Białystok

After a four-hour minibus ride on the bumpy, unfinished streets of the Polish countryside, we finally arrived yesterday evening in Białystok. Initial impressions: sparse, gray, and industrial. Walking around the "city center" at night (in search of a bar where we could celebrate my friend Kate's 21st birthday), it was easy to see the difference in affluence between this place and Krakow or Warsaw- this is much more of a traditional "working class" city, judging from the numerous factories and cinder block apartments. This afternoon we took a walking tour of the city, and saw a few things that I definitely found a bit disturbing. Our first stop was the old Jewish cemetery, which contains no historical marker signifying the fact that the Jewish community, which at one time made up 80% of Białystok's population, had been completely wiped out in the space of a few short years. According to our tour guide, the few Jews who did survive the Holocaust and returned to the city were forced to leave in the late 1960s and early 70s due to a wave of anti-Jewish violence. Without a community to maintain it, the cemetary has crumbled into ruins, and what's worse, it has become a dumping ground for empty beer bottles, and its walls contain swastikas and other anti-Jewish slurs. Our tour continued into the downtown area, and once again we saw a swastika graffitied on the wall of an old shed. Our tour guide, whose English skills weren't all that well-developed, really couldn't articulate the social, political and economic factors that created an environment in which such symbols are a regular sight. On the surface it doesn't make any sense- the Nazis completely destroyed Poland, forcing it to completely rebuild all of its infrastructure and its economy from the ground up, so why pay them such obvious homage? Our tour guide said it was mostly young boys "trying to express themselves," and while this may be true, I think it probably has more to do with the fact that this is one of the poorest areas of Poland, a former industrial collasus whose inhabitants are most definitely the "losers of globalization" we keep hearing about in our lectures. Korai, who spoke to us at the MBR center in Berlin about the radical right in Germany, said something that I was reminded of today in Białystok: people who are the victims of economic forces they can't see, like globalization, will often search for a group of people they can see, or at least visualize, and by attaching their current economic troubles with a group of real people as opposed to some intangible force, the situation becomes easier for them to understand. The only real way to reverse this train of thought, in my opinion, is through education, and it seems as though Poland unfortunately hasn't come to terms with its historical role in the Holocaust and the social problems related to antisemitism today.