How do Jewish people watch and appreciate this movie?

For some reason, Poles are often portrayed in Hollywood movies as nazi accomplices. I think this is totally unjustified. Poland was harbour to the largest Jewish community in Europe, and for a good reason - for centuries, Jews had found a relatively safe haven in Poland, where they could live and practice their faith without the level of persecution found elsewhere in Europe.

That is: until the Germans dropped by in 1939.

In the past two decades, some historians like Jan T. Gross (who personally suffered from the Soviet-installed communist puppet regime in Poland) have found a challenge in portraying 'the Poles' as nazi accomplices. That is like portraying 'the Americans' as typical racists who "are fed anti-black sentiments with their mother's milk" (expression by the Israelian prime minister Shamir) because of the Ku Klux Klan and what they did 80 years ago. With the difference that there was never an antisemitic Ku Klux Klan in Poland. Yet there was a Polish resistance movement specially for the aid to nazi-persecuted Jews (Zegota) that is without peer in any European (or American) country.

The movie 'A courageous heart' is about one of the many Poles honoured at Yad Vashem for aiding Jews during the Holocaust. Some people like to observe such heroes as exceptions to the rule. The rule that is: Poles aided the nazi's, or passively stood by while they should have acted.

As a non-Jew and a non-Pole, I always wondered how *I* would have acted, had I lived through the war. Would I have joined the resistance? Would I have hid Jews in my home? Would I have risked my life to save the life of some unknown people? I fear that the reality would have answered 'no'. History informs us that for most people the answer is 'no'.

Yet it *seems* easy to answer 'yes' to all of these questions. Far too easy, if you ask me. It is easy to be on the good side *after the war*, but not easy to be on the good side *during the war*, when the stakes are high, lives are cheap, and people did not only have to take their own lives into account, but also the lives of the family they are a part of.

So I wonder: how do present-day Jews watch this movie? How do they appreciate the personal courage of Irina Sendler? Do you watch this with the same questions as I do? Do you watch this movie and think Irina Sendler is doing what every Pole "should have done"? Do you watch this and believe that you, or Jews in general, would have done the same, and shown the same courage, as Irina Sendler did, had the roles been reversed, and had you walked in Polish shoes?

I think there can be no reconciliation without acknowledgement. I think Poles and Jews can never reconcile without acknowledging their respective fates. Poles did not ask to be in the shoes they were in - being persecuted themselves, killed by the millions - and having to witness, rather powerlessly, the destruction of their fellow countrymen whom they shared a love-hate relationship with, but whom they never ever destined for destruction.

Jews did not ask to be persecuted either, of course. But I hope that a growing number of Jews will come to acknowledge that the Poles found themselves in an impossible situation, and that they wouldn't know what Jews would have done, were the roles reversed, and had Jews been in the situation that the Poles found themselves in.

There's no way of knowing. There's just asking the question. There's just the necessity to be humbled, by the courage of Polish people like Irina Sendler.