Spartacist Group Poland Protest Statement

Anti-Semitic Provocation in Warsaw

The following is translated from a February 2013 supplement of Platforma Spartakusowców, published by our comrades of the Spartakusowska Grupa Polski.

FEBRUARY 17—Many black-and-white posters portraying Adolf Hitler have been displayed on advertising columns in the center of Warsaw since at least late December. Hitler’s image was brought back to Warsaw as “art.” It is presented as an advertisement for Maurizio Cattelan’s “exhibition,” organized by the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, under the honorary patronage of the Italian Embassy and the City of Warsaw. A photo of Cattelan’s wax figure of Hitler kneeling that was made in 2001 was used for the poster. Hitler’s figure is “one of the major pieces” of the event and has been displayed since mid November at 14 Próżna Street, in a passage with a locked gate leading to the courtyard of a devastated prewar building in the former [Jewish] ghetto. The kneeling wax figure can be seen only from a distance, from behind, through a hole in the locked wooden gate. The figure has been described in the media as a “praying Hitler” supposedly asking for “forgiveness.” One can read that Cattelan’s installation was erected at the Próżna Street building as “an artistic commentary on the Catholic credo: what, in fact, does love your enemies mean?” (www.csw.art.pl, Maurizio Cattelan, AMEN).

Whatever the stated intentions of its creators, objectively the display of Hitler’s wax figure and its portraits in Warsaw are an anti-Semitic provocation, serving as an icebreaker for Nazi terror. A good answer to this media garbage was given by a passerby walking on Próżna Street, quoted by the Jerusalem Post (26 December 2012). She wondered: “‘Why did the artists decide to put a praying child here?’... When she heard that the ‘child’ was in fact Hitler, she said angrily: ‘Hitler did not have the right to ask for forgiveness’.”

Expressing typical Polish-nationalist insolence, the “exhibition” curator, Justyna Wesołowska, told a journalist from Jewish News One (a TV channel in Brussels, Belgium): “It is really rather funny. For me it’s very positive that locally we are receiving only positive reactions” (www.jn1.tv, 4 January). They ignored the fact that in 2010 in Milano, Italy, an earlier version of the same poster with a kneeling wax Hitler, ostensibly advertising Catellan’s exhibition, was banned. After days of debate, Milano’s town hall decided to stop the posters from being distributed. The Jewish community welcomed the decision to ban the posters. “The ad wounds our sensitivity and that of many people, overriding the sarcastic message of Hitler begging forgiveness,” said community leader Roberto Jarach (www.lagazzettadelmezzogiorno.it, 15 September 2010).

It is worth quoting a statement by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. It called the “intentional placement of the statue in the area in which tens of thousands of Jews were murdered and from which hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to their death by the Nazi regime headed by Hitler, a senseless provocation which insults the memory of the Nazis’ Jewish victims.” Moreover, the “installation is a manifestation of a total lack of sensitivity to Nazi crimes in Poland, and especially those committed against Polish Jews. As far as the Jews were concerned, Hitler’s only ‘prayer’ was that they be wiped off the face of the earth.... Thus a ‘praying’ Hitler purposely placed in the center of the area of the Warsaw Ghetto is a total distortion of the history of World War II and the Holocaust” (www.wiesenthal.com, 27 December 2012).

Another example of the insolence of Polish nationalists is a protest statement, posted on the right-wing Internet site wPolityce.pl (29 December 2012), which does not mention Jews at all! Titled “Taxpayer!... The Criminal Hitler Has Returned in Hundreds of Posters!”, this statement displays photos of the poster with Hitler, photos of some stone plaques commemorating mainly the fallen soldiers of the [Polish nationalist] Home Army (AK) and a plaque commemorating the fallen Catholic victims of a Nazi concentration camp. They also criticize “playing with ‘questions about the meaning of the Catholic credo’.” As if the Catholic church had not collaborated with the Nazis, they lament: “As if that German criminal [Hitler] had anything in common with the Christian faith, as if he had not persecuted priests, both in Germany and also, on a much wider scale, in Poland and other occupied countries. As if his crimes hadn’t come exactly from rejecting God, from the Germans perceiving themselves as supermen.” The authors of that statement prefer to keep silent on the priest Jozef Tiso, who headed the fascist regime loyal to Hitler in neighboring Slovakia. Or on the support that the fascist dictator of Croatia, Ante Pavelic, got from the Vatican and the local Catholic church. Or on the support that many top priests in Germany and the Vatican, etc. gave to Hitler’s crusade against godless “Jew-Communism,” as expressed for instance in the slogan on German army belt buckles: “Gott mit uns!” (God with us!).

In fact, there is one thing the whole political spectrum of right-wing groups, including those running the city and national government, have in common: they are all happy to see Poland cleared of Jews. As they came to power during the capitalist counterrevolution led by Solidarność in 1989-90, many of them espoused anti-Semitism, along with national chauvinism and anti-woman Catholic bigotry. The capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe and the USSR opened up a long period of reaction, with annual fascist veterans’ marches in Lvov, Riga, etc. In 1943, the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising looked to the Soviet Army as their potential liberator, and some participants looked to the socialist revolution in Europe as the only hope for the remaining Jews in East Europe. In fact, it was the Soviet Army that liberated the country from the Nazis. But socialist revolution was betrayed long before the war by the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, with its doctrine of “socialism in one country.” In 1948, these bureaucrats supported the creation of a capitalist Israel and Jewish emigration, and they periodically led anti-Semitic witchhunts at home. In Poland, the background for anti-Semitic witchhunts and pogroms was the traditional anti-Semitism of the dominant Catholic church. Such anti-Semitism hasn’t disappeared.

As revolutionary Marxists, we do not look to the capitalist state or local authorities to ban Nazi propaganda. Such bans are always primarily directed against the workers movement. Thus we opposed the recent legal ban of media featuring “fascist, communist or other totalitarian symbolism”—a ban that lasted from 8 June 2010 to 3 August 2011 (see “Down With Anti-Communist Law in Poland!” WV No. 958, 7 May 2010). It is in the interest of the working class to act against Nazi provocations, since the ultimate target of fascist terror is the organized working class. What is needed are mobilizations of organized workers leading all the oppressed minorities—Jews, Roma, homosexuals—and other intended victims of Nazi terror. We need to build Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties to lead future October Revolutions that would overturn the genocidal capitalist order, build a new society of workers democracy based on a planned economy and fully avenge the victims of the Nazi Holocaust in Germany, Poland and other countries. Down with the anti-Semitic provocation of “praying Hitler” in Warsaw!