Poland's Holocaust Distortion

"Unfortunately, the politics of memory pursued and enforced in Poland are nowadays best described as Holocaust distortion."

"Unlike Holocaust deniers of yesteryear, states, institutions and people engaged in Holocaust distortions do not deny the factuality of the Jewish catastrophe. They freely admit that the Germans murdered six million European Jews."

"What they refuse to acknowledge, however, is that their people, their nation, had something to do with the vent. That their ancestors took part in the German genocidal project."

"They're using them [Auschwitz and Treblinka] as platforms of Polish martyrdom. And I find that obscene."

Jan Grabowski, professor of Holocaust history, University of Ottawa

A group of Jewish Poles surrender to German soldiers after the collapse of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. Photograph: anonymous/AP

 

"Whitewash: Poland and the Jews", published in The Jewish Quarterly publication recently, authored by Professor Grabowski, is a strong argument for replacing the government of Poland as curator of the Auschwitz site as a memorial to the Holocaust, to avoid further "distortion" through Polish nationalism of the site and the history it reflects. The complicity of individual Poles in the slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust has seen the light of day through Professor Grabowski's previous publications.

His focus is the complicity of many Poles during the Holocaust in the mass killing of Jews. Of the six million Jews that perished during the Second World War in the Nazis' diabolical plot to destroy world Jewry, the vast majority of the deaths happened to have taken place in Poland. The government of Poland a few years back ferociously fought against the commonplace linking of Poland with the death camps of Nazi Germany. To call them 'Polish death camps', the Polish government raged, defied  history and reality; they were 'German death camps located in Poland'.

Guilty Germany, innocent Poland. The world has since acquiesced largely, although Israel's government was not comfortable with that distinction. It was Poland's way to clear itself completely of any hint of complicity in the Nazi Germany death machinery. Although, like France's Vichy period, official Poland under like German occupation, reacted similarly, since Polish officials, like those in France, found it expedient and perhaps not entirely fully foreign to their own beliefs and traditions that Jews were expendable.

Six extermination camps were established by the Nazi SS in Poland; they were -- Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek and Belzec -- five of the six million European Jews murdered during the Holocaust years met their death in those six camps. All but a fraction of Poland's prewar Jewish community perished; just over three million. Infamously, when some Polish survivors attempted to return to their post-war villages to reclaim their property, they were met with violent hostility, threatened and some were killed.

Professor Grabowski is of the considered opinion that the very fact of Poland having hosted those death camps, the site of the vast majority of Jewish annihilation, imposes on the country "a unique obligation of memory"; a duty to care for those places commemorating the Holocaust. Unfortunately Auschwitz and Treblinka, he charges, are being used by Holocaust distortionists in valorizing Polish gentiles who did help Jews, at the same time preferring to be oblivious of those who were helpful in assisting the Germans to wipe out Poland's Jewish population.

Blame has been shifted in its entirety to Nazi Germany. Those same distortionists conflate Polish prisoners of war and those Poles used for slave labour, as equal in number and outcome with those of the Jewish internees slated for immediate death. The extermination camps were exclusive to Jews in Auschwitz II and Treblinka II. The slave labour camps were primarily the destination of Poles who had the opportunity of outliving their onerous labour conditions and confinement.

According to Professor Grabowski's historical investigations and reckoning, about 200,000 Jews were killed as a result of direct or indirect actions of their Polish, gentile neighbours. Polish nationalists loathe this historian of the Holocaust. The Polish League Against Defamation views him as their favourite target. Airing the complicity of some Poles in the slaughter of Jews insults Poland and diminishes its gallant wartime history and its people's suffering.

The good professor was introduced to his professional life's work as a Holocaust historian entirely by chance, following his unrelated search of Polish archives, discovering a cache of German wartime records revealing new issues on the Jewish experience in Poland. Yad Vashem awarded the professor its International Book Prize for his 2014 book, Hunt for Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland.

As a co-editor of the publication Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, he and his co-author Barbara Engelking were ordered by a Warsaw court ruling to apologize for writing that a Polish villager gave up the village's Jews to the Nazis. That was a decision that failed to withstand the test of time; overturned on appeal.

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"Nowhere else in Europe was the Holocaust so complete, so total; nowhere else did the destruction of the Jewish people proceed with such nightmarish perfection."

"Given the apparent unwillingness of the Polish authorities to act as honest custodians of the memory of the Holocaust, perhaps the time has come to place these sites under European, United Nations or other international jurisdictions."

"Auschwitz and Treblinka could become places in which humanity can reflect unhindered on one of the greatest catastrophes in history, on its own tragic heritage, and its own moral condition, past and present."

Jan Grabowski