(Jewish Group) Holocaust Survivors Welcome Ukrainian Refugees to Poland
In the best of times, Krakow is a clash of civilization with its antithesis—or maybe of civilization with one of its inevitable outcomes. At Auschwitz, an hour and a half west, a visitor can see a display case filled with hair harvested from arriving prisoners, a small portion of the 15,000 pounds of stockpiled human hair discovered when the Red Army liberated the death camp in January of 1945. Like the intact concrete posts stringing the barbed wire at nearby Birkenau, this still-existing physical remnant of victims of the Holocaust testifies to how recently the Nazis brought Jews from Warsaw and Berlin and Salonika to eastern Poland for extermination. Auschwitz having been absorbed, though never quite processed, a visitor’s day might end with borscht and fried sheep’s cheese under the mismatched towers of the 750-year-old Gothic church hulking over the tourist-glutted center of one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval cities, a few blocks away from the Czartoryski Museum, which is home to a Leonardo da Vinci painting.
These are not the best of times in Central Europe. Today, someone arriving to Krakow by train in the evening might be greeted with the smell of cup noodles being distributed to crowds of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the least fortunate of whom haven’t strayed far from the city’s railway station, where much of the emergency assistance effort is still clustered. It is some of Ukraine’s poorest who are arriving now, even if the mass migration of February and March has largely ended. The newest of Krakow’s refugees tend to be from more outlying or rural areas where much of the actual fighting is now taking place.
Poland’s right-wing government has shocked its many detractors by treating the refugees as decently as it has. History suggests that the Poles wouldn’t automatically be open to helping Ukrainians, especially in light of the country’s supposed turn away from liberalism. Poles and Ukrainians fought a war in the late 1910s, and ethnically cleansed one another as the German hold on the region collapsed in the closing days of World War II. I was given at least a half-dozen explanations for the welcome the Ukrainians have received in Poland less than 80 years later. Perhaps it was because of a common experience of Russian oppression, which for Poland spans much of the modern era, dating from the 18th-century partition right up to the fall of the Soviet-supported communist regime in 1989. Perhaps it was a result of 1939, a shared ancestral memory, and for some a direct memory, of standing alone against the Nazis.
More cynically, the Ukrainians solved the country’s emerging labor shortage, serving as a boost to an inflation-strapped economy. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, suspects his twin brother was murdered on Vladimir Putin’s orders when a plane of Polish dignitaries crashed outside of Smolensk in 2010. The European Union had been feuding with Warsaw over the application of EU law in Poland and pressuring the country to curtail its coal mining industry; the worldwide energy pinch caused by the war, along with Poland’s critical role in managing the refugee crisis, suddenly turned Kaczynski from a pariah into one of the more indispensable figures in Europe. Perhaps most pertinently, the vast majority of refugees, nearly 95% according to Polish government figures, are women and children. The young men, who might drift into drunkenness or violence if left idle in a foreign land for long enough, are back in Ukraine, fighting the war. As Krakow Jewish Community Center (JCC) Executive Director Jonathan Ornstein observed, three months into his unexpected career as coordinator of what’s turned into a refugee center, “You don’t always fully understand how individuals act during a crisis, and you don’t fully understand how more complicated things like a society and a government react during a crisis.”
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