15 - Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth-Century Poland

Summary

This essay aims to outline some of the main features of Poland's pre-war society, and to relate them to the study of Polish-Jewish relations. It is not a research paper, and does not present any facts that are not widely known. What it does is to stress the multinational character of old Poland, and to place the bilateral problems of Poles and Jews within the multilateral complexities of ethnic relations as a whole. It warns against the tendency of some modern historians to view the past anachronistically, or to reduce the complex realities to a simple confrontation between Poles and Jews.

Nowadays, the ethnic make-up of modern Polish society is remarkably, and artificially homogenous. Contemporary Poland is overwhelmingly Polish. As a result of the mass murders, mass deportations and comprehensive frontier changes of the Second World War and its aftermath, young Poles can grow up without ever hearing their neighbours speak a different language or practise a different religion. Very few Poles under the age of 45 or 50 - i.e. the great majority of the population - can ever remember having a German or a Jewish or a Ukrainian classmate or neighbour, or can remember seeing a recognisable ‘resident foreigner’ in their midst. Although they know, of course, that pre-war Poland contained many so-called ‘minorities’, the present state of affairs has inevitably strengthened traditional nationalist mythology linking the Polish ‘land’ exclusively with the Polish Nation’. Government propaganda has undoubtedly played its part: but it was perhaps inevitable that an uprooted post-war generation of Poles should yearn for a national past in which their own antecedents held pride of place and where the ‘minorities’ played only a marginal role. Post-war historiography has certainly reflected this feeling.

Similarly, it is entirely natural that post-war Jewish opinion, traumatised by the Holocaust and properly impressed by the creation of the Jewish state of Israel, should be dominated by the Zionist perspective. Zionism (in the sense of modern Jewish nationalism) naturally stresses not only the existence but the distinctness of the Jewish nation in the past, as in the present. The thousand-year sojourn of the Jews in Poland is viewed less as an integral part of Polish history; but rather as a lengthy stage of the Jewish nation's Long March through the world's wildernesses, begun in Zion and ending in Zion.