An effort is underway to repair Polish-Jewish relations. But if a program held recently at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum is any measure, true reconciliation between the two groups lies far off. After a millennium of uneasy co-existence in Poland, capped by a particularly ugly twentieth century, good intentions may not be enough.

The lead-off speaker on the Holocaust Museum panel was Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a Pole who received Israel's designation of "Righteous Among the Nations" for co-founding a Polish wartime group to aid Jews. Speaking in a quavering voice through an interpreter, the elderly former Polish Foreign Minister discussed the importance of Polish-Jewish reconciliation to what he called the Polish-Jewish community in Poland and to Polish-Israeli relations. The state of affairs was encouraging, Bartoszewski suggested. As an example of this, he said, many Poles are interested in working in Israel.

The old Polish patriot meant well. More importantly, he had acted well -- even heroically -- when it had counted most, during the war. But Bartoszewski's failure to acknowledge Poland's history of widespread anti-Semitism made his discussion of Polish-Jewish relations ultimately unsatisfying.

His words also showed how little sometimes even the best-intentioned Poles understand Jewish sensitivities. Asked what Poland was doing to make restitution for Jewish property taken during the war, Bartoszewski replied, "Do you know who were the first victims of Auschwitz? Polish peasants whose land was taken [to build the camps]."

Bartoszewski may not have been especially sensitive, but he was not hostile. His Polish colleague on the panel, Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, a courier in the Polish underground during the war, came across differently. Nowak opened his presentation by implying that fellow panelist, Yisrael Gutman, a Polish-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, historian, and research director of Israel's Yad Vashem, was not a man of good faith. Too much talk of Polish anti-Semitism, Nowak also cautioned, could cause a kind of "secondary anti-Semitism" in Poland. This came uncomfortably close to sounding like advice that Jews should "go along to get along."

Gutman had declared himself for reconciliation, but not at the cost of historical truth. His thesis was that while the Poles seek to portray themselves as simply another innocent group that was victimized by the Nazis, they have their own history of anti-Jewish actions. Nowak did not contest the facts that Gutman pointed to: the notorious 1946 pogrom in Kielce in which Poles killed Jews returning to their homes after the war, the official anti-Semitic campaign of the Polish government in 1967-68 that led to the exodus of most of Poland's surviving Jewish population (my own parents left in 1956), and the recent Polish presidential campaign in which Lech Walesa's supporters smeared an opponent with the (false) rumor that he was partly Jewish.

Instead, Nowak demanded to know why there was all this emphasis on Polish anti-Semitism. Why didn't Jews talk about anti-Semitism during the war on the part of Ukrainians and Lithuanians? he asked.

Unwittingly, Nowak hit on the central problem when he asked why Jews and Israel were willing to reconcile with Germany and not with Poland. While it is, in fact, difficult for some of us to reconcile with Germany, that country has at least acknowledged its guilt. Poland, by and large, has not. (Nor, for that matter, has Ukraine or Lithuania.) And Nowak, who presumably was participating in the Holocaust Museum program because he supported reconciliation, reflected the hard-line approach of disavowing any Polish responsibility for wrongdoing. (It was all Moscow's fault.)

At least Nowak did not make the charge one commonly sees in Internet discussions that Jews, some of whom were Communists at the time, were responsible for Stalin's post-war domination of Poland and therefore were themselves to blame for Polish anti-Semitism -- as if Polish anti-Semitism did not predate 1945.

While it is understandable that many Poles or Polish-Americans would have difficulty facing certain unpleasant facts about twentieth century Polish history, it was rather surprising that some Jews at the program, apparently caught up in the spirit of reconciliation, seemed eager to help their Polish counterparts downplay the historical truth.

A generation younger than the other three panelists, David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, struck a tone of determined neutrality. Harris implied that the Poles and the Jews had equal reason to be mistrustful of each other, listing grievances in carefully balanced pairs. For example, Harris mentioned the Polish priest who made anti-Semitic remarks in the presence of President Walesa, but he also noted that the documentaries "Shoah" and "Shtetl" had "angered some Poles." This latter equation of expressions of prejudice with superb documentaries depicting the existence of such prejudice was puzzling.

Similarly, during a question and answer session, a woman in her twenties said that she had just spent seven months in Poland working with "the Jewish community" there and she reported that its greatest concern was not anti-Semitism but, rather, anti-Polish feeling among Jews outside of Poland!

Given the pitifully small number of mostly elderly Jews living in Poland today, I was struck by the young woman's statement about a Polish-Jewish community I had never encountered during my own visits or even heard of. She explained to me after the program that the Polish Jews she had referred to were, in fact, young adults raised as Catholic Poles who had recently learned that they had some Jewish blood.

A reconciliation based on false premises is no reconciliation at all. We cannot, it seems to me, move forward by pretending away a painful past. When it comes to healing the rift between Poles and Jews, the program at the Holocaust Museum showed that we still have a long way to go.

Martin Kimel, a lawyer, has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the American Lawyer, Legal Times and elsewhere.