Two 'Must-See' Warsaw Museums

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Warsaw, Poland's capital city, is truly a phoenix.

It was almost totally destroyed in the Second World War while under Nazi German occupation, which was followed by almost five decades of Soviet-imposed dreary Communist rule.

Since the fall of Communism, Warsaw has risen from the ashes to become a vibrant, modern, efficient, clean, and beautiful city.
And I must emphasize that point: Warsaw is indeed beautiful.

But no one can, or should, forget the horrors it endured in the 20th century. For a visitor, these can be experienced at two "must-see" venues, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the Warsaw Uprising Museum.

They provide a window into the unimaginable suffering here, one that included the deaths of  hundreds of thousands of people.

Both venues are fairly recent additions to an already rich mix of museums, memorials, and other testaments to Warsaw's complex and often tragic history.

The Polin Museum opened in 2013, the one on the 1944 Warsaw uprising on the 60th anniversary of that battle against the Nazi occupiers.

The state-of-the-art Polin Museum chronicles the history and diversity of Jewish culture during that community's 1,000-year history in Poland, which basically ended in the Holocaust.

Situated where the Nazi-imposed Jewish ghetto stood during the Second World War, this excellent museum comprises eight galleries.

Highlights include a beautiful replica of a wooden synagogue ceiling, books produced by Jewish printers 400 years ago, and a replica of Zamenhofa Street in the heart of the Jewish district of Muranow. This was a typical Jewish street in Warsaw between the two world wars.

Polin introducers visitors to antique objects, paintings, imnteractive installations, reconstructions and video presentations.The museaum also features temporary exhibitions, concerts, debates, films, lectures, and workshops.

On the grounds there is a statue of Jan Karski, the Polish envoy who in 1942 told the world about the ongoing Nazi effort to kill all of Europe's Jews.

Nearby one finds the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, unveiled in 1948.

Of Poland's prewar population of some 3 1/2 million Jews, only some 300,000 survived the war, most of them by having fled into the Soviet Union before 1941.

The Museum of the 1944 Warsaw uprising is also quite an experience. It presents the heroism of the Polish Underground State and its Home Army (Armia Krajowa,or AK) in its attempt to liberate Warsaw.

The uprising began on Aug. 1, 1944 and lasted 63 days. It resulted in the complete destruction of 85 per cent of Warsaw and the death of at least 170,000 of its people.

The museum is a tribute to those who died for the freedom of Poland and its capital. Packed with interactive displays, it chronicles the heroics and tragic ending of one of the war's most seminal events.

Exhibits include a full-size B-24 Liberator  airplane, like those which were dropping American supplies to the insurgents, and replicas of the sewers where AK soldiers evaded Nazi gunfire while moving through the city.

Included is a 3-D film, The City of Ruins, which takes you on an aerial journey over devastated Warsaw, showing what the city looked like when finally liberated from the Germans in 1945. It had been almost obliterated.

The museum also helps visitors understand the complicated international situation at the time, one which made it difficult for the western Allies to provide more aid.

It describes in particular the duplicitous behaviour of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, whose Red Army stood across the Vistula River from Warsaw but did not help those trying to liberate the city from the Nazis.

Anyone interested in what happened in Poland during the war should, at the least, visit these two museums.

Songs Trace Decline of Calfiornia's Youth Culture

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In summer, many thoughts turn to beaches and the quintessential American state with which they have long been identified – California.

Is it possible to trace the decline of the California youth culture through a closer look at three seminal songs by California rock groups?

I’m thinking of the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, and the Eagles, all in their time massively successful musicians. They exemplified the genre, itself influenced by, and in some ways a synthesis of, African American gospel and blues. and white country and folk music.

The songs are the Beach Boys hit “California Girls,” “California Dreaming,” by the Mamas & Papas, both released in 1965, and “Hotel California,” the 1976 triumph by the Eagles. Those in my age group grew up with these songs and many others like them.

When Brian Wilson wrote the pop song “California Girls,” with its sunny, upbeat (and by today’s standards, sexist), lyrics -- “The West coast has the sunshine and the girls all get so tanned” -- it came to define the promise of mid-sixties Los Angeles as the centre of American glamour and youth. (The Beatles did a humorous take on “California Girls” in their 1968 recording “Back in the U.S.S.R.”)

Hollywood was producing beach and surfing movies for appreciative teenage audiences. It was all about fast cars, surfboards, and innocence.

“California Dreaming,” though released at about the same time, was already influenced by the burgeoning counterculture. A blend of sixties pop and the folk music that had surged in popularity early in the decade, it sounds wistful and melancholy.

The civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam had made young people aware that all was not well, even in sunny California.

The “myth” of Southern California had now become a somewhat unattainable dream. As Denny Doherty, himself of course a Haligonian, laments, he’s just “California dreamin’ on such a winter’s day.” 

Eleven years later, with “Hotel California,” the Eagles have descended into a narcissistic world of drugs, lust, hedonistic excess, and nihilism. “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device,” Don Henley is told.

In the end, many want to escape, but there is no going back once you have joined the party at the Hotel California. As the last stanza warns Henley, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!”

Don Felder, the guitarist for the Eagles who wrote the tune for “Hotel California,” has said the song was inspired by driving into Los Angeles filled with high expectations that later proved disappointing. The Golden State was no longer so golden.

In a Nov. 25, 2007 interview on the CBS show 60 Minutes, Henley called it “a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream.”

By 1976 the United States had gone through many traumas: the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the disaster of Vietnam, and the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal.

Though the turmoil of the 1960s had dissipated, the downward trajectory was nearly complete, and America would soon be entering the 1980s and the Age of Reagan.

The Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump were about to appear over the horizon. The age of innocence, if ever it existed, was long gone.

In Poland, A Return to the Past

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

I’m writing this from Czestochowa, Poland, where I was born 72 years ago.

The city is best known for the Jasna Gora monastery. Visited by around four million pilgrims per year, it is a shrine to the Virgin Mary.

The cloister houses the Black Madonna, one of the holiest icons of the Catholic Church.

My parents, native to the city, had been freed from a Nazi labour camp by the Red Army in January 1945. We all left Poland in 1946, and I’ve only been back once, 40 years ago.

Back then it was a Communist country and tourism was not high on its list of priorities. It was hard to even obtain information about its past history, including the Holocaust, in which some 90 per cent of the Jewish population was murdered by the occupiers.

Things are different now, and historical sites are well marked, tourist guides are everywhere, and the history of its once major Jewish community is recognized and even celebrated.

Czestochowa was an important centre of Jewish activity before the Second World War, and the community prospered.

All this changed on Sept. 3, 1939, when German troops occupied the city. At the time Czestochowa numbered 29,000 Jewish residents, out of 138,000 people. Soon enough persecution of the Jewish population began.

In August of 1941, the overcrowded Jewish ghetto was hermetically sealed off from the rest of Czestochowa. In 1942, more than 20,000 people were forcibly transferred from neighbouring towns, raising the Jewish population to over 50,000, which turned Czestochowa into the third largest ghetto in conquered Poland after Warsaw and Lodz.

Between Sept. 22 and Oct. 7^th, 1942, most of the city’s Jews were packed into trains and sent to their deaths to the Treblinka death camp.

By 1943 only 3,990 Jews (including my parents) were still alive, all of them working in the HASAG-Pelcery munitions factory as slave labourers.

When the Red Army liberated Czestochowa on Jan. 17, 1945 some 1,500 Jews from Czestochowa remained alive in HASAG.

In Czestochowa, where in 1977 it was almost impossible to even locate the Jewish cemetery, there is now a Jewish Museum, opened last year, on Ulica Katedraina.

It spans three centuries of Jewish contributions to all aspects of life in the city, with particular emphasis on the 20th century.

It also serves as a venue for various events, including academic conferences and reunions of descendants of Czestochower Jews visiting the city.

The Jewish Social Club (TSKZ), a community hub, is located at Ulica Generala Jana Henryka Dabrowskiego.

As for the Jewish cemetery, it now includes memorials at the mass graves of Jews killed during the 1943 uprising by the Jewish Combat Organization. My mother’s two brothers were shot by the SS at that time.

We walked around the area that served as the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. Among the monuments located there is the Umschlagplatz Memorial on Ulica Strazacka, unveiled in 2009. This was the place, near the Warta train station, from where Jews were sent to their deaths at Treblinka.

The brick monument resembles a ghetto wall on which a large Star of David is mounted.and is situated in the spot where daily round-ups and deportations took place.

It was designed by the Czestochowa-born artist Samuel Willenberg, one of the last survivors of the 1943 uprising in Treblinka.

At Bohaterow Getta Square, a plaque recalls the members of the Jewish Combat Organization who died fighting the Germans. Ulica Kawia, the site of mass executions of Jews, also has various plaques commemorating some 4,000 murdered victims.

The ruins of HASAG-Pelcery still stand, a massive brick and mortar compound on Ulica Filmatow 30-32. A plaque, in English, Hebrew, and Polish, was placed on an outer wall in 2009 “In memory of the Jews who suffered and died in the German forced labor camp in the Hasag-Pelcery ammunition factory 1942-1945.”

Today it looks like a nondescript old building; a packaging supply distributor occupies part of the site.

We also visited the site of Dr. Filip Axer's Jewish Gimnazjum, a private Jewish high school on Ulica Ferdynanda Focha, which my mother attended as a child (she used to tell me she was the prettiest girl in her class!).

And we went to Warsawska 13, where my parents had lived before the Nazis, and Aleja Wolnosci 19, where they were housed in 1945-46, after their liberation (along with me, born after the war).

The Czestochowa Museum, located in the old city hall on Aleja Najswietszej Maryi Panny, documents the city’s heritage, and contains a large collection of paintings of Polish artists. It also, of course, includes some of the city’s Jewish history.

Has Qatar Overplayed Its Hand?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The little Persian Gulf state of Qatar, with just over 300,000 citizens, has been described as punching above its weight.

It has sought to parlay the financial muscle it derives from its enormous oil and natural gas reserves into a diplomatic status otherwise undeserved by its size.

But has it now become collateral damage in the escalating and complex conflicts in the Middle East?

Citing Qatar’s support of “terrorists,” three of the emirate’s partners in the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, broke off diplomatic relations on June 5. So did Egypt, Yemen and the Maldives.

They imposed a land and air blockade that left the small nation with only a single access route for essential supplies.

On June 22, they issued a 13-point list of demands as a prerequisite to lifting the sanctions, including the shutdown of the news network Al Jazeera, which they accuse of being a platform for extremists and an agent of interference in their affairs. Qatar rejected all of the demands.

Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, Qatar has supported anti-government movements, both secular and Islamist, with diplomatic support, money, and sometimes weapons. It is among the most active backers of Islamist fighters in Syria and Libya

In particular, the current issue revolves around Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch in Gaza, Hamas.

Qataris were ecstatic when Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt in 2012 – something the man who overthrew him, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has not forgotten.

To Saudi Arabia, though, the uprisings imperiled both the regional order and, potentially, its own rule; populist Islamist movements had long challenged it at home.

Qatar’s ambassador to Gaza, Mohammed al-Emadi, has pledged continued support to the coastal enclave. “Despite the crisis in Qatar, we will continue to support you,” he promised Gazans on June 9.

Over the past five years, Qatar has already pledged $1.4 billion worth of reconstruction money which has been going to hospitals, housing units, and upgrading roads to housing projects.

Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani maintains that Hamas is a legitimate resistance movement. “We do not support Hamas, we support the Palestinian people,” he asserted during an interview June 10.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir three days earlier had insisted that Qatar end its support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood before ties with other Gulf Arab states could be restored.

Jubeir added that Qatar was undermining the Palestinian Authority and Egypt in its support of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Qatar has also maintained cordial relations with its Iranian neighbour, partly because the two countries share a giant offshore gas field in the Persian Gulf.

The Saudis now view Iran as an existential threat and have stated that they want to block Iran before it can gain yet more strength in the Middle East. They consider the emirate too friendly with Iran.

So, from their perspective, it is time for Qatar to choose where it stands with regard to both Iran and the Islamists.

Washington has an interest in seeing this issue resolved, because more than 11,000 American and coalition forces are stationed at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. 

It is the largest U.S. military facility in the Middle East, from which U.S.-led coalition aircraft stage sorties against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Refugee Issue Roils Polish Politics

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

U.S. President Donald Trump visited Poland in early July, stressing the country’s importance as a loyal NATO ally.

“Poland will always prevail,” he said, praising the courage and spirit of the Polish people in a major speech at Warsaw’s Krasinski Square on July 6. 

The backdrop to his address was the memorial to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 against Nazi Germany. It resulted in more than 200,000 Polish deaths and the destruction of much of the city.

Poland is among the five NATO members that spend at least two per cent of their gross domestic product on the military. It also hosts a contingent of about 900 U.S. troops, and has for many years contributed to U.S. and NATO missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

It is now acquiring a new American missile system for its defence. After all, it still shares a small border in the northeast with its historic enemy, Russia.

Trump also met leaders of the 11 other European Union member countries attending the Three Seas Conference. It is intended to serve as a counterweight to Franco-German dominance in European politics.

The country is doing very well. With a population of nearly 40 million, Poland’s half-trillion-dollar economy is already the world’s 24th largest. Exports continue to boom and the trade balance is in surplus. 

Poland has been ruled since October 2015 by the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, or PiS). It won 37.6 per cent of the vote in elections to the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, good for 235 of its 460 seats. 

Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski, twin brothers, founded the party in 2001. Lech died in a plane crash in Russia in 2010, while president of the country. 

Jaroslaw is currently the party’s chair, though not formally part of the government. He served for a little over a year as prime minister in 2006-2007 during his brother’s presidency.

The right-wing PiS pursues a nationalist agenda and is more skeptical than its liberal Civic Platform predecessor about the EU, which Poland joined in 2004. 

Poland is a classical nation state; almost 97 per cent of its 38.6 million people are ethnic Polish-speaking Catholics, and they want to keep it that way.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, on June 13 initiated legal action against Poland for failing to comply with an order to take in thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The dispute dates back to September 2015, when, at the height of Europe’s migration crisis, EU member states voted to relocate 160,000 refugees already in Italy and Greece to other parts of the bloc. 

Nine countries in Central and Eastern Europe were ordered to take in around 15,000 migrants. But several refused. Poland was given a quota of 6,182 migrants, not one of whom has been admitted.

Opposition to the EU demand was one of the issues the PiS campaigned on during the October 2015 electoral campaign.

Poland’s PiS prime minister, Beata Szydlo, recently declared that her country would not be “blackmailed" by EU officials. 

“We are not going to take part in the madness of the Brussels elite,” she told parliament on May 24. “If you cannot see that terrorism currently has the potential to hurt every country in Europe, and you think that Poland should not defend itself, you are going hand in hand with those who point this weapon against Europe, against all of us.”

A few days earlier, Jaroslaw Kaczynski blamed German Chancellor Angela Merkel for causing the bloc’s migration problems, and insisted that Germany bear the consequences, not Poland.

President Andrzej Duda, who is now officially an independent, but came up through the rank of the PiS, said on June 8 that he supports holding a referendum asking Poles if they want to accept refugees, but not until 2019, and only if migration is still a “problem” then.

The current Polish government doesn’t agree “with a mandatory redistribution of refugees to Poland,” he told reporters.

The public certainly supports this position. Some 70 per cent want to stop all migration from Muslim countries; and 40 per cent say they would prefer financial penalties to accepting the refugee quota. 

The quarrel allows the Polish government to further its narrative that this is part of a broader effort by the EU to impinge on Poland’s “sovereign right to control its own borders, cultural identity and security,” argues Daniel Tilles, an assistant professor of history at the Pedagogical University of Krakow. It hurts the EU “for no benefit whatsoever.”

Guantanamo Remains Politically Sensitive Enclave

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI Guardian

Just like islands, enclaves can be useful for countries wishing to house undesirables away from their own shores.

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Think of the notorious Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, which served as a penal colony, or Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay, the site for a prison.

The most famous site used for that purpose today is the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, an enclave located on 120 square kilometres at the southeastern edge of Cuba.

The prison made news in Canada on July 4 when it was disclosed that Omar Khadr, who had been imprisoned there for 10 years after being found guilty in the death of an American soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002, received $10.5 million from Ottawa for the violation of his Charter rights by Canadian officials.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision on June 16 to revoke much of his predecessor’s policies relaxing the restrictive American regulations towards the island has also drawn attention to Guantanamo in the United States.

Long before the base began to be used as a detention centre for terrorists, it has been a source of contention between Cuba and the U.S.

Until 1898, Cuba had belonged to Spain; as the Spanish empire diminished, Cubans fought for their independence. The U.S. joined in to help its neighbor and, when the Spanish-American War ended Spain gave the U.S. control of Cuba

Three years later, Cuba became an independent nation, but with a catch. The new Cuban government was required to lease or sell certain territory to the United States.

By a treaty known as the Platt Amendment, signed in 1903 and reaffirmed in 1934, Cuba granted the U.S. “complete jurisdiction and control” over Guantanamo through a perpetual lease that can be voided only by mutual agreement.

When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, he threatened to unilaterally abrogate the treaty, and made it clear he considered the base unlawfully occupied territory. But he feared that Washington would attack and depose him if he followed through.

Havana would continue to regard the presence of an American base on its territory as illegitimate and made that clear - in 1964, for example, Castro cut off the water supply and power grid to the base, forcing the U.S. Navy to build its own water and power plants.

The issues surrounding the base took on a whole new level of intensity following the attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.

The decision to ship al-Qaeda detainees to Guantanamo was reached in 2002, in order to circumvent questions about their status, which would have come up had they been incarcerated on U.S. soil.

The Bush administration detained almost 800 “enemy combatants” in a territory that was under American control but ostensibly beyond the reach of constitutional protections. The legal status of these prisoners, mostly held in the Camp Delta detainment facility, was a source of international condemnation.

Even with the thaw in relations with Cuba after 2014, including the restoration of diplomatic relations and Obama’s visit last year, the base has remained in American hands. Of the 242 captives in Guantanamo when Obama took office, it still houses 41 prisoners.

On Jan. 22, 2009, two days after he became president, Barack Obama issued an executive order designed to “promptly close detention facilities at Guantanamo,” to take place no less than a year from that date. But it never happened. It certainly won’t under Trump.

Post-British Hong Kong at Twenty

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

When Britain handed the prosperous colony of Hong Kong back to China 20 years ago, after 156 years of rule, most people assumed that Beijing wouldn’t want to do anything to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Much of the talk then was of convergence. Hong Kong boasted a freewheeling capitalist system underpinned by an independent judiciary, a largely free press and basic individual rights. 

China, meanwhile, was still a nominally communist dictatorship. Wouldn’t Hong Kong’s freedoms prove irresistible to mainland Chinese?

But Chris Patten, the last governor, knew better. “History is littered with the carcasses of decapitated geese,” he remarked.

In authoritarian states, politics always trumps economics, and control counts for more than success.

The Beijing government, despite having agreed to a fifty-year period of “one country, two systems,” appears to be bearing down hard on Hong Kong. Its status as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) seems less and less of a political safeguard.

In turn, many of the 7.4 million islanders have begun to speak of a distinct Hong Kong identity, as though it had some sort of previous existence.

But that’s not true. Hong Kong was a colony with no pre-colonial past, a purely British invention and creation, following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars. 

Nonetheless, they persist, as a way of trying to preserve their political liberties.They link the awakening cultural identity of Hong Kong to the freedoms, civil liberties, rule of law, and democratic practices that are enshrined in its Basic Law, which was drafted in 1984. 

They champion local identity and values against a perceived “mainlandization” of Hong Kong, defending its autonomy against socio-economic integration with China. 

A survey by the University of Hong Kong Public Opinion Program found only three per cent of residents ages 18 to 29 identified as “Chinese,” while two-thirds now give “Hong Konger” as their identity.

Many look longingly to another island, Singapore, a Chinese-dominated part of a former British colony that had successfully established its independence as a city-state from Britain’s successor, Malaysia.

But the Muslim Malays of that country were glad to see the Christian and Confucian Chinese go; Beijing, on the other hand, considers the Hong Kong Chinese simply part of the Han-majority state, one that was intent on regaining territories lost to European powers, and the Japanese, during its centuries of weakness and humiliation.

Hong Kong does chafe under China’s increased pressure. There have been mass protests since the autumn of 2014, when the so-called Umbrella Movement captured international attention by occupying sections of the city for weeks, in opposition to the growing influence of Beijing.

The movement distinguished local culture, language, and experiences from the culture of the mainland Chinese. Most people speak Cantonese, while the official dialect on the mainland is Mandarin.

In March, a new chief executive for the territory, Carrie Lam, was chosen by a selection committee dominated by allies of Beijing. They also have a majority in the legislature because half the 70 seats are selected by interest groups mostly loyal to the mainland government. 

But the other half is elected, and lawmakers who favor greater democracy have won a majority of those seats. 

In recent months two young elected members of the Hong Kong legislature, Yau Wai-ching and Baggio Leung, have been refused permission by Beijing to take their seats because they appealed to a separate Hong Kong identity and called for a greater degree of autonomy if not outright independence for Hong Kong. 

Yet the Chinese economic and political juggernaut has, if anything, gained strength. Mainland companies are challenging the local capitalists. Last year, more than half of all companies listed on Hong Kong’s two stock exchanges were entities from the mainland.

For residents who have watched Beijing increasingly interfere in Hong Kong’s political affairs, the activities of mainland companies seem like an ominous sign. 

During local legislative elections last fall, major Chinese state-owned enterprises pressured their employees in Hong Kong to vote for pro-Beijing candidates.

Actually, China doesn’t need Hong Kong as much as it used to. Its twentieth century role as the entrepot, or connector, between China and the West has long since vanished, as foreign firms are able to base offices in China and sell directly to Chinese consumers. 

On July 1, President Xi Jinping of China visited the city and, despite protests, cautioned that “making everything political or deliberately creating differences” will “severely hinder Hong Kong’s economic and social development.”

Trip to Poland is "Back to the Future"

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian 

Later this month we will be travelling to Poland. It remains one of the most religious countries in Europe. There are Catholic shrines everywhere, and main streets and airports are name for the late John Paul II, the Polish pope.

I was born in the city of Czestochowa, site of a well-known Catholic pilgrimage site, the Jasna Gora Monastery, with its famed icon of the Black Madonna. It was July of 1945. 

Czestochowa had beoame one of the most industrialized cities in newly independent Poland after the First World War. In 1925, 136 factories including 17 big textile plants operated in the city.

 

When the German Army arrived on Sept. 3, 1939, Jews comprised approximately one-fifth of a population of 138,000. By the end of the War, fewer than 5,000 survived.

My parents, native Jewish Czestochowers, were married in 1942, in the Czestochowa ghetto; the rabbi who married them was shot later that same day.

Though they lost their entire families in the Holocaust, they survived, after becoming prisoners in the Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft (HASAG)-Pelcery slave labour camp in Czestochowa, established by the Nazis in what had been a textile factory.

It became a massive munitions plant that, ironically, produced small arms for the Nazis, until its prisoners were liberated by the Russians in mid-January1945. 

My mother was by then three months pregnant. I often wondered how that happened, since I was conceived in October 1944, but never asked. I only found out when listening to a tape recording she made in 1995 for the Shoah Foundation.

Even the married people in the camp lived in separate barracks. However, the women’s barrack that my mother slept in was so full of bedbugs and lice that the German taskmasters allowed the married women to go to their husbands for one night while the building was disinfected. 

It was, she said, the only time before the liberation that they slept together. Had the Red Army tarried by just a few weeks, her pregnancy would have become evident, and she would have been immediately killed, especially as the SS itself took over HASAG from its civilian administration in December 1944. 

My parents, with me in tow, led Poland as soon as they could and we spent two years in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany before coming to Canada in 1948.

I’ve only been back to Poland once, in 1977, when it was a Communist state, and I visited, apart from Czestochowa, the Auschwitz death camp, Lodz, and Warsaw.

Back then it was, for a Jewish visitor, a virtual wilderness. There were no tourist brochures or guidebooks, and information about the Holocaust was almost non-existent. In Czestochowa, no one even knew where the old Jewish cemetery was located – though I eventually found it.

Upon my return, I wrote a series of very pessimistic articles for a newspaper about the remnants of Jewish life in Poland, with titles like “1,000 Years of Jewish History Face Pitiful End” and “Polish Jewry in Final Death Throes.”

But no one can predict the future. The end of Communist rule in Poland after 1989 has seen the re-emergence of a vibrant Jewish life in the country. 

It is, of course, nothing like the pre-1939 community, when more than three million Jews lived in the country. Today only some 20,000 Jews call Poland home.

Still, there are now functioning synagogues with rabbis, an annual Jewish Cultural Festival in the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz in Kracow, Warsaw’s amazing Museum of the History of Polish Jews, with a core exhibition comprises eight galleries, covering 43,000 square feet, and there are even tours of Jewish sites in Czestochowa. 

Czestochowa today has a population of more than 231,000; fewer than 50 self-identify as Jewish.

Is the Saudi Succession Shift Really Such a Royal Surprise?

Mohammed bin Salman, newly appointed as crown prince, left, kisses the hand of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef at royal palace in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. (AP) 

By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, N.S.] Chronicle Herald

The sudden decision on June 21 by the aging King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia to name his 31-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman as the new crown prince — as well as deputy prime minister — came as a surprise.

Maybe it shouldn’t be.

The newly-minted dauphin replaces 57-year-old Mohammed bin Nayef, the king’s nephew.

The king-in-waiting also continues in his role as defence minister.

This must be seen in the context of the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, in particular the bitter rivalry between the Saudis and Iran, the two major pillars of Sunni and Shiite Islam, respectively.

The ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, Hezbollah’s tightening grip on Lebanon and the ostracism of the Gulf state of Qatar all form the backdrop to the move.

The Saudis fear they are losing leverage to their rivals in Tehran.

The Saudis have waged a costly yet inconclusive military campaign against Shiite Houth rebels in Yemen who are allied with Iran — despite bombing campaigns that have led to a huge loss of life and mass starvation and disease.

The new crown prince is one of the key movers behind Qatar’s isolation.

On June 5, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain all severed diplomatic relations with Qatar — accusing it of supporting terrorism.

They cut air, sea and land links with Qatar.

The crown prince maintains that dialog with Iran is “impossible” because Iran’s goal is “to control the Islamic world.”

He has vowed to take the battle to that country.

The Iranians have also escalated the war of words.

The Mehr news agency has contended that Mohammed bin Salman “is an extremist, arrogant, adventurous and hawkish prince who will undoubtedly take a new path to fulfill expansionist goals in the region.”

The Iranians also claim that the recent Islamic State terrorist attack on Iran’s parliament and on the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic — which left 17 dead — was orchestrated by Riyadh.

On June 13, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that Tehran has “intelligence that Saudi Arabia is actively engaged in promoting terrorist groups” along the country’s eastern and western borders.

Into this complicated mess stepped U.S. President Donald Trump, who is not bothered by Saudi Arabia’s lack of democracy or by its promotion of its austere Wahhabi form of Islam.

Trump has decided that the Saudis need to be supported at all costs against the Iranian threat.

On his recent visit to the kingdom, he backed up the Saudi government by announcing the sale of $110 billion worth of U.S. weaponry to Saudi Arabia’s military.

Saudi Arabia strenuously opposed the nuclear arms deal the U.S. struck with Iran.

Trump is also on record as opposing the nuclear deal, so these developments should confirm the improved working relationship between the Saudis and Washington.

Still, the amount of power the new crown prince has accrued has rankled some older members of the royal family. Some referred to the succession shift as a “soft coup.”

The decision by the 34-member Allegiance Council, which formally approves the choice of crown prince, to confirm the new succession was not unanimous. There were three negative votes. As well, Mohammed bin Nayef has been restricted to his palace and barred from leaving the kingdom.

Central European University's Future in Doubt

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

Victor Orban hates liberal western values and makes no secret of it. Of late, this has led to a major row with Michael Ignatieff, Canada’s former Liberal Party leader, and American financier George Soros.

The fate of the Central European University (CEU), located in Budapest, hangs in the balance and its future will depend on which side prevails.

Orban, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, is trying to shut down the school. It’s all part of a larger battle he’s waging against western institutions. He has also ordered a crackdown on foreign-funded non-governmental organisations, or NGOs.

A new law passed in June requires NGOs that receive more than $26,000-a-year from overseas to register with the authorities and to declare their “foreign status” online and in all press kits and publications.

Critics say the law is intended mainly to stifle independent points of view and to stigmatize as unpatriotic those groups that receive support from western philanthropists and foundations.

Orban has especially focused on those NGOs funded by the Open Society Foundations, the international grant-making network founded by the Hungarian-born Soros. He considers them a “mafia-style operation” with paid political activists who threaten national sovereignty. 

They “serve global capitalists and back political correctness over national governments,” remarked Szilard Németh, a vice-president of the ruling party Fidesz.

“In Hungary the national government is under continuous pressure and attacks,” Orban stated in April, so what is at stake “is whether we will have a parliament and government serving the interests of Hungarian people” or “foreign interests.” 

He called Soros an “American financial speculator attacking Hungary” who has “destroyed the lives of millions of Europeans.”

Soros in turn has denied he was trying to interfere in Hungarian politics. “He sought to frame his policies as a personal conflict between the two of us,” Soros said about Orban at the annual economic forum of the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, in June. 

Orban’s government has for years tried to gain control of the country’s institutions of higher education. It now appoints powerful chancellors and tries to shape what is taught. 

But the CEU remained beyond his reach. Founded in 1991, soon after Hungary emerged from decades of Communist rule, and financially supported by Soros, it operates mainly in English and concentrates on post-graduate education. 

Its focus has been global, with a special emphasis on democracy promotion and human rights around the world.

In 2016, Ignatieff became the university’s fifth president. He has a longstanding connection to Hungary, and his wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar, is Hungarian-born. 

“Dr. Ignatieff is a scholar and policy practitioner and as such is ideally suited to lead CEU in these challenging times,” remarked Soros at the time.

But the Hungarian government has accused the university of trying to undermine Hungary’s political culture. Fidesz has referred to the CEU as “Soros university,” and sees it as a bastion of liberalism and privilege. 

The university has an endowment of over 500 million euros (over $740 million), in a country where incomes are well below the European Union average.

In April the Hungarian parliament voted in favour of legislation which places tough restrictions on foreign-registered universities. It requires them to have a campus both in the capital and their home countries; the CEU only has a campus in Budapest and none in the United States.

Those working at the CEU will in future require work permits, which the institution says will limit its ability to hire staff.

Ignatieff and the university have secured the support of the European Union, which has launched legal action against Hungary over its new law, claiming that the bill violated fundamental EU values such as academic freedom. 

In May, a majority in the European Parliament voted for a resolution asking Hungary to repeal the law. As well, Isabelle Poupart, Canada’s ambassador in Budapest, said in a statement that Canada was “seriously concerned” about the new law.

But Hungary has not backed down. “The regulation of higher education is a member-state competency, not the EU’s,” responded Zoltan Kovacs, a Hungarian government spokesman.

 “All this seems like a co-ordinated attack not just on academic freedom but on freedom of association, and, finally, on democratic freedom,” contends Liviu Matei, provost of the CEU. For the first time in Europe since the Second World War, a university will have been closed for political reasons.

Pakistan's Blasphemy Laws Increasingly Dangerous

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Christian community in Pakistan earlier this year observed Easter by confining their celebrations to church premises and homes, amid tightened security. Over 70 people were killed in Lahore last year as a suicide bomber blew himself up on Easter Sunday.

Christians make up less than two per cent of Pakistan’s 190 million people, who are overwhelmingly Muslims. The majority of Christians are very poor. Many of them are converts from low caste Hindus, who embraced Christianity in the hope of better status, but most end up sweeping the streets and cleaning clogged up gutters.

Yet this community has been the object of attacks from intolerant extremists, in many cases making use of Pakistan’s stringent blasphemy laws. 

Recently, for example, Jacqueline Sultan, a Christian lawyer defending people charged with blasphemy and helping victims of forced conversion and marriage received a threatening letter warning that she would be killed if she did not stop her work.

The offences relating to religion were first codified by India’s British rulers in 1860, and were expanded in 1927. Pakistan inherited these laws when it came into existence after the partition of India in 1947.

Between 1980 and 1986, a number of clauses were added to the laws by the military government of General Zia-ul Haq, a devout Sunni Muslim.

They carry a potential death sentence for anyone who insults Islam. Even illiterate children have been charged.

Critics say they have been used to unfairly target minorities, and this is confirmed by data provided by National Commission for Justice and Peace, which has documented the charges against those who have been accused under various clauses of the laws since 1987.

Those accused of blasphemy may be subject to harassment, threats, and attacks. Over 60 people have been murdered before their respective trials were even over.

When Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, a prominent critic of the law, was assassinated by his bodyguard in 2011, Pakistan was divided, with some hailing his killer as a hero. 

A month after Salman Taseer was killed, Religious Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian who spoke out against the laws, was shot dead in Islamabad, underlining the threat faced by critics of the law. 

Of late, extremists have accused secular activists, bloggers, journalists and others of blasphemy. On April 13, Mashal Khan, a 26-year-old Muslim student, was shot and beaten to death by fellow students at Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan, who had accused him of blasphemy. 

It was apparently at the instigation of university authorities in retaliation for Khan criticizing official policies. Over 20 people were arrested, including a number of university employees.

There has been a greater level of sympathy for Mashal Khan than for other victims accused of blasphemy partly because the police made it clear there was no substance to the allegations against him.

Still, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif waited two days before issuing a strongly worded statement saying he was “shocked and saddened by the senseless display of mob justice.” 

A month earlier Sharif had called blasphemy “an unpardonable sin,” while the Federal Investigation Agency took out newspaper advertisements asking the public to inform them of anyone involved in blasphemous activities online.

Pakistanis also began receiving text messages from the government warning them against sharing or uploading “blasphemous” content online.

On June 10, a court sentenced Taimoor Raza, a Shiite man, to death for committing blasphemy. He was found guilty of making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad, his wives and others on Facebook and WhatsApp.

Raza confessed to being a member of a banned Shiite group, Sipah-e-Muhammad, which had been outlawed in 2001 along with the Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.