We Won’t See Auschwitz by Jeremy Dres

Poland is something of a no-go for Jewish people. If you ask a Jew what he thinks about Poland, he’ll tell you all about the Holocaust, and how there are no Jews left there. But in this wonderful graphic novel, you’ll see that the opposite is true. There are Jews in Poland, and the Poles are not the pitchfork-wielding peasants intent on driving the Jews out.

Jeremy Dres assumes the worst when he visits Poland. What he finds is that the Jews who left after WWII were mostly the ones from the countryside, and before the war they were farmers. But the urbane educated ones didn’t all leave, in fact a lot of them stayed on afterwards. The Jews of Poland today are often employed in civil service jobs, and they are in positions of importance. As they go into the countryside, a lot of their fears turn out to be unfounded. It’s been years since there were any Shtetls in Poland, and most Poles haven’t met any Jews anyway, so it’s unlikely there’ll be any real anti-Semitism. As for the Christian based anti-Semitism, I doubt most young Poles today ever bother to go to church.

There are Jews that visit Poland every two years. We have something called March Of The Living, where Jewish teenagers from all over the world visit the remains of the death camps. They have a protest march from Auschwitz to Birkinau to say “you lost, we’re not all dead.” Some of my classmates went there back in 1996, and remember the photos of locals lining the streets to jeer at them. Most of them said “I grew up in that time, and I had no idea what those camps were for.” But others would say (in hushed tones) “I knew what was happening in Auschwitz, I could smell the burning bodies.” Nowadays, the Poles are not as hostile to stories about the Holocaust, but at the same time, can we expect them to feel guilty? To Jewish people, it’s a big part in our history, but to Poland it’s just history. This book isn’t really about history, but the present. It focuses on those who are still living.

I give the artwork top scores. The simple pen and ink drawings are perfect for this book. My only problem is that some more background information would have been welcome. I would like to have seen more detailed maps, like we saw in Maus, to show where they were going. Other than that, I’d recommend it to anyone studying Jewish history. The case of the Jewish community in modern Poland has rarely been taken into account.