How the steamroller of antizionism rolls through the Warsaw Ghetto – Anna Zawadzka and Helena Datner
Anna Zawadzka writes:
It seems that contemporary antisemitism of a left-wing variety, which reached Poland with a considerable delay, is finally gaining momentum here too. I think this delay stemmed in part from a certain stupor. There at least four reasons for this stupor. These reasons do not operate in isolation; on the contrary, their effectiveness is ensured by their mutual interplay.
The first one is the antisemitic campaign of 1967–1968. Unlike the rest of the extremely rich history of Polish antisemitism, this particular chapter is widely known in Poland. Here, you don’t have to study history to know that immediately after the Six-Day War some 15,000 Jews were stigmatised, dispossessed and subsequently expelled from Poland, accused of “Zionism” and associated accusations, imperialism”, “colonialism” and “apartheid”. This constituted over half of the Jews in Poland at the time. In Poland, thanks to this purge, “antizionism” is associated with communism, while everyone, including the radical left, avoids associations with communism at all cost.
The second reason is specifically Polish, but it is a factor in Eastern Europe more widely. It is the historical politics around the Holocaust: at times a totem in the middle of the square, at times an elephant in the room, and at times a football in a Polish-Polish derby. Or, to be more precise, the ceaseless, obsessive competition for Polish martyrdom, Polish suffering, Polish heroism, and what they call ‚Polish Holoczaust’, or ‚Polocaust’. Thanks to school textbooks, museums, exhibitions, galleries, monuments, commemorations, the names of roundabouts, junctions and streets, murals, film and television productions, parliamentary acts and national holidays you learn about it every day. If you trust to its creators, you would have to believe that for over 600 years Poland was a paradise for Jews, even if this remained unfortunately unappreciated by the Jews themselves; that when the Germans came, despite Jewish ingratitude, Poles did everything, and on a massive scale, to save the Jews; that Poles were murdered just as Jews were: for racial reasons, and on the same scale; that at least as many Poles as Jews perished in Auschwitz and other camps; that when Jews rose up against their oppressors, Poles brought them aid, weapons and homemade baked cookies, but when Poles rose up against the occupier, the Jews, driven by an instinct for betrayal, sided with the enemy (the communists) and had to be, with a heavy heart, “eliminated” – but only as traitors, never as Jews! And that, above all, a double Holocaust took place on Polish soil: the Holocaust of Poles at the hands of both the Germans and the communists, the latter being subsequently forgotten. It was erased from the pages of history. It was covered up, obscured by the endless wailing about Jewish suffering. And since Poles are modest, they did not complain. With humility, they remained silent about their suffering and their heroism. Until communism ended and the truth could finally be told.
I know this sounds as if I were being particularly spiteful. Polish historical politics stays so far from the facts that it is hard not to get the impression that one is reading and listening to fairy tales. These fairy tales have, more or less in unison, been told until now by both the hard right and the liberal centre of Polish discourse, which has shifted sharply to the right since the political transformation of 1989. Personally, I have often railed against this shift. Today, for the first time since 1989, the Polish political centre has begun to speak with a much more left-leaning voice; but unfortunately it is an “antizionist” voice. Apparently, the way to attract Polish liberals more to the left was to make the left more antisemitic. Thanks to antisemitism, the left is achieving what it has dreamed of since at least 2005: for its agenda to be heard in the mainstream media. I, too, once dreamed of this. And now I’ve seen it come to pass. As they say, may you not live to see your own wishes fulfilled.
The third reason for the slowness of left antisemitism to take root in Poland is closely linked to the second. The Holocaust is the key reference point for contemporary historical politics in Poland, because 3 million Jews “disappeared” exactly from here. They were imprisoned, humiliated, dispossessed, abused and murdered here. This is our doikait. We walk here through housing estates built on the ruins of ghettos. We go sledging here down hills made from the rubbles of Jewish cemeteries. We live in houses that belonged to Jews. We have grandfathers who looted these houses and grandmothers who kept silent all their lives about the rapes of their Jewish neighbours. And for a while, now, we have sold Jewish history as a souvenir, as something exotic, as a tourist product. Antisemitism, and the Holocaust as its consequence, have a very literal dimension in Poland. Tangible. Material. Physical. These are the places, buildings, streets, fields, railways, forests, cities, towns, villages, roadside graves – and even more often their absence – amidst which our everyday lives unfold. So there is plenty to fight against. The work of obscuring, erasing, appropriating, distorting meanings and imposing a whitewashing narrative on all this – that is a huge task. This work must be uninterrupted, and it is certainly in full swing. The machinery runs 24 hours a day, fueled by massive state subsidies for public institutions such as the Institute of National Remembrance or the Museum of the Second World War.
And then there is a fourth factor: the old but gold antisemitism of the Catholic Church, whose role in “spreading the word” against Jews cannot be overstated. On the one hand, thanks to the Catholic authorities, the legend of ritual murder took a particularly rich toll here, and, especially in the Polish countryside, many still believe there is a “grain of truth” in the story of Jews craving for Christian blood. On the other hand, however, precisely because of the Church’s active role, reflection on Polish antisemitism often focuses specifically on Catholicism. I hoped that scholars, humanists, intellectuals, artists, writers, journalists, and their acolytes would be more skeptical of the new version of the blood libel – today’s narrative of Jewish genocide against non-Jews in Gaza – because they are aware of how the old one worked. I should have known better. Antisemitism is a bit like capitalism: it owes its long and persistent survival, among other things, to the extraordinary plasticity, flexibility and malleability of its structure, which adapts to various circumstances just as a liquid takes the shape of its container.
To show you how the narrative of the “terrible Jews” from Israel has taken root in the Polish public sphere, I will recount two incidents that occurred one after the other, within just a week. Of the many, I’m choosing these as the most telling examples, because they involved not just activist circles – that is those that could be easily marginalized with the disparaging label of “radicalism”. This time, the matter struck right at the heart of the most opinion-forming and culturally authoritative section of the metropolitan intelligentsia.
Rude Jews against the ambassador
The anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is approaching. As it does every year, the POLIN Museum, located right in the heart of the former ghetto, has launched its Daffodil Campaign. On 19 April, museum volunteers across Poland will hand out to passers-by the paper daffodils in the form of brooches that can be pinned to a jacket as a token of remembrance. To make the campaign more recognizable, the museum engages celebrities as ambassadors for the initiative. This year, one of the campaign’s ambassadors is Mariusz Szczygieł: a reporter, publisher of non-fiction, and a famous figure of Polish journalism. Since October 2023, Szczygieł has been consistently promoting the thesis of the Jewish genocide, posing for photographs in t-shirts bearing the slogans “A child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes” [2], and when accused of engaging in antisemitic blood libel, he defends himself by claiming that “it is Israel’s actions that have provoked antisemitism in Poland.”[3]
In an act of protest, Beata Lewkowicz, a non-famous non-star who is active on Facebook, and is regularly accused of being on Netanyahu’s payroll, wrote a letter to the POLIN Museum, and she made it available for people to sign. Lewkowicz called for:
– greater responsibility in the selection of people representing the Daffodils Campaign
– maintaining proportion and context in public debate
– transparency in communicating decisions regarding ambassadors
– taking into account the full context of events, including Hamas terrorism and the fate of Israeli victims.
She justified her demands as follows:
“The Daffodils Campaign is a symbol of remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Holocaust and the history of Polish Jews. This places an even greater responsibility on the institution that represents this memory, and on the individuals who become its symbolic face.”
“In this context, the decision to appoint Mariusz Szczygieł as ambassador is not a neutral one. It is a choice that sets a specific tone and indicates what manner of writing about Israel and contemporary Jews is deemed acceptable and representative by your institution.”
“This is not about a single post or a single statement, but about a prolonged, recurring narrative in which the suffering of one side takes centre stage, whilst the context of Hamas’s terrorism, the events of 7 October, and the fate of Israeli hostages and victims remains marginalized or treated as a secondary element.”[4]
Lewkowicz’s letter did not even call for Mariusz Szczygieł to be dismissed from his post. The author emphasised that “this is not a matter of one person or one choice”. The text was measured (far more so than this one), balanced and refrained from personal attacks. Nevertheless, Lewkowicz and other signatories were immediately subjected to a barrage of criticism. The enlightened Polish intelligentsia vied with one another in expressing “outrage”, “embarrassment”, “disgust”, “repulsion” and condemnation of the “theatre of hatred directed at Mariusz Szczygieł”. The ones seeking a middle ground between antisemitism and anti-antisemitism equated those supporting Lewkowicz’s stance with supporters of the current Israeli government. “If someone says anything slightly critical of Netanyahu, they can no longer remember the ghetto,” quipped one commentator.[5]
I have never been politically close to the current Israeli government, and today it terrifies me more than ever. This does not alter the fact that the narrative of genocide is an antisemitic blood libel. What on earth does one thing have to do with the other?
The letter was signed by nearly 600 people. I consider this an unprecedented success. For years, if ever, such a “sharp”, “rude”, and “cheeky” Jewish voice of opposition to the appropriation of Jewish history has not been heard in Poland. I am immensely grateful to Beata Lewkowicz that I was able to be part of it.
To tell the truth, I signed it to feel better. Its author has created a unique opportunity to express dissent, and that brings relief. Had it not been for this letter, we would have been left with a sense not only of growing hopelessness, but also of complicity. That POLIN Museum would change its mind, however – I did not count on that. I believe that the choice of an antizionist ambassador was not a mistake, but a deliberate strategy. The aim was to attract the anti-Israel crowd to the museum’s initiative, because this crowd is growing ever larger and, above all, stems from circles which until now have revelled in displays of philosemitism. Whereas previously (dead) Jews were a charming trinket for the Warsaw intelligentsia, emphasizing their nobility and sensitivity, now the trinket is the condemnation of (living) Jews. The idea was that Poles could adorn their keffiyehs with daffodils without feeling that something was amiss.
I hadn’t intended to write about this, though, because it requires a lot of effort. I’m getting lazier with age. Besides, my cholesterol is too high, so I’m trying to spare my nerves. A few days later, however, a second thing happened. And it was as if someone had landed a right hook on my solar plexus. Since there is only one solar plexus, I couldn’t turn the other one.
Israeli playmakers, Polish defenders
Two well-known and well-liked figures from Warsaw community – Adam Lipszyc, a professor of philosophy, and Maria Świetlik, a labor union activist involved in the third sector – have sent a petition to the Mayor of Warsaw “to refrain from displaying the flag of the State of Israel during the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.” They did this on April Fools’ Day, so I’m not giving up hope that, however poor, it was still a joke. Or provocation. Even if so, it was a highly successful one, as the authors of the petition were showered with thanks and congratulations.
As you might expect, the letter states that flying the Israeli flag, as is done every year in Warsaw on April 19, would be a gesture of support for a criminal state that is committing genocide. But there is a greater chutzpah in their petition.
There are many substantial and excellent works on the dangerous consequences of universalising the Holocaust. One of those consequences is the erasure of Jewish experiences, struggles, lives and deaths from the history of antisemitic violence, in the name of turning that violence into general narratives about evil, good and humanity. The erasure, to put it briefly, of the truth. The truth, for example, about historically entrenched relations of power and domination that enable violence, as well as about historically shaped patterns of that violence and the acquiescence to it. And all this in the name of the lulling narrative that “we are all Jews”. Or at least “we could be”. Who is this “we”? Who was the perpetrator, then? Who stood by and watched? Who could walk through Warsaw with their head held high, and for whom were appearance, accent, clothing or former neighbours a death sentence in Warsaw? What determined whether one was on this side or that side of the wall? In the universal narrative, this differentiating “thing” – as uncomfortable as it is crucial – is removed from the picture.
Usually, this process of removal happens bit by bit. It is driven by the need for comfort and the power of collective unconsciousness. In the letter to the Mayor of Warsaw, however, it is explicitly addressed. The authors are aware of it, support it and wish to accelerate it. To me, this passage in Lipszyc and Świetlik’s petition hits like a punch:
“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is an event of particular significance. It remains a key point of reference for the Polish Jewish diaspora, of which we are a part, for Jewish communities around the world, and for the State of Israel. However, it is also an integral part of the heritage of the residents of Warsaw. This memory does not belong to any single entity. This is precisely why the Warsaw authorities should act as its neutral guardian, so that it is not appropriated or exploited.”
As I was clumsily trying to explain above, there is no less neutral player on the Holocaust ground than Poland. Meanwhile, the authors of the petition are asking the Polish state — which instrumentalises, distorts and appropriates the Holocaust in a uniquely intensive way — to defend the significance of the Jewish uprising against… the Jewish state.
They say: take it, take it all and do whatever you want, just so long as it does not fall into official Jewish hands.
They say: Polish instrumentalisation is innocent, it is harmless, it does us no harm, or it does not exist at all. What is truly dangerous, terrible and must be condemned, is Jewish instrumentalisation.
They are asking Poles to defend Jewish memory from Jews, because Jews are corrupting that memory with their Jewishness, whilst Poles are the guardians of universal values.
I’ve been rewriting these a thousand ways, trying to somehow make it fit in my head. It still doesn’t. On Facebook, Anne Goldschmid explained best just how perfidious this petition is:
“This is a petition that takes the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and attempts to strip it of its Jewish continuity, then return it to the public as a morally purified, universal product for common use. First, the authors declare that memory “has no single custodian”, which is meant to sound noble, but in practice serves only to strip the Jewish state of its particular legitimacy. Later, they dilute this event into a narrative of anti-fascism, state violence, systemic dehumanisation and the world’s indifference, as if it were necessary to tear the ghetto uprising away from the concrete reality of Jewish history and transform it into an abstract ethical lesson for everyone. And in the end, they do what they wanted to do from the start: they say that the Israeli flag is today a symbol of “genocide”, and so it should be symbolically banished from the commemorations of the Jewish uprising. Everything else is merely window dressing. The crux of the matter is this: Israel is to be excluded from this memory, cut off from it, morally erased.”[6]
Asking the Polish state to act as a “neutral guardian” on the subject of the Holocaust is more or less like inviting the Saudi Arabian authorities to negotiate the introduction of a gender equality law in, say, Bulgaria. The authors of the letter believe that the Warsaw authorities, representing the Polish state, would be better, more legitimate custodians of the Jewish uprising than the Israeli Jews, and than everyone who roots for the Israelis’ well-being. The same uprising about which Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1943, as the ghetto burned and he walked along the wall.
On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again
baskets of olives and lemons
once more on the vendors’ shoulders.
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned out
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.
At times, the wind from the burning
would carry dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in mid-air.
That same hot wind
blew up the girls’ skirts
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Sunday in Warsaw.
Someone will interpret as a moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs’ pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of human things,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.
How to breathe when there is nothing to breathe with
When I was still living in Warsaw, I used to go to the monument to the Ghetto fighters from time to time. The one of which a replica stands at Yad Vashem. Today, the fancy building of the fancy POLIN Museum stands next to it. Back then, there was just a patch of lawn there. On sunny summer days, in their swimming trunks and on towels, as if they were at the beach, the people of Warsaw would sunbathe there. I used to go to that monument for a peculiar sense of relief. When Poland got on my nerves too much – with its nationalism, its arrogance towards Jewish history, its terrible role in it, and its constant clamor that everyone here had helped the Jews – the monument of the heroes of the ghetto, designed immediately after the war by a Jew, serving as a gathering place for Holocaust survivors, on the ruins of the ghetto, was for me, amidst all that clamor, a long-awaited moment of silence.
On 19 April, on the successive anniversaries of the uprising, there were ceremonies, with state, municipal, military and Israeli delegations taking part. Wreaths draped in Israeli flags, candles bearing Stars of David, the sound of Hebrew echoing there – all of this felt like a respite in a place that, at every turn, alienated, erased and obliterated Jewish history. You do whatever you like with our history, I thought. You shout it down, appropriate it, distort it. You rewrite it so that it’s all about you: your comfort, your image, your good name. But on this one day, you must sit on the sidelines and face the truth.
On 19 April 2026 the antizionists will come there against the Jews they dislike. They will come under the guise of political correctness: after all, they love dead Jews, so they are allowed to decide the fate of the living. Defending neutrality, in the name of Jewish values, walking over Jewish corpses, wrapped in keffiyehs, and convinced of their historical righteousness, they will try to take down the Israeli flags from the flagpoles. What antisemitism failed to destroy, appropriate or distort so far, antizionism is now destroying, appropriating and distorting. In Western Europe and North America, this steamroller is rolling through space where the battle is over narrative and memory. Now it has entered a territory where the skeletons do not hang in the closets. Here they literally lie beneath the ground we walk upon. The bodies of the people who died in the ghetto were never exhumed. Antizionism will level that ground.
Anna Zawadzka
Professor of Sociology
Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
Helena Datner adds:
The uprising was not a noble struggle for universal ideals
A kind of madness is spreading across the world — the madness of anti-Israelism. This is not about criticism of a state’s policies, but about its eradication. Never in my long life have I encountered calls for the elimination of an existing state on the grounds that it has failed some supposed test in the conduct of its policies. What makes this even more troubling is that there is only one such state, and yet this glaring inconsistency seems not to trouble those who explicitly or implicitly demand the dissolution of Israel.
The recent stance of the Green Party in the United Kingdom, which intends to support such a proposal, points to a path that many others will likely follow. It is no longer only Hamas and Iran — European centrist parties are now embarking on a course the world has never before witnessed. And yet, if we allow ourselves to consider an uncomfortable thought — one that many are eager to dismiss — namely, that the moral panic gripping the world is rooted in antisemitism (a word so deeply resented in public discourse), then the picture falls back into a pattern long familiar from centuries past. Along with its consequences.
We were taught in school that the role of intellectuals is to think critically — to ground their reasoning in broad knowledge, to apply logic, to connect facts, and to resist the pull of herd mentality. They were meant to lead social dissent, to point toward the need for change. Today, however, intellectuals seem instead to be riding the crest of the mainstream. How gratifying it must be to be carried along by a crowd equally convinced of its moral outrage — a crowd that, with heroic fervor, calls for the unrelenting condemnation of Israel, while remaining impervious to historical knowledge, absorbed entirely in the arguments of a single side, and deaf to the tsunami of antisemitism sweeping across the world — a phenomenon driven not by Israel’s actions themselves, but by their interpretation.
The demand to exclude the Israeli flag from commemorations of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is both striking and deeply perplexing.
Consider, for instance, the claim that the uprising “remains a key point of reference for the Jewish diaspora.” Intellectuals ought to see reality as it truly is. The uprising was not a noble struggle for universal ideals; it was a desperate fight in which Jews were brutally murdered, often in silence and with the approval of many of their neighbors. That, for me, is the true point of reference — the profound difficulty of life in the diaspora, in all its countless forms.
By the same logic, one could just as well demand the removal of the Polish flag — a symbol of the place directly tied to the uprising — on the grounds that it represents Polish nationalism, including its most extreme and genocidal variants, as well as contemporary attempts to instrumentalize the memory of the Holocaust, even to the point of denial in a distinctly Polish form. Yet such a demand would be nearly impossible to articulate: it would be met with immediate outrage and condemnation, labeled “anti-Polish,” and dismissed by much of the public — not to mention political leaders — as the product of an unbalanced mind. More moderate voices would argue that the flag represents a plurality of traditions.
Displaying the Israeli flag is not an attempt to “appropriate the memory of the Holocaust for a single state.” That notion itself is a form of intellectual distortion.
For many of those who perished in the Holocaust, the idea of a Jewish state was a source of hope and strength. Those who survived but did not share this vision often left Europe, where they were no longer wanted. The state of Israel, once established, became the only country willing to accept Jews without exception. This is a matter of historical fact — and for that reason, the Israeli flag, if one chooses to display it, is a natural and fitting element of commemorations of the ghetto uprising.
Helena Datner
Helena Datner is a sociologist and historian, who researches and writes on antisemitism in contemporary Poland, the social history of Jews in Poland in XIX century and after WWII; recently on annihilation of Jews in Bezirk Bialystok during the Shoah. In the years 1999-2001 she was the President of the Warsaw Jewish Community.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/MariuszSzczygielReporterOfficial/photos/dzi%C5%9B-1-czerwca-pod-wrzenie-%C5%9Bwiata-lub-we-wrzeniu-zale%C5%BCnie-od-pogody-trwa-akcja-n/998379074990794/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=122209563908571703&set=pcb.122209564460571703
[3] Full text of the letter: https://www.petycjeonline.com/petycja_do_muzeum_historii_ydow_polskich_polin_w_sprawie_doboru_ambasadorow_akcji_onkile_i_kierunku_dziaa_instytucji
[4] https://www.facebook.com/piotr.pazinski.3/posts/pfbid0HR5EZUbacQnscgoWLhknYBMCH7UrCxoFAQx8AFcHny9Ta2scfEv6Vaj1zGni4Mmtl
[5] https://www.facebook.com/anna.goldschmid/posts/pfbid0WZ2rPVP9qza3Yrb3kwHB8M3KHhi3eV9C3cmGFTj73PTRe6MuvEGSq2qbs1Lk4W5kl
