The train tracks full of wooden plates with prays and wishes are pictured by the former Auschwitz Birkenau Concentration Camp during 35th March of the Living on April 18, in Oswiecim, Poland.Omar Marques/Getty Images
Something terrible happened in Poland last week, and it involved a Canadian. University of Ottawa professor Jan Grabowski was just starting his talk at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw when a far-right member of Parliament rushed the stage, attacked the sound system, and smashed Prof. Grabowski’s microphone to prevent him from speaking.
The title of Prof. Grabowski’s lecture was “The (growing) Polish problem with the history of the Holocaust.”
This is a very sensitive topic. In 2021, Prof. Grabowski, who was born in Warsaw – his father was a Jewish Holocaust survivor – was prosecuted under a terrifying law that makes it illegal to accuse Poland of Holocaust complicity. His book, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, co-edited with Polish historian Barbara Engelking, landed them both in court in a lawsuit supported by the Polish Anti-Defamation League, which has been described as a nationalist organization close to Poland’s government. The two academics were convicted of defamation and ordered to apologize to a surviving relative of a wartime mayor whom the book said helped the Nazis locate hiding Jews. The ruling was later overturned.
More recently, Prof. Engelking, who is the founder and director of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research, has been targeted by the Polish government because of a TV interview in April, in which she said Jews were disappointed with Poles during the war.
At the same time, there is unrest against the right-wing Law and Justice ruling party, with an election coming this year. On Sunday, an estimated 500,000 anti-government protesters marched in Warsaw.
This should have been a good year for relations between Poland and Canadian Jews. The city of Lodz has declared 2023 the year of Chava Rosenfarb, a Yiddish writer who was born there in 1923, survived the Holocaust, and immigrated to Canada. In Lodz, activities have been planned to celebrate her work, including an academic conference to be held in her honour this fall, sponsored by the University of Lodz.
Though she lived most of her life here, Ms. Rosenfarb’s work is not well-known in Canada. There is a good chance, however, that you have heard of the man she married, the late Henry Morgentaler – the abortion-rights advocate and physician who was also a Holocaust survivor from Lodz. (They later divorced.)
Among the attendees at the conference will be Ms. Rosenfarb’s daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, professor emerita of English at the University of Lethbridge. She learned about the attack on Prof. Grabowski last week while listening to a webinar about what were known as ghetto benches, where Polish universities forced Jewish students to sit – or stand – at the back of the class. This segregation began in the 1930s – years before the German invasion.
”So I’m listening to a lecture about the 1930s, and suddenly the 1930s are now,” Prof. Morgentaler told me.
“It makes me very nervous,” she said. “My first reaction was ‘I’m not going.’ And then I thought, ‘Well, that’s silly; I’m going. I can’t not go.’ … It’s all in honour of my mother. So how can I ignore it?”
What does a conference honouring Ms. Rosenfarb look like, in light of these events? How will historians and students of Yiddish literature feel about travelling to a country where a stage can be stormed in the name of Holocaust revisionism?
This question is not entirely theoretical for me. This month, I will be travelling to Poland – to Lodz, in fact, which is my father’s hometown – to do some research. I’ve asked myself: Should I be nervous about this trip, because of anything I’ve written in my Holocaust book? Did I suggest Polish culpability at any point? Could I get in trouble because I wondered where my family’s belongings, like my grandfather’s violin, ended up after they were deported?
Of course, many Poles helped Jews – at great danger. Non-Jewish neighbours of my mother’s family, for instance, were planning to hide her little brother, but he refused to go with them. He was murdered at Treblinka with his parents and sister.
Prof. Grabowski has bravely continued his important work after his prosecution, at his peril.
Ms. Rosenfarb also continued with her work, in spite of it all. Poems she wrote in the ghetto were confiscated at Auschwitz. When she was then sent to a forced labour camp, she wrote what she could remember onto the bunk where she slept, and memorized the words. After the war, she wrote the poems down and sent them to a publisher.
Her daughter told me that when Ms. Rosenfarb died in 2011, she felt she was a failure as a writer. Prof. Morgentaler continues to translate her mother’s work into English, hoping to correct that. “I want the world to know about her.”
There is a lot the world needs to know.