Poland’s Jewish community, the biggest in Europe before World War II, was virtually obliterated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. As if to rub salt into the wound, the Communist government, in 1967, launched an antisemitic campaign under the thinly-veiled guise of anti-Zionism, prompting many of the remaining Jews to emigrate.
Since the advent of democracy in Poland, a new and self-confident Jewish community has arisen, composed in large part of Holocaust survivors, Poles of Jewish or partial Jewish ancestry who have come out of the closet and embraced their Jewishness, and their descendants.
Poland’s emerging new Jewish community reminds Poles that Jews once played an important role in Polish society. As Poland’s consul general in Toronto, Grzegorz Morawski, put it recently, “The Jewish presence in Poland left a lasting imprint.”
Francine Zuckerman, a Toronto filmmaker whose father left Poland in 1939 to immigrate to Canada, has made a heart-felt documentary about this small but growing community.
We Are Here will be screened at the Royal Cinema in Toronto on Dec. 3 at 7 p.m. and again on the Documentary television channel on Dec. 9 at 9 p.m.
Six years in the making, We Are Here focuses on five Jews who have built or are building their lives in a nation where three million Jews, or 90 percent of Poland`s pre-war Jewish population, perished within the short span of six years.
Speaking minutes before its world premiere at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema on Oct. 1 — an event co-sponsored by the consulate general of Poland and the Polish Jewish Heritage Foundation — she acknowledged that Poland summoned up negative connotations of antisemitism in her family.
Her mother, who had “bad memories” of the country, was less than pleased that she was planning a trip there. And as far as Zuckerman was concerned, Poland was an “unwelcome place” that was little more than a vast Jewish cemetery.
We Are Here, which unfolds mainly through interviews, is sad yet uplifting. On the one hand, the legacy of death is omnipresent in modern Poland. On the other hand, hope is in the air now that Poland has moved away from totalitarianism and is honestly coming to terms with the past.
Zuckerman distills the essence of this duality in her balanced and poignant film.
Her subjects range from a spirited old man who survived the Holocaust thanks to righteous Poles to an animated young dancer and teacher who represents the face of young Jews in contemporary Poland.
Henryk Prajs, 97, is the last of two Jews in the town of Gora Kalwaria, which had a thriving Jewish community prior to 1939. He lost his entire family during the Holocaust, including siblings who were murdered in Treblinka. He went into hiding, saved by a Polish woman who made him pledge he would marry one of her daughters, and by a priest who provided him with false papers that identified him as a Catholic.
After the war, he decided to settle in Israel, but scuttled the plan after being reminded of his promise. “I took the youngest and prettiest and we got married,” he says with a smile.
Ruddy in complexion, clear eyed and in reasonably good shape for a person of his advanced age, Prajs loves his family, which treats him with tenderness and respect.
Occasionally, he utters a few phrases in Yiddish or breaks into a sentimental Yiddish song redolent of pre-war Polish Jewry.
Irena Likierman, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, distanced herself from her Jewish background for decades before returning to the fold following the collapse of communism in 1989. Saved by a Polish railway worker who was beguiled by her blue eyes, she developed negative views of Jews and never even bothered to inform her son that he was Jewish, a decision she now regrets.
Although Likierman is no longer a self-hating Jew, she does not want to be reminded of the Holocaust. The pain is too deep.
Leslaw Piszewski, a middle-aged man, came out of the closet twice, first as a Jew and then as a homosexual. Piszewski’s late father, whose wife was a devout Catholic, renounced his Jewish past and did not wish to discuss it. After the Communist era, much to his father’s chagrin, Leslaw was drawn to Judaism.
But he has no illusions. “There is a stigma attached to being a Jew in Poland,” he claims.
Larysa Merunowicz, whose Jewish mother rejected her heritage, only found out she was Jewish when she was already in her 40s. When she told her friends, they abandoned her. She is proud of being Jewish, likening it to “a great gift.”
Ania Ciszeska, whose great grandmother was Jewish, feels connected to both her Jewish and Catholic identities. But she confesses that her quest to delve into the submerged Jewish side of her identity caused a crisis in her family.
Having visited Israel as a participant in the Birthright program, she seems completely at ease with her Jewish roots. So much so that her face is emblazoned on a huge poster in downtown Warsaw advertising the Jewish presence in the city.
No one knows what the future holds in store for Poland’s resurrected Jewish community, a pale imitation of its pre-war self. But judging by We are Here, conditions in Poland are better for Jews than they have been for many decades.