"I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack or a Jew in Poland." The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

When I read this sentence to my students, their faces immediately became somber. Needless to say, after the atrocities of World War II, few Jews remain in Poland. To break it down, quite broadly:

-Something like 6 million Jews died during World War II.
-About half of these Jews were living in Poland.
-Around 20,000 Jews left Poland during the events in 1968, when the Communist Party was divided and different factions used anti-semitism as a tool to garner public support. (A very brief simplification of what was going on at this time.)
-In the 2002 Census, the Polish government estimated only 1,100 Jews still living in Poland. BUT, the question was poorly worded, and being „Jewish” is a difficult thing to define and categorize. In addition, after World War II and the purge in the late '60s, many Jews prefer to keep their heritage on the down low. And obviously, being Jewish does not preclude being Polish. At any rate, other studies have estimated between 6,000 – 15,000 Jews still living in Poland.

Most of Poland's Jewish population is concentrated in large cities; Jews have virtually disappeared from the countryside. However, the signs of their presence have not been completely eradicated. If you look closely in small towns where large Jewish populations previously resided, you'll find half-forgotten clues.

The eastern Polish town of Narewka was home to a population that was 90% Jewish before World War II. After the war, the Jewish cementery was used as a dumping ground for nearly fifty years, before a local organization decided to clean it up and use it for public education about the cultural heritage of the town. They found that some townspeople had taken the tombstones to use as building material or as blocks to whet their axes and scythes.

The synagogue and the old Jewish school were destroyed and replaced by private residences. But on the street where both buildings used to be, you can see two address plaques on one of the houses. The current address is „4 Ogrodowa,” but on the left, „4 Szkolne”—„4 School.” On the same street, I came across a house with a porch with a rounded roof—typically Jewish—but now the roof has a small cross on it.

Białowieża, about 15 kilometers away from Narewka, is a popular tourist destination due to its access to the Białowieża National Park. Here too, you can spot the old Jewish houses. Generally, the more costly brick houses belonged to Jews, because they ran the shops and often had more liquid assets on hand. Also, most non-Jewish Poles (usually of the Orthodox or Catholic persuasion) worked in the timber industry and could purchase wood for their houses at lower cost. The entrances to the Jewish houses tend to face the street, rather than the side, because these were store fronts, with their living quarters in the back.

Last night, I finished Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernieres. Speaking about the Treaty of Lausanne, in which the Christian Turks who speak no Greek were forced to move to Greece, and the Greek Muslims who speak no Turkish were forced to move to Turkey, Bernieres writes, „The criteria are explicitly religious rather than ethnic, and in the interests of preventing future strife it looks like a good idea, until one takes into account the innocent people concerned.” These forced returns to their respective „homelands” followed a decade of war, in which Christians/Greeks and Muslims/Turks took turns slaughtering each other as savagely as possible.

Maybe the connection between the Holocaust in Poland and the results of the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence in Turkey might seem feeble to you, but the brutality and the dehumanization in both events, and the subsequent removal of entire populations of ethnic and religious minorities really strike a chord in me. Upon his watery death, the character Georgio P. Theodorou spends quite a bit of time ranting (quite beautifully) at not only the leaders of various nations who have caused all this turmoil and destruction, but the people who followed them. All that is left of the Christian „Greeks” in Eskibahçe (the main setting of the novel) are the churches, the ancient Lycian tombs, and the sculptures, all of which the new imam goes through the trouble of having vandalized.

Bernieres ends the novel with a glimpse into present day Fethiye, Turkey, with descriptions of its markets, its people, its tourists: the epitome of the modern, globalized city. He writes, „The truly anomalous and remarkable thing about Fethiye, its market and the region of Lycia, is that there are no Greeks.”

I would say the same about the absence of Jews in rural Poland.