The issue of the Polish government's attempts to whitewash Poland's WW2 history came to the fore recently with the case of the two Holocaust historians ordered by a Warsaw District Court to issue an apology to a woman who claimed her deceased uncle had been slandered in a historical work they co-edited. I linked to a piece by Laurence Weinbaum which looked at the historical record of Polish collaboration with the Nazis. Yes, of course the responsibility for the death camps lies with Germany's Nazi regime, and yes, the Poles suffered appallingly as the country was carved in two by the Nazi-Soviet pact. But they were often far from innocent bystanders when it came to the organised extermination of the Jews.
Last week Tablet featured a piece by Stanisław Żaryn, a spokesman for the office of the Polish Prime Minister, which tried to explain why Poland supposedly had to act to protect its good name, and attempted to justify political interference into historical research. Havi Dreifuss now takes it apart:
Repeating old anti-Semitic tropes, Żaryn and the government he represents would have us believe that this worldwide concern for academic freedom in Poland is in fact evidence of coordinated German-Russian-Jewish collusion against Polish integrity and identity. Evidentially, my own expertise in security issues can be compared with Żaryn’s apparent ignorance of contemporary history. Just as I have no business enacting laws, so, too, governments have no role in writing history; this must be left solely to historians and scholars. Therefore, I am not sure what he means by the need for Poland to “control [sic!] Holocaust memory,” a concept unheard of in a free democratic society, and certainly not in the world of academia. As an historian in this field, I fear that we are facing a further pinnacle in the current Polish regime’s attacks on history, and its attempts to revise the fact-based historical narrative of the Holocaust. [...]
Of the many inaccuracies and distortions his article contains, it is sufficient to focus on three of them.
First, according to Żaryn, “Poles were the first nation the Germans had selected for extermination in the Auschwitz death camp.” In fact, they were not. While tens of thousands of Poles perished in Auschwitz, the Polish nation was never “exterminated” there (nor anywhere else). True, the first prisoners sent to Auschwitz were Poles—728 political prisoners deported as early as June 14, 1940. However, Auschwitz at this point was a concentration camp—horrible, horrific, and often deadly—but not yet part of the machinery of systematic mass murder (of Jews, not of Poles). Only in mid-1942, with the implementation of the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” did Auschwitz (mainly Auschwitz II-Birkenau) become an “extermination” camp, where Jews from all over Europe were brought for annihilation. According to the most up-to-date statistics, nearly 1 million Jews were murdered there, along with perhaps somewhat more than 100,000 non-Jews, among them about 75,000 Poles and 21,000 Sinti and Roma. Blurring the fate of all Jews who faced systematic genocide during the Holocaust with that of those Poles who were killed during WWII is a well-known characteristic of Poland’s current “history policy.”
Second, Żaryn maintains, “It is indisputable that among the Poles there were many more ‘righteous’ people than traitors.” Wrong again. The fact-based information, as well as the latest research, including that which is found in the cutting-edge study Dalej jest Noc [Night with No End], edited by Engelking and Grabowski, indicates that a great many more Poles were involved in persecuting the Jews than in assisting them. Even numerical acrobatics cannot suffice to pave the road for the ambitious current governmental Polish journey of heroism. It was, in fact, the State of Israel that initiated the title of Righteous Among the Nations on behalf of the Jewish people, and the rigorous research-based process each and every case must follow before being awarded this most coveted recognition. Attributing the courageous actions of Righteous Among the Nations to the whole Polish nation, while omitting the much more prevalent acts in which Poles blackmailed, persecuted, informed upon, and murdered Jews, is nowhere near a reflection of the complicated reality that existed in German-occupied Poland. It only fits the current wishful thinking of PiS.
Third—Irena Sendler, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, and Wiktoria and Józef Ulma were indeed noble people whose heroism has earned them the appellation of “Righteous Among the Nations,” and rightly so. Yet it might be worth mentioning that all of them were forced to hide their courageous actions for fear of revenge attacks by local Poles; and that the Ulma family was murdered only after being denounced to the Germans by a fellow Pole. Despite Witold Pilecki’s heroism in the struggle against the Germans, the Jewish issue was a marginal dimension in his activities, and one of his deputies, Dr. Władysław Dering—a Polish underground hero—committed horrific crimes against Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz. History is complex, and some so-called “Polish heroes” turned out also to be monstrous tormentors of Jews. [...]
It is important to note that the Polish nation of the mid-20th century was not (solely, or even chiefly) responsible for the tragedy of the Jews during the Holocaust, even though many Poles did take an active part in it. Yet the current Polish government, and its many agencies, are defiantly responsible for trying to “control” the uncontrollable past, which reveals the not insignificant complicity of Poles in the Holocaust, by using lies and not a small measure of anti-Semitism.
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