While we all came into the trip with a solid historical background on the Holocaust, much of that knowledge was focused on the German end of things. Annamaria provided us with an extensive overview of Poland, during and after the Holocaust, helping us to better understand the persistence of those painful memories today.

The partial transcript of our interview with Annamaria follows:

TLP: Can you describe for us the Polish national identity? And what I mean by that is that Americans most certainly have an identity. And Poles also, they have a national identity, and time and time again we hear martyrdom come up as an issue and so, I'd like you to just say a few words about the Polish national identity and how does martyrdom fit in.

Annamaria: Americans, I don't think, have a national identity. When I was growing up in the United States, people would ask me what my nationality was. They would see my first and last name and ask me what's your nationality. When I met somebody whose last name was O'Malley, I said, "Oh, you must be Irish." I don't know if things have changed in the United States, but all of my lifetime in the United States there was always this awareness that all of us came from somewhere else. Unless you were a Native American, you were not an American, you were from somewhere, and a connection with a person's roots were always important, knowing where you came from. So, I would say that if there's something that is an American national identity, it's an identity of knowing where your roots are and how those roots came to America.

The Polish national identity is like most European countries' national identities, very much a mono-cultural identity. In the sense, not that our countries were mono-cultural, because for instance Poland was hugely multicultural until 1939 - the Holocaust and World War II ended that. But, mono-cultural in the sense that in all of the countries of Europe, there was always one group, one ethnos, one group of people whose ideas about what was important became the things that were important for the national identity. In almost all of the countries of Europe, this started with the educated elites, with the nobility, then gradually this gets carried on, drops down to lower and lower classes with the emancipation of the peasants and various minority groups at the end of the 19th century or so. That said, what's very key about Polish national identity is of course going to be different from what's key in French national identity. I usually say that any national identity is based of course on its collective memory. What do Polish people feel that they should remember? What is very key to remember? Because, with amnesia you don't remember who you are, so there's something that you have to remember.

Some of the things that we think we always have to remember is that Poland was the country that was, that associated itself, that decided to associate itself with Latin civilization, with Rome, with Roman Catholicism, with a Western version of Christianity vis a vis the Eastern, Byzantine version of Christianity. We were also very aware, Poles were, that Poland was on the far frontiers. That, more East of Poland, the only countries that carry Western civilization are the Baltic states - Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. But, those countries, for most of their history were not sovereign, and were not countries that had a strong influence like Poland did. So, Poland always felt that she was the savior of Europe, that whenever people came invading from the East, whether they were the Mongol hordes, quote unquote, or they were for instance Russians, or the Red Army coming in - then Poland was the group that was always supposed to save - or, for instance, the Turks coming up. Poles were asked to come to Vienna and Poles remember that the Battle of Vienna in 1863 was won because of the Polish army and the Polish king.

Another thing that Poles feel are very, very key things to remember is that Poland had to sacrifice very often. In order to protect herself and in order to protect others, she had to sacrifice. This leads to this whole idea about martyrdom, about victimhood, Poland as the Christ of nations. So, not only did she have to protect Europe from everything that was attacking from the East, sometimes she felt she was protecting Europe from her own self, like for instance from German fascism. But also there's this feeling that Poles have very often fallen on the battlefield and then, like Phoenix rising from the ashes. So, the counterpart, it isn't just martyrdom, it's also always rising from the ashes, that on the continent of Europe a country that disappeared for 123 years and then was able to rise again, only 20 years, one generation, and then collapse again, fall for another 50 years under German-Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, and then come back again in 1989. Another thing that the Poles would really like the Americans to remember is that Poland sees herself, and has reason to see herself, as the first democracy on the European continent. A few months after the American constitution, and a few months before the French constitution, the Polish parliament passed the first constitution on the European continent on the 3rd of May, 1791. It was not a good idea to pass a constitution and bring in a constitutional democracy, surrounded by three autocratic empires - the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian, and with the Ottoman Empire just a little bit south of that. All of Central and Eastern Europe at that point in time, at the end of the eighteenth century, was all under empires - something that would have been great for Americans, easy geography, four empires, you don't have to learn nation-states.

In any case, the Polish democracy didn't have a chance to survive, because she was the first democracy surrounded by three non-democratic empires and they swallowed her whole within four years of having her pass this constitution. But then, Poles, not really willing to, at heart, give up democracy, they started to fight in other people's wars. And they fought in the American Revolution - Tadeusza Kosciuszko, Kazimierz Wunsche, who gave his life at the Battle of Savannah. People all the time from then on - nobody knows who coined the phrase - but very key in Polish identity is "For your freedom and ours" - that if Poland doesn't have its freedom, it will fight for everybody else's freedom. And maybe win a little bit for herself in the way. So, these are the key things in Polish national identity.

TLP: I've heard that when the Nazis started killing Jews in Poland, that they actually had to tell the Poles, stop killing Jews so fast, we've got this under control, we have a plan in place for how we're going to do this, and that local Polish people were so willing to kill Jews that the Germans actually had to put the brakes on them. Is there any truth in that and what's the history in terms of Jews in the late '30s and very early '40s in terms of...

Annamaria: Sounds like a baited question...

TLP: Not intended to be, it's actually just out of curiosity, because from a historical perspective I honestly don't know.

Annamaria: There is a prevalent stereotype in the West, I think it's more prevalent in the United States because the people in the United States didn't experience war in their backyard. So, I think Americans associate the end of war with a ticker-tape parade on 5th avenue, and the daddies come home, and everybody goes to work and school the next day. Here in Europe, most of us know that war isn't pretty. When it ends it isn't ended, and it also doesn't have a symbolic date - the first of September - but that wasn't really the beginning of the war. There is a prevalent stereotype in the West that the Polish Christians wanted to get rid of the Jewish problem, something that was being discussed all throughout Europe for centuries, especially the 19th century and 20th century because it was the age of nationalism, and everybody was getting their nation-state, and everybody had a problem with the Jews. As late as 1936, the French were willing to give up Madagascar as a future Jewish state. So, there were talks between France and Poland, and some of the other countries that had high Jewish populations. But, when the Germans attacked in 1939, and two weeks later when the Soviets came in - the German occupation, there was no desire on the part of the Polish Christians to kill Jews. First of all, they were all escaping. One statistic that I've found, and I'm very willing to believe it, was that in 1945, at the end of World War II, two-thirds of the Polish pre-war population, meaning 24 million people, were in a different place at the end of the war than they were at the beginning of the war. Which means only one-third was still at home, everybody else had moved and many people had been moved several times over. In my mother's family and my fatherŐs family, not a single person was in the same place at the end of the war as they were at the beginning of the war, and almost everyone moved several times during the war. In those kinds of conditions, nobody is out to kill anybody else, they're all running from the same enemy. At first they were running for the first two weeks of September from the Germans. Many people tried to escape to the east, to the areas not yet occupied by the Germans. Then the Soviet army comes in on the 17th of September 1939, and now it's very clear that there is no place to escape to. And now there is only, try to find a way to survive.

This is not to say that in this incredible chaos, which became very quickly economic - ration cards, or goods disappeared, and no way of bringing in things from the field, because they've been bombed, that in this economic also loss of political leadership, and also social chaos of running for your life - that there would be people who would take advantage of a situation, take out their rage and frustration of not being able to do anything to save themselves and save their family, and take that rage out on a convenient scapegoat.

At the beginning of the war, however, I have never seen any statistics that showed Polish Catholics killings Polish Jews at all. This starts to come into play in 1941, in mid-1941, when the Germans start to move east across Russia, across the Soviet Union. And when they take over lands that have been held under the Soviet occupation, they tended to let the local population know that they had a green light to take care of the Jewish problem. All occupants, all totalitarianisms love to use the idea of divide and conquer, and to take advantage of different animosities that have been there for centuries. The same people that could live next door to each other for centuries in peace and coexistence, under wartime suddenly became enemies with different interests. From a Polish Catholic perspective, Polish Roman Catholics had two enemies - Poland as a country, as a nation-state had two enemies: the Nazis and the Soviets. From a Polish Jewish perspective, there was only one enemy, and that was the Nazi regime. So, Jews very often escaped to the east, and sometimes they got shelter within the Soviet system. Sometimes, they got positions of power. A minority that is suddenly raised to a higher level also is going to take advantage of the situation to finally take out some old frustration, and feelings of, well, "now we are in power, now we can do something." This is not to say that I am speaking about even a plurality of either the Polish Roman Catholic population or of the Polish Jewish population, but there were such cases, and unfortunately they were the ones that are most talked about even today. And, they were the ones that became more prominent in people's stereotypes and in people's feelings. In a time of war, people are afraid. When you're afraid, you either run or you attack. And if you have any chance to attack, generally you will. This meant that by mid-1941, as the Jews are almost all now in ghettoes or, under the Soviet occupation, they are the ones that are often - a plurality of the people, a majority of the people that are in power in local government. Now, when the Germans come across and retake those lands, or take Soviet lands in the first place, now the Jews are again the minority, the helpless minority, and the Polish Christians did, in some places take advantage of this and kill Jews. But, again, in the Soviet occupation, stories could be very, very different. Things could be the other way around. Although under the Soviet occupation, the one massacre against the Polish Roman Catholics was Ukrainian, again Ukrainians at the end of the war, '43-44, realizing that they were going to lose all hope of having a free Ukraine, only ten years after they've been starved to death by Stalin, they take out their frustration on the Poles and kill them.

TLP: I recognize this could be a five-minute long answer, it could be a five-hour long answer, but certainly we don't need it to be. We've asked this of Henryk Mandelbaum and Josef Pyszcynski - what is the greatest lesson we can learn from the Holocaust?

Annamaria: Because I'm a sociologist, a social anthropologist, and not a historian, the Holocaust isn't important for me from the perspective of learning all of the facts - who did what to whom and where. It's more important to me precisely because I teach about contemporary racism and nationalism, and because I teach about multiculturalism, about treatment of minority groups in different countries and different settings. And I teach to groups that are very often international. I have students who are exchange students from all over the world. And sometimes, something that I expect, but also something that makes me wonder - and that is that the mechanisms are the same everywhere. I hear the same stories from my student who is of Tunisian descent and lives in France, in Paris, as I hear from my friend who is Iranian and who is a professor at a university in New York state. The same sort of attacks ever since 2001, the same sort of stereotypes being applied to them, the same sort of - talk about homeland security, feeling of insecurity in a country that you have raised your children in, or that you were born and raised in. For instance, my student of Tunisian descent was born and raised in France. So, in his home country he doesn't feel so secure. Should it be normal for him to expect that when he takes the metro to university that he will be checked every single time, that his documents will be looked at every single time? No, that's not the world that should be. But, human society, that is the way that we work and function, and especially, again, if our politicians talk about fear and terror, and if they're using the rhetoric of fear and terror, that's another warning sign. Again, the only thing that we can do when we are afraid, I think everybody knows, is that if you are afraid you either run or attack. An individual can run, but a political state should never run, it needs to attack, otherwise it seems to be a coward. And so, in all of these cases, if our politicians are speaking that there is terror, or that we have to fear something, then that means that they are headed for a war, that they are looking for the enemy. Even if it's invisible, even if the enemy doesn't exist, or if the enemy can't be found, they'll be looking for one, and they will name it - the Jews. Or, they will name it - terror. They will try to wipe all of the Jews off of the European continent and the world. Or, they will do proxy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they will try to find a way to show that they are effecting a counter-attack against this mortal enemy, called fear.