A history of suffering

I thoroughly enjoyed the report of the global seminar in Poland. The Foreign Service (which I’d like to think will enlist at least one of these students) transferred me and my wife from ­Hamburg to Warsaw in 1965 without language training, apparently believing my German or Russian (thanks to Princeton) would suffice, even though most Poles wanted nothing to do with either. So I learned the language on the job, and soon could count among my friends a young scholar who was jailed in the 1968 purge, only to become his country’s ambassador to Canada once the Communist regime fell. Professor Gross has produced groundbreaking work, but I think he underestimates the anti-Semitic attitudes that survived into the late 1960s, and perhaps beyond, due to the heavy representation of communist-oriented Jews in the Russian-imposed regime immediately after the war.