The theme of Polish-Jewish relations is complicated and even unpleasant; both sides approach it with a heavy heart. I believe that Poles who want to talk and think about these matters (and there are perhaps only a handful of them), feel somewhat ill at ease with the subject, as if expecting that something will come up that they will find difficult to cope with. No one likes to be censured, least of all, justly.

Amongst the Jews themselves there are many who have no wish to return to these matters, nor open up old wounds; they want to forget about the past in Poland, turn their backs on it for ever. They regard conferences, symposia, discourses on these matters as drawing-room games. Who needs this now, they ask.

The extermination of the Jews in Poland (I purposely avoid the term Holocaust, because it is ill-chosen and remote, even in those languages where its constant use has made it into a household word, and in Polish it is certainly totally artificial) has left scars on the psyche of the survivors so deep and crippling that their reactions are not always finely balanced. One must bear in mind that we cannot talk about the subject ‘objectively’ - objectivity, i.e. distance, calm, equilibrium, would be out of place here.

The fabric of Polish-Jewish cohabitation on Polish soil has been irreversibly destroyed. No one is under any illusion that the few thousand Jews remaining in Poland, who openly consider themselves to be such and who, as it were, apologize for being alive, are not physically and spiritually a community in terminal decline. They have no schools, no synagogues, no rabbis, no contact with Israel, no leadership, no future. It has to be admitted, albeit regrettably, that world Jewry has ceased to care for them: they have been written off as lost. Therefore, from the Jewish point of view, we are talking not about current affairs but exclusively about history.

For the Poles, however, it is, I believe, a subject of primary importance. A millenium of Jewish presence on Polish lands and their sudden and final absence, are facts without which Poles are not able to understand their past and, therefore, their present.