Judah Ari Gross is the religion and diaspora affairs correspondent for The Times of Israel.
Faced with the denunciation of adding Polish pogroms against the Jews of the Holocaust in his recent report on the damage caused by Germany in World War II, the chairman of the Polish committee that drafted the document presented the following justification: the Nazis deserve to have protected them. .
Earlier this month, the Polish government published a three-volume document of more than 1,300 pages, “Report on the Losses Suffered in Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation in World War II, 1939-1945,” which was advertised as a calculation of the reparations Poland believes it deserves from Germany.
The third volume includes a list of 9,293 towns, cities, and towns where the “Nazi German attacks” took place, as well as their death toll. Poland demanded 1. 3 trillion euros ($1. 29 billion) in reparations from Germany for damages, most commonly for the human cost of the war.
Germany rejected the request.
Included in this list are a number of villages that saw pogroms across ethnic Poles in which thousands or even thousands of Jews were massacred.
The village of Jedwabne, in northeastern Poland, is the best-known site of one such pogrom, in which many Jews (probably as many as 1,600) were burned alive or otherwise killed by their Polish neighbors in July 1941. Similar atrocities happened in other towns in the region in the summer of 1941, when Germany captured the rule of the Soviets, who had been brutally occupying it since 1939.
“Due to Germany’s aggression, the Third Reich and the USSR occupied Polish lands. International conventions stipulate that occupiers are guilty for the safety, life and property of the population. Jedwabne under the profession of the USSR and the Third Reich, killing citizens of the Second Republic,” Mularczyk wrote in a tweet.
Mularczyk, chairman of the Polish committee that drafted the report, was referring to the 1907 Hague Conventions, which call for an occupying force to “ensure, as far as possible, public order and security. “
When asked what her idea of this justification was, Israeli Holocaust researcher Havi Dreifuss used the Yiddish expression of exasperation, “nu shoyn,” while saying the claim sounded like “a joke in bad taste. “
Dreifuss, who is a history professor at Tel Aviv University and a researcher at Yad Vashem’s World Holocaust Remembrance Center, which directs the Holocaust Center in Poland, said at least Mularczyk stated that Poles had carried out a pogrom in Jedwabne, as in the past. . , there were false Polish statements that the Germans had led it.
To say that it is the duty of the Germans to save you sounds like a joke in bad taste.
“The report is an old essay, it’s a political document. It uses and abuses history to ask for economic and ethical appeals,” he told The Times of Israel on Monday.
Poland has been grappling with its legacy of the Holocaust for decades and, at most, with what happened in Jedwabne since 2000, when a Polish-American historian, Jan Tomasz Gross, wrote an e-book about the event called “Neighbors,” which caused a stir in Poland when it was launched.
For decades after the war, while under Soviet influence, Poland considered itself guilt-free in the Holocaust, focusing on the role its supporters played in the fight against the Nazis and the movements of the “righteous among the nations,” the non-Jews. Those who stored the Holocaust for the Jews, as if they were the norm and not the exception.
According to Dreifuss, in Poland, the “righteous” had to hide their movements not only from the Germans but also (and even mainly) from their Polish environment.
“[During the Cold War] there were no independent studios in Poland, which started impressively after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But even before that, there were more critical voices related to Polish involvement in the Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust. “Dreifuss said.
Related: In its $1. 3 billion request from Germany, Poland seeks reparations for Jews murdered by Poles
In 1987, a Polish literary critic, Jan Błoński, wrote a much-discussed article in a local newspaper that it is not easy for Poland to acknowledge its passivity in the face of the Holocaust, prompting a fierce reaction and a fierce insistence on Polish innocence through some but also valid deliberations. through others.
These debates intensified after the publication of “Neighbors,” which sparked an investigation that found that Poles had burned their Jewish neighbors alive in Jedwabne and committed pogroms elsewhere.
The reasons why the Poles did this were less clear. Anti-Semitism alone, which undoubtedly existed in those regions, may not be enough.
“Between the two world wars, Jews faced anti-Semitism in Poland, especially from the mid-1930s onwards. However, there were no massacres (or anything like that) like the Holocaust,” Dreifuss said.
“These massacres of Jews through their Polish neighbors occurred in the context of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies, the former Russian occupation, and the brutality of World War II. But to say that it was Germany’s duty to prevent the killing of Jews. through poles, the Holocaust is so out of context that it almost sounds like a bad joke. Polish officials know the story; Therefore, this saying is not only not old but also very disturbing,” he said.
In the 20 years since the publication of “Neighbors,” additional studies have been written that have revealed even greater Polish involvement in the execution of the Final Solution, with one researcher, Jan Grabowski, estimating that around 200,000 of the 3 million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust were murdered directly or through Poles.
Earlier this month, Grabowski told The Times of Israel that the Polish report was “appalling” and accused the government of deliberately ignoring Polish involvement in the Holocaust.
The existing Pole has explicitly sought to replace the narrative of the country’s role in the Holocaust.
It has fought vigorously and effectively against the erroneous term “Polish concentration camps” to describe Nazi sites on Polish soil, such as Auschwitz or Treblinka.
We are witnessing a new level of Holocaust distortion. The Polish government. . . He misrepresents or even outright lies about where Jews were killed through Poles.
However, this opened the door to civil lawsuits, and several were filed against Holocaust investigators, both in Poland and abroad, Grabowski.
Meanwhile, Princeton University researcher Tomasz Gross has been investigated by the Polish government for another law that opposes “insulting” the Polish nation.
The Polish government does not deny the Holocaust, on the contrary, the Holocaust is closely related to it, but it only expresses parts of it: it focuses on instances, which of course were the majority. , where Germans killed Jews, but hide, distort, and even rewrite cases where Poles killed Jews, and those cases are also part of Holocaust history.
According to Dreifuss, this included exaggerating the number of Jews stored across Polish “righteous nations,” reducing the number of Jews killed through Poles, or even locating so-called “justifications” for those attacks and inflating the number of Poles killed. at war.
In the case of Jedwabne, some Poles in the afterlife claimed “comments that have no ancient basis. “Some have attempted to link or even justify massacres of Jews through their Polish neighbors by accusing Jews of supporting the Soviets, but this contradicts genuine confusion. history and the fact that many of the perpetrators of the pogrom served both the Soviets and the Nazis.
Rather, this can be noted as an “attempt to blame Jews for their own death,” he added.
Dreifuss said it is part of an overall effort through Poland’s right-wing ruler Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS), or Law and Justice, to equate the Polish experience of the Holocaust with the Jewish experience of the Holocaust.
“This deserves to be noted as a struggle for victimization. PiS attempts to paint Polish Jews who were killed for their Judaism and other European Jews, such as among Poles who were killed during World War II. By blurring the mass murder of Jewish men, women and young people with Polish suffering, they claim that Poles and Jews were similarly persecuted and highlight Polish torment. Poland,” he said.
This has led to a persistent diplomatic rift between Warsaw and Jerusalem. Trips to Poland through top Israeli schools and the Israeli army have been canceled, and Israel claims it is due to the Polish government’s insistence on dictating the educational content of the trips.
Dreifuss noted, however, that there are prominent Polish scholars who follow the government’s line and conduct extensive studies on the Holocaust; Some of them have even faced or face lawsuits for it.
“These Polish colleagues are not only very good historians, but also courageous, professional and committed educators whom I appreciate for their innovative educational work,” he said.
Dani Dayan, president of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel, also denounced the developing phenomenon of Holocaust distortion, which he said can only be noticed in Poland but also in Russia, Ukraine, France and other European countries.
“It usually happens like this,” Dayan told The Times of Israel on Monday, following an occasion at the museum honoring Holocaust survivors.
“[They say] ‘Of course the Holocaust happened, and of course the six million Jews were massacred, and there were fuel chambers and firing stations. ‘But each and every country says, ‘But in my country, all citizens have tried to help. ‘ The truth, of course, is that this is a mistake. In almost every European country under German occupation, there were far more collaborators, not to mention spectators, than righteous among the nations, those who stored the Jews.
Dayan, who made the comments the morning after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi cast doubt on the Holocaust, said the distortion factor was very troubling because it is perpetrated through governments and political parties with significant resources, as opposed to the “blatant and bare-handed Holocaust. “denialism. “, which has a more marginal phenomenon.
“Distortion is more serious than absolute denial, which is limited to fundamentalists and anti-Semites, such as M. Raisi,” Dayan said.
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