Poland Should Study Remorse and Humility

"During World War II, due to the demoralizing circumstances and German actions, it is true that vile-acting individuals could be found among Poles and Jews alike."
"Yet, we should remember that the objective of the Germans was also to 'eradicate the Polish nation' and 'completely destroy Poland'."
"In his numerous publications and public statements, he [Grabowski] falsifies the history of Poland, proclaiming the thesis that Poles are complicit in the extermination of Jews."
"The attempts to ascribe part of the responsibility for the crimes of the World War II and the Holocaust to the Poles are evidently actions damaging Poland and are based on Jan Grabowski’s unconfirmed estimated figures."
Polish League Against Defamation statement

Jews are loaded onto trucks in the Lodz Ghetto, to be sent to an extermination camp in 1942.

"What is important, from my point of view, is that the militant nationalists who nowadays hold sway in Poland be warned that they will be held to account, that they are wrong if they think that their outrageous statements and slanders will go unnoticed."
"The more I studied these issues, I saw a level of complicity of parts of Polish society in the destruction of Polish Jews."
"From among the approximately 250,000 Polish Jews who had escaped liquidations of the ghettos and who had fled, about 40,000 survived. We have thus more than 200,000 Jews who fled the liquidations and who did not survive until liberation. My findings show that in the overwhelming majority of cases, their Polish co-citizens were – directly through murder, or indirectly by denunciation – at the root of their deaths."
"Whether they lived or died depended to a large extent on the attitude of the Poles. [While some Poles did save Jews], Polish society demonstrated various behaviours, some of which were horrifying."
Jan Grabowski, Holocaust researcher, professor, University of Ottawa

Jews are liquidated from the Krakow Ghetto in 1943.

 

"[The Polish League Against Defamation] has attempted to silence Prof. Grabowski by criticizing both his academic credibility and his personal integrity. Most recently, the league circulated a letter to universities in Europe and North America – including the University of Ottawa – that questions Prof. Grabowski’s widely acclaimed scholarship and accuses him of defaming the Polish nation."
"The HRREC affirms our confidence in the highly respected scholarship of Prof. Grabowski and we underline his academic freedom to pursue and publish his research without fear of attacks on his person or reputation."
"The HRREC strongly denounces the attacks on Prof. Grabowski as well as any endeavour to interfere with independent research."
Human Rights Research and Education Centre (HRREC), University of Ottawa

After the Second World War, Jewish refugees who settled in Canada among the already long-settled Jewish immigrants from Europe, became aware that it was entirely conceivable that they might come across a former guard from any of the extermination or forced-labour camps operating in Eastern Europe walking the streets of Canadian cities. East Europeans, post-war, made application to leave their countries of origin and settle in Canada. They took steps to conceal their past during the war and succeeded in their applications for settlement in Canada.

Among them a good number of Ukrainian and Polish nationals who had collaborated with the Nazis taking up prison work with relish, work that made them complicit in the deaths of millions of Europe's Jews. When the Canadian Jewish Congress applied to the various governments of Canada over the years to establish a commission that would root out former war criminals living in Canada who took part in Nazi Germany's genocide against the Jewish population of Europe, nationalist Canadian-Ukrainian did everything they could to circumvent any such actions, denying that Ukrainians had ever been part of Germany's extermination plans.

 

Germany, by contrast, has a dreadful legacy to live down, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people -- among them six million Jews in a diabolical plan to exterminate European Jews -- through its plan for world domination, bringing the world to a second global conflict in the first half of the 20th Century. Had Nazi Germany with its Axis partners succeeded, there is little doubt that the Nazi killing machine would have continued to dedicate itself to a Jew-free world. Post-war Germany in its defeat had little option but to face its dreadful legacy. Successive German governments have acknowledged the horror of the nation's responsibility.

For the past few years Poland has been strenuously applying itself to teaching the world that it is morally incorrect to refer to 'Polish' concentration camps, though so many were located in Poland. The Nazis knew that in establishing death camps in Ukraine and Poland they could anticipate local complicity. Even in occupied France French police and authorities were swift to make common cause with the Nazis, helping to round up Jews to be dispatched to concentration camps from which they would never return. Poland prefers the descriptive of 'Nazi' concentration camps, never 'Polish' concentration camps. Clearly, Poland struggles with itself, unwilling to remorsefully indulge in introspection.

Dr. Grabowski, a highly internationally respected Holocaust researcher, has been the victim of a campaign of defamation by the Polish League Against Defamation, allied with the conservative ruling party of Poland which claims that his research uses wholly fictional accounts in a deliberate effort to slander Poland. History speaks for itself. There is more than ample documentation, from meticulously-maintained German archives, much less personal testimony of Holocaust survivors to attest to Polish complicity in Nazi atrocities. Ukraine's defence is Poland's as well. Most Eastern European countries lent themselves under Nazi occupation, to the hunt for Jews.

Poland's Law and Justice party attempted to make it a criminal offence to label the concentration camps in that country where millions were exterminated 'Polish' installations. International indignation convinced it to back down. Professor Grabowski wrote an historical accounting of Poland's complicity during the Holocaust years titled Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, to document the involvement of Poles finding and killing Jews who managed to escape from ghettoes attempting to survive by installing themselves surreptitiously among non-Jews.

With its publication, heated debate ensued even as the book was recognized in 2014 for an award by the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. That award was not the only recognition given Dr. Grabowski for his research and writing; he received numerous death threats. A German newspaper review of the book recognized its quality of revelations and that favourable review saw a response from a far-right Polish website which chose to publish an article alongside a photograph of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister.

"Sieg Heil, Herr Grabowski, Three times Sieg Heil" ran the headline of the article. Leading to a successful libel suit. Now, with this latest besmirching of the professor's scholarship and literary and moral  integrity, the Polish organization is being sued for libel by him, in recognition of its public campaign accusing him of slandering Poland by writing of Polish violence against Jews. Should justice prevail, he will win this lawsuit as well.

Poland does itself no favours by their disingenuous efforts to exonerate their wartime record. Far better to be resigned to the reality of history, to express regret and shame and the intention to cultivate a more humane and responsible admission of wrongs done and deplored. What has passed is past; what is required is to ensure that there can be no repeats of the past. This offensive defensiveness does the country no credit whatever, other than bringing more shame upon it for denying its part in the horrors of genocide.

An inscription 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sits above the main gate at the Auscwitz-Birkenau concentration camp museum in Auscwitz-Birkenau, Poland, February 28, 2018.   Bloomberg