2010-06-14 17:59:16

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Edward Serotta Talks Helen Thomas, Israel And The Jews Of Central Europe

Filed under: Ed Serotta, Europe, Featured, Germany, History, Holocaust, Hungary, Poland, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Last week, when 89-year-old Helen Thomas of Hearst told the world via YouTube that the Israelis should leave “Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland–back to the heart of the continent, in other words, where most Jews were annihilated in the 1940’s–she touched on a seldom-mentioned truth. The Israelis are never going “back” to Europe, because they’re already home, but there are, in fact, Jews in Europe, specifically in Central and Eastern Europe, where most of the worst of the murder took place.

A tiny handful are the last living survivors of the Holocaust. A few more are their descendants. The majority, from Prague to Budapest, from Berlin to Vienna, are more recent arrivals, emigre Jews of the former Soviet Union and their children.

No one talks about them much, certainly not the Israelis, for whom these communities, perceived as nothing more than dying remnants, have always been a nuisance. After 1948, when Israel was founded, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were supposed to pack their bags and leave the countries where they had been persecuted. Over decades, most of them did, but by 1988, when Edward Serotta showed up in Budapest with his camera and notebook, those who stayed behind had managed to hang on. As Serotta says here, the world that existed before was gone, but something tiny and hardy had survived in its wake, and its survival was moving beyond words.

He resolved to help, and the result is the Central Europe Center, Centropa for short, a Vienna-based operation that started as one man and a computer and became the go-to guide for anyone interested in Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

The Jews of the East were obscure for reasons that went beyond the Third Reich.

After the war, they got stuck behind the Iron Curtain under dictatorships that allowed them to survive without much caring whether they did.

Complicating matters, they fit poorly into the structures of the post-world-war order. The founding of Israel and the ascendancy of the United States, the two great magnets for Jews in the second half of the 20th Century, made the communities of Eastern Europe an inconvenient anomaly, a quiet embarrassment for those who wanted to make the case that after the Holocaust all Jews belonged in Israel, an outrage for those who believed that no Jew could conscionably remain in those countries where their own people had been treated so terribly.

As a result of the first two realities, these communities tended to be impoverished and voiceless. Until the end of the Cold War, most people, including most Jews, had no idea that something worth saving had survived.

Those days are mostly over, and Serotta is a big part of the reason. With the help of several major donors, Jewish relief organizations and a handful of governments, the Central Europe Center has mounted a campaign to being these communities “out of the shadows”, as one of Serotta’s books is titled. In a few weeks, Centropa will host a milestone of an event, a guided tour of the seemingly lost worlds of Prague, Budapest and Viennese Jewry for dozens of educators from around the world.

That’s the next step in the evolution of Serotta’s vision: education. Is it mean-spirited to suggest that Helen Thomas should enroll in the program?

Q:This July, 75 educators, museum directors, diplomats and other government officials from the United States, Israel, Turkey, Romania, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere will come to Central Europe. They’ll meet the Czech Prime Minister, the mayors of Vienna and Budapest and hear from Israeli author Tom Segev. They’ll see Jewish sites and meet Jewish communities in Prague, Vienna and Budapest. What is the essence of what you want them to understand about Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe?

A:Centropa spent eight years and around $2.5 million using new technologies to preserve Jewish memory in 15 European countries. We set up local teams in each major city, brought in oral historians from Boston University and Hebrew University to work with us, and our goal was to spend up to 20 hours with each respondent, digitize their old family snapshots from before and after the war, and create a portrait of how their families lived, not just how they died. We never used video in these interviews, but we now have 22,000 digitized snapshots, every one of which comes with its own keywords, crossreferenced stories.

When we started ten years ago, we had never planned to go into education, but teachers simply wouldn’t leave us alone. And because we—or at least I—knew nothing of educational programming, we hired a core group of 12 teachers from three countries to help us design programs, all using our material, that they could use in class.

What did they like the most—that we are so much more about 20th c. Jewish life than only its destruction.

In order to focus these teachers on our website and archive, we brought them to Europe each summer—in 2007 we coaxed nine to join us. IN 2008, we have 15; in 2009 we had 25. And this year, we’ll have 75.

By the time they go home, they will be steeped in the stories and histories of this land of Kafka, Freud, Canetti and Mahler, and they will have established networks with teachers from other countries—we have 13 countries represented.

Q:Given the horrific nature of what happened during World War II, a lot of people may think that Jewish life in Europe ended in 1945. But that’s not the case, is it?

A:The world that was is certainly no more. My first book, Out of the Shadows, came out in 1991 and in it, I said there was no such thing as “the last Jews of Eastern Europe.” These small communities have been fighting to take their rightful place in the world, and no matter how small they are, they are doing a relatively good job of caring for their elderly, nurturing their youth, and trying to develop a new generation of leaders.

But I do not buy the term “renaissance.” Calling it that does not make it so. Most of these communities do not have a rosy future before them, but whatever efforts they are making should be supported by everyone who can. After all, they paid retail for having kept a Jewish flame alive.

Whatever important will happen Jewishly in Central and Eastern Europe, it will happen in one city: Budapest. With anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 Jews, there are more Jews living there than in Romania, ex Yugoslavia, Poland, Czech and Slovakia and Austria—combined. The stories of tens of thousands of Polish Jews—the offspring of hidden children of the Holocaust—is wildly exaggerated.

Q:It may be hard for people to understand why Jews would stay in Austria or Germany, but you know those communities well. Can you give some insight into why survivors of the Holocaust made that decision?

A:Most Austrian and German born Jews who survived the war (and that was the great majority of them) could not bear to return home at war’s end. These two communities were largely resettled by Jews from further east who were fleeing worse anti Semitism. Some were living in Austrian or German displaced persons camps and had every intention of moving on. But as the ‘economic miracle’ of postwar Austria and Germany gathered steam, some of these Jews remained. They rebuilt their community structures and schools and kept to themselves, never identifying with Austria itself or West Germany. They were living ‘on packed suitcases,’ they would say.

Germany’s Jewish community of some 28,000 souls in the mid 1980s is now well over 125,000—due to the emigration of Soviet Jewry. Obviously there are frictions and problems between the Jews who rebuilt Jewish life during the postwar decades, but in time, they will more than likely sort themselves out, for one simple reason: these Soviet Jews have given the German Jewish community something it did not have a decade ago: a future.

Austria’s prognosis is not nearly so good. The community is small, insular, well organized and has all manner of institutions—schools, kindergartens, social welfare services, eight or nine synagogues, kosher restaurants and large kosher food shops. There are less than 4,500 Jews there whose families trace back to the 40s or 50s (and a few whose roots are genuinely Austrian). The Jews from the Soviet Union who have moved there, however—around 3,000—are all Uzbeks and Georgians.

And here is the fascinating difference between Germany and Austria. Most of the Jews who went to Germany came from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltics. They are—for the most part—well educated, have had little or no contact with Jewish traditions, and are very often intermarried.

The Uzbeks and Georgians in Vienna come from low educational backgrounds, are very traditional (almost every family keeps a kosher home), and are almost never intermarried.

My institute did programs to match up the children of these people with elderly Holocaust survivors, and the results were decidedly mixed. Some of the kids were lively, interested and clearly wanted to learn. Others had no more interest in European Jewish history and culture than we have in 16th century Uzbek literature. Yet Vienna’s Jewish community—even as it continues to shrink—will belong to them someday.

Q:Lately, and once again, 20th Century Jewish history has been making headlines in the US. Last week, veteran White House reporter and columnist Helen Thomas had to resign after she urged the Jews of Israel to go back to Germany and Poland, where millions were killed. What’s your take on her comments and resignation?

A:I watched the video, and it was definitely a gotcha moment. I’m not sure how fair it is to corner an 89-year-old woman like that, plant words in her mouth, and have her re-chew them for you. But words, as they say in Yiddish, are like arrows. Once you use them, you can’t get them back.

Q:Her comments did touch on a historical reality that often gets overlooked, the sometimes tortured relationship between Jews who emigrated to Israel and those who stayed behind on the continent where the genocide took place. Can you speak at all about the complexity of that relationship? How do Israelis generally regard the communities of Eastern European Jews? And vice versa?

A:We now spend a lot of time in Israel, working with teachers and students and education ministry officials. Europe for Israelis is a one stop shop of past horrors. 30,000 Israeli high school kids are taken to Poland each year to march around with Israeli flags draped around them as they sing hatikva, write poems about the hateful Poles who would kill me if they could, and that’s why there must be a strong Israel.

There are more than a few public intellectuals who are trying to right this situation, and our programs, which offer multi media films and exhibitions of prewar life in Poland and elsewhere, are being truly welcomed in our pilot schools in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Herzliya.

So things are just at the cusp of change, but at this time, the entire concept of Europe is used by the Israeli right to instruct the country’s youth that everyone hates us and we must never listen to anyone else.

In other words, a certain section Israelis don’t even recognize Jewish communities in this part of the world, other than as potential emigrants.

As for how East Europeans see Israel—many made aliya—certainly from the FSU: more than a million. But from Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria—a very few.

Mostly, they see Israel as a place of refuge, not as a magnet. And that, of course, has always been Israel’s problem but it would be lovely if that changed.

Q:Those who do know something about the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe may regard those communities as nothing more than remnants or vestiges, but that’s something of a misnomer, isn’t it? Tell us why.

A:This is mostly answered in nr 2 above, but on a broader scale, we have to say these communities aren’t remnants of anything. Leaving out Germany and Austria, as they were described above, here’s what we know about Central and Eastern Europe and the FSU: communism basically forbade all religious observance. One could not learn Hebrew (except, oddly enough, in Romania). There were no rabbinical seminars (save of an anemic one in Budapest that barely functioned). Almost no one kept kosher. All Jewish newspapers were silly party organs. Jewish youth clubs and summer camps (except for a lucky few in Yugoslavia, Romania and Hungary) did not function. So clearly, by the late 1940s, that surviving remnant decided to move on and out of the region, save for the Hungarians. And those who stayed had no contact with Jewish life in any form.

Therefore, when Jewish life returned in 1989 and in 1991, it was invented anew. I remember Kostek Gebert of Warsaw saying, “we don’t have any bubbiemeizers” [grandmother’s tales] because we don’t have any bubbies.”

So what we see today is something new and fresh. As I stated above, outside of Budapest, though, I see no real future for Jewish communities here—save for perhaps Moscow, Kiev and Riga.

Q:In countries, where there may in fact be a remnant quality to the community, can you talk about some of the challenges faced by the Jews there? I’m thinking of people in Ukraine, perhaps, or Romania, where the vast majority of the Jewish population did leave. How do Jews there manage to hang on to some semblance of a communal life?

A:In Ukraine they did not. Almost no one lived as a Jew until communism fell. But oddly enough, they died as Jews and the Jewish cemeteries are testaments to that.

Romania is without doubt the most interesting Jewish story in the whole region. For for decades a plump little rabbi with a gold Jewish star the size of a hubcap and black and purple robes ran everything, and was chauffeured around in an aging, sagging Mercedes. David Moses Rosen was his name. He managed to run soup kitchens, Sunday schools, had childrens’ choirs, a summer camp or two. And he had a massive social welfare program for Holocaust survivors that was a marvel to observe.

But this was all very top down. It could not be otherwise in Communist Europe. And no other Jewish community leader in the region was half as bold as he was.

He also did a brisk business in selling more than 100,000 Jews to Israel. How much he played a role will never be known, but he wanted his Jews to go there, and go there they did, with the Romanian government profiting from it—and so did the Israelis. I once asked him in 1985, “Rabbi, all of Romania’s Jews go to Israel?” He looked at me from under heavily lidded eyes, eyes that had traded in markets far beyond my experience, and just sighed. “Serotta, we’re Jews. Where should we go: Philadelphia?”

Q:Looking back for a minute, the lives of Jews who lived through the 20th Century in Central and Eastern Europe have a tremendous fascination, so much change, so much violence, dislocation and reinvention in a single span of years. Can you give us a couple of quick sketches of lives that you have found particularly inspiring or extraordinary?

A:A woman, Rosie Jakab, who ran a Jewish soup kitchen in Arad, Romania, until she was ninety-five. The aforementioned Rabbi Rosen, who I adored. Jakob Finci and Ivica Ceresnjes, a middle aged lawyer and architect who turned themselves into humanitarian aid specialists when war came to Sarajevo in 1992. That’s when they turned the Jewish community into a free and open house for all. Anna Szeszler, a Hungarian Jewish school teacher who, in 1987, was walking on a street in New York and saw a book called, The Last Jews of Eastern Europe with her sister’s picture on the cover. She said, “well my sister’s not an damn last Jew,” went home, and three years later started the Lauder school in Budapest, the biggest and best in Central Europe.

Q:In addition to a dwindling population of people who survived the Holocaust, there are also growing numbers of young people in some countries. Can you describe a particularly vibrant youth scene in one or two countries?

A:Obviously, Budapest is the place to observe. There are several cafes like Siraly and Spinoza where scores of young Jewish college students hang out. When they hold a festival or Purim party, they get hundreds, sometimes thousands.

The key, however, is summer camp. Studies show that the single best way to infuse kids with a sense of Jewish belonging is to send them to a Jewish summer camp. There are several throughout the region. There should be more and they should be bigger.

Q:How do Jews in Hungary, say, or the Czech Republic, deal with issues of assimilation versus tradition? Given the Holocaust, these questions would seem particularly acute, or is that a false impression?

A:One has nothing to do with the other. Sure you’ll meet an elderly Jew who said, “I came back because I didn’t want to give Hitler a posthumous victory,” but that’s not a serious answer. As stated above, young Jews in this region are coming to Judaism on their own terms, not in ways that worked 70 or 80 years ago. Of course, that statement can be applied to Jews everywhere. Very, very, very few younger Jews in this region are becoming religious. They are involved with Jewish social clubs, take a few weeks to visit Israel to see friends, go to lectures and once a year poke their heads in a synagogue. Again—that sounds like many younger American Jews, too.

Q:A lot of our readers are evangelical Christians, who tend to be well versed in the lives and beliefs of Jews in Israel. In fact, for many evangelicals, the representative Jew is an Israeli, and lots of donor money flows from evangelical churches and organizations to that country. Can you talk at all about importance of the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe to an understanding of Judaism as a whole?

My institute interviewed 1,200 Jews in 15 countries in this region. 99% of them were Holocaust survivors. Of that number, around 750, I would estimate, live at or below the poverty line. Most have no extended families to care for them—the Holocaust saw to that.

There is no comparison between how Holocaust survivors in Bulgaria or Romania live compared to their counterparts in Israel or the US.

We have established two clubs for them—one in Vienna, the other in Budapest. We also help support a soup kitchen in Romania for Holocaust survivors.

We receive around $10,000 from German church groups each year to distribute these funds to these partner organizations. I would be happy to speak with anyone who might be interested in a similar, targeted project.

Q:As you’ve educated yourself over the past two decades in the lives and times of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, what are one or two things that surprised or shocked you, things that you didn’t know before or wouldn’t have guessed before starting this work about these communities?

A:The single biggest surprise was watching the Sarajevo Jewish community turn itself into a humanitarian aid agency during the Bosnian war (1992-1005), as they helped Muslims, Serbs and Croats alike. If ever any organization deserved the Nobel Prize for Peace, it was them.

As stated above, the rebirth of Jewish life in Germany has proven a great surprise, and a welcome one.

The most beautiful thing I’ve seen was the dining room at lunch time in the summer camp in Szarvas Hungary. I walked in—this was in 1990, a year after communism fell—and the dining room was filled with nearly 400 Jewish children—from Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia—all standing on their chairs and screaming out Hebrew songs, then flinging themselves around the table tops arm and arm in wild abandon. Even a year before this, those kids would have been chased away by their own parents and told not to make trouble. And their parents would have lived in mortal fear of losing their jobs.

But the Berlin Wall had fallen, the dining room floor was littered with felalafel and pita, and 400 Jewish kids were once again lighting that tiny flame of Jewish life in Central Europe. You could hear them caterwauling outside the camp, along the Maros River, where tourists in their canoes stopped paddling to listen to this strange singing coming from somewhere through the trees.

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2010-04-20 15:09:13

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Veteran New York Times Reporter John Tagliabue Talks About The Polish Tragedy

Filed under: Catholicism, Cold War, Europe, Featured, John Tagliabue, Poland, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Poland is still in mourning. Yesterday, its people buried President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, the First Lady, in Wawel Castle, tomb of the kings of the nation. The move was controversial. The Kaczynskis were the first non-royals to be laid to rest there. Yet so much about this tragedy has touched on the tragic history of this country that one more conflict only seems appropriate.

In the meantime, the Polish government has formally asked Russia to hand over the black box from the downed Tupolev. The investigative phase is going forward as the country moves on.

Here to help us make sense of this awful event, its pre-history and its possible ramifications, is New York Times correspondent John Tagliabue, who covered Poland for most of the decade of the 1980’s. He speaks fluent Polish, among several other European languages, and has a deep historical and cultural appreciation for the forces that lay beneath the dissident Solidarity movement.

In addition to experiencing firsthand the collision between Poland’s democratic forces and an entrenched Communist government, he lived in Warsaw for several years. Before and after that assignment, he covered the two Germanies during the middle and late Cold War. He was in Poland with then West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl the night the Berlin Wall fell. He was shot in Romania during the revolution that brought down the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

None of which does justice to the depth of his experience and breadth of his knowledge when it comes to Europe. John Tagliabue has covered the continent, East and West, for almost half a century and is arguably the great working journalist on the beat.

Many thanks to John for talking to us.

Q:First, for those who don’t know much about what happened in 1940, could you tell us about the Katyn massacre? What actually happened there?

A:In 1940, in fulfillment of a treaty between Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union, the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty, the Red Army
invaded eastern Poland and quickly defeated the Polish army. Thousands
of Polish officers were taken prisoner. In an order issued that same
year, and signed by several of the top Soviet leaders, including
Stalin himself, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, was ordered to
execute the officers. It must be noted that many of these Poles were
reserve officers, in civilian life lawyers, doctors, university
professors, and so on.

In the end about 22,000 Poles are believed to
have been killed, shot individually in the back of the head. Much of
the killing was done at Katyn, near the Soviet city of Smolensk, where
President Kaczynski’s plane went down. For more than forty years, the
Soviets spread the lie that Nazi troops, who occupied the area in
1943, had murdered the Poles.

Q:The Second World War was fought across much of Poland. Millions of Polish citizens lost their lives. But Katyn was always a special
instance Why did it matter so much?

A:Simply because, as mentioned above, the officers executed at and near
Katyn represented the elite of Polish society, its leadership
potential. It was as if the Polish nation were being robbed of its
eyes, ears and other senses, as well as its intelligence. And that is
exactly what Stalin wanted.

Q:You lived and worked in Poland for several years during the
Solidarity movement’s emergence. What role did it play in the sense of
Polish national identity during that era? Was it a sort of rallying
cry against the Soviets? Something along the lines of “Remember The
Alamo”? Or is that overstating the case?

A:I must confess that in the early years of Solidarity, the
anti-Communist trade union that ultimately toppled Communism, Katyn
played a subordinate role. It was there in Poles’ consciousness, but
it was certainly not a rallying cry. It was however a story that
Polish grandmothers told their grandchildren, one of the many stories
that formed a parallel history to the one taught in the
Communist-controlled schools, where Katyn was one of a number of
forbidden words. Ironically, it was the reform movement in the Soviet
Union under Mikhail Gorbachev that brought Katyn into the open. As
part of his policy of glasnost, Mr. Gorbachev came out publicly in
favor of an effort to fill in the ‘’white spots,’’ the Poles called
them biale plamy, in the history of the Soviet Union’s relations with
its neighbors. And the most prominent of the white spots vis-a-vis
Poland was of course Katyn.

Q:Did you ever have a memorable conversation or exchange with families of survivors? Or anyone connected to the massacre? Was there a gap between the private grief of those who had lost loved ones and its symbolic importance? I’m thinking of the way that a historic
tragedy like 9-11, for instance, often leaves the families of victims
in its shadow.

A:The only time I recall talking with a Pole connected to the massacre
about Katyn was a conversation I had, probably about 1988, with
Andrzej Wajda, the filmmaker who lost his father there and who in
2007, at the age of 81, fulfilled long-held desire by bringing out a
very powerful full-length feature film on the subject. Like most
Poles, Wajda believed, and this comes across clearly in his film, that
the killings took on a kind of religious significance, a kind of
crucifixion, that could however only be followed by resurrection. I
always thought it was that widespread belief that closed the gap
between the private grief of those who lost loved ones at Katyn and
the symbolic, historic significance of the event.

Q:In the wake of the crash, relations between Russia and Poland are said to be warming up. If it’s true, the full admission of
responsibility and the expression of something like genuine regret for
the killings obviously has something to do with it. How deeply did the
official lie over the Katyn massacre poison relations between the two
countries?

A:Well, of course, when both Poland and the Soviet Union were governed
by Communist regimes, Katyn was simply not an issue. For the
Communists, Katyn was the work of Nazi Germany, and the Poles were
killed by German troops. So the whole substructure of relation between
both countries was based on lies. This was something that not only
divided Poles from Russians, it divided Poles from their own Communist
rulers, since every Pole, as I said above, knew from his grandmother
the truth about Katyn. I think that was Gorbachev’s great insight, one
of many, was that the truth about these events had to come out into
the open before one could talk about healthy relations between the
countries.

Q:This week, the Poles are burying President and First Lady Kaczynski, and there has been a massive outpouring of grief, despite the fact, as observers have pointed out, that the president had not been very
popular and was unlikely to win the next election. At least one Polish
commentator has observed that the grief is not for the leader per se,
but for what he represented in terms of the fact and the symbolism of
the Polish state. Do you agree? And if so, can you talk about the
specific relationship that Poles have to their national identity?

A:I agree entirely. There has been great controversy in Poland about the
importance of the presence, and above all about the decision to bury
him in the vault of the Wawel Castle in Krakow, reserved until now for
kings and other rulers of Poland, but not a single president. But I
believe that, in general, Poles recognized his significance in
standing for Poland, and as I suggested above, the Poles have an
almost religious relationship to their fatherland. The notion goes way
back, at least to the partition of Poland in 1792, when the country
ceased to exist, divided between the Russian, Prussian and Austrian
empires. The Polish national poet, Mickiewicz, spoke of ‘’Poland, the
Christ of the nations,’’ meaning that, like Christ, Poland had been
crucified with the partition, but that like the Savior, the nation
would rise again. The Polish Pope John Paul II, sought to improve ties
between Christians and Jews by frequently referring to Jews as ‘’our
elder brothers.’’ What many people overlook is that he is again
quoting Mickiewicz, who however referred to the Jews as the elder
brethren of Poles. Like the Jews, the Poles were a chosen people, he
believed, and like the Jews, the Poles, despite persecution, could
ultimately expect salvation through a Messiah.

Q: From an outsider’s point of view, there is a horrible spookiness about the crash of this plane on this occasion near this place. One thinks of curses and destinies and unseen forces that are more
appropriate to the realm of superstition than statecraft. Do Poles
feel that as well or will this seem like just an awful coincidence
with no uncanny echoes?

A:I think many Poles felt exactly that. The wife of a government
minister, who was not on the plane, began an e-mail to me with the
phrase, ‘That cursed place.’’ A Polish friend in Berlin began a
conversation with the same words.

Q:On the surface, anyway, there are a few silver linings. First and foremost, it seems to me that in the light of this tragedy we can see
the evolution of what was once of the most troubled regions on the
planet into an almost exemplary case of stability. Half a century ago,
the Polish-Soviet border lay at the heart of post-war trauma. Is that
an overly rosy assessment?

A:I don’t think relations between Poland and Russia will ever be simple.
For if Poland has had its share of Mickiewiczes, Russia has had its
Tolstoys and Dostojevskis and Solzhenitsyns, all men imbued with a
sense that history is far more than just an agglomeration of events
and personalities. But I think the behavior of the Russian leadership,
above all Prime Minister Putin, shows that the events could contribute
to deepening mutual trust.

Q:Equally surprising to Cold Warriors might be the human—and dare I say humane?—face of Russian leaders actually admitting to the depth of Stalin’s crimes.

A:As I mentioned above, the process is not new, having begun with Mr.
Gorbachev in the late 1980’s. All Russian leaders since then, Yeltsin,
Putin, Medvedev, have endorsed Mr. Gorbachev’s position entirely.

Q:Another happy fact worth noting might be the relative health of the Polish economy. In a less stable country such a disaster might
have dire financial consequences. The head of the central bank was on
board the plane after all.

A:Yes, Poland seems to have survived the economic crisis with fewer
bruises and cuts than most of its European neighbors. Also Prime
Minister Tusk is a forceful, effective personality who enjoys a high
degree of popular confidence. And, the acting president, Mr.
Komorowski, is very popular. In recent primaries to determine who
will represent his party for president in election later this year, he
got almost 70 percent of the vote, so that he is almost certain to
succeed President Kaczynski.

Q:In general, for all its horror, the Smolensk crash feels like a
moment to appreciate, perhaps mournfully, all that has happened in the
last two decades to move countries in central and eastern Europe
beyond a truly dreadful Twentieth Century history. At the time of the
Wall’s collapse in 1989, there was so much unfinished business ,
including Katyn, but much of it has slowly but surely been addressed.
Or so it would seem.

A:I agree entirely. The changes that have come about since 1989 across
Europe are truly extraordinary. And yet I think that if the history of
the first half of the Twentieth Century, perhaps even the century
until 1989, teaches us anything it is how fragile peace and prosperity
are. Even after 1989, the horrible events in former Yugoslavia should
teach us this lesson. I can recall visiting Sarajevo in the winter of
1984 for the Winter Olympic games celebrated there, and how united,
prosperous and proud Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs seemed. How deceptive it was. Only six years later I was back in Yugoslavia, to cover the
bloody and fratricidal conflict that ultimately tore the country
apart, with Serbs and Croats killing each other and both falling upon
the Bosnians.

Q:It’s easy to imagine a time when such a tragedy might have led to serious conflict between Russia and Poland, but now we seem to be seeing the opposite here. If it’s the case, then, that one of the
world’s more intractable divisions, that between Poles and Russians,
has improved dramatically, are there lessons for other intractable
conflicts elsewhere on the planet. Care to draw a few large and
obviously speculative conclusions about what might be learned from
Smolensk?

A:I think if one looks to other parts of the planet, I think above all
of the Middle East and of Asia, notably China, two regions where in
different ways but equally effectively big lies hold sway, the example
of Katyn might offer a spark of hope. Can China make the transition
from a Communist-controlled society to an open, pluralistic one
without the kind of vicious killing that tore apart Yugoslavia? Can
Middle Eastern societies, I think of Iran above all with its vigorous
opposition movement, embrace the truths about itself and about others
that are necessary for their societies to move forward, without
violence? I think more than one Katyn is perhaps necessary.

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2009-11-12 09:52:02

BERLIN WALL WEEK: WHEN THE LEFT WAS WRONG

Filed under: Berlin, Cold War, Europe, Germany, Poland, Romania, Stalin
Posted by: John

In a short piece in the FAZ, the French philosopher-slash-flaneur Bernard Henri-Levy provides a valuable service by reminding readers that plenty of people, including a pope and a clutch of conservative thinkers, saw clearly that the Soviet Union was founded on a horrendous and unsustainable lie, i.e. that it was a Dictatorship of the People, by and for the People.

Lots of people grasped the lie and called it out and predicted a collapse. Lots more people turned a blind eye or refused to listen. Most of the latter were the children of left-leaning intellectual movements, the progeny of Heidegger and Marx, and while they weren’t Stalinists and had little interest in or sympathy for Stalinist projects, they never much cared about the peoples imprisoned by Stalinism on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

As a student in West Germany in the early 1980’s, I had countless conversations about El Salvador and South Africa with outraged students who were prepared to storm the barricades on behalf of faraway peoples. Never once did these radicals talk about Prague or Warsaw. They didn’t give a damn about white folks on the other side of the Iron Curtain, silent populations who didn’t quite look the part of the damned of the earth. Their concern for death squads and apartheid was laudable and just, but it was half-blind, to put the bias in the kindest possible terms.

Back in the day, leftwing European and American intellectuals hated Ronald Reagan far more than anyone in any Politburo anywhere. That’s just as true today as it was then. One salutary benefit of the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall might be the reminder it offers to the self-righteous Left in this country of a moment when it was incontrovertibly and rather disgracefully wrong. Humility before history is a sign of character.

It’s a duplicitous sort of myth, as Henri-Levy points out, that allows the past to be rewritten as an exoneration of an egregious and never admitted mistake.

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