"We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it."
The 1902 Pogroms were Czarist policy and were largely carried out by Cossaks and Ruthenians, not Poles.
The option to return was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore
Poland existed as a region, not as a national identity, not as a nation-state in 1903. It was split between Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary.
If he is talking about Jewish life in Poland, then yes, it was largely destroyed. But this was true for most of Eastern Europe, and for the Netherlands too. The Nazis, not the Poles, were the killers. (This is not to say that many Poles did not cooperate or benefit from the Holocaust. Many also died protecting Jews and other targeted peoples) However, 6 million Poles died in World War 2, 20% of the population. Of these, only half were Jewish Poles.
y this week a Radio 4 programme revealed plans by the Lithuanian state prosecutor (with the full support of Lithuania's Deputy Foreign Minister, Jaroslavas Neverovicas) to charge former members of the Jewish resistance in Lithuania - escapees from the ghetto, who were fighting for their lives - with war crimes. As state-sponsored anti-Semitism, it makes Jörg Haider (remember him?), with his mild nostalgia for shiny leather boots and concentration camps, seem terribly innocuous.
Nasty time. Some Jewish partisans were essentially agents of the Soviets and took part in some very nasty raids. In other cases, locals who had benefited from or co-operated with the SS and Lithuanian police in rounding up Jews were targetted.
Depending on the crime involved, it may have been justified, or may have been a war crime. I won't prejudge.
Lithuania - which was part of the same state as Poland until 1795 and, like Poland, but unlike Germany, has never gone through any process of recrimination for, or even fully acknowledged, its role in the Holocaust - had an impressive war record, wiping out 95 per cent of its Jewish population, 200,000 people, with very little help from the invaders.
I get thefeeling that the author has never been de-Sovietized.
Since then it has shown no interest in prosecuting its own war criminals. And now it's decided that it was all the Jews' fault - again. Don't expect Poland not to follow suit.
I'm all for prosecuting war criminals. I'd like to see Israel prosecute some of the atheist antisemites who fled to Israel from Eastern Europe, discovering their "Jewishness" only upon prospect of being prosecuted for communist crimes.