Not all Central Europeans are racist. To recognize this is a moral necessity. But hate in Central Europe is rampant and dangerous. Its open expression has become more common than in much of the West, both among the general public and at the highest levels of political leadership. At the same time, hate there is not entirely different in form from the West, nor does it spring from completely different sources. That also means that, just as in the West, there is hope for overcoming it.

As we have seen earlier, when East Central European states refused, in 2015, a compulsory quota for refugee resettlement, which had been decreed against their objections in Brussels, they were accused of transferring to Muslim migrants an intolerance spawned by centuries of anti-Semitism. The eminent Princeton historian, Jan Gross, asked:

Gross’ anger at the inhumane attitudes against the migrants was justified. His outrage was shared by people in Europe and the world. Yet his generalizations about Germany and about the implied difference between Eastern and Western Europe are problematic.

If anyone has the right to comment on the murderous past, it is Gross. It was he who forced the Polish public to take a look at anti-Jewish atrocities committed by Poles during the Holocaust and even after, when survivors returning from the camps to reclaim their property were attacked by Polish mobs. Emblematic of the wartime horrors was the incident at Jedwabne, where a large number of local Jews – estimates range between 350 and 1,600 – were massacred by the local Poles.