Our Man in Warsaw: Konstanty Gebert
Born in 1953 when Poland was under communist rule, Konstanty Gebert viewed his Jewish lineage as a “biographical accident” until he was 15
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That year, 1968, the government launched an anti-Semitic purge. Many Jewish adults—even communists—lost their jobs, and Gebert was expelled from school. He became an outsider, which would deeply influence his life journey. After the government declared martial law in 1981 in an effort to repress the trade union Solidarity, Gebert emerged as one of Poland’s foremost opposition activists and dissident journalists, writing under the pen name David Warszawski. He began to observe Shabbat and attend synagogue, and he helped establish the Jewish Flying University—a semi-underground group that studied Judaism and Jewish culture. In the two-and-a-half decades since the fall of the People’s Republic of Poland, Gebert has become one of Poland’s leading journalists. A founder of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s biggest daily newspaper, he has written 11 books, covering subjects as diverse as the European 20th century, Israel, Polish Jews, and the Balkan wars. The kippah-wearing Gebert is also a key figure in Poland’s reconstituted Jewish community. In the wake of growing Russian aggression and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, Moment managing editor Sarah Breger speaks with Gebert about the awakening of his Jewish identity, the state of Polish-Jewish relations, the dangerous tensions in Crimea and Ukraine and why he thinks Americans should be more worried about anti-Semites in Western Europe than Eastern Europe.
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Comments
09/08/2014 at 4:32 pm
K. Gebert claims: “About a million Poles have emigrated abroad looking for better economic conditions.” However, according to the Polish sociologists and demographers, the number of Poles who in 2007 temporarily (over 3 months) emigrated, was 2.227. 000. Since then this number has not changed noticeably. Regarding emigration to EU in the period 2004-2007 alone the number of the Polish emigrants increased from 750 000 to 1.860.000. Oh, this reliability of the journalists, before 1989 and after 1989!
09/13/2014 at 11:23 am
The McCarran Act, or The Internal Security Act of 1950, 64 Stat. 987 (Public Law 81-831), also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 could obviously not have indicted anybody in 1947. Thus, Konstanty Gebert’s father must have run from American justice for other reasons, which were serious enough for the state-owned Polish ocean-liner “Batory” to illegally take him in at New York harbor and pull him out of danger. After that, neither Mr. Gerbert senior, nor “Batory” were allowed to touch the U.S. land again. “The Polish Army of the Soviet Union” got first time in the action on October 12, 1943. “After this costly rehearsal, it had taken us half a year to replenish our forces in order to show them off in Poland, and then we kept moving behind the [Soviet] offensive… in a long march without a single shot…” recollects Adam Bromberg, an officer in that Polish Army (see H. Grynberg “Memorbuch,” Warsaw 2000, p. 154). Thus, Gebert’s mother could not have spent “more than two years in the trenches.” Also doubtfully, she sat there “with a machine gun,” a heavy weapon that required two strong men to pull it. Even so-called light machine gun, with no wheels, was quite heavy and therefore carried by men of considerable strength. Besides, it would have been very unusual for that army – whose main purpose was helping to establish communist rule in Poland – to allow an intelligent communist activist with considerable education to waist her time in the trenches instead of using her as a political officer. Perhaps it is true that “the city of Warsaw alone suffered more deaths in World War II than any of the Western allies,” but only if one counts the Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants together. Therefore, this is not a logical answer to the question about “competing narratives between Jews and non-Jewish Poles.” Similarly confusing is Gebert’s argument about “Poles being the first inmates at Auschwitz before Polish Jews or French Jews” and his conclusion that “it’s a terribly complex issue,” for it is rather simple: the Poles were the first inmates of Auschwitz I, the concentration camp from which non-Jewish prisoner were sometimes released (like Władysław Bartoszewski). The Jews were the first and almost exclusive inmates of Auchwitz II, the Auchwitz-Birkenau death camp from which nobody was released.
09/13/2014 at 2:14 pm
Mr. Gebert stated that his father while in the US “was under indictment through the McCarran Act, which required members of the Communist Party to register and in some cases prevented them from leaving the country. He returned to Poland illegally in 1947.” Actually, his father was under investigation as a member of a Soviet intelligence network (see the Venona Project). He fled to avoid an arrest.
Mr. Gebert stated: “In 1968, the government, reacting both to the ‘wrong’ side having won the Six-Day War, and to a student democracy movement in which many activists were Jewish, launched an anti-Semitic purge, officially called the ‘Anti-Zionist campaign.’” The anti-Zionist campaign was officially launched by Wladyslaw Gomulka at the 6th Trade Union Congress in Warsaw on June 19, 1967, when he warned people celebrating the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War that a “Zionist fifth column would not be tolerated” in Poland. See my “The March Events: Targeting the Jews,” POLIN: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, vol. 21 (2008), pp. 62-92.
Mr. Gebert stated that “In Poland, you had numerous individual perpetrators. And you had the one massacre in Jedwabne.” Actually, there were many places like Jedwabne in Poland; they were of great concern even to some prominent Polish intellectuals, known for their open hostility toward the Jews (i.e. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, 1942). This was painfully established during the national debate over Gross’ book.
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