THE JEWISH COMMUNITY 195Boleslawiec (the former Reichenbach). Jewish volunteers were trained in secret
camps by the Polish communist military for service in the ranks of the Haganah
in Palestine. But the experiment collapsed. It was not welcomed by the growing
Stalinist element in Poland; and most of its original advocates preferred Israel to
the Recovered Territories. By the late 1940's, no more than 40,000 Jews
remained in Poland's population of 24 million. They were numerically negligi-
ble and politically marginal. For the first time in half a millenium, Poland had
ceased to be Europe's most important sanctuary.
Once the Stalinist regime was established after 1948, Poland's Jewish legacy
became one of many taboo subjects. Communist censors insisted not only that
all unnatural deaths during the war be attributed to 'Fascist crimes' but also that
the ethnic identity of victims be concealed. As a result, a whole generation of
Poles was raised and educated with only the haziest of knowledge about the
tragic fate of their Jewish compatriots. Even in the 1960's and 1970's, when
information about 'the Holocaust' was widely disseminated in the West, often
with little regard to the specific conditions of Nazi-occupied Poland, people in
the PRL continued to learn about the Second World War in a similar selective
manner, in which the Jewish aspect was largely missing. Misunderstandings
inevitably multiplied. On the seminal subject of Auschwitz, for example, the
Soviet-sponsored formula about the killing of 'four million persons of various
nationalities', held good for over forty years. It was not until 1989 that the direc-
tor of the State Museum at Oswiecim (Auschwitz) was free to reveal that the
best estimate of the number of victims in the former SS camp was 1.2. to 1.5 mil-
lion, and that the majority of them had been Jews. In the meantime, many
people abroad had (wrongly) assumed that Auschwitz had been a dedicated
death-camp only for Jews, whilst many Poles had been to led to assume that the
camp's victims were mainly Polish. Unscrambling the crossed wires proved
wellnigh impossible.
Most sadly, the destruction of Poland's Jews by the Nazis equally destroyed
the living memories which could put Jewish History into an appropriate con-
text. The many common experiences which the Jews of Poland had shared with
the country's other inhabitants were rapidly forgotten. And the large cohort of
people who had seen themselves both as Polish and as Jewish was disregarded.
The numerous important distinctions between assimilated and non-assimilated
Jews, between 'Poles of the Mosaic Faith', 'Polish citizens of Jewish identity',
and 'Poles of Jewish origin' were lost. Complicated historical realities were
relaced by the simplistic demands of current politics. Once Zionism triumphed
both in the new state of Israel and in Jewry's most numerous sanctuary in the
USA, Zionist perceptions prevailed and Zionist interpretations were increas-
ingly projected into the past. American Jews were encouraged to think of them-
selves as good Americans and as good Jews. But Polish History was not treated
in a similar way. Once historic Poland had been turned into the Babylon of
modern Zionist mythology, Poles and Jews had to be treated as two completely
separate sets of humanity.