In Poland, A New National Debate On Hate

Warsaw — A middle-aged, non-Jewish Polish man, driving a Jewish visitor from the States on a shopping errand one recent morning turned abruptly to his guest and asked, “What do you think of the Polish people?” In case the question wasn’t clear, the Pole clarified: “Do you think all of us are anti-Semites?” It was a fair question. For many Jews who live outside of Poland, history stopped in 1945, when the facts of the Holocaust, much of which took place on Polish soil, came to light. To many Jews, most Poles are anti-Semitic. The Polish man did not wait for an answer. He answered his own question: “Only 2 percent of Poles are crazy,” in other words, anti-Semitic, he said. Anti-Semitism and other forms of racism are increasingly in the spotlight here these days. A swastika scrawled on an electrical transformer in northern Poland last year sparked an ongoing national debate about anti-Semitism and racism in Polish society. But it wasn’t the Nazi symbol itself that led to the latest round of national introspection — it was the prosecutor’s reaction.

Anti-Semitism in Poland “still exists on a level that’s unacceptable,” says Rafal Pankowski

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