Day One Reflections: Asking Questions

Submitted by Daniel Braunfeld

While today indicated the “official” start of Facing History and Ourselves’ Poland Study tour, for many staff and Board members this trip started long before today.  Some participants began their journey, literally, yesterday – taking personal side trips to visit the Polish towns, neighborhoods and gravesites of family members.  Others were in Poland in the 1990s with a previous Facing History trip or other organized journey.  Still others were here during the communist era, studying and investigating.   And still another participant is a Holocaust survivor, for whom this trip is in no way a start, but rather a type of return.  Building upon all of those experiences, and the individual experiences each of the 85 participants bring to this trip, we officially began today.

What is remarkable about the participants, and hosts, of this trip, is the wide range of perspectives assembled.  During her introduction to our group, Helise Lieberman, Educational Director for the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland Foundation, encouraged us to be like the Jewish concept of a tent – left open on all sides, as you never know from where people will come, nor where they will want to go.  Her father once said, “Ask questions.  Discuss and deliberate and you will find yourself in a different place.  We all have the same materials.  How you look at it will depend on where you enter the discussion.  Turn the questions around and find yourself in a different place.”  This trip is about asking questions and pushing ourselves to reconsider our previously held beliefs.

The questions raised today have been complex.  What did we each learn, from personal experience, family influence, movies or textbooks, about the role Poland played during the Holocaust?  How do we reconcile those lessons with the role Poland actually played during the Holocaust?  To what extent was the Polish population perpetrators, bystanders, upstanders or victims from 1939-1945?  What does it mean to be the country that was an eye-witness, the stage, to genocide?  How does the Holocaust fit within the 1,000 year history of continuous Jewish presence in Poland?  How should the Holocaust be remembered in Poland – academically, emotionally, and ethically?  What are the unique challenges facing the modern Jewish community of Poland, a country celebrating its 25^th Anniversary of free democratic elections?

It is impossible to answer these questions within the confine of just the first day, but we began our exploration of them at a truly remarkable site of Warsaw – The Museum for the History of Polish Jews.  The Museum, symbolically, is located across from the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising at the heart of the former ghetto.  In that way the Museum, committed to telling the story of how Jews lived, is juxtaposed with the memory of how Jews were killed.  There we met with historian and Holocaust survivor Marian Turski (Chairmen, Council for the Museum), Dariusz Stola (Director of the Museum) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Program Director for the Core Exhibition at the Museum) to understand the Museum’s unique scope and purpose.  Unlike Jewish museums around the world, this museum is not about the history of anti-semitism, nor does it use the Holocaust as a starting point (or end point) for the story of Polish Jews.  Rather, the Museum wants to tell the story of 1,000 years of continuous Jewish life in Poland.  The Jewish community is not a footnote to the Polish story, neither is it a history that must be reconnected to Poland.  The story of the past 1,000 years is the story of an interconnected Jewish-Polish identity. 

How then, is the Holocaust to be understood here?  The location of the murder of 90% of Polish Jewry and millions of other victims, Jewish and not, from across Europe.  Warsaw, the location of a failed, but important, uprising against occupying Germany one year after the famous ghetto uprising.  Here, where today non-Jews actively promote and protect Jewish culture and history.  What does memory look like here?  And what should it look like in our classrooms back home?

The academic, political and Jewish worlds of Poland have opened their arms to our visit.  This access – this true sense of welcoming – is testament to the reputation of Facing History and Ourselves.  Our hosts and partners on the ground – politicians, NGOs, cultural and educational centers – have such deep respect for the work Facing History does, our mission, and our methodology, that we are fortunate to be in conversation with the thinkers and doers of Poland. 

We all begin this trip with personal questions.  It is the goal of the next 9 days to ask those questions of our hosts, of our co-participants, and of ourselves and to remain like an open tent – open to the possibility that what we hear, see and experience may change our perspective and understanding. 

Any questions?  

Historian and Holocaust survivor Marian Turski (Chairmen, Council for the Museum), Dariusz Stola (Director of the Museum) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Program Director for the Core Exhibition at the Museum) discuss the Museum’s unique scope and purpose.