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“In Poland, well after the fall of Communism, there was a deafening silence about how survivors were treated, a silence that lasted through the end of the 20th century,” says Tych, himself a survivor of the Holocaust. These scholars who have broken Poland’s silence have had to buck Polish denial and to challenge Poland’s view of itself as a country of World War II martyrs and heroes. “The problem is that some of the things I have uncovered are difficult to speak about in Poland,” says Tokarska-Bakir. “Nobody believes me that my findings are based on empirical research.” Among the post-war topics raised at the conference were the plunder and killing of Jews, the persistence of the blood libel myth, analysis of emigration waves, Yiddish culture, the Catholic Church’s attitudes on Jewish issues, public opinion surveys and the futile and sometimes fatal attempts by Jews to retrieve their property....

....Poles, she says, pictured themselves as either saviors or martyrs – but never collaborators. “It was difficult for the majority of Poles to accept the fact that there were these criminals among them, as in Jedwabne. There were even eminent historians who desperately looked for evidence to prove that it was the Germans who did the killing in Jedwabne. There was a psychological barrier that needed to be overcome, the belief that Germans can be cruel but not Poles. The positive result of this controversy was that lots of Poles faced this revelation and this gave stimulus to further research....

....In a survey conducted just before coming to the conference Sulek asked people, “Which groups have too much influence in Poland?” The respondents included politicians, business circles and the Catholic Church. Only 2 percent of those surveyed mentioned Jews. But when asked specifically to assess the scale of Jewish influence, 23 percent answered “too much.” “This experiment shows that sometimes it is enough to directly refer to the ‘Jewish matter’ to activate anti-Semitic thinking,” says Sulek. “However, there is room for moderate hope. Eight years ago, 43 percent said Jews had too much influence.”

This is a whole lot of words and says very little.

Jews fared poorly wherever communism was installed. It was not specifically the Poles. Communism has to give people something to hate. Communists like to say how broadminded they are, they do not discriminate. Ha!

See Janusz Bardach’s book, “Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag,” http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Freedom-After-Janusz-Bardach/dp/0520237358/ref=cm_cr-mr-title if you want to know what it was like—he was there and he tells you all about it. He says before the war it was against the law to make anti-Semitic slurs but after the war Jews were openly being insulted, both in Poland and Russia, the two places Dr. Bardach lived during those years. It became so bad that by around 1968 he had to leave and America became the lucky recipient of a brilliant doctor who did many good works in his career.