Politics at the most personal level: Living through something you do not fully understand

Sometimes I think we don’t use the words “I’m not sure” often enough. We have too much confidence, too much belief in our own choices and interpretations. We think ourselves to be above malice (‘it’s everyone else, never me’), above repression (‘I like differences, in theory’), to be generous and peace-loving (‘I avoid conflict, it’s everyone else that invites it’), believing in what we want to believe in (‘I’m incapable of being unkind; war is necessary; my country does it right’).

When I was very very young, I went to a birthday party of a classmate (this was in Warsaw, Poland). It wasn’t a well planned event (American families put lots more effort into children’s parties) and so the kids got restless. Soon, the activity of choice was to search in the flower pots for bugs and to transfer them into the hair of Fela Fastman. Why pick on Fela Fastman? Why indeed. Many many years later, it was suggested to me that she was often made fun of because she was different. She was Jewish.

In high school, I had a close friend named Malgosia. She and I recently found each other through email. She writes this about her last high school weeks (roughly translated): Do you remember our end-of-year prizes? How the teachers gave me mine and Felek his behind the scenes? How the principal would not recognize us publicly because we were Jewish?

I did not remember. In fact, I had not even known that Felek was Jewish. Malgosia said that she hadn’t known either until that last day of school.

In the turbulent political climate of the late 60s, I joined ZMS, which was the Union of Socialist Youth. Among liberal Poles, I later found out, it was considered a repressive organization, parroting the party line, avoiding all the difficult questions. I did not know that when I joined. I thought it to be full of energetic idealists, the doers, the movers, the ones that wanted to work together to accomplish worthy goals. I un-joined later.

One spring, I walked home from high school (in Warsaw) by way of the School of Engineering. I’d heard there were students out in the streets, marching in protest against recent government decisions. I knew by then that the students were on the side of reason. I knew. As I got closer, I noticed that it was no longer a peaceful march. I did not know that my very presence there put me in danger and so I did not see the police running toward me, I did not anticipate being repeatedly clubbed and beaten by them (so much so that I needed a hospital visit).

Not to know, not to see, to live in political and personal ignorance, not to engage in questioning, to accept as hard facts what you’re told by friends, politicians, those around you. To hang on to your own implacable vision of the world as if it could never be improved on. Or changed.

Adam Michnik, perhaps the most influential former Polish dissident, wrote an impassioned article in the New Yorker a few years back questioning the complicity of Poles in the anti-Semitism that has haunted the country for many decades. The occasion for this was the publication of a book by Jan Gross that detailed the massacre of fifteen hundred Jews in Jedwabne during WWII, not, as was originally believed, by the Nazis, but by the Poles living in this northeastern corner of Poland. Many Poles found the accusations to be slanderous and reprehensible. (For more info on this, see this website.) But the evidence is compelling.

In the article, Michnik implored everyone living in the 50s, 60s and 70s in Poland to look back and accept responsibility at the very least for the ignorance that was ours during this period – ignorance about our present and about our past.

It seems so much of this still has application, here, everywhere. Because we still live as if we know, even though we know and understand little. We act as though we are moral and just whereas oftentimes we’re neither. We don’t waffle, we don’t admit to errors, we don’t search out new evidence. And we don’t accept responsibility for our ignorance. We don’t even recognize it as such.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. It’s been weighing on me.