In Poland the attitude towards Jews has never been indifference. Today when there are hardly any Jews in Poland the fascination persists, being latent for some and open, even close to the point of obsession, for others. One can discern four manifestations of this attitude. First, there is antisemitism: mariy are suspicious of the presence of Jews, assimilated, fully Polonized Jews included. Second, there is a conviction that Jews were well off in Poland - too well off, some think-which goes together with rejecting all suggestions that Jews could suffer because of Poles. This is why blaming Poles for anti-semitism provokes so much outrage. On the other hand, I believe that reproaching Poles for particular acute, let alone specifically Polish anti-semitism is unjustified, and the phenomenon of Jewish creativity on this very soil deserves to be better appreciated by Jews.

While negative attitudes towards Jews were widely known, it is only by perceiving the positive ones that a full picture emerges. The third type of current Polish attitude towards Jews is philo-semitism, a sympathetic interest in Jewish culture corn bined with nostalgia for the former presence of Jews in Poland. As a rule, the intelligentsia condemns anti-semitism, at least verbally. Being against anti-semitism is also considered a test of one's acceptance of pluralism, and even the criterion of one's decency. Furthermore, an opinion recurs, among young people as well, that Poland suffered a vital loss with the disappearance of Jews. This feeling results from the awareness that today's homogeneous Poland is too dull, and the Jews personify the pluralism and vividness of old Poland.

The interest in things Jewish was illustrated by the exceptionally wide response to the recent (November 1985) exhibition ‘The Last Ones', a photograhic reportage by Tomasz Tomaszewski about the Jews now living in Poland. Also popular, though narrower in subject, was another exhibition held in the same Warsaw photographers’ gallery back in 1981 - a panorama of Jewish cemeteries in Poland by Monika Krajewska. In the meantime a number of books on Jewish subjects immediately sold out. In the visitors’ book of ’ The Last Ones', among many entries expressing sympathy and concern, the wish appears that the world of Polish Jews should not die, that the people on the photographs should not be ‘the last ones’, and that Poland should not be without Jews.