At last this spectacular new museum in Warsaw is fully open and buzzing. So many sites in Poland recall how Poland’s Jewish community died. Now this one recalls how they lived.

Here is a good piece from Timothy Garton Ash:

“Mir zaynen do!” (“We are here!”) The defiant Yiddish refrain of a Polish Jewish partisan song, written in the darkest days of the second world war, rings out in the winter sunlight, echoing between a sombre monument to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto rising and the shining, brand-new Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

The words are spoken, with passion, by a Polish Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, Marian Turski, who remained in Poland after the war. Here, still here, or here again, where so much of European Jewish life was lived for so many centuries. If an electric tingle does not go up your spine at such a moment, there is something wrong with your spine.

Then we pass into the museum, through a giant twisting canyon of sand-like stone, conceived by the architect to recall Moses’s parting of the Red Sea. Down a curling marble staircase we find a multimedia exhibition that documents 1,000 years of Polish Jewish history. The Holocaust is there, of course, but the story does not begin or end with the Holocaust. “It is not a museum of the Shoah,” says the president of Israel, at this opening ceremony. “It is a museum of life.”

… Now we have reached this once almost unimaginable better place in the relations between, and the historical, cultural and individual intermingling of, Poles and Jews. Why has it come about?

First, due to the efforts of women and men of goodwill who for decades have explained, often to deaf ears on both sides, that we can only get beyond those hostile stereotypes when we understand the full historical complexity.

Second, thanks to the freedom that Poland achieved 25 years ago. Only when Poland was itself no longer a victim of history – stuck behind the iron curtain, under Soviet domination – could a larger part of Polish society begin to face up to the excruciating truth that a victim can also be a victimiser. For a part of Polish society most certainly did victimise the Jews, in pogroms during and immediately after the war, and in a final, communist-manipulated spasm of hate in 1968…

As Ambassador in Warsaw I did a modest bit to lend moral support to this huge project. It’s worth remembering that the late Lech Kaczynski as Mayor of Warsaw (before be was elected President in 2005) helped get it moving.

This is what I wrote back in 2009 about Jews and Poles and their long entangled history (with T G Ash appearing there too):

What if any conclusions one way or the other might be drawn about the massacre by local Poles of some 400 Jews at Jedwabne in 1941? Or the fact that so many Poles were executed by the Nazis for protecting Poles? Or the later Kielce pogrom in 1946 – a horror inspired by the communist secret police?

Was/is modern antisemitism in Poland some sort of aberration reflecting wider European intellectual trends?

Or was it something much deeper in the Polish national psyche, waiting for its horrible chance to erupt?

Is Poland better or worse in these respects than eg France or Germany?

What about the role of individuals such as Helena Wolinska-Brus? She was an unrepentant post-WW2 Stalinist prosecutor from a Polish Jewish family who left Poland in the antisemitic Party campaigns of 1968 and ended up in the UK. Until her death last year she successfully fought extradition back to democratic Poland to face justice on her Stalin-era judicial crimes, mendaciously citing Polish antisemitism as one reason she would not get a fair trial.

And, indeed, what about basic nomenclature?

Just as the denizens of Republika Srpska call themselves ‘Bosnian Serbs’ rather than Serbian Bosnians, thereby emphasising their ultimate Serbitude rather than their Bosnian-ness, should we be talking about Polish Jews or Jewish Poles?

What counts as national loyalty today in Europe with its a violent history, in which ethnicity has been so much emphasised and intellectualised?

Would a fine Museum of the History of Jewish Poles be anything like as successful?

Probably not. But maybe this is a thought that falls into the category of important – but doesn’t matter.