Poland: Beginning of a Dialogue?

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If any solution to the ugly geographical scars that divide East and West Europe is ever to be achieved, a way must first be found to soften the bitter hatreds that today—two decades after World War II—still poison the atmosphere among its peoples. Poles still recall with white-hot hate the six million dead left in the wake of Hitler's occupation. For their part, millions of West Germans bitterly demand back the "lost territories" east of the Oder and Neisse rivers taken away from Germany by the Communists after World War II. Voices of reconciliation have been few, but of late new gestures have emerged, and they have come from quarters that should be expected to produce them: the Christian churches.

First came last October's startling memorandum from the West German Evangelical Church partly justifying the loss of the Oder-Neisse region in terms of German war guilt. More recently, it has been the Polish Catholics who have seemed to seek a new basis for understanding.

Bitter History. Near the end of the Ecumenical Council in Rome, Poland's delegation, headed by Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, decided to ask East—and West—Germany's 54 bishops, archbishops and cardinals to attend the 1,000th anniversary of the conversion of Poland's King Mieczyslaw I, to be celebrated in Czestochowa next May 3. In a remarkable 17-page invitation, the Polish primates reviewed the bitter record of Polish-German relations, concluded it had been an accident of history. "We grant forgiveness and we ask forgiveness," they said. "Let us seek to forget. No polemics, no more cold war, but the beginning of a dialogue."

Though the document defended Poland's postwar acquisition of the Oder-Neisse territories as a "basic question of existence," it sought forgiveness for the suffering of German refugees and expellees forced from their homelands in the Polish takeover. Such sentiments had not been heard by Germans from Poles since the war, and the German bishops were delighted to accept the invitation. In their response, they carefully explained that when Germans speak of their Heimatsrecht to the eastern territories, "it does not—with a few exceptions—signify aggressive intentions" but merely a feeling of remaining emotionally "linked to their homeland." The statement mirrored current moderate West German sentiment, although official German policy will continue to withhold formal recognition of the Oder-Neisse boundary in hopes of using it as a bargaining tool toward reunification.

Fairy Tale. Polish Communist response was not moderate at all. Snarled the daily Zycie Warszawy: "Who in Poland empowered the Polish bishops to repent and forgive? On whose behalf have they done it? On behalf of the millions murdered in Auschwitz and Maidanek?" Other government papers chimed in, while "students" and "workers" rallied in Lodz, Szczecin and Warsaw to accuse the prelates of meddling in foreign affairs and sabotaging the national interest.