Reframing, Readjusting Historical Accuracy

"This is a fairly unprecedented verdict which strikes at the heart of what I as a historian do. This verdict, if upheld on our appeal, which will follow, means an end to independent research of the history of the Holocaust and, I would argue, of many other parts of Polish history which run contrary to the official myths and legends espoused by the Polish state today."

"I became sort of a face to hate. There are bad people out there, with vast support from different states, who want to write themselves a new history."

"The damage probably has already been done.The authorities in Poland have already won."

"Their goal was not actually to talk about history, it was to frighten people."

Professor Jan Grabowski, Holocaust Historian, University of Ottawa

The "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate at the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz.   Credit: Kacper Pempel/ REUTERS

"Anyone suggesting that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust could face fines or even imprisonment of up to three years under a controversial new law approved by president Andrzej Duda. The law makes it illegal to accuse the Polish nation of having taken part in the atrocities and the systematic mass murder of the Jews committed by the Germans during World War II."

"A milestone was reached when scholars felt able to move away from simplified categories of German perpetrators and Jewish victims. They shone light on the complicity of non-German citizens in German occupied territories. Scholars such as Jan Tomasz Gross and Jan Grabowski played a key role in studying Poland. With the help of testimonies from Holocaust survivors, Gross revealed in 2000 that Polish citizens took part in a 1941 massacre in the small town of Jedwabne, helping German occupiers to murder their Jewish neighbours."

"The Polish law gives the government the right to restrict different interpretations of the past. It aims to rewrite that history according to nationalist political aspirations. It will question academic achievements in the field of Holocaust studies and represents a danger to academic freedom, openness and critical reflection."

"The law is an insult to Holocaust survivors and the recognition of their suffering – which was, and still is, a painful process on the individual as well as on the collective level. It could allow powerful political institutions to anchor their narratives on the past and silence those who were not given a voice during the Holocaust."

"Allowing politically motivated, whitewashed versions of history to take hold is the first step in legitimising Holocaust denial. Only by confronting the difficult and painful aspects of the past can we understand how to prevent events like the Holocaust happening in the future."

The Conversation, February 16, 2018

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and museum director Piotr Cywinski at Auschwitz, December 6, 2019. Credit: KACPER PEMPEL/Reuters

"Of course, anti-Semitism was not some foreign ideology imported to Poland by the Nazis in 1939. Many individual Poles participated in pogroms, assisted in turning Jews over to the Nazi authorities, and profited from blackmail and the plunder of Jewish property, while some Polish agencies were used in the management of ghettos and concentration camps."

"On the other hand, thousands of Poles are recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, as “righteous among nations” for their efforts to resist the Nazi occupation and rescue Jews from the Holocaust."

Jonah Shepp, Foreign Affairs, Intelligencer

When the new law criminalizing linking Poland and its citizens to aiding and abetting Nazis in the Second World War round-up of Jews for annihilation during the Holocaust was signed into law, it was feared then, several years ago, that the law's threat would have a stultifying effect on future historians writing of the reality of Jewish existence in Poland, the fragility of living among neighbours long accustomed to slandering Jews who on occasion launched themselves into deadly pogroms to let off steam. The law was a blatant device to disassociate Poland and Poles from accusations of complicity in the death of Jews.

It has never been a secret that Polish society has always been anti-Semitic. Which also does not seek to deny that not all Poles subscribed to the demonization of Jews as set out in the Elders of the Protocols of Zion, a masterwork of racist slander out of Russia at the turn of the 20th Century. It became part of the German school curriculum, and was widely published and distributed, aided by some like Henry Ford who himself subscribed to its anti-Semitic fictional claims. Among Poles and Jews, who lived together mostly in small towns and villages for a thousand years, there was some amity as well as enmity.

During the Holocaust years Poles suffered under German occupation, targeted themselves for exile from Poland and mass murder at the hands of the Third Reich which considered them, like Jews, to be sub-human. They were far from the German Nordic ideal. Many Poles betrayed their Jewish neighbours for a variety of reasons; simply to see them dead, to be able to loot Jewish property, take over their abandoned hovels, to cleanse Polish villages from a Jewish presence.

 

Survivors walk in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, in 2017.Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

Renowned Holocaust scholar Professor Jan Grabowski in professional tandem with a Polish scholar Barbara Engelking, co-edited a lengthy tome whose contents they had researched with the assistance of nine researchers to produce 1,700 pages for a book titled Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland. The book, which took years of work, was released in Poland the very year the new law came into effect, raising the heated outrage of Polish nationalists among whom the name of Grabowski became a battlecry.

A Polish court recently ordered the pair of scholars to issue an apology to the niece of a Polish man who was mayor of a small town who had been accused of betraying the presence of 22 Jews hiding in a nearby forest, who were then killed. A trial had taken place in 1950 when the mayor had been accused of complicity in the death of the fugitives, with a Jewish woman attesting to his innocence. He was acquitted. When the woman was years later interviewed for the book she admitted having been beholden to the mayor and as a result giving false testimony. Telling her interviewer that the mayor had indeed betrayed the Jews and was complicit in their deaths.

It was that passage in the lengthy book that caught the eye of the mayor's niece who launched a lawsuit against the two co-authors. "The results of this research (for the book) have been greeted warmly by academia, and they were greeted with absolute fury by the nationalists governing in Poland right now and of course their electorate", Professor Grabowski stated, who himself had been born and raised in Poland, and whose father was a Holocaust survivor.

In the lawsuit, the woman claimed that her uncle had been defamed, demanding financial compensation and an apology. She had the support of a nationalist group (funded by the Polish government) formed to defend Poland against any such accusations of aiding the German occupation and most specifically, collaborating with the Germans in their hugely successful bid to rid Europe of the presence of Jews. A week ago the judge ordered a written apology be made for "providing inaccurate information" and "violating his honour". She deliberately failed to order financial compensation as being inappropriate.

 

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Auschwitz, December 6, 2019. Credit: Krystian Maj / KPRM

"[Dr.Jan T.] Gross told me he didn’t think the law would have many practical consequences for established historians, although he worried that it might prevent younger ones from studying the Holocaust. Above all, he was concerned about the teaching of history in Polish schools."

“'No one will dare to teach the Holocaust,” he said. “The ignorance in Polish society about the Holocaust is extraordinary. There were surveys made and the majority of the people who were asked the question ‘Who suffered more during World War II under German occupation, Poles or Jews?’—the majority of the people responded ‘Poles.’ How ignorant do you have to be?”

Rachel Donadio, The Atlantic, February 8, 2018

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