Poland's Holocaust Sanctimony

Jan Grabowsk in Warsaw, Poland February 8, 2021 Reuters

"I have tremendous, tremendous concerns. I am a senior, tenured professor at the University of Ottawa, and I am in a very delicate situation. I am feeling an extraordinary amount of pressure in Poland now..."

"In my case, it's unpleasant. But imagine you are a 25-year-old graduate student of history. Do you think you're going to embark upon discovery of difficult history? I don't think so."

There are very many people in Poland for whom what I do is wrong, it's unpatriotic. There's a wave of hate you cannot even imagine, with my face being plastered on the covers of mass circulation, right-wing newspapers."

"This is my deepest worry about this whole verdict. It basically tells historians that Jewish testimony from the Holocaust should not be assigned such value as we tend to assign it."

Dr.Jan Grabowski, Faculty of Arts History, University of Ottawa

"[There is] unwavering support] at University of Ottawa for Dr.Grabowsky whose examination of the fate of Polish Jews during the war] shows how knowledge of the past remains vitally relevant today."

"The impact his work has had in Poland, and the censorious reaction it has generated, demonstrates this truth."

University of Ottawa president Jacques Fremont

 

"The [Polish court's ruling] is clearly meant to whitewash unfortunate aspects of Polish history and to offer protection for anti-Semites."

"[It opens the door to renewed attempts to intimidate Holocaust scholars]."

"By ordering the scholars to 'apologize', it puts both historians and victims on trial, and offers protection to the reputations of Poles and others who collaborated in the murder of Jews."

Mark Weitzman, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, Los Angeles

 

Judge Ewa Joneczyk hearing a case brought before her by the niece of a wartime mayor of a Polish town called Malinowo, arguing that her uncle was a Polish hero who had saved Jews and that two eminent scholars of Holocaust history were in error when they claimed him to be responsible for the murders of the town's Jews -- claiming that they had defamed her and her family, demanding a retraction of their historical account and $34,000 in compensation -- ruled a written apology was in order. For "providing inaccurate information" and "violating his honour". While withholding the imposition of monetary compensation on the grounds that to do so might hinder academic research.

 

This, in a climate of the Polish government having lashed back at the common phrase "Polish Death Camps", claiming them to be defamatory, historically incorrect and illegal, that Poland itself had nothing to do with the extermination camps that were established under German occupation. They were to be referred to as Nazi Death Camps in Occupied Poland. Justice Joneczyk, in handing down her ruling obviously read the law as she saw it, echoing Poland's 2018 law under President Andrzej Duda criminalizing statements that ascribe collective responsibility in Holocaust-related crimes to the Polish nation

 

Dr.Grabowski had co-edited a 1,600-page historical account of the fate of the Polish-Jewish population during the Holocaust years titled Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland with Barbara Engelking, director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, in Warsaw. The court order for the apology has led Michael Levitt, head of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies to characterize the ruling as shameful: "Poland cannot continue to bury the facts and silence Holocaust scholars. Its actions must be roundly rejected by Canada and the rest of the international community".

Now that would be interesting; lobbying the Government of Canada to hold Poland to account for its refusal to entertain the thought that historical accounts of actual events were to be respected and acknowledged, not condemned as inaccurate and slanderous, representing criminal acts under Poland's new law against defaming the nobility of Poland. This, in view of the fact that Canada's deputy prime minister is herself a Ukrainian-Canadian, Chrystia Freeland. A woman proud of her heritage, whose grandfather was editor of a newspaper publisher in Poland, and was in fact himself a Nazi collaborator.

 

The passage in question contained in this now-controversial book relates to then-mayor Edward Malinowsky who robbed a Jewish woman during the war and was involved in the deaths of 22 other Jews hiding in a forest in the village of Malinowo, in 1943. Professor Grabowski travelled to Poland to be present for the court decision regarded as a precedent of sorts, in testing academic freedom. The ruling has the full support of the Polish League Against Defamation whose purpose is to "defend Poland's good name".

The offending passage in the 2018 book being contested resulted from an interview with a Jewish survivor whom Mayor Malinowski had helped to protect. He was cleared in 1950 by a Polish court of collaborating with the Germans. "In her capacity as a scholar of the Holocaust, she (Engelking) chose to believe the Jewish survivor and witness", stated Dr.Grabowski of his colleague's passage that claimed Malinowski had betrayed a group of Jews to the Germans. Yet the court decision effectively stated that "a historian has no right to make a judgement like that".

Dr.Grabowsky by virtue of his own research and writings has attracted fierce opposition from Polish nationalists, led by the Polish League Against Defamation which gained influence when the nationalist Law and Justice party of President Duda gained the government in Poland in 2015. It is the Polish nationalist belief that spotlighting the complicity of individual Poles in killing Jews contradicts Poland's gallant wartime history, along with diminishing the enormous suffering of its people. Six million Poles died during the war years, fully half of whom were Jews, quite apart from the annihilation of Jews from other parts of Europe.

Professor Grabowski ventured into Holocaust studies when he visited the Polish archives to discover a huge cache of German wartime records with new revelations relating to the Jewish experience in Poland. He has since, for the past two decades, been a recognized Holocaust scholar. In 2014 he wrote Hunt for Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, which won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize. Professor Grabowski's father Zbigniew was a Holocaust survivor and Polish resistance fighter who was involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

"As German authorities implemented killing on an industrial scale, they drew upon Polish police forces and railroad personnel for logistical support, notably to guard ghettos where hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were held before deportation to killing centers. The so-called Blue Police was a force some 20,000 strong. These collaborators enforced German anti-Jewish policies such as restrictions on the use of public transportation and curfews, as well as the devastating and bloody liquidation of ghettos in occupied Poland from 1942-1943. Paradoxically, many Polish policemen who actively assisted the Germans in hunting Jews were also part of the underground resistance against the occupation in other arenas. Individual Poles also often helped in the identification, denunciation, and exposure of Jews in hiding, sometimes motivated by greed and the opportunities presented by blackmail and the plunder of Jewish-owned property.

"Cases of anti-Semitic action were not limited to abetting the German occupation authorities. There are well-documented incidents, particularly in the small towns of eastern Poland, where locals—acutely aware of the Nazis’ presence and emboldened by their anti-Semitic policies—carried out violent riots and murdered their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps the most infamous of these episodes was a massacre in the town of Jedwabne in summer 1941 when several hundred Jews were burned alive by their neighbors. More difficult to unpack is the tangled history of the southeastern village of Gniewczyna Łańcucka. In May 1942, non-Jewish residents of the town held hostage some two to three dozen local Jews. Over the course of several days, they tortured and raped their hostages before finally murdering them. Yet recent interviews with locals reveal that other Christian Poles in Gniewczyna Łańcucka tried to shield Jews. These and countless other episodes muddy the waters between victim and oppressor in the chaotic environment of wartime Poland."

The Atlantic, Edna Friedberg, February 6, 2018