Christ of Nations

Poland's population contains some of the most devout Christians I had ever come into contact with. Since 966, the year of the Baptism of Poland, Catholicism has been the state religion. This devoutness is not expressed with the need to convert, bigotry or superiority - but practice. Long after Vatican II, which meant nothing to the families I knew, we only ate fish on Fridays. Church was attended every Sunday without fail. Crosses hung over doorways, portraits of Mary and the Son of God hung in hallways. Several relatives I knew returned to Poland to participate in pilgrimages.

My Polish-Canadian counterparts joined in amusement to watch older generations and Polish-raised friends and relatives give themselves so fully to their faith. I'd seen footage of Polish pilgrims treading miles, some crawling on hands and knees the entire distance. Many were weeping, moaning, crying out to the open sky with hands raised as though waiting for God to reach down and pluck them from the earth. Christian extremism we called it.

Our history was as unescapable as our religion. All Polish children knew of our turbulent past, it is the source of Polish Pride - the stubborn, unbreakable character so common amongst us. We were never allowed to forget our disappearance from the map for 100 years. "And we're still here," my father somberly stated, "They tried to kill our language, or culture, our people. But we're still here."

“If you cannot prevent your enemies from swallowing you, at least you can prevent them from digesting you,” were the words of Jean Jacque Rousseau.

This was our lesson as Polish children, the legacy our parents wanted to give us. Even if the whole world stands against you, never let go of who you are. Get in the way. Revolt. Better a corpse than a coward. If they swallow you, give them indigestion. They may beat you down, but we will be born again.

Resurrected in glory. Saved. The Christ of nations.

The Passion of Christ held a unique significance to the Polish people - we identified with the figure of a suffering servant, hoping to redeem mankind. Carrying the cross through pain and weakness, to the place of his own crucifixion represented the struggle of our country as imperial powers used us to achieve their goals. Our delicate placement between the West and the Slovaks meant the country would be a fighting ground for power. Between Prussia, Russia, Austria and Germany, Poland would know little peace. As one occupation followed another, our language was made illegal. This sky rocketed the importance of literature to the Polish people. Underground newspapers, theatre and language classes would keep our native tongue alive. Our language was an integral part of our identity, like our religion, binding us together as one people. Throughout this suffering, people held the cross closer to their chests, convinced it was their duty to bare the cross of war that had fallen on them so often. They take pride that it was the invasion of Poland which made the world stand up, and take notice of the Hitler's monstrosity. Our blood would free Europe from the devil.

Pope John Paul II, was a culmination of everything that the Polish people held close to their hearts, and so they would love him deeply. To see one of their own as the leader of the Church they so loved filled everyone with a sense of pride.

As a common man he was an athlete, actor and playwright, knew ten languages and studied drama. During war, he was a soldier of a different sort. Throughout his compulsory military training, he had refused to hold or fire a gun. By the time WWII slammed its iron fist on our land, we'd had plenty of practice. Poland had one of the most advanced networks of sabotage and counterfeiting in Europe, saving themselves and their Jewish friends. In 1933, they had the highest concentration of Jewish people in all of Europe totaling at just over 3 million, accounting for nearly 10% of the population. Pope John Paul II participated in underground theater, spreading information, and some claim aiding in the escape of Jews. In 1944, on Black Sunday, the day of the Warsaw uprising, the Gestapo gathered the men in Kraków to prevent another revolt. Then just a young man, the Nazi's entered John Paul's home and searched the basement, but he hid himself well enough that he went undiscovered.

Once he became Pope, his work to liberate Poland from communism made him more than a religious leader, he was the guardian angel of his people. I would never again see one man inspire such joy and reverence. One of my favorite stories was of his first return visit to Poland after leaving for the Vatican. Vast crowds gathered and as their Pope stood before them, they began to sing an old Polish folk song, about a man who leaves the mountains for city life, and pines for home. It is said the Pope cried, and so did his people.

As he aged, he would become the embodiement of Christian and Polish suffering. Taking the position at the age of 58, he was an extremely active man who loved jogging, hiking, sports and other physical activities. He even survived and recovered from an assassination attempt. However, by the 1990's Parkinson's disease forced his health to steadily decline. Eventually, he could barely walk, or speak, or hold his head up.

For years my irreverent friends and I placed bets on when the ailing pontiff would pass - none of us won, he out lived all our expectations. The day of his passing, my brother was throwing himself an early birthday party before departing for a 3 month stint over seas. Nearly the entire party stopped when they overheard the broadcast. Stunned silence choked the laughter and revelry out of the room - then the crying started. One by one, people gave way to tears as though a member of our family had passed away. I was bewildered. Even a week after his death, I could visit Toronto's Little Poland, and still see people standing by the Pope's statue, crying and making the sign of the cross. Weddings were canceled, parties were stopped. There would be no celebration, everyone would mourn his loss.

"He was our father," I heard over and over again.

Deeply attached to our history of pain, my family made certain I understood the Shoah (Holocaust). Though we never discussed it at length, I was given books, articles, and encouraged to take history classes in school. It was my belief that only Jews were being mercilessly slain. It wasn't until I was 17 years old that I realized Hitler had called for the cleansing of all ethnic Poles as well. Now this information is not so hard to come across, as it appears in a great deal of reading material, documentaries and museums. Heinrich Himmler swore "All Poles, will disappear from the world." In 1939, German planners and developers wanted the "complete destruction" of the Polish people, leaving only enough alive to use as a slave race for the new German settlers. There would be no right to marriage or health care, so that eventually, even the slaves would die, and my people would vanish from the face of the earth.

In Constantine's Sword, by James Carroll, he states the following:

Here the sibling rivalry of Judaism and Christianity has been twisted into a contest not over who is the "True Israel" but over who can lay claim to the mantle of "suffering servant," an image that the Church applies to Jesus but that originates in the prophecy of Isaiah. Here suffering has been defined as a source of identify, and ironically, on the Christian side, as the source of superiority. This is what it means when Polish Catholics from towns around Aushwitz complain that their victimhood is being slighted by a Jewish monopoly on the Holocaust.

It is no small complaint. Polish Catholicism particularly is inclined to define itself around the idea of its victim hood. Since the nineteenth century and through most of the twentieth, Poland was self-styled "Christ among the nations," an epithet associated with the nineteenth-century Romantic poet Adam Mickievicz. Poland's passion and death, repeatedly enacted at the hands of imperialist neighbors from the early 1800s to 1939 engendered a stoic hope Poland's suffering would redeem the godlessness of modern Europe and would at last restore Christendom."

He speaks the truth, and yet, I feel the need to protest. Perhaps because of I am born of Polish blood. More likely because the faces of all those Polish people I've met flash before my eyes. I am not blind to the imprefections of my culture. Being far enough removed in my Canadian upbringing, I can see the camel's humps. I have indeed heard displeasure concerning the Jewish monopoly on the Shoah.

However, I must disagree with James Carroll, that this is a fight over the identity of suffering servant. He speaks strictly as a scholar, looking at broad sweeping truths rather than individuals. I have never experienced a Pole who held resentment towards the Jews because they have made the Holocaust their own. I'm sure they exist, but I pray you, do not judge the group by the worst of its people. The individual nature of the disquietude amongst the Polish is our loss of life: our friends, our relatives, the families that would never be, the children that would never have their own. The Genocide of the Poles was not played out on so grand a scale as the Jews. Of 3.3 million Jews, 90% died. Yet, we live with the knowledge that we too were slated for extermination. This is impossible to let go for any people, particularly when they have a bloody history, as both the Polish and Jews do.

The Poles I have known want their memory of loss to exist along side the Jews not supersede it. Lest we forget. They want their dead honored, nothing more, nothing less. The only comments I have heard on the subject revolved on the nationality of those who died: They were Jews, and they died because they were Jews, but they were Polish as well. They walked the same streets together with the rest of Poland, lived in and were part of our communities. Some feel the Jews were hunted with such efficiency because they were Jewish and Polish, making them twice as revolting to the Nazis.

I agree that the cross has no place at Aushwitz, and I am ashamed of the Poles who tried to keep it there with acts of violence, as are many others. The Shoah has no reedming factor, those people were not sacrificed for a greater good, they were not saved, this is not the will of God. They died at the hands of men who manipulated a population with fear, and gave promises of security, peace and prosperity to a ravaged nation with a broken spirit.

Those who support having a giant crucifix looming over this grotesque testament to human treachery aren't thinking in scholarly terms. Their ideas are simple, and not always in the best of taste. It is important, particularly for Christians, to see how altruistic actions in the name of self-righteousness can gain traction and lead to ultimate evil. Books like Constantine's Sword are essential in spreading this knowledge, they do a great deal to illuminate truth and educate those that don't know better. Ignorance on its own is dangerous.