during the Soviet occupation. However, there are also Polish groups of young people who do not know anything, and it has to do with the fact that the generation of their grandparents gradually disappears.

Regarding issues of Israeli nationality and the concept of Holocaust as solely a Jewish tragedy, one of the guides said:

I have no problem with Israelis who come here with all their flags to march demonstratively in Majdanek. The problem is that they do not take any of our guides. We have no chance to meet them, and I think it is a pity—they lack a different perspective of the place. I used to have some connections with Israeli guides who came here several times; some of them are open minded, but there are also those who are interested solely in Jewish matters.

Another guide proclaimed:

Jews are an integral part of our heritage, and I find it very sad that Jews come here to learn about death camps but not about how Poles and Jews had been sharing mutual life for centuries before the war. There are Polish organizations that were constructed for this task, but you do not hear too much about them. Instead, occasionally, there is an anti-Semitic event that catches the headlines and puts a shadow on any attempt to revive our good relationship.

All in all, then, the guides of Majdanek are focused mainly on universal lessons to be learned from the Zagłada of World War II. They try to achieve objectivity in teaching history, exposing the world to truths that until recently were concealed and to facts that tend to be forgotten as time passes. Regarding the Poles’ relationship with Jews and Israelis, there is a feeling of uneasiness—the Jewish-Israeli delegates that arrive in Majdanek make little contact with the museum’s management, and they seem to be concentrated mainly on the Jewish narrative.

6. Brama Grodzka—Teatr NN in Lublin

6.1. The Gate center

Brama Grodzka—Teatr NN translates from Polish into: Grodzka Gate—NN Theatre. This is a local government cultural institution operating in Lublin, housed in the Grodzka Gate. The Grodzka Gate is also known as the Jewish Gate, because historically it used to be the passage between the Christian and the Jewish parts of Lublin. After the murder of Lublin’s 43,000 Jews was completed, the Jewish part of the town was razed to the ground by the Germans, leaving just an empty space. The memorial center located at the gate carries out activities that are intended to commemorate Jewish victims, collectively—as a group and on the personal level. However, in the Grodzka Gate center, the Polish-Jewish past of Lublin and the Jewish cultural heritage serve also as a platform for educational programs for school classes; groups of youngsters come for a one-day training program, sponsored by the authorities (Pietrasiewicz, 2019).

The various exhibitions focus on Jewish life in Lublin throughout centuries, their destruction by the Nazis, and the Polish Righteous-among-the-Nations who risked their lives to save Jews. There is an archive in the center with 43,000 folders; each Jew who lived in Lublin in September 1939 has been assigned a file containing all the information that was found about him or her, from just a name to various pictures and personal documents (Pietrasiewicz, 2019).

The Grodzka Gate center was established in 1990, and throughout its 30 years has been granted multiple international awards for its numerous projects. The founder and initiator of the center, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, who grew up in Lublin from childhood, asserted that with the burial of Jewish buildings under a large concrete shell of a parking lot, the citizens of Lublin forgot about their former Jewish neighbors and subsequent generations had no knowledge of their fate (Pietrasiewicz, 2019).

6.2. Focus group at the Brama Grodzka

Our focus group was a small group of four guides who worked at the center. One of them was part of the management and the three others were young women in their mid-thirties who, as we noticed throughout the conversation, perceive their work at the center as an educational assignment and as an endeavor of historical justice. As one of them told us:

During the Communist era it was very unpopular to speak about the Jews and for years my mother kept asking me when I would find a better job. My grandmother too was against working here. I never told her, but I thought it was unfair of her, because she lived near the synagogue, and for her to meet Jews was part of her daily life. I never had the experience, so in a way I am filling some gaps. Anyhow, I think that now both my mother and my grandmother are proud with my passion to the subject.

Another guide, originally a Lubliner, testified:

Throughout seventeen years of our schooling system nobody ever told me that there had been Jews in Lublin. They did tell us about the Holocaust, education used to be nationally managed and not by the local authorities, but we learned about the Warsaw Ghetto, nothing about our own city. This is outrageous. You should bear in mind that for seventy years nobody ever mentioned the existence of an Umschlagplatz⁶ here in Lublin!

The managing guide, who has been working in the center for about 15 years, demonstrated his attitude demanding a fair trial for all, so to speak, announcing that for him history is what counts, and we should stay away from any governmental political manipulation, referring particularly to the post-Act on the IPN atmosphere of the last couple of years:

All the Polish collaborators and murderers, just like those who saved Jews, are all together part and parcel of one history. I am not impressed at all with the numbers of righteous among the nations. I want to know about the Szmaltzovniks,⁷ just like the French want to know about those who led Vichy France. The problem is that during the last five years, things are becoming difficult. Everyone is afraid these days. It is harder to collect testimonies from witnesses, and it is harder to persuade teachers from other districts to come to our center. These teachers do not have today the support of their local councils the way they used to have.

The younger guides, on the other hand, are more optimistic about the future of the center’s activities:

The reason for a different atmosphere is that there is a generational change. Now we can ask questions that have not been asked before, and now we can raise new points of view. We can be freer to deal with values, not just trauma, to handle discourse about the complexity of things. There were Poles who cooperated with the Germans and there were others who were heroes; there is not and there cannot be just one story, and yes – some of the stories contradict each other.

In sum, the guides at the Grodzka Gate center are more outspoken and critical than their counterparts at the Majdanek museum, and just like them they emphasize the complexity of the events and the difficulty in understanding the course of history. However, the Grodzka Gate guides are certainly more connected to the Jewish story, and though stressing the fact that they are first of all Poles—their mission is ultimately to commemorate the Jewish heritage in Poland.

7. Witnesses in Uniform—IDF reserves officers

Established in 2001, the Witnesses in Uniform program brings IDF officers to follow the paths of Jews in Poland during the Holocaust physically and spiritually. By 2011 tens of thousands of IDF soldiers have already taken part in the project.

In the course of a weeklong trip, the soldiers learn about Jews’ lives before the war, as well as about Nazi ideology and Jewish resistance in the Holocaust. Each such IDF delegation includes a Holocaust survivor, who gives explanations about the places and events from his or her personal perspective. During the trip, soldiers visit sites of the local Jewish communities, including synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, as well as remnants of ghettos, labor camps, concentration camps, and extermination camps. One of the highlights of the project is a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. At some of the sites, soldiers hold military memorial services. The participants conclude each day of the journey with a reflective discussion (Davidovitch et al., 2012; Feldman, 2008).

The trip to Poland is preceded by extensive studying and preparations by the delegation members. These preparations include a visit to Yad Vashem and learning about Jewish history. Throughout these preparations, as well as during the trip itself, delegation members are involved in discussions about pre-war Poland, the Holocaust, and contemporary Jewish life (Ben-Amos & Hoffman, 2011; Feldman, 2008).

Three reserve officers who participated in the delegation in three consecutive years (2015, 2016, and 2017) gathered for this research in a meeting that took place in one of the military offices where their reserve army service takes place. One of them was a 55-year-old lieutenant colonel whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors; the second was a 41-year-old Major; and the third was a 30-year-old female Major. The three were officers at the Home Front Corps, though in their regular army service, they served in combat units. Coincidentally, when narrowing down their comments and summing them up, it seems that these officers each represented a different point of view concerning Holocaust remembrance. The elder one stated:

One never returns from this delegation the same person as he had been before. The importance of this trip is that it is a process where officers strengthen their Jewish identity, and I have heard them say on more than one occasion sentences like “Now I realize what we are fighting for” or “Now I finally understand why we need a strong IDF.”

[…] The only sensible conclusion anyone can think of is that we should always be prepared to fight because, without a state, we stand no chance in this world.

The major in his early forties hardly spoke about Israel’s right to exist as an outcome of the Holocaust. Rather, his concern seems to be internal social problems in Israel, particularly divisions over political issues:

Going to Poland to see what happened there gives you a certain sense of proportion. If people were truly aware of what the Holocaust was all about, all the [social] cleavages […] would all vanish in a second. The most important thing is that we stop fighting with each other because, unlike those who were in the concentration camps, we are privileged; we must not waste this privilege, not just for us but also for their sake.

The younger officer, a woman who had left a regular army career a couple of years prior to our meeting, stressed the importance of refraining from potential atrocities. Pointing this out, she said:

I do not see the experience in Poland as just a process of studying a certain chapter in history. It is not about Germans and Jews, nor is it about the so-called bystanders. It is actually about not taking our victimhood to the wrong place. We should be cautious not to take advantage of our strength and always to remain human and moral. We should refrain from any possibility of turning into – well, yes, turning into something like the Nazis. Whether it is our fault or not, we are now ruling over another people, so we should be cautious!

In a way, then, the three officers express entirely different approaches to the topic of Holocaust remembrance and education. The first one holds the classic, so to speak, attitude of the historical event as the very raison d’être of the State of Israel. The Jews, for that matter, have earned by victimhood their right to a state of their own. The second officer tends to take things to the domestic arena, and speaks more about the dangerous internal controversies, and the third officer sticks to universalism. Noteworthy, to some extent the three officers also hold different attitudes in the ongoing debates concerning the educational objects of the Israeli youth delegations to Poland (Feldman, 2002, 2008).

8. Conclusion

We set sail, in this study, attempting to locate premises of reconciliation between two sets of Holocaust narratives. We investigated the Polish and Jewish contending national narratives in quest of themes of reconciliation. On the face of it, this task is impossible. The question of whether competing national constructions can fit together has already been answered, in a way, by the famous African proverb: A fish and a bird may fall in love, but they cannot build a home together. With this impossible point of departure, in this paper, we took the task of finding mutual paths for different Polish and Israeli narratives of the World War II experience. Three different groups showed us that indeed, a broad common denominator can be found, even within the controversy over the Act on the IPN. The first group was The Majdanek Guides who try to shape some universal conclusions from the Zagłada, striving for objectivity and respecting all the various nations whose sons and daughters marched to their deaths in this specific concentration camp. The second group counted some guides of the Grodzka Gate center who accentuate historical complexity, but in spite of identifying as Poles, they attach themselves to a great extent to the Jewish heritage in Poland. The third group consisted of IDF reserves officers who had participated in delegations to Poland. Whereas one of them demonstrated loyalty to the old national ethos of Holocaust as the ultimate justification for the State of Israel, it was rather the youngest officer who expressed some universal thoughts about historical events. These universal thoughts are not detached from the various liberal attitudes that are typical for the younger generations in Israeli Society (Gutwein, 2009; Kenan & Wolff, 2022; Lewin, 2014; Wolff, 2019).

There are various reservations that must be mentioned. First—the case studies that had been chosen for this research do not necessarily represent any specific social group—neither in the Polish case nor in the Israeli one. Indeed, this qualitative study referred to very small and specific groups of individuals. Moreover, this research lacks the capacity to prove that in practice, recognition, and acknowledgment of the narratives of others lead to international compromise. However, the findings imply that there are ethics that can potentially lead to forms of narratives that can lower flames between nations. These ethics are presented by the guides in Majdanek who, in their interviews, testified how they were adopting a universal manner when speaking about the Zagłada, and how they used didactic tools when striving for objectivity and for an unbiased historic story. These ethics were also demonstrated in the focus group at the Brama Grodzka, through the group members’ ability to cherish the Jews who inhabited Lublin for ages. These ethics were also displayed by the group members’ courage to be critical of the Polish society of the 1940s, despite its relatively minor part in the murder of Jews. Finally, these ethics were presented through the Brama Grodzka focus group interviewees’ willingness of younger generations in Poland to raise questions about the past. True, statements by IDF officers who attended the visit to Poland tended to stress the Jewish particularistic narrative; however, also among Israeli interviewees, as earlier quoted in this research, one can identify, alongside themes of victimhood, the buds of ethics that highlight a universal attitude. Encouraging and developing these approaches in Poland as well as in Israel can diminish the particularistic character of national narratives and reduce disagreements. Such approaches will eventually contribute to a productive dialogue about the issues surrounding disagreements between the two countries. Needless to mention how vital this dialogue is to overcome these issues.

Looking for a key to bridge over the troubled waters of conflicting narratives, one should bear in mind that collective memory is, to a large extent, artificial. The social group’s common recollection is a contested ideological terrain, where different actors try to establish their interpretation of the past as the only way in which their group should comprehend its history. In this manner, society’s historic narrative is an ongoing process that binds the group according to ideological perceptions and common ethics that derive from its retold history (Bloch, 1964; Durkheim, [1912] 1995; Halbwachs, 1992; Rothstein, 2001; Russell, 2007). The name of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s edited book reflects the idea of the artificiality of social cultures: The Invention of Traditions. Constructed versions of the past, and of the continuity between past and present, form a social engineering mechanism with which modern societies establish social cohesion, legitimize authority, and socialize populations into a common culture (Hobsbaum, 1983; Hobsbaum & Ranger, 1984). Press agencies, sometimes connected with hegemonic forces in society and at other cases opposing them, are also active agents in constructing various narratives (Herfroy-Mischler, 2016). Late twentieth century critical scholars assert that narratives are manipulated in national contexts, legitimizing a monopoly of administrative control. National history, according to this attitude, can be, at times, no more than a presentation of false unity designed through an elite’s conquest of historical awareness. These scholars also point out how national states all over the world exploit professional historical research and shift their peoples’ centers of collective memory from religious sets of myths to political ones relying on subjective interpretations of history − for example, a change of public focus from the temple and its priests to the university and its professors (Duara, 1995; Levi-Strauss, 1979; Smith, 1986).

Politicians often draw on collective comprehension of the past to mobilize remembrance as an instrument of politics. Collective consciousness, based on group memory, often intentionally forged, is utilized to legitimize politicians’ actions (Hayden, 1992). In their introduction to a book, that bears the title that illustrates the phenomenon accurately, Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, the editors of the book note how our comprehension of the past has its strategic, political, and ethical consequences. Contests over the meaning of historic events are also competitions over framing the present (Hodgkin & Radstone, 2003).

It seems, then, that the key to bridging over the troubled waters of narratives lies, perhaps, in research, like this paper, but also within grassroots organizations. One organization, for example, is The Bridge to Poland, that leads trips and workshops specifically for those, all over the world, who want to learn and understand the history of others (Tec, 2021 (a)). Established by Leora Tec, an American scholar, this organization handles speaking engagements of all kinds that take place in Poland and on air. Another initiative is The Neshoma Project, where video conversations with non-Jewish Poles who dedicate time to preserve Jewish memory is collected (Tec, 2021 (b)). These projects match with the words of Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, founder of the Grodzka Gate center, in an award reception speech on 8 October 2019: To remember the murdered Jews, you do not have to be Jewish. To remember the murdered Poles, you do not have to be Polish (Pietrasiewicz, 2019, p. 175).

Perhaps, then, the guides in places like the Majdanek Concentration Camp Museum, as well as their colleagues in the Brama Grodzka—Teatr NN Center − and of course, travelers from all nations who visit those locations − will eventually construct a path of compromise and conciliation. This spirit will enable each group to stick to its own heritage yet at the same time to recognize, acknowledge, and respect the narratives and ethos forms of others.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eyal Lewin

Eyal Lewin is Professor Assistant [Senior Lecturer] at Ariel University. He is also a research fellow at the Kinneret Center on Peace, Security and Society. Lewin is the author of academic papers and monographs and editor of books focusing on general socio-political phenomena such as patriotism, national resilience, national ethos, and Israel studies. Editor in Chief of the academic semi-annual National Resilience, Politics and Society.

Slawomir Jacek Zurek

Slawomir Jacek Zurek is professor and head of the Centre for Polish-Jewish Literature Studies, as well as director of the International Centre for Research of the History and Cultural Heritage of the Central and Eastern Europe Jews at The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. He has published widely on Jewish motifs in Polish literature and Polish-Jewish literature in Israel. He is a member of the Polish Society for Jewish Studies, the Council of the Polish Episcopate’s Committee for Dialogue with Judaism, and the Polish Council of Christians and Jews. In 2002-03, he held a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame.

Nitza Davidovitch

Nitza Davidovitch, serves in teaching and administrative positions at Ariel University. She is currently the director of academic development & evaluation. Her areas of research interest include academic curriculum development, development of academic instruction, Holocaust awareness and Jewish identity, student exchange programs with Germany and Poland, preservation of the heritage of Jewish sects, and moral education.

Notes

1. The term used throughout this paper is short for Act on the IPN: 44 Denunciations Insulting the Polish Nation.

2. Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority.

3. IDF stands for Israel Defense Forces.

4. Righteous Among the Nations is a title used by the State of Israel to convey the highest esteem and respect in addressing non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews.

5. The German word translates into German-people, relating to ethnic Germans who lived outside Germany.

6. Umschlagplatz is the German word for a reloading or a collection place. The Nazis used this expression for the location where Jews would be assembled for deportation to the death camps.

7. Szmalcownik [pronounced: shmaltzovnic] was the Polish slang from the time of the German occupation for a person who blackmailed Jews who were in hiding or who blackmailed Poles who secretly protected Jews.