Eastern Europe’s Crisis of Shame
BERLIN
– As thousands of refugees pour into Europe to escape the horrors of
war, with many dying along the way, a different sort of tragedy has
played out in many of the European Union’s newest member states. The
states known collectively as “Eastern Europe,” including my native
Poland, have revealed themselves to be intolerant, illiberal,
xenophobic, and incapable of remembering the spirit of solidarity that carried them to freedom a quarter-century ago.
These are the same
societies that clamored before and after the fall of communism for a
“return to Europe,” proudly proclaiming that they shared its values. But
what did they think Europe stands for? Since 1989 – and particularly
since 2004, when they joined the EU – they have benefited from massive
financial transfers in the form of European structural and cohesion
funds. Today, they are unwilling to contribute anything to resolve the
greatest refugee crisis facing Europe since World War II.
Indeed, before the
eyes of the entire world, the government of Hungary, an EU member state,
has mistreated thousands of refugees. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sees
no reason to behave otherwise: the refugees are not a European problem,
he insists; they are a German problem.
Orbán is not alone in
this view. Even Hungary’s Catholic bishops are following Orbán’s line,
with Laszlo Kiss-Rigo, Bishop of Szeged-Csanad, saying
that Muslim migrants “want to take over,” and that the Pope, who has
called on every Catholic parish in Europe to take in a refugee family,
“doesn’t know the situation.”
In Poland, a country
of 40 million people, the government initially expressed a readiness to
accept 2,000 refugees – but only Christians (Slovakia proposed a similar
stipulation). Refugees are not an Eastern European problem, a Polish
journalist told National Public Radio in the United States, because
these countries did not participate in the decision to bomb Libya
(neither did Germany).
Have Eastern
Europeans no sense of shame? For centuries, their ancestors emigrated in
droves, seeking relief from material hardships and political
persecution. And today their leaders’ heartless behavior and callous
rhetoric play to popular sentiment. Indeed, the electronic version of
Poland’s largest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, now publishes a
stunning notice at the end of every article about refugees: “Because of
the extraordinarily aggressive content of remarks advocating violence,
contrary to the law, and calling for racial, ethnic, and religious
hatred, we will not allow readers to publish comments.”
Not so long ago, in
the immediate postwar years, Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors
fled from the murderous anti-Semitism of their Polish, Hungarian,
Slovak, or Romanian neighbors to the safety of displaced persons camps
in, of all places, Germany. “Safe Among the Germans” proclaimed the
title of an important book
by the historian Ruth Gay about these 250,000 survivors. Now Muslim
refugees and survivors of other wars, having found no refuge in Eastern
Europe, also are fleeing to safety among the Germans.
In this case, history
is not a metaphor. On the contrary, the root cause of the Eastern
European attitudes now on grim display is to be found in World War II
and its aftermath.
Consider the Poles, who, deservedly proud of their society’s anti-Nazi resistance, actually killed more Jews than Germans during the war.
Although Poland’s Catholics were cruelly victimized during the Nazi
occupation, they could find little compassion for the fate of Nazism’s
ultimate victims. In the words of Józef Mackiewicz, a conservative,
anti-Communist Polish writer with impeccable patriotic credentials:
“During the occupation there was not, literally, a single person who
would not have heard the saying – ‘One thing Hitler has done correctly
is to wipe out the Jews.’ But one should not talk about this openly.”
Of course, there were
Poles who helped Jews during the war. Indeed, the number of Polish
“Righteous Among Nations,” recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem for their
wartime heroism, is the largest among all European countries
(unsurprisingly, given that prewar Poland had Europe’s largest Jewish
population by far). But these remarkable individuals typically acted on
their own, against prevailing social norms. They were misfits who, long
after the war had ended, insisted on keeping their wartime heroism a
secret from their neighbors – afraid, it seems, that their own
communities would otherwise shun, threaten, and ostracize them.
All occupied European
societies were complicit to some degree in the Nazi effort to destroy
the Jews. Each made a different contribution, depending on
country-specific circumstances and conditions of German rule. But the
Holocaust played out most gruesomely in Eastern Europe, owing to the
sheer number of Jews in the region and the incomparable ruthlessness of
the Nazi occupation regimes.
When the war ended,
Germany – because of the victors’ denazification policies and its
responsibility for instigating and carrying out the Holocaust – had no
choice but to “work through” its murderous past. This was a long,
difficult process; but German society, mindful of its historical
misdeeds, has become capable of confronting moral and political
challenges of the type posed by the influx of refugees today. And
Chancellor Angela Merkel has set an example of leadership on migrants
that puts all of Eastern Europe’s leaders to shame.
Eastern Europe, by
contrast, has yet to come to terms with its murderous past. Only when it
does will its people be able to recognize their obligation to save
those fleeing in the face of evil.
Jan T. Gross, Professor of War and Society and Professor of History at Princeton University, is the author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community at Jedwabne, Polish Society under German Occupation, and Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz.
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