I am the first in my immediate family to go back to Poland since my Zeidy (grandfather) left in 1920. My mother had some desire to see Zambrow, but she and my father focused their travels on places they really wanted to see and experience, such as Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. The idea of spending their vacation time in Poland never made it to their agenda. My mother and I had spoken about the possibility of going to Poland together, but we never turned that idea into a reality before she died three years ago.  My father, like many other Jews, had and still has absolutely no desire to step foot in Poland. Indeed, he instructed me, not entirely in jest, to spit on a Polish street for him. Israeli Prime Minster Yitzchak Shamir famously said that Poles “suck [anti-Semitism] with their mother’s milk” and that anti-Semitism “is deeply imbued in their tradition.”

To say the least, Poland has had a mixed history vis-a-vis its Jews. Jews were originally welcomed in the Poland lands (Poland did not become an actual country until after World War I), reflected in the Jewish idea of Poland as “Po-lin,” which in Hebrew means here (Po) we will reside (lin). Poland was fairly hospitable toward its Jews during the Middle Ages (at least relative to other places in Europe), which accounts for why it became the largest center of Jews anywhere in the world. It’s amazing to realize that, by the mid-16th century, eighty percent of the world’s Jews lived in Poland, and before World War II, there were over three millions Jews in Poland. (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Poland.html.)

However, in the inter-war period, when Poland got its independence, anti-Semitism grew into a major political and social force. Indeed, before the war, restrictions on Jewish life in Poland were almost as severe as those in Germany, although Polish Jews were never stripped of their citizenship and Polish Jewish parties of various ideologies remained active in the government. It’s probably not fair to say that, by 1939, Polish Jews were “On the Edge of Destruction,” the title of a popular book on Jews in Poland in the interwar period by Celia Heller.

In the post-war period, when only 50,000 or so Jews were left in Poland, anti-Semitism continued to be a force in Polish politics. It is a complicated story, because many of communist leaders who Stalin put into power to rule Poland as a Soviet satellite state were Jews. A renewed anti-Semitic campaign led to an exodus of many of the remaining Jews after the Six Day War.

With all this history of of anti-Semitism, a strange fact about Europe today emerges: it seems that the two countries that evince the least anti-Semitism and have done the most to confront their murderous past are Germany and Poland. The leaders of both countries have publicly denounced anti-Semitism. Part of the Solidarity movement against the Soviets involved confronting Poland’s anti-Semitic past. Both countries have recently opened museums that commemorate the lives and contributions of the pre-war Jewish community. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw is one of my must-see destinations and a major destination of tourists in Warsaw general today.

As the president of Poland remarked at the ceremony of the museum’s opening: “it is impossible to understand the history of Poland without knowledge of Polish Jews. It is equally impossible to understand the history of Jews without knowledge of Polish history. (See the very positive review of the museum upon its opening by Professor of Yiddish studies David Roskies.)

Thus, to visit Poland is at once to go to the largest Jewish cemeteries in the world (Auschwitz, Treblinka) and also where Jewish life in the Diaspora reached its greatest cultural and religious achievements. I don’t think I will honor my father’s wish of spitting on a Polish street. However, I will mourn the fate of my ancestors. I can never embrace Poland as a place that is dear to my heart. I’d be shocked if I fell in love with the country. I don’t expect to visit it again after I leave. But will I leave with feelings of loathing? I cannot say. It’s complicated.