A Chosen Few Read Free Page A

At the insistence of the Jewish community, the relatively inexpensive $9.5 million building was financed mostly by the city of Dresden and the regional government of Saxony rather than by Jewish contributions. The building was dedicated on November 9, 2001, the sixty-third anniversary of Kristallnacht.
    The day after the new synagogue opened, someone had drawn a swastika on one of the walls. This kind of attack on Jewish monuments and buildings by right wing extremists has steadily increased in Germany over the past decade.
    In France, though dialogue about the Nazi occupation has been fairly open for a long time—if not since the death of De Gaulle in 1970, certainly since the return of the Socialists in 1981—books, television, film and commentary continue to expose the shameful French collaboration, as though it had never been exposed before. For all its sorrow and pity, France did not have one of the worst records of Nazi-occupied countries. The Belgians and the Dutch did worse. But no one wants to write about Belgium. Understandably, the French love to write about France. So do Americans. And so they continue to expose the already well-documented French collaboration.
    While France still struggles with its history of Nazi collaboration, the majority of both Jews and non-Jews there were born since the Liberation. More than half of French Jews are either from North Africa or related to North African Jews who did not directly experience the Holocaust. Today French Jews feel secure enough to do what Jews do, fight among themselves—angry arguments over such subjects as the future of Israel.
    While the large French Jewish population debates endlessly, the tiny surviving Polish Jewish population remains a topic ofendless debate—the Jewish question, which, in reality, is the Polish question.
    Almost six decades after the Holocaust, in which three million Polish Jews were murdered, mostly on Polish soil, Poles continue to see themselves as a heroic and suffering people who have fought for freedom and endured the brutality of their neighbors—in other words, they are the victims. The Poles are undeterred by the fact that virtually no one outside of Poland sees them that way.
    It is true that three million non-Jewish Poles also died in the war. The Polish three million was ten percent of the population. The Jewish three million was more than ninety percent. According to the Polish version of history, the Jews were murdered by the Germans not by the Poles and when Poles participated they were forced at gunpoint. Poles, when not victims, were bystanders, never perpetrators. This does not explain why Jews were massacred in Poland before the Germans came or after they left, nor why anti-Semitism has remained part of Polish life.
    Curiously, the difference in viewpoint inside and outside Poland has created an important rift between the Jews of Poland and the Jews of America. Poles both Jewish and Christian resent the American Jewish tendency to indulge in hatred of Poles. After all, the few Jews who have remained have done so because they feel that Poland is their home and non-Jewish Poles are their friends and colleagues.
    It is interesting to compare the attitude of world Jewry toward the Netherlands and Poland. Both countries were occupied by the Nazis. Both countries had organized resistance but a general population that cooperated in the removal of more than ninety percent of its Jewish population. One difference was that in Holland the Nazis could count on the help of a home-grown Nazi movement whereas there was no such movement in Poland.
    And yet the few remaining Jews in Holland do not have to constantly justify their existence in their own country. Holland is not filled with Jewish tourists openly displaying contempt for the Dutch. Dutch Jewry do not have to be on a constant vigil to keep their art treasures from being removed by the world Jewish community. But the Jews of Poland must explain why they are living in their