LETTERS Jews in Poland
Sir: Some reviewers, I note, of Martin Gilbert's book The Holocaust speak of German and Polish anti-semitism in the same breath. Norman Stone (Books, 8 February) writes of 'the Poles being as anti-semitic as the Germans'. Yet the difference in degree between the anti- Semitic records of these people under the Nazis is enormous. They cannot be equated.
Last November, when I was in Krynki, a small place on the Russian border east of Bialystok, I asked three peasants who were loading sacks in a yard where the Jewish cemetery was. They looked at me in surprise. 'I am not a Jew,' I said, hoping to avoid a string of questions, as on previous occasions in Poland, about my own origins (Have you Jewish relatives?' and so on). I had made a blunder. One of the peasants took me by the arm and said, 'I didn't ask you who you were and I don't care if you are a Jew or not. You are a czlowiek [human being]. I am a czlowiek. A Jew is a czlowiek. Let the dead sleep in peace.' He seemed quite upset but not drunk. It is true that Jewish cemeteries in Poland are neglected, overgrown and rot- ting: a cow tethered to a gravestone in Tykocin, a single horse grazing in Krynki, a mass of tumbled stones in Bialystok, brambles and erosion in Warsaw. There has been some vandalism. But lack of funds is the problem. The surviving Jews in Poland are very poorly off. But I have also heard it said among them, that as the body returns to the earth, so the earth must be allowed to take its own way.
Denis Hills
12 Kilmorey Gardens, St Margarets, Middlesex
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