The Polish town of Bedzin chose a drastic way of
remembering the evacuation of its ghetto by German
forces in August of 1943
(Source: Press-Enterprise)

REP. JOHN BOEHNER IS out campaigning for Ohio Congressional candidate Rich Iott, and why shouldn’t he be? The upcoming national election may be tight, and if Boehner wants to become Speaker of the House he’s going to need all the Republican backing he can get. And yet, Iott may prove to be a tough sell, largely due to the consternation he caused when he admitted that he regularly plays the role of an SS officer in World War II reenactments, proudly posing for cameras in an SS uniform. While Iott claims a certain admiration for the Third Reich’s military prowess, he protests that he dons the uniform not out of any genocidal impulses but solely “to keep the public aware of what happened.” In a piece on Salon.com today, Joan Walsh writes: “What's next: Re-enacting cross-burnings while denying fealty to the Ku Klux Klan, just because you like the way some scrappy southerners defended home and hearth? Torching Catholic convents in Know-Nothing re-enactments?”

While I know nothing about Iott’s own personal mental state, I would like to ask Joan Walsh: Why not reenact such events? History is a messy business, and if we only choose to reenact the politically correct and feel-good bits, we do less than nothing to advance our society’s historical knowledge, let alone to promote its modern-day maturity. History may be made up of glorious heroes and outright villains, but there are a lot of others in-between – including, let me suggest, virtually everyone reading this essay.

Last month, a southern Polish town decided to go the difficult route and reenact all angles of its own gruesome recent history. When the Nazis conquered Poland in 1939, they immediately began abusing and isolating that country’s large Jewish population. In the town of Bedzin, the Wehrmacht and SS concentrated 30,000 Jews in a ghetto pending a “final solution” of their status by the Nazi authorities. In August 1943, German troops and Polish volunteers forcibly rounded up the last of the inmates, deporting them to the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau labor and extermination camp, where most of them perished. Today only one Jewish family remains in Bedzin.

 
Local Jews were uprooted and sent to the
Bedzin ghetto soon after the German invasion
(Source: Die Welt)

 
Scenes from the Biedzin reenactment on September 11, 2010
(Source: tvn24.pl)

Not everyone is delighted about this hands-on history lesson. As the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza stated a few days before the scheduled event, “Is it so hard to understand that one should not reenact murders, massacres, and pogroms? There are other ways to preserve memory.”

However, the president of the region’s Jewish community, Zeew Leron, hailed the organizers’ “good intentions,” saying “one must thank those who commit themselves to spreading the truth.”

The reenactment, which was preceded by detailed planning and three months of rehearsals, was organized by the Bedzin municipal government and the Israeli embassy in Warsaw and took place within the framework of the “Eight Days of Jewish Culture.” The audience included at least one eyewitness of the evacuation, ninety-two year-old Stanislawa Sapinksi, who recalled to reporters how the Jews prayed loudly as they were placed in trucks. The town is planning yet another reenactment to commemorate its liberation from the Nazis - at the hands of the Red Army - at the end of the war.

I suspect that Rich Iott would have fit right in with last month's event – although, of course, he was probably out campaigning.

For footage of the Bedzin reenactment, click HERE.