Even 73 years removed from the war, the Poles, it seems, were and still are anti-Semites. I was 11 years old when the war broke out and at 12 I entered the Lodz Ghetto. The Poles would snitch to the Germans about who was Jewish, willingly pointing us out to turn us in to the German soldiers.
They had a sixth sense about who was Jewish or not. One night, I was waiting with my brother in the bread line. When I was second in line, one of the Poles called to a German soldier and pointed at me, he said "Jude!" in German. The soldier pulled me out of the line, kicked me in the behind and I returned home without bread. From the Lodz Ghetto we were transferred to Auschwitz and from there to the Stutthof concentration camp until our liberation.
The Polish law in question is preposterous. The Poles were full partners with the Nazis. Like former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said back in the day: The Poles suck anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk. Even in the first grade I remember my Polish classmates shouting "Jews to Palestine, Jews out."
The crime the Poles committed against the Jewish people cannot be erased with a stupid law. History recounts different facts. They took the Jews' property and belongings and the only thing they gave back after the war were the synagogues. The Poles were cruel to Jews who tried returning to their homes, many times killing them. That was after the war. Over 1,000 people were murdered at the hands of Poles after the war, completely irrespective of the German extermination camps.
I first heard about this ridiculous and demented law around a year and a half after the current Polish regime ascended to power. With or without the law, they cannot shed responsibility for their crimes – Poland actively, willingly collaborated with the Germans. People tend to associate Auschwitz with Germany because it was a Nazi concentration camp, but it was on Polish soil.
Today, as a living witness who tells his story to students, I often travel to Poland and feel the anti-Semitism. I know their language, I look like one of them, and they don't know I am Jewish. I hear their anti-Semitic undertones. To this day I can still hear the mother admonishing her son who doesn't want to eat: "I'll sell you to the Jews or the Gypsies." But I go back there, time and again, because giving testimony is important.
Despite their best efforts to bury their Nazi past – they cannot outrun history. Just last month I was at Yad Vashem speaking to Polish army colonels; I told them, in their own language, my life story and how we suffered from the anti-Semitism their country, about the wrongs done to us. They admitted it was all true. They bowed their heads. So now what, will these colonels be arrested? I delivered a similar speech in Poland in front of the mayor of Lodz. Will those who listened to me in humiliated silence now be arrested as well? It is absurd.
Because they won't ever be able to erase the horrors they perpetrated, not while Holocaust survivors are still alive, and not as long there are Jews in the world who can tell the story.
