Jewish Ghosts

I belatedly watched the Hungarian film 1945 a couple of days ago and found it mesmerizing and powerful. The performances were understated and gripping, the cinematography masterful, the subject matter riveting, devastating, and infuriating.

The film depicts a Hungarian village shortly after the end of the Second World War in Europe, which is thrown into a collective panic at the news that two Jews have arrived. It turns out that the mayor's drug store actually was taken from his Jewish friend whom he, the mayor, had denounced to the Germans during the war. Other villagers live in homes and proudly show off goods that previously had belonged to Jews. When hearing of the Jews' arrival, one woman frantically hides the silverware and other valuables in case they have come to collect their possessions, and she impatiently urges her sons to do the same. Her husband, on the other hand, feels gnawing guilt over the dispossession of his Jewish friends and neighbors and, no longer able to bear it, drinks himself into a stupor and hangs himself. Meanwhile, the two Jews, who walk silently and erectly, have come only to bury the shoes and prayer shawls of a few of the countless murdered. But the village's frenzied guilt is the point. It points toward an important historical phenomenon.

A still from the film 1945.

The non-Jewish populations of Eastern Europe were largely indifferent, if not gleeful, about the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors. The Jews' houses, businesses, valuables, and clothing were for the taking. And given that the non-Jews knew where the Jews were being taken, if only vaguely, they did not expect any Jews to return. The vast majority of Jews, of course, did not. However, when some did trickle back, after having witnessed the humiliation, torture, and murder of their loved ones, they almost universally faced overwhelming, even murderous, hostility. The Hungarians, Poles, and others knew very well the provenance of their newfound and ill-gotten possessions - the sight of returning Jews caused a flare-up of intense guilt, leading to a defense mechanism manifesting itself in disbelief, then righteous anger, and then, occasionally, outright physical violence (for example, in the pogrom in Kielce, Poland in July 1946). When Toivi Blatt, a survivor of the Sobibór extermination camp, visited his hometown of Izbica, Poland decades after the war, he was greeted by suspicious Poles warily eyeing him, anxious that he was there to demand his family home, although this was hardly the case. Blatt's experience was not an isolated one - throughout much of rural, and once-heavily Jewish, Poland, visitors are often suspected of having come to take back their things.

No sooner had the Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka death camps ceased operations than Polish peasants swarmed the sites, shovels and pickaxes in hand, anxious to find any valuables left behind by the murdered Jews. These macabre scavenger hunts have been described in terrifying detail by Jan Gross in his book Golden Harvest. In Polish peasant lore, it was typically believed that all Jews were rich, as Jews had historically served as middle men between the Polish aristocracy and the peasantry, and were viewed as the taxman, the unyielding creditor, and the well-to-do merchant. After the Jews were deported to their deaths, their houses were ripped up, their walls knocked down, their furniture chopped up in a frenetic, fruitless hunt for the non-existent, but fervently believed in, "Jew Gold" that had to be somewhere.

Polish peasants pose after hunting for Jewish treasure; Treblinka, Poland.

Jews had lived in Poland for over half a millennium and had had direct contact with all classes of Polish society, having intricate commercial relationships and even, albeit limited, personal ones. But they were ultimately strangers to their neighbors. Jews were different: in their garb, their mannerisms, their religion, their diet, their habits, and their language, and were largely unknown despite their proximity. The strangeness and remoteness of the Jews lent them an aura of the mysterious, and even the malevolent. The Jews were for many rural Europeans the diabolical "other" whose ways were unknown. The lack of understanding easily led to fear and suspicions, which took on ridiculous proportions: the Jew was simultaneously a Bolshevik and an arch-capitalist, too parochial and too cosmopolitan, too pushy and too pacifistic, too assimilative and too distinctive, controlling the weather and poisoning wells, and murdering Christian children, using their blood to bake Passover matzo - the blood libel - a demonic inversion of the Eucharist. The Jews had murdered Christ, and his blood was upon them for all eternity. This was fused with exclusivist Polish nationalism (as preached by politician Roman Dmowski) and socioeconomic tensions in the immediate years after Polish independence (1918), which saw the consolidation of Bolshevism in Russia as well as other attempted Communist revolutions throughout Central and Eastern Europe, all of which were seen as the handiwork of the Jews. The beginnings of the delicate independence of the states of Central and Eastern Europe coincided with the rise of Communism in what was seen to be their most dangerous neighbor: this was to have cataclysmic consequences for the Jews. The stage was set for a conflagration, and the Nazis gladly set a torch to the explosive situation. Poles burned their Jewish neighbors alive in the town of Jedwabne and Ukrainians massacred Jews by the thousands in the streets of Lwów in the terrible summer of 1941. 

A Ukrainian mob chases a bloodied Jewish woman in Lwów, Poland, summer 1941.

The peoples of Eastern Europe have a complex vis-a-vis the murdered Jews, their former neighbors. It is a historical fact that the death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka were staffed largely by Ukrainians and that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Jews were shot into ditches by their Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Belarusian neighbors in what had been the Pale of Settlement, the area to which Jewish settlement was limited between the years 1791 and 1917. These same nationalities assisted in the liquidation of the ghettos and the rounding up of Jews (of this latter charge, all Europeans save the Danes are guilty). Adolf Eichmann arrived in Hungary with a couple dozen men, so he could not have accomplished his murderous task without local assistance - the Jews were marched to the deportation trains by Hungarian gendarmes.  

Eastern European SS volunteers look at the bodies of murdered Jews during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; May 1943.

It is a fact that the Poles largely did not view Jewish citizens of Poland as fellow Poles - Jews were in Poland but not of it. Therefore, the Polish underground never sabotaged a railway leading to a death camp, or attacked a camp itself, or lent more than grudging support, at best, to Jewish resistance in the ghettos. As stated above, many Poles took their Jewish neighbors' homes, businesses, and possessions. And yet the Poles fought ferociously and honorably against the Germans and the Polish underground did more than anyone else to bring the extermination of the Jews to the attention of the Allies (let it be known that President Franklin D. Roosevelt cared not one whit when he was told by Polish underground agent Jan Karski, a true hero, of the murder of the Jews of Poland). The Poles did not collaborate in the fashion of the other nations above. Individuals who tried to blackmail Jews - called szmalcowniki - were sentenced to death by the Polish underground. 

Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground and a Righteous Among the Nations.

The Jews made up 10 percent of the Polish population at the eve of the war and the Jews were a fixture in Polish life. And yet the great Jewish communities of Poland, the gravitational center of world Jewry, are no more. The Poles feel their absence, a phantom limb, as well as a collective guilty conscience that can manifest itself in obstreperous pride impervious to argument and a martyr complex. (The Poles, in fact, have long had a martyr complex, dating back to the years 1795-1918, when Poland did not exist, and was partitioned between three great European powers: Russia, Prussia, and Austria). While many Europeans courageously fought back against the Nazis and did everything they could to help the Jews, the vast majority of Europeans did absolutely nothing, while others collaborated willingly. Europeans know this, and their feelings of guilt go far in explaining that continent's largely antagonistic relationship with Israel ("You see, Jews aren't so great either - we're not the only bad ones!") - although, interestingly, that is not the case in Poland or Eastern Europe as much as in Western Europe.

The Jewish ghost haunts European memory and sits in silent judgment of their crimes of both commission and omission. The film 1945 beautifully captures this psychological reality in microcosmic and artistic form.