Creating a completely new museum comes with lots of opportunities (that the Museum for the history of Jews in Poland discovered well) and also with dilemma’s. From my visit to this museum I remember two of them.
1. How do you present your history when it has got possibly unfavourable elements? Especially in the light of a history where others have tried many times to present your people as bad people and that this had fatal consequences. The first image of the Jews in Poland happens to be one that connects them to trade of slaves. It was by the way for the first time for me that I learned that the word ‘slave’ is actually connected to the Slavic people, that they were the slaves of the Middle Ages.
The image shows Jews trading slaves and a bishop protesting against it; not because he was against slavery as such but because he was against the trade of Christians as slaves. Slavic people were already Christians by that time. Jews are recognizable with a 2-pointed hat. Could this image make actual prejudices increase? Is a scientific approach ‘this is the very first image and thus reality’ the correct one or should the museum be more careful and avoid a possibly bad image? The museum chose to show the 12nd century reality…
2. During war, the Polish were the only people to have an organizational structure to help Jews and this shows their heroic side. Opinions differ on the scale of effectiveness of the organisation. 
How small or large should that part of Polish resistance take in the presentation of the 2nd world war part of the museum? You can imagine the discussions…
Most probably there were many more decisions to take that were a dilemma. What I like about this museum is that the makers are not afraid of decision making and also not of discussing the decisions made afterwards.They are transparent and they are accountable; a great sign of modernity that one can only appreciate!
Two other posts about the Jewish Museum in Warsaw:
Jewish Museum Warsaw context
Jewish Museum Warsaw beauty
It is one of the myths in our family history: my grandfather ‘saving’ a Jewish girl from a Nazi. It was in the 2nd World War. In villages, children from Jewish families lived as if they were part of the farmers’ family, trying to escape a certain death when the Nazis found out they were Jewish. A 14 or 15 year old ‘secretly’ Jewish girl, described as very beautiful, accidentilly fell in the village street and bumped her head against a stone right in front of the house where one of the Nazis in charge was temporarily located. He came out of the house, saw the beautiful girl and took her into the house to take care of her. All of the village worried, they were talking about it: what is he doing to that beautiful girl and also, most of all: what if he finds out that she is Jewish? They were extremely nervous!
