The topography of the memory of the Holocaust in post-1989 Poland

Introductory remarks

Redefining the idea of Jan Józef Lipski, Robert Traba (2006) articulated further that Poles not only received the territory, but are also the spiritual successors of those lands. In other words, this is not our heritage, but we give a new sense and new life to this material and non-material space, whilst simultaneously not forgetting the former creators of this culture. This “not forgetting” requires memory, both individual and collective. Being a successor of Jewish culture in Poland requires particular attitudes, competencies and skills. The stakeholders which are involved in reconstructing the memory of Jewish life and death have a difficult task. They act in the context of open society – as Zdzisław Mach (2006, 102) described the scene of the memory of the Holocaust in Poland – with a “pluralism of memory and pluralistic interpretation of heritage” as opposed to the “closed society, xenophobic and dogmatic, with Jewish heritage excluded from the memory of Poles.”

According to Habermas (Habermas, Michnik 1994), what we learn can only be proven by our actions. Selected actions, in our case educational practices, provided the data presented in Part 3 of this publication. The aim was to demonstrate how educational practice can have an impact on attitudes and thus this part attempted to present how the Polish state and its institutions, teachers, NGOs activists, and students dealt with the vacuum and wounds left by the Holocaust. The earlier survey focused on attitudes toward the memory of the Holocaust in a wider context of attitudes toward others, minorities and Jews. Since the phenomenon of antisemitism is related to xenophobia, ethnocentrism and fear of the Other in general, it constituted the topic of the quantitative part of this study. In Poland, antisemitism has a cultural basis and, as is the case in some other European states (Germany in particular), it is connected with attitudes toward the Holocaust. The qualitative part of the study was focused above all on educational projects related to the memory of the Holocaust because they were prevailing among the initiatives focused on history and culture of Polish Jews, at least in secondary education.

Scholars and practitioners searching for ways to understanding and even improve the decision-making process on the use of military means could very well benefit from the outcome of this research. The prescriptive vigour of theories on civil-military relations and strategy has proven to be less foundational, if at all, to the roles acquired and actions initiated by the civil and military decision-makers. Consequently, the outcome of this study enriches both theoretical and empirical findings about civilmilitary decision-making on the use of military means.

The analysis in this study gives rise to a more realistic approach to upholding practices in the field. These practices go beyond an invented theoretical world in which the dynamics of the logics of action at play in the minds of agents are often downplayed, ignored, or denied. We ought to focus more on entrapments and the path dependency that may occur between senior civil and military decision-makers whilst discussing the deployment of military means. Applying prescriptive theory on roles and rules would prevent path-dependency would be naive. Instead, let us focus on fostering a structural dialogue between civil and military decision-makers, a dialogue that informs strategic thought and practice.

This chapter applies the most salient findings of this study to matters in the field of strategic studies and civil and military relations that are in need of addressing. Firstly, an actor approach is recommended to improve the research programme of strategic studies. The inherent action-oriented nature of this field would call for placing civil and military decision-makers at the centre of attention. Secondly, the method of process tracing should be incorporated more prominently as a method for research on the decisions, design and direction of military operations by civil and military decision-makers, since it facilitates closing in on these groups of actors, especially when combined with the framework of decision units.

Thirdly, the quality of civil-military relations is believed to be foundational for comprehensive decision-making on the use of military means and for designing effective strategies. Therefore, artificial and normative boundaries need to be addressed in order to advance civilmilitary relations.

Introduction

The occasion for decision is metaphorically described by Hermann as a single frame of film in a motion picture. The single frame is the foundation from which a continuous strip of film is produced. Just like frames in a movie, the snapshots of the decision-making process at various points in time form an episode of a particular crisis.

To take this metaphor further, an exciting but confusing film is taking shape. The director (politicians) and his cast (senior civil and military decision-makers) developed this movie in a way that did not follow their traditional textbooks (strategic studies and civil-military theory). Some actors (senior military decision-makers) had already created a script in which their ideas featured prominently. Once they informed the lead actors (senior civil decision-makers) about the script, they all joined hands and further developed the plot. Every now and then they would quarrel about its direction. Yet, they were united in their belief that the movie needed to be a success because the investors (the international partners/NATO) had already invested a lot of money and the credibility (making up for Iraq and Srebrenica) of the director and his cast was at stake. Unfortunately, the audience (the constituents) was confused because there were different film trailers. Some expected a violent movie (fighting mission), whereas others expected a feelgood movie (reconstruction mission). As a result, the film was not become the success as had been envisioned. In order to prevent a future fiasco, a research agency (the author) reconstructed the writing of the script of the film (the sequential decision path) and advised the director, his cast and the writers of the film script on possible adjustments.

This chapter presents prominent findings that clarify why the senior civil and military decision-makers in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom decided to provide military means for the stabilisation of southern Afghanistan and how this decision was converted into a military operation.

Why and How: Inescapable Entrapments?

In order to understand why the United Kingdom and the Netherlands committed their military forces to the stabilisation of Afghanistan, the opportunity for a decision on the matter was scrutinised. The pressing nature of the decision in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom featured prominently in both cases.

Introduction

The governing idea of the need to deploy military forces to southern Afghanistan materialised in an extremely powerful manner amongst senior civil and military decision-makers in London and The Hague. In fact, it dictated the course of events, driven by the implicit belief that a mission had to transpire and, as such, exhibited the working of a trap.

The momentum, created by the internationally agreed NATO expansion into southern Afghanistan, was captured by a like-minded group of senior military decision-makers. Their actions were supported by their political masters, who joined them in their self-enforcing logic. In this chapter, the decision paths of the senior civil and military decisionmakers in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are compared.

The Strategic Setting

The most prominent and most consistent pillars of British and Dutch foreign and security policies, i.e. the desire to be trustworthy NATO members and, at the same time, reliable partners to the United States, have clearly played a constitutive role in the motivations underlying the reasoning of the senior civil and military decision-makers of the two nations. At first glance, the desire to remain a relevant partner can best be defined as being rooted in a rationalist calculation of interest. However, taking a second look at the behaviour of both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in the international arena, the rationale behind their support for NATO and the United States appears to be founded on a shared belief, at times even a habitual reflex, to do so. As such, the actions of the senior civil and military decision-makers were in line with these traditional pillars of foreign and security policy.

The foreign and security policy of both nations contained a rather normative component to provide security in the international arena, although this was more profoundly articulated in the United Kingdom when Prime Minister Blair was in office. Ever since Labour had come to power in the United Kingdom, the ‘forces for good’ became a driving force in British foreign policy. This policy manifested itself, not only through rhetoric but also in practice, as British military forces were used to bring about security in places like Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Also, the Netherlands, albeit less prominently, attained the posture of an active contributor to international stability through the deployment of military forces.

Each and every society has a duty to pass on its legitimate cultural achievements to subsequent generations (Ricoeur 2006, 82). Unfortunately, it is equally the case that a society passes on its failures and those of their ancestors to the generations which follow. The history of World War II and the Shoah provides a plethora of moral dilemmas, hostile attitudes and violence, norms and values that challenged the basic conditions of humankind and the development of civilization. For Theodor Adorno, as he expressed in his essay “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (1970), the main goal of education was not to allow Auschwitz (a trauma for philosophy itself) to be repeated (see: Kranz 1998b, 140). He also argued for greater self-awareness and more self-criticism in relation to collective identities.

Frank Ankersmit (2004), asking what type of discourse is suitable to study the Holocaust, underlined that traumatic events from the past are traumatic because they cannot be accepted and assimilated. The painful memory of the Holocaust cannot be healed and should remain as a permanent scar which reminds us of this terrible crime. The above reflections on the nature of trauma perhaps provide the best insights into some of the processes present in post-1989 Poland, where the lack of public recognition of the Jewish past is present in so many places, along with the local silent memory of anti-Jewish violence and Jewish property, the houses where non-Jewish Poles are currently living and certain synagogues in ruins or transformed into cultural institutions or local businesses. Jewish property holds the memory of the greed of war, the unwanted and the (non)memory of local communities and its relations.

The experts on education about the Shoah, E. Doyle Stevick and Zehavit Gross (2015, 3, 5, 6), shared the conviction that TLH “effectively can contribute to making a better world, to protecting human rights and strengthening democracy and even to preventing genocide” yet they were aware that empirical research has not provided evidence that such correlations exist. Nonetheless, the connections between TLH and anti-racism, democratic, for human rights and citizenship education, multicultural, intercultural, peace, remembrance, global citizenship, against antisemitism, tolerance education both exist and are explored. The foundations are set by the surveys of knowledge about the Holocaust, but “attitudes and dispositions are particularly difficult to research” as they note.

The word “history” comes from the old Greek word istorein which means to look for knowledge, to learn, and its meaning is close to seeing, being a witness. This book refers to the history of the Holocaust represented in collective memory, the educational environment and attitudes of youth towards Jews in Poland, where the history of the Holocaust is still a taboo topic and a source of severe conflicts.

The Holocaust was the unprecedented mass murder of Jews in the heart of Europe and Western civilization, which erased vibrant, assimilated and religious communities and their culture. The mass killing, profoundly rejecting the values of the Enlightenment, was predominantly, but not exclusively, industrial. Altogether two-thirds of the Jews, treated by the Nazi Germans and their collaborators as racially inferior subhumans, were killed. The term “Holocaust” does not have one standard definition, but there is an agreement that it refers to a specific genocide in the 20th century involving the systematic murder of six million Jews and the destruction of their communities. There were other groups of people who were victims of Nazi Germany and the terror of their collaborators: the Roma and Sinti, approximately 2 million ethnic Poles, 200,000 disabled people, almost 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, political dissidents targeted for destruction on the basis of racial, ethnic, national, religious or political reasons. In most definitions these groups of victims are not incorporated within the scope of definition of the term “Holocaust.” The main institutions guarding the memory of the Holocaust: Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Imperial War Museum in London, the Holocaust Centre Beth Shalom, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) use slightly different definitions of the term.

We (humans) are haunted by the historical fact called the Holocaust because several generations have tried to comprehend what really happened during World War II. Despite numerous studies we are still desperately looking for the answer to so many questions because knowing historical facts is not equal to understanding many of their causes and consequences.

Introductory remarks

The subject of attitudes can be approached from many points of view and disciplines, and with different purposes in mind. Why study attitudes, a multidimensional, hypothetical construct, at all? The relative permanence of attitudes is a fact underlined by many authors. The intention here was to contribute to a better understanding of attitudes toward Jews and the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations in post-communist Poland, specifically among Polish youth. In definitions of attitude, psychologists frequently emphasise that attitudes, first introduced as a concept in the 19th century, are learned in the social context. In this chapter the focus will be on specific attitudes toward Jews, the Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust. In many cases of empirical studies, including my own, the variables include: ethnocentrism, xenophobia, self-esteem, attitudes toward other national, religious and ethnic minorities/foreigners and were related both to teachers and students as target groups.

The impact of education on attitudes is increasingly the focus of attention of not only researchers, but also various social actors, including governments and nongovernmental organizations commissioning various studies. The measurement of the impact is complex. For example, factors like family environment, the influence of peers and the media, including social media, may skew the results of studies. Looking into the attitudes of younger generations of Poles toward Polish/Jewish relations might reveal the social context of a memory of difficult past.

The authors of a large comparative study on historical consciousness of youth “Youth and History” underlined the limitations of surveys in the field of education (van der Leeuw-Roord 1998). Scholars with a more pragmatic approach argue that there is a false dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative methods and express the opinion that researchers should use both to understand social phenomena (Creswell 1994, 176; Bauman, Palka, after: Zaręba 1998a 45–54). For the purpose of this study, a two-phase design emerged. Quantitative and qualitative data for this study were collected in separate phases, although partially overlapping, at various times and places and integrating both attitudes and various educational approaches for the purpose of evaluation.

Introduction

The construction of the analytical lens applied to this study draws on the field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) as this field of inquiry employs an actor-specific focus. It focuses on ‘agents of the state’, human decisionmakers, acting in groups or alone. This study acknowledges the fact that FPA employs middle-range theories that only account for clearly defined situations/cases and, consequently, only partially explains foreign policies and actions. However, the advantage of this approach is that its epistemological, unassuming nature is not caught up in ‘dogmatic and sectarian arguments between rival schools of thought’.

The main strength of FPA is the acknowledgement of human agency and its focus on events of which the individual is the perpetrator. As such, it moves beyond the ‘black boxing of states’ approximating all decision-making units as rational, unitary actors or the equivalent of states as frequently exhibited in the field of international relations. The difficulty of attempting to define a group derives from the fact that agency often evolves and cannot always be predefined. Hence, empirical data often illustrate how agency emerges and follows a certain path that becomes instrumental to the outcome.

This study employs the decision unit model in order to track and trace the decisions made by the senior civil and military decisionmakers. The analytic framework allows for to distinguish the variety of ways the decision-makers shaped what happened and acknowledges that decision units are often active participants in the making of foreign policy. The model also has the advantage of conducting comparative research between countries with different political systems. By doing so, it allows for a more inclusive and comparative approach when studying how decisions are made in and between other political systems and it overcomes the American bias in literature about decision-making. It is, however, not the intention of this study to contribute to foreign policy practices by employing this framework to identify which theoretical models are most relevant to explaining foreign policy. The framework is merely employed to identify, track and trace agency and to structure the empirical findings of this study.

This book addresses the issues of memory (a more suitable word would be Marianne Hirsch's term of postmemory) of the Holocaust among young Poles, their attitudes towards Jews and the Holocaust, in the comparative context of educational developments in other countries. The term “Jews” is, as Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (2010) rightly noted, a decontextualized term used here in the meaning of Antoni Sułek (2010) as a collective “symbolic” entity. The focus was on education (transmitting values), attitudinal changes and actions undertaken to preserve (or counteract) the memory of Jews and their culture in contemporary Poland. The study to which the book primarily refers was conducted in 2008 and was a second study on a national representative sample of Polish adolescents after the first one undertaken in 1998. The data may seem remote from the current political situation of stepping back from the tendency to increase education about the Holocaust which dominated after 1989 and especially between 2000 and 2005, nonetheless they present trends and outcomes of specific educational interventions which are universal and may set examples for various geopolitical contexts.

The focus of this research was not primarily on the politics of remembrance, which often takes a national approach, although state initiatives are also brought to the attention of the reader, but rather on grassroots action, often initiated by local civil society organizations (NGOs) or individual teachers and/or students. This study has attempted to discover the place that Jews have (or do not have) in the culture of memory in Poland, where there lived the largest Jewish community in pre-war Europe, more than 90% of which was murdered during the Holocaust. The challenge was to show the diversity of phenomena aimed at integrating Jewish history and culture into national culture, including areas of extracurricular education, often against mainstream educational policy, bearing in mind that the Jews currently living in Poland are also, in many cases, active partners in various public initiatives. It is rare to find in-depth empirical research investigating the areas of memory construction and the attitudes of youth as an ensemble, including the evaluation of actions (programmes of non-governmental organisations and school projects) in the field of education, particularly with reference to the long-term effects of educational programmes.

In Missionaries, Phil Klay's 2020 novel about war (among other things), one of his protagonists, Lisette, an American journalist, talks to a friend and former soldier, Diego, about the conflict in Afghanistan. ‘Go through the mission set of every unit operating in Afghanistan right now’, Diego challenges her; ‘tell me a single one that doesn't make sense.’ Lisette concedes the point. Individual missions did make sense. ‘It was the war as a whole that was insane, a rational insanity that dissected the problem in a thousand different ways, attacked it logically with a thousand different mission sets, a million white papers, a billion “lessons learned” reports, and nothing ever approaching a coherent strategy.’

Lisette's views presumably reflect those of their author: Klay served with the United States Marine Corps during the ‘surge’ in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan may have been different in many respects but, even if its veterans disagree over specifics, they will recognise the force of Lisette's point. British and Dutch units in southern Afghanistan did their best to bring stability and security to Helmand and Uruzgan. At the end of each tour, their commanders could and did reflect with pride on what they had achieved – what Lisette calls ‘a thousand tight logical circles’ as each task was executed ‘with machinelike precision, eyes on the mission amid the accumulating human waste’. Nonetheless, by the end of 2014, when NATO ceased active offensive operations, nobody could be quite sure what lasting results had been achieved. That uncertainty has only increased with the passage of time.

The British and Dutch armed forces were good at addressing what Mirjam Grandia in this important book calls the ‘how’ of the war in Afghanistan but neither government proved able to provide a consistent and coherent answer to the question ‘why’. Throughout the Cold War, for both countries the ‘why’ of military effectiveness had been simple: the defence of western Europe from Soviet aggression, most probably along the inner German border. It was the ‘how’ that generated the big questions: whether NATO had sufficient conventional military strength to mount a successful defence without an early recourse to nuclear weapons, whether Dutch conscripts of the 1960s or ‘70s would be ready to fight, and whether either army was intellectually equipped for war at the operational level.

Introduction

Imagine an afternoon at military headquarters in the United Kingdom. Two generals are smoking a cigar during a short meeting break. They are discussing a possible deployment of their armed forces, anticipating an upcoming request of NATO to its member states to contribute military forces for an expansion of the Alliance's presence in Afghanistan. Whilst talking, the first contours of a plan to deploy their forces into south Afghanistan see the day of light.

What appears to be a collegial talk between two military senior officers sharing their thoughts on a potential deployment of their forces is actually not as futile as one might think. In fact, these generals are the directors of operations of their respective militaries. One is from the United Kingdom and the other is from the Netherlands. Their initial ideas came to fruition in a series of actions and decisions that, ultimately, led to the deployment of British and Dutch armed forces into southern Afghanistan.

The deployment of military forces for international military interventions raises fundamental questions such as why these interventions are undertaken in the first place but also how these decisions were taken. The use of military means is often treated as a neutral, an ‘all-in-one toolkit’, to be utilised when other methods for achieving a particular political goal fail. By learning about why and how foreign policy decisions on the deployment of military forces are made, we gain information about the intentions and strategies of governments and, respectively, how definitions of the problems at hand are translated into action. Put differently: “Who becomes involved in a decision, how, and why is essential to an explanation of why decision-makers decided the way that they did”.

The particular focus of this study is the role of the military in foreign policy decision-making on the deployment of military forces. Hence, investigating the ‘how’ of their role in foreign policy decision-making is as important as investigating the ‘why’ of their involvement. The outcome of this study will inform various academic fields and policymakers since direct military involvement in foreign policy decision-making has long been anathema in both academic and practitioner circles.

Introduction

The context in which the decision of the Netherlands to commit their armed forces to the stabilisation of the Afghan province of Uruzgan was made should largely be seen in relation to the Dutch desire to adopt a more prominent role as a reliable NATO partner and to demonstrate its ability to conduct combat operations in the volatile region of southern Afghanistan. Military alliance politics and a shared belief amongst senior civil and military decision-makers in forging a prominent role for the Netherlands in NATO's expansion into southern Afghanistan have been instrumental in the decision path that emerged.

Throughout the whole process of deciding if and how the Dutch armed forces were to contribute to the stabilisation of southern Afghanistan, several strategic decisions, such as the selection of the province and the number of troops to be deployed, were taken without having been articulated at the political level. These decisions were made at the military level, as such implicitly questioning the primacy of politics in the matter.

Before taking a closer look at the decision path that resulted in the deployment of Dutch forces to Uruzgan, the features of Dutch foreign and security politics will be explained first in order to understand the context in which the decision-makers operate the features of Dutch foreign and security politics will be explained first.

The Netherlands: A Small Power with a Desire to Make a Difference

The Netherlands is a small power with limited military capabilities. Its economic relations benefit from stable international relations and it strongly promotes the international rule of law, which it believes is fundamental for international stability. Consequently, the strategic cultural tenets of Dutch security politics are to advance the international rule of law, project stability and use the military as an instrument to boost Dutch international significance, often in support of the major player in the international order, the United States.

Even though it is problematic to identify perpetual features in Dutch foreign politics, three pillars can be distinguished: Atlanticism, Europeanism, and multilateral activities in support of the international legal order are the common denominators on which Dutch foreign and security politics is founded.