Last night I gave my Rescuers of Memory talk, “They Enable Us to See: Non-Jewish Rescue of Jewish Memory in Poland,” to a group of mostly students at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. It’s so different speaking to students than adults. Whenever I speak to adults I am confronted with questions about Polish anti-Semitism or complicity that sometimes border on attacks or accusations. I don’t take them personally though because I understand where they are coming from—they come from the great pain and loss that Jews experienced in Poland during World War II (as well as ant-Semitism before World War II). Unfortunately the loss was sometimes at the hands of non-Jewish Poles. So, I understand the anger, and the difficulty in seeing the positive in a people that perhaps you were brought up to think so negatively of.

The audience last night did not come to my talk with this history. Perhaps some of them came from families with Holocaust in the background, I don’t know, but this was the first time I gave a talk when I can remember NOT getting a question about Polish anti-Semitism (and don’t get me wrong—I love those questions because they get us into important dialogue—please see my blog post right before this one for an article that delves deeper into this). They had some great questions:

“I just read a book about the Armenian genocide and the author said he did not learn about the genocide until he was a teenager, when did you learn about the Holocaust?” I answered that my mother had been silent about her past for 30 years and I too learned about it as a teenager, from reading her book! But I cannot recall the exact moment when I found out.
“Do you see parallels between your work and your mothers?” Yes, my mother’s work is about rescuers during the war and mine is about rescuers of memory. Some criticize me for focusing on this positive aspect of Polish society but I will leave it to others to focus on the negative.

3. “How can we foster the kind of attention and care for our neighbors that you have shown us that these people exhibit?” Oh, that’s a tough one. I will say I take inspiration from my Polish friends.

There was a middle school teacher there who said she wants me to speak to the middle school class. Now that scares me. I think they are too young to even know about the horror of the Holocaust but she said the stories that I tell are what they want to know. If I do it I will report back here.