First Round
Perceptions
A
ndrzej Folwarczny wants to
improve Polish-Jewish rela-
tions one step at a time.
Folwarczny, 35, Polish parliament
member of the liberal Union For
Freedom Party from 1997-2001 and
current president of
the Forum for
Dialogue Among
Nations, works out
of a small Warsaw
office with one staff
member and 30 vol-
unteers.
He knows that
Poland, a new mem-
ber to the European
HARRY
Union, considers
KI RS BAUM
itself the biggest
Columnist
European friend- to
Israel — but Jews,
as a whole, perceive Poland as a dan-
gerous place with a long history of
anti-Semitism.
He bristles at the
negative description
of his country,
especially from the
reference point of
the March of the
Living, the annual
tour of Jewish teens
to the death camps
of Poland, where
Folwarczny
Poles line the walk-
way shouting anti-Semitic epithets.
Still, Folwarczny is on the road,
reaching out to Jewish communities
around the country in conjunction
with the American Jewish Committee,
touting the forum's programs to help
Jews and Poles come together here
and in Poland.
In 10 years, the forum brought
together 100 exchange students in one
program and two American rabbis to
meet with Polish clergy and govern-
ment officials in another.
Soon, the forum will bring together
Catholic seminary and Jewish rabbini-
cal students.
Next year, 10,000 copies of Difficult
Questions will be published and sold
in America and Poland. In the publi-
cation, professionals answer questions
such as "Why were Poles so compla-
cent during the Holocaust? And
"Why do American Jews think that all
Poles are anti Semitic?"
He hopes the book will become
part of the Polish school curriculum, a
counter to the rose-tinted lenses of
the Soviet educational system that
told two generations of his country-
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men that Poles weren't complicit in
killing Jews in World War II, but res-
cued them. After all, more Poles than
other nationalities have been honored
as Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem.
Yet anti-Semitism still exists in
Poland, due to ignorance more than
discrimination, he said.
Folwarczny's Poland is basically a
homogenous nation, with a popula-
tion of 39 million — only 5,000 to
20,000 of them Jews.
He knows how long the road to
success will be, and he knows he has
little help, but someone has to try.
My father came from a wealthy fami-
ly in Lodz. He managed an apartment
building owned by his father, and he
lived in one of the corner apartments
until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.
My mother also came from Lodz,
but she came from a poor family. Her
father was cobbler.
She played soccer after school and
the fights that broke
out usually involved
the fact that she was
Jewish. She fought a
lot back then. That
was long before the
Nazis entered the
picture.
My parents met on
the road back from
the death camps. They traveled in a
group back to Lodz, where they
placed their names on a list in the
center of town and regularly checked
the list for family members and
friends, with no results. Almost every-
one they knew was dead.
My father returned to his apartment
to find someone else, a Pole, living
there.
"Go away, Jew; you don't live here
anymore," he told my father. "If you
,
stay, we'll kill you.'
When my parents packed what little
they had after the war and left their
"homeland," they never looked back.
They settled in Germany until they
could afford to come to the United
States.
I grew up listening to similar stories
from neighbors, and these days I can
hear more stories of cruelty and violence
at the Holocaust Memorial Center.
Folwarczny has good intentions, but
the roadblocks are huge
b
The survivor generation won't forgive,
and my generation won't either. It will
take generations for Jews to get to a
place where the Holocaust is a history
lesson, and Poland is just another
European country.
But right now the wounds are just
too deep. ❑
.