‘Perceptions vs Reality’

The Museum of the History Of Polish Jews

in Warsaw, Poland (1)

 

“The museum is a legitimate institution. It, therefore, finds itself with considerable power….the images created by museums can buttress social identity and consolidate social position and class interests…..they can enable the opening of new ideas and the articulation of long silent questions. They can even provide the basis for an agenda for change.”(2)

This paper will consider the balance that The Museum of the History of Polish Jews will have to find between what visitors expect to find and reality of the millennium of Jewish life in Warsaw. The spectre of the Holocaust overshadows all of this but it is not the beginning or the end of the story as this museum is at pains to recognise.

This museum’s ‘Mission Statement’ (3) ‘simply’ states that it is to become a centre for education & culture, preserving & providing a lasting legacy of Jewish life in Poland and what was created in the course of that millennium. Therefore, this will principally be a museum of ideas and memory not just objects.

This mission statement sets out how Polish Jews were fundamental in the shaping of their locality, the City, the Nation, Europe and beyond. The Holocaust will not be ignored but it will be implicit much like the Jewish Museums in Vienna and Berlin. The premise is; to fully understand what was lost – ‘the Void’ – there needs to be a deep understanding of Jewish history, culture, society and commerce.

Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, the leader of the museum’s development team has emphasised the need for the museum to create a ‘Trust Zone’ i.e. to be accurate and fair. She explained in her interview with Contemporary Art Magazine that many worry that an honest account of Polish Jewry will reinforce the perceptions of Poland as an anti-Semitic country, while others are afraid that a rosy picture will presented. She hopes that this zone will facilitate discussions of “difficult” subjects, e.g. Jedwabne or the expulsions of 1968, and provide these contemporary debates with necessary “long and deep historical context”.

The concept of such a ‘Trust Zone’ is found wherever one set of people have been subjugated to another. Where this has happened, often an honest and uncompromising review of history has provided a means to build a lasting peace and reconciliation. Encouragingly, this issue is debated at the highest levels in Poland.

If you are from places like Cambodia, South Africa, Northern Ireland or the Highlands of Scotland such a zone is a requirement of any institution which wishes to accurately depict the past. In Cambodia the ‘official’ photographs of the executed stand witness to their own demise and these have been the focus of mourning, memory and healing. In Scotland, the depiction of the Highland Clearances and, in time, how ‘The Troubles’ will be presented in Northern Ireland will be key to reconciliation with the past and the present. As well as holding a mirror to unimaginable & incomprehensible events the museums in these countries also seek to provide a level of understanding by placing them accurately within the overall historical context.

In Warsaw, it is impossible to fully understand how the city developed and appreciate the level and extent of what has been lost without considering the 1000 years of Jewish life. In her book, ‘Lost Landscapes’, Agata Tusynska eludes to this:

“I did not know any Jews at least I thought I didn’t. No-one had taught me their history or customs. Or pointed out how deeply rooted they were in this land that was mine. No-one made me aware of the foundations of the centuries long Polish Jewish History.” (4)

Pre-partition, the word ‘Polin’ was used to describe Poland. It is derived from the Hebrew words ‘po‘ & ‘lin‘ which, according to Jewish tradition, implies a place of rest or the notion of Poland as a ‘safe place’. This set the country apart from the vast majority of European states, where anti-Semitism, expulsion, exclusion etc were common. As a result, the country became a magnet for Jews seeking relative refuge to live and work. This diaspora lead to a rich and diverse Jewish life, culture in Poland and not the homogeny which many depictions of the Shoah portray. The outcome was the largest Jewish community in the world, the centre of the Jewish world.

They were afforded communal autonomy based on special privileges. They were not confined in their economic life to purely subordinate occupations and they were not engaged solely in petty trade and money-lending. The Jewish community carried on important export trade, leased government revenues & large estates and, to a certain extent, agriculture. They were not restricted to ghettos like the German inhabitants. All these conditions contributed toward the evolution, in Poland, of an independent Jewish civilization. As a result of the social and judicial autonomy, Polish Jewish life was enabled to develop freely along the lines of national and religious tradition.

This was no Jewish ‘Shangri-la’ however, they ‘fitted’ into the lacuna which existed between the landlords, burghers and peasants. A much needed commercial class was developed which, as a result of its diversity and international connections, provided a foundation for economic success.

This ebb, flow and flood of the diaspora to and from Poland which created the largest Jewish community in the world demands a ‘Trust Zone’. People from across the world who have identified an European Jewish ancestor are usually able to trace links to Poland. Therefore, they come from across the globe seeking the ‘old country’ of their ancestral past. This is particularly lucrative for a developing economy and will go a long way to counter the view of Poland as just being about the Holocaust and Warsaw as merely a transit point on the way to Krakow and Auschwitz. However, there is a danger in this because the Poland that these visitors find may not be the one they seek.

The Highlands of Scotland has always had a marginal economic base and whose peoples have been scattered across the globe in a diaspora which spans centuries. Today the most lucrative form of income generation is providing visitors the ‘Highland’ experience. This is a mixture of ‘Brigadoon’(5) and ‘Braveheart’ (6) (both Hollywood movies which ‘depicted’ the Highlands). It is highly romantic view with a heavy reliance on tartan, bagpipes, shortbread and noble Highlanders all of which bears little resemblance to the modern, outward looking and confident Scotland of the early 21st century. In this view of Scotland, there is no place for an accurate portrayal of the clearances beyond the fact that it is the mechanism by which the visitors ancestors left the ‘old country’. Museums like the Highland Folk Museum in Newtonmore, must maintain reality against this backdrop if they wish to continue to be relevant to the people of Scotland.

Currently, there are waves of philo-Semitism (7) sweeping Europe and are evident in Łódź & Krakow. For example, ‘Anatewka’ is a restaurant in Łódź which the Easyjet magazine describes in the following way “[p]ortraits of wizen faces, elegant table cloths & violins on the walls decorate this Jewish restaurant which celebrates a culture all but lost in Poland….with miniature figurines ….souvenirs of ‘little’ jews”. Ruth Ellen Gruber (8) has described this phenomenon in the following terms “much of the visible Jewish culture in Europe today takes place without the involvement of actual Jews….Here Jews figure not as cultural agents but as symbolic figures; indeed, the absence, not their presence, is key”.

As experienced in Scotland, a ‘romanticised’ version is sought where visitors can either enjoy the first half of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (9) – quaint village life, lots of jokes, feel good songs and lots of dancing or wallow in the second half – dark foreboding music with pogroms, migration, poverty and a reference to the ‘inevitable’ Shoah to follow. However, this is tourism not history and this museum must ensure that only ‘truth’ is depicted to ensure that the ‘Trust Zone’ can be trusted by the citizens of Poland.

As Kirschenblatt-Gimblett mentions in the aforementioned interview, there was nothing inevitable about the Shoah in Poland. Therefore, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw will not start or end the history of Jews in Poland with the Holocaust. The museum has an open ended story which includes the post-Soviet, the creation of the museum and is well placed to capture the future of Polish Jewry as it unfolds.

 

End Notes

(1) This essay was written in 2011 when the museum was still a building site, it was for a Birkbeck course so there was a strict word limit and was developed from a 10 minute talk delivered on site.  Of course, it is now a real life museum which I hope, in the not too distant future, to finally visit.  Congratulations to all who fought so hard to make to a reality.  I did consider re-writing in light of this opening, as well as, to reflect the recent debates in Scotland in the run up to the Independence vote however, I would prefer to review once I have visited the museum and the outcome of the referendum is known.

(2) Gourievidis, L “Representing the Disputed Past of Northern Scotland: The Highland Clearances in Museums” – full citations in bibliography

(3) http://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl/index.php?lang=en

(4) A Varsavian born in 1957.

(5) 1954

(6) 1995

(7) An interest in, respect for, and appreciation of the Jewish people, their historical significance and the positive impacts of Judaism in the history of the western world, in particular, generally on the part of a gentile.