Poland and the Holocaust – demons from the past

Ljupco Popovski

History can always be turned into a weapon. Or, more precisely, whenever politicians wish for it. In Europe, this is not the case only in the Balkans (that historic minefield), but more weapons are reaching the eastern continent. The last case in Poland disrupted the Jews in the world, and the Jews in Washington, who accused the right-wing populist government that by law it wants to change the history and tragic events of the Second World War.

Poland is extremely sensitive when in the world media, and even in statements by some statesmen, Nazi concentration camps are called “Polish death camps”. And it’s completely right. Nazi Germany built the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibór, Treblinka, Chełmno, Bełżec and Majdanek camps and operated them on the occupied Polish territory and SS officers. Guards were not Poles, but very often Ukrainians and Latvians. Half of the six million European Jews and two million Poles were killed in these camps. It is one of the greatest crimes in human history. Every Polish government had a task to clear this unprecedented historical attribute from the world public. In 2012, US President Barack Obama had to apologize for using the wrong words when he mentioned the existence of “Polish death camps” in World War II. Between 2008 and 2015, Polish authorities issued 912 statements in response to the mention of “Polish death camps”.

This Polish government, on the wave of patriotism and the nation’s sublimity, expanded its historic sensitivity and prepared it, and parliament passed a law that would be punished with fines or up to three years in jail who would blame the “Polish nation for the Holocaust.” The government says it sends a “clear signal to the world that it will not allow Poland to be insulted.” Former Prime Minister Beata Szydło explained that the law was indispensable: “We Poles are victims, as were the Jews. It is the duty of every Polish man to defend the good name of Poland.”

With this legal “certificate of innocence”, Poland wants to cleanse itself of the misdeeds that some of its citizens made during the reign of the Third Reich with their country. Unlike other occupied Nazi states in Poland, there was no collaborative government, there were police services, but no organized puppet government. But, like in every nation, even among the Poles, all its members are not righteous. Many Poles, who because of the money awards, because of the anti-Semitism, which because of pressure, had their share in the Holocaust. For decades before the Second World War, anti-Semitism was widespread in Poland, among other things because of the vast influence of the Catholic Church. There before the war lived the majority of Jews from any European country – 3.2 million, 10 percent of the population. Now, barely 10,000 people openly declare themselves to be Jews. In the epicenter of the pogrom, in Germany, nowadays there is more incomparably more – 275,000 Jews. Many of the Jews in Poland did not die from the Nazis’ terror, but from the hands of their fellow Poles.

The law caused a storm of anger in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “no one can change history, nor can the Holocaust be denied.” The official Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, sent a statement stating that “this unlucky law cannot blur the historical truths that a certain segment of the Polish population participated in crimes against Jews.” The US State Department said the law “undermines freedom of speech and academic discourse” and emphasizes that it is concerned about “the consequences of Polish strategic interests and relations.” Israel reminds that when a year ago there was visiting Polish President Andrzej Duda (he has two more weeks to sign a bill on the law), said that historical truth is not always beautiful and that it also applies to the Polish nation. “Every nation has exemplary people, but there are evil people, and those who behaved inhuman should be condemned.”

Then, who was President Duda thinking of? Of those same people to who in 2001 then-President Aleksander Kwaśniewski offered to apologize to Israel for the role of some Poles in the Holocaust. Did Duda think of those people who in two explosive books described the two historians, Poles of Origin, Jan Grabowski and Jan Gross? Both now live abroad: Jan Gross teaches history at US Princeton University, and Grabowski teaches history at the University Of Ottawa, Canada. When Jan Gross published the famous Neighbors in 2000, it was a shock to the entire Polish society and a catalyst for a delayed search for the truth about the events of the war. In it with historical documents and statements of witnesses is told about the massacre in the small village of Jedwabne in July 1941, which was remembered by local residents, but forgotten by history. Then half of the inhabitants of the place, the Poles, closed the other half in the barn – 1600 Jews and burned alive. Only seven Jews from the city’s residents managed to save themselves. Mercilessly, they sent their classmates, neighbors, the people they bought from and they sold to them, in horrible death – those with whom they lived their lives.

Grabowski published Poland’s book “Hunting of Jews” in 2011, referring to the German term “Judenjagd”. Exploring only the micro-history of a rural district in southeastern Poland, Dąbrowa Tarnowska, Grabowski describes the persecution of Jews by their Polish fellow citizens. Grabowski documented the participation of local Polish residents in the discovery and killing of Jews seeking their help. According to the documents, of the 60,000 inhabitants of the county, 5,000 were Jews and almost all were sent to the extermiantion camp Bełżec. Five hundred of them managed to escape and hide among the Poles, but only 38 of them managed to survive the war. All others, according to Grabowski, were discovered, handed over and killed in a direct or indirect manner by their Polish neighbors.

Was President Duda also thinking of members of the Polish Blue Police who was guarding the Jewish ghettos in many Polish cities and who were responsible for many murders. Subordinated to the German command they may not have been able to act differently, but should their participation in the pogrom be erased from history? Grabowski estimates that as many as 200,000 Jews were directly or indirectly killed by their Polish neighbors. It’s a huge number and it’s almost impossible to prove its accuracy.

But the other, the human side of the Poles’ behavior is greater. Hundreds of thousands of Poles put their lives at risk by hiding Jews. The Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem has listed 6,706 Poles who are recognized as “righteous among the nations” for their help to the exiled Jews. Most of any country in Europe. It should be known that only in Poland the Nazis imposed a death sentence for all who are helping the Jews and supposedly (although there are no full relevant data), as many as 30,000 Poles were killed. The most famous case is that of the Ulma family. Because of the hiding of the Jews, the whole family was killed-the parents and their six children, together with the Jews who were with them. Facing historical truth is terribly difficult for all nations, and especially for post-communist ones. In many countries, the World War II atrocities committed by their inhabitants to wipe out the blame on the nation are attributed to historians by the Nazis. For easier dealing with sins. US historian Timothy Snyder called “Bloodlands” countries of the region – Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic countries and western Russia where there are attempts to change the roles of criminals and victims. Ukraine passed a law in 2015 that obliges citizens to honor Ukrainian nationalists in World War II, who initially co-operated with the Nazis in the massacres of Jews and Poles. The authorities in Warsaw were angry after this step to erase the historical truth, and now they set off at the same rates.

In Lithuania last year, a major publisher withdrew all the books of the famous writer Ruta Vanagaite after she accused the famous Lithuanian nationalist hero, in fact, a collaborator of the Nazis. “I destroyed everything. I have ruined my career as a writer, since no publisher any longer loves me and no bookstore wants to sell my books,” Vanagaite said to the New Yorker magazine.

Historic black spots still traumatize “Bloody nations” even 73 years after the end of the war. It seems pointless to ask from the Poles, Ukrainians, the Baltic nations, and Serbs and Croats here that the war does not re-occur. It ended in 1945. But history can be given new weapons to look acceptable to those who want to hide demons from the past.