44 thoughts on “Poland’s Holocaust Denial – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. Your last line:

    But one thing I do know is that Meir Kahane today would be popularly acclaimed as Israel’s prime minister.

    Maybe from your coddled view of Israel in the PNW it might appear that we're a bunch of goosestepping facists in Israel but if you were to read the polls it reveals something else entirely, don't deny it..

    1. ‘…Maybe from your coddled view of Israel in the PNW it might appear that we’re a bunch of goosestepping facists in Israel but if you were to read the polls it reveals something else entirely, don’t deny it…’

      This sort of remark actually points to a larger problem. We’ve made an improbable cartoon out of ‘fascists’ (by which are almost invariably meant Nazis). Their motivations, and hence their actions, and hence, their crimes are no longer the acts of people — and on the whole quite normal people.

      So when we begin repeating them, we don’t realize it. Actually, in many respects, Israel shares a certain other state’s sense of victimization, its morbidly exaggerated racial nationalism, its indifference to legality, its compulsive aggressiveness, its sense that its people and its people alone have rights that need to be respected, and its yammering demand that all fall in line and support the one true cause.

      If the shoe fits, wear it.

    2. @ gefilte: Which polls? Opinion polls confirm that Israel is a cesspool of racism and hate. I’ve confirmed & analyzed that here regarding numerous polls of social, racial & ethnic attitudes.

      As for election polls, they prove that the Israeli government is the most extremist in the history of the nation. They confirm that parties that are explicitly racist & homicidal run the government. They confirm that there is a small minority who claim to be liberal, but who refuse to endorse the most minor concessions toward the Palestinians. Furthermore, their views have no weight or bearing on national policy as they’re ignored both in society, government & the Knesset.

  2. I generally enjoy reading your thoughts and usually find them balanced. However the exception seems to be the Holocaust. Your usual balance seems to go out the window and you are happy to trot out the usual tropes and wide generalisations.

  3. Neither Polish state nor Polish nation was responsible for the Holocaust.

    Yes, many individuals (whether Polish, Jewish or Ukrainian) collaborated with the occupiers, but Polish state/nation
    made stand in September 1939 when the first and alone resisted Nazi Germany with military force. After the defeat Polish state was no more.

  4. It is unfortunate that the above 2 commentators choose to say nothing when there was so much to say.

    Richard. There is one terrible howler here which you should amend asp. You say:

    ‘In one terrible incident, they burned down the synagogue of Jedwabne filled with the remaining 340 Jews in the town.’

    No this is not true and indeed if you go to the link which you provide, it is clear that the Jews of Jedwabne were gathered in the town square on 11 July (from memory) 1941 and herded, with blows and whips etc. into a barn which was then set alight. We don’t know how many died. Anna Bikont in The Crime & Silence estimates up to 1,600 Jews were burnt alive. Also there were similar massacres in neighbouring villages. Jedwabne was not alone. You might want to go to my site for more info.

    The MP for Jedwabne was Michal Kaminski, who was also a Polish MEP for the Law & Justice Party and Chair of the European Conservative & Reform Group which the British Conservatives are part of. He is a vehement ZIonist, has spoken at Israel’s prestigious security conference at Herzliya in 2009 and has also spoken at the Conservative Friends of Israel fringe meeting. As I say I have more links to this but the guy is a fascist and an ardent Zionist.

  5. Richard, you also ask ‘Is the Polish people responsible for the Holocaust? Yes it is’. I disagree. The responsibility is that of the Nazis not a whole people, even a whole German people. However many Polish people were complicit in the the Holocaust, but they were never responsible for it. Poland was itself under Nazi occupation. There was no Polish Quisling and up to 3m Poles were also murdered, many in the death camps, by the Nazis.

    1. ‘…The responsibility is that of the Nazis not a whole people, even a whole German people…’

      You raise an interesting point there. Don’t people bear some responsibility for the actions of their government?

      While the Nazi regime certainly took care to control the organs of mass expression, and to discourage displays of popular discontent, people did voice their opinions, and they were able to obstruct or at least delay such actions as the euthanasia programme, and the subversion of the organized churches. What’ more, although specific knowledge of the Holocaust was lacking, that was perhaps as much a matter of people choosing not to look as of the information being impossible to uncover.

      What’s more, don’t most of us do the same thing? Israel’s actions — her very existence — would be impossible without the vigorous and continuous support of the US government, and don’t most Americans simply prefer not to look into what Israel is and does? I mention this because I feel personally, not a desire so much an an obligation to do something about Israel. I really just wish it wasn’t there, or at least not within my control. Unfortunately, it is there, and as an American, I am responsible for its crimes, even if by omission.

      Finally, I find it particularly hard to excuse American Jewry. Most of them, to be frank, essentially support Israel. They wish it were a nice Israel — but they support it. If one can argue that it’s pardonable for them to wish to have a Jewish state, and to support that state, one could as easily advance the same argument for the Germans — and afterwards, protest ‘but ve didn’t know,’

      No — but you could have guessed. The Germans bear responsibility for the Holocaust — and I’ll go on to assert that we as Americans bear responsibility for Israel, and that American Jews in particular should take a hard look at what they permit to be done in their name. None of it is somehow ‘okay.’

      1. @ Colin WRight: Don’t “most of us” do the same thing as the German people did during the Holocaust? No we don’t. In fact, the American people at certain points in history (the Vietnam War, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, etc) have risen up and opposed criminal policies and stopped them. Perhaps we have not done it as quickly as we should, nor as effectively. But we’ve done it. Again, I concede imperfectly at times. But we have used democracy to put our country back on, or closer to the right track. Are we perfect? Not by any means? Do we have a right to crow about our record? No. But we’ve done far better than the Germans during WWII.

        That never happened in Germany. Dissent was crushed. Hitler’s assassins were executed. The White Rose were executed for writing flyers of dissent.

        1. ‘@ Colin WRight: Don’t “most of us” do the same thing as the German people did during the Holocaust? No we don’t. In fact, the American people at certain points in history (the Vietnam War…’

          Meh. More immediately, we — and at least there’s the small mercy that ‘we’ includes both Jews and gentiles in this case — generally overlook Israel’s crimes.

          And why do we do that? Because we’d rather continue to support Israel. It would be inconvenient to admit what she is, and does.

          It really is remarkably analogous to the average German and the Holocaust. Certainly Goldhagen’s ‘eliminationist anti-semitism’ is nonsense. At the same time, the average German preferred to be able to continue to support Hitler to at least some extent — or at least Germany and its cause in the war. So he took care not to look into just what had happened to the Jews who used to have that shop down the street.

          The moral process if not the actual crimes in question — not yet, anyway — is indistinguishable.

          To cite our moral triumphs is really beside the the point. A German might as well name Schiller and Beethoven to offset Auschwitz. They ignored the crimes they found inconvenient, so do we.

          1. @ Colin Wright:

            Because we’d rather continue to support Israel. It would be inconvenient to admit what she is, and does.

            It really is remarkably analogous to the average German and the Holocaust

            No, it isn’t. “We” are much of world Jewry. But certainly not all. But regardless, Jews who support Israel are not supporting a genocidal state murdering half the Arab population of Israel-Palestine (as bad as Israel’s policies may be). Germans during WWII acquiesced in mass murder. There is a difference.

            To cite our moral triumphs is really beside the the point. A German might as well name Schiller and Beethoven to offset Auschwitz.

            You completely misunderstood by argument. I wasn’t arguing that we are a cultured country who produced poets and composers, therefore we are good. I was arguing that in the face of evil, many in this country stood up to it & either changed things or at least made a courageous effort to do so. When I rallied with 1-million Americans in DC in 1970 and sang “All We are Saying is Give Peace a Chance” with Pete Seeger leading us, I wasn’t saying we’re a great country because we have culture and art. I was saying we’re mad as hell at our country & its leaders & by God we’re going to do something about it.

            That doesn’t always work. But we try.

            Once again, I really don’t want this to drone on & on. So let’s let this be the end of the discussion in this thread.

    2. @ Tony Greenstein: First, since the instruments of the German state exterminated the Jews, then certainly the entire people is responsible. The German government itself has accepted this principle in making reparations to the survivors and their families.

      Poland is more complicated since it was under German occupation and had no official national government. But the extermination could not have taken place without cooperation, whether tacit or explicit, from the Polish people. The refusal by the current government to entertain any responsibility for these crimes fits unfortunately with your exoneration of the Polish people.

      I believe that the American people are similarly responsible for genocide against Native Americans. Though my family never arrived till well after the Native Americans were conquered and placed in reservations, all Americans today bear some responsibility for these crimes.

      That being said, of course there were valiant, courageous Poles who deserve recognition. And any account of the era must acknowledge their role. And I have done this in my post.

  6. ‘ …But he could not have exterminated six-million Jews, including nearly 3-million Polish Jews, without the willing support of local populations like the Poles…’

    I question that. Without disagreeing with the larger point, I’ll point out that the Holocaust occurred even in states such as Hungary and Italy, where both the government and the people were apathetic and even obstructive. Certainly many Poles and others cooperated enthusiastically in the Holocaust — but it would have happened even if they hadn’t.

    1. @ Colin Wright: Italy is a different case. It is true that Mussolini, when he was in power, didn’t hunt down Jews as governments and Nazis did in occupied Europe. Yet many thousands of Jews were deported and eventually killed. I personally know such a Jewish survivor. The Garden of the Finzi Continis tells another similar story.

      But you are dead wrong about Hungary. The Iron Cross government were out & out Nazis. Though they didn’t personally get their hands dirty in exterminating Jews, they certainly cooperated with the mass deportations which resulted in the death of 400,000 Jews beginning in 1944.

      And I disagree that the Holocaust would have happened without collaboration from local anti-Semites in Poland and elsewhere. Many fewer Jews would have died without such willing support of the Death Machine.

      1. ‘And I disagree that the Holocaust would have happened without collaboration from local anti-Semites in Poland and elsewhere. Many fewer Jews would have died without such willing support of the Death Machine.’

        One wonders. What was the survival rate for — say — Italian or Belgian Jews as opposed to Polish or Lithuanian Jews?

        Did the attitudes of their Gentile neighbors really make much of a difference in how many Jews lived? I hold that the Germans were entirely capable of killing Jews whether the neighbors minded or not. Certainly the gentiles of Poland could have had almost any attitude at all and the Germans would still have killed most of the Polish Jews. They weren’t running for reelection.

  7. ‘…But the new Polish law is a form of Holocaust denial, a common malady afflicting neo-Nazis and Jew-haters everywhere…’

    Not really. I’d compare it to the sort of denial one sees in Japan, where their actions in World War Two are whitewashed and even transmogrified into a the first stirrings of Asian anti-colonialism.

    It’s normal for countries to rewrite their history so that they were good. See France’s fantasies about her conduct during the German occupation. Poland’s doing the same thing here. Per se, it has little to do with anti-semitism or Holocaust Denial. The Poles don’t deny that the Holocaust happened; they just prefer to believe that they were invariably on the side of the angels during it.

    One could even compare it to the Zionists’ attempts to claim that the Palestinians were ordered to flee by the Arab states in 1948, etc. Truth is secondary; what matters is to write a version of the past in which we were blameless. Ask any partner in an unsuccessful marriage about that.

    1. @ Colin Wright: What you say makes no sense. I claim the new Polish law is a form of Holocaust denial. And you respond acknowledging this by comparing it to Japanese denial of their genocide in Nanjing and their role in other war crimes during WWII. In fact, you use the very term “denial” which I used. You don’t realize it but you are agreeing with me. Japanese denialism is deeply offensive & problematic. The Japanese, however, didn’t collaborate with the murder of nearly 3 million POlish Jews (though they did murder millions of people in countries they occupied including China.

      France too is responsible for its crimes. And Marie LePen during the last election claimed the French people were not responsible because it was the Vichy government which collaborated. She was roundly condemned for this form of denialism.

      I didn’t say Poles deny the Holocaust happened. But they deny their own responsibility for it. That is Holocaust denialism. Perhaps tailored to the Polish situation. But it is denialism.

      I would even concede there is a form of mass denialism on the part of Israelis and Zionists who deny their own country and movement collaborated with the Nazis until at least 1943. This is equally distressing and a historical whitewash of history. However, it didn’t cost 3 million Jewish lives and the Polish complicity did.

      1. ‘…However, it didn’t cost 3 million Jewish lives and the Polish complicity did.’

        But that — to say the least — is a highly dubious claim. You’re asserting that absent Polish complicity, the Germans couldn’t have killed three million Polish Jews.

        Nonsense, to be frank. The Germans also managed to kill about three million Polish gentiles. Presumably, you don’t see the Poles as complicit in that. They also killed about four million Soviet POW’s — again, without anyone’s complicity.

        The Germans were perfectly capable of killing people — Jews or gentiles — without anyone’s help.

        There are two distinct issues here. Was the attitude of many Poles reprehensible? Yes. Would the Jews of Poland have survived if that attitude had been different?

        No. A few thousand more might have survived, but the vast majority would have died anyway. You can’t — and shouldn’t — blame the Poles for the Holocaust.

        1. @ Colin Wright:

          You can’t — and shouldn’t — blame the Poles for the Holocaust.

          That seems like the 4th time you’ve said that, which is why I wanted this to end.

          In short, I can, I should, & I do blame the Poles for the Holocaust.

  8. I’m a big fan of your work on Israel and the Palestinians, Richard, but to my mind this post misses the mark. I’ve spent a bunch of time in Poland and speak and read the language, or at least I used to. Sure, there was and is anti-semitism in Poland, as there was and is everywhere in Eastern Europe; during WWII quite a few Poles were happy to collaborate with the Nazis; and even after the war, as Gross has documented, some continued to murder Jews. On the other hand, as I’m sure you know, huge numbers of Poles put up heroic resistance to the Nazis, and suffered and died for doing so, and many took incredible risks to aid Jews. And in any case, no matter how many of them were anti-semites and collaborators, it’s beyond dispute that the Nazis, not the Poles, created and directed the death camps from beginning to end, so even though most of them were in Poland, it makes no sense to call them “Polish death camps,” as so many Israelis are so eager to do – if we have to describe them in national terms, better to call them German death camps, as Germany’s Foreign Minister just acknowledged. It would be an exaggeration to say that calling Auschwitz a “Polish death camp” is like calling Guantanamo a Cuban prison camp, but there’s something there.
    I should make clear that I don’t at all support the efforts of the current right-wing government in Poland to criminalize the phrase and others like it, but I do understand the frustrations they’re playing on, and I’m disappointed that you don’t seem to.

    1. ‘… It would be an exaggeration to say that calling Auschwitz a “Polish death camp” is like calling Guantanamo a Cuban prison camp…’

      Thinking about it, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration at all. The comparison is quite accurate.

      Guantanamo is on a piece of Cuba ruled by the US government rather than Cuba; the entirety of Poland — including the sites of all the death camps — was under direct German, not Polish, rule.

      1. @ Colin Wright: Not the same at all as I wrote in an earlier comment here. Cubans play no role in Guantanamo. They never enter the base, have nothing to do with its operation. Poles collaborated with the Nazis in many circumstances and the Nazis couldn’t have exterminated as many Polish Jews without tacit or direct collaboration of large elements of the population.

        I want to make an announcement I hope all commenters in this thread will see. We could go on forever in this vein. But I think those who disagree with my view have made their views crystal clear multiple times & I’ve made mine clear as well. I’d prefer to move on to other subjects & not belabor the point. So unless you have something completely new to say on the subject, please let’s put this to bed.

        1. ‘So unless you have something completely new to say on the subject, please let’s put this to bed.’

          Okay.

    2. @ Henry Norr: I have acknowledged the heroism of the Poles you rightly applaud for their acts of conscience. But these were isolated acts by individuals, when the overwhelming response of the rest of the Poles was collaboration or acquiescence in the mass murder.

      You’re siding with Polish anti Semites in making a mountain out of a linguistic molehill concerning whether “Polish death camps” is an accurate descriptor. As far as I’m concerned it’s acceptable, though I always use the term “Nazi death camps.” But the camps were on Polish soil. Poles participated directly and indirectly in the mass murder. Therefore it’s acceptable, though not preferred as far as I’m concerned.

      As for Guantanamo, your comparison is wrong. Guantanamo is fully U.S. territory. We lease it from Cuba and neither the government nor the Cuban people play any role in what happens there. The crimes there are wholly American, not Cuban.

  9. “Occupied Poland was the only territory where the Germans decreed that any kind of help for Jews was punishable by death for the helper and their entire family” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_Jews_by_Poles_during_the_Holocaust

    Quite surprised no one has mention this fact.

    The nazis mainly chose Poland bc half of Europe Jewry lived there and logistically it made sense. And yes, Poland is known for antisemitism but my take is – while Germany was western and worked hard on compensating for its past, until 1990, Poland was behind the Iron Curtain and didn’t care for it. Therefore some people forgave Germany but not Poland. And that’s wrong.

    1. ‘“Occupied Poland was the only territory where the Germans decreed that any kind of help for Jews was punishable by death for the helper and their entire family”’

      The punishment happened too, and the fear was real.

      I read some account of how the Germans caught a Jew, and found out who had been sheltering him, and killed that farm family. The next morning, twenty four dead Jews were found in the locality.

      All these peasants had been sheltering Jews — admittedly, probably for money rather than out of sheer goodness, but sheltering them nevertheless. When the risks became apparent, they saved themselves.

      It wasn’t like they wanted to kill Jews. As the above indicates, they were even quite willing to hide Jews. However, they weren’t prepared to martyr themselves for Jews.

      And it’s worth asking; how many Polish Jews would have martyred themselves for their gentile neighbors?

      1. @ Colin Wright: I find your closing question asking how many Polish Jews would have martyred themselves to be offensive. Both because it is a historical hypothetical that never happened & could never happen; and because the plight of Jews throughout our history (with the exception of ancient Biblical periods in which Jews did have agency and their own nation/government) has always been one of victim. Never perpetrator. I wish Polish Jews, or Jews expelled from England multiple times, or Jews tortured during the Inquisition had the option of betraying their neighbors as they were betrayed.

        But alas they never did. So don’t make such offensive and theoretrical hypotheticals.

        I exclude the period of Israel’s existence of course & roundly condemn Israeli actions since 1948. But I would also maintain these are the acts of the Israeli nation, not world Jewry.

        1. ‘… the plight of Jews throughout our history (with the exception of ancient Biblical periods in which Jews did have agency and their own nation/government) has always been one of victim. Never perpetrator…’

          Perhaps the purpose of Israel in the divine plan — to teach you humility.

          Hard on the Palestinians, of course, but…

  10. Too much focus on guilting contemporary peoples for crimes of the past done by people other than their ancestors, which breeds enmity, and coming from hands reddened with blood and other crimes (Naftali Bennett is not exactly an angel, to say the least), and also from those who don’t have any connections to the Holocaust directly or indirectly (their ancestors lived outside of Europe/Slavic regions during the era comfortably).

    Poland claims their law has historical merit. An easy rebuttal would be to provide the satisfactory proof necessary to overcome the alleged inaccuracy.

    The victims and the tragedy victimizing them should not be political footballs for those seeking to extract a political price. They should be historical lessons.

    Countless Zionists today claim things like that “Palestine never existed”, that “Palestine was made up”, that refugees have no place in Israel, that one is “delusional” and needs “professional help” for raising issues about the Palestinian plight seven decades now ongoing from Zionist colonization that didn’t necessarily get advertised to those that participated in it as something as nefarious as it is today (a “secular democracy utopia” turned horrific international pariah and colonizing police state with foreign espionage apparatuses capable of inciting massive wars to its liking), that Rachel Corrie deserved what she got, that Gaza’s humanitarian crisis is a lie, etc. They gas light these tragedies, yet the historical facts show they exist and the conveyors of the truth unfazed by the attempts of liars.

    Personally, I believe the Holocaust should furnish the same strength in fact. If people choose to gaslight the facts, to scrutinize the history, and to embellish inaccuracies, then simply shine the truth in greater amplitude. The truth is not what anyone says, but the reality tethered to incontrovertible facts. No one should fear the truth and an examination of the truth.

    Poland’s maneuver is a political strategy to insulate itself from people like Naftali Bennett who want to extract a present day price for the Holocaust. It is, IMHO, not one that can, even under best attempts, to hide the truth. The truth can only be censored for so long.

    Soli

  11. Richard,
    When I was in Indonesia (all of this is years ago), I was asked a number of times: Do the Chinese in your country also own all the shops in the village? When I was in Zambia and Zimbabwe the same kind of questions, but this time concerning Indians: Is all the trade in the city in the hands of the Indians in your country too? They all complained that it was impossible for local people to join, because they were excluded, and that all the contacts of the Chinese/Indians with fellow countrymen made them impossible to compete with. (In Africa they aso complained that Indians would never intermarry with Africans.)

    I had to think of the position of the Jews in Poland all the time, when listening to these things. I had read that there too, the city/village center was usually Jewish, with shops and tradespeople, and the Poles made up the agricultural hinterland.

    There has been terrible violence against Chinese in Indonesia in the sixties (the estimation of victims in these massacres varies from 500,000 to more than one million, and a Chinese classmate of mine in high school told me her father had seen the river in his city turned red with blood). There was a smaller repeat of this violence in the nineties. In Uganda Indians were expelled under Idi Amin.

    Three populations, Jews in Poland, Chinese in Indonesia, and Indians in ex-British colonies in Africa, have been in similar social positions, and all have faced animosity from local farming communities. I watched Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah after hearing these things and a lot of the negative things the Polish people in the countryside in this film said about Jews, reminded me of what I had heard about Chinese and Indians in Indonesia and Africa.

    I really think this special position of Jews, Chinese and Indians in eastern Europe, Indonesia and Africa, respectively, has been, and is, a major factor in the animosity against these three populations. I do not think Jews had a similar position outside of eastern Europe. In western Europe they were just a part of a much larger merchant class, so they did not stand out much at all.

    In short: I can understand your anger about Polish anti-Semitism, but I do think you have to take the larger (universal) background of this kind of hatred of local farmers against outside merchants into account as well.

    1. @ Elisabeth: You are wrong about your claims regarding Jews in western Europe. Many western European countries who had supposedly accepted the emancipation of Jews centuries earlier, and their assimilation into their respective societies, turned around the shipped their Jewish populations to death camps during WWII. This happened in particular in France, Germany and to an extent in Italy. The only reason it didn’t happen in Spain or Portugal was they had long ago expelled their Jews. There were centuries of rancid anti-Semitism and acts of genocide against Jews in western Europe going all the way back to the Crusades and earlier. Spain expelled all its Jews in 1492 & tortured those who tried to remain.

      I don’t dispute the suffering of Chinese in Indonesia or the Indians in Uganda. Not at all.

      But the truth is that the Holocaust exterminated half the Jews in the entire world. Though the Indonesian mass murder of Chinese was genocide, it didn’t exterminate half the Chinese in the world. To me as a Jew , that is the crowning horror of the Holocaust.

    2. Elisabeth, you left two things out.
      Time – you Indonesia and Africa examples are of recent populations moving into another country. Century or two old. Jews lived in Poland for longer than that.
      Church – the hatred preached toward Jew as an ideology based on their religion (and killing of Jesus).

      But it is interesting and can explain some of it. I heard the 1/3 of Warsaw residents before the war were Jews. That’s huge.

      1. You are right about the church, but I wonder if the sociological context was not more important because all of Europe was christian, but pogroms happened in countries where Jews had a ‘Chinese in Indonesia’-like position. I think the Chinese have actually quite a long history in Indonesia (from the 15th c. on). The Dutch favoring them over other ethnicities during the colonial time made things worse.
        To answer Richard comment in part too: There was no need for an especially strong Jew hatred in a country during WW2, for the Nazi’s to achieve great success in their extermination campaign.
        Fear, apathy, deference to authority and a proper resistance not having been formed fast enough were enough to seal the fate of the Dutch Jews, while for a pogrom (evidence for Jew hatred among the population) you would have to go back to the 12th century.
        Here is an article that examines possible reasons for the exceptionally low survival rate of the Jews in the Netherlands.
        https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/languages/dutch/pdf/article_croes.pdf

  12. This seems relevant. What’s wrong with this picture?

    ‘In First, Germany to Compensate 25,000 Holocaust Survivors From Algeria.’

    The Germans were never in Algeria. Vichy France persecuted the Jews in Algeria, not the Nazis. Worse, the Germans never really had to coerce the French to do it; either the French were motivated by their own anti-semitism, or they were trying to curry favor with the Nazis. However, notice that the French aren’t rushing to insist that they should write the checks instead.

    The sin was widespread. One can even find American Jews working to limit the influx of Jews from occupied Europe in 1939-1941 to a few hundred. It’d be nice if we could pick out the bad man and make him apologize, but as the cartoon strip used to have it, ‘we have met the enemy, and he is us.’ Most of the definite villains were hung long ago.

    1. There is a saying Talmudic in Jewish law:השליח כמוהו=one who sends someone to do an errand etc has the same culpability as the sender.
      Thus any collusion with the Nazis {willingfully} makes them partners in the atrocities.

  13. I hope Richard and everyone else following this discussion will read a new op-ed in Haaretz entitled “‘Germany Bought Israel’s Forgiveness With Money. Poland Couldn’t Offer You a Thing’.” It’s by Yuli Tamir, an Israeli academic, former Labor Party member of the Knesset and cabinet minister, describing a conversation she had with Lech Kaczynski, then President of Poland, who asked to meet with her when she was minister of education under Olmert. It’s at

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-germany-bought-israeli-forgiveness-poland-had-nothing-to-offer-1.5803505

    but since it’s behind a paywall, here are some key passages:

    “I understand the terrible pain and powerful urge not to forget what happened, Kaczynski said, but you forgave the Germans. You forgave because they had money to pay you; they bought their forgiveness with money. We were poor. We were under the Soviet juggernaut, so we couldn’t offer you a thing, and you cynically made a decision to divert your fire to us. You send your high school students to Poland, they march in our streets, waving Israeli flags, exuding hatred and fear; they look at us as though they’re seeing Satan, and then they go to Berlin to have a good time. And they havWhat do you know about the history of the Jews in Poland, he asked. A thousand years of joint Jewish-Polish history – what do you know about it? The truth, I said hesitantly, is that I know a lot about the end and not much about the beginning. I will tell you, he said, and launched into a detailed, riveting history lesson.

    Do you know why there were so many Jews in Poland on the eve of the war, he asked. He didn’t wait for an answer: because the Poles accepted the Jews and granted them rights that they didn’t have in other countries; there were cities and towns in Poland in which the Jews were a majority; the Polish people did not view the Jews as an enemy; and I intend to build a museum that will survey these hundreds of years – hundreds of years of life together, and at the end the extermination camps. The end is terrible, but the story of the life also has to be told. I do not deny what happened in the extermination camps, but you have to remember that if the Nazis hadn’t come to power in Germany, there would not have been extermination camps in Poland. The Poles never aspired to annihilate the Jews.

    The Nazis conquered us, he continued, they tore Poland to pieces. My parents were members of the Polish underground – what do you know about the anti-Nazi Polish underground? What do you know about the Warsaw Uprising of the Poles? What do you know about the persecution of the Polish intelligentsia? What do you know about the destruction of the Old City in Warsaw? It was completely wiped out.

    I am not saying that we were saints. There were Poles who collaborated willingly, there were those who collaborated out of indifference, there were those who collaborated out of fear, and there were those who fought. We were a conquered nation, the Poles lost the battle and the campaign, six million Poles were killed in World War II – half of them Jews. The entire Polish nation suffered from the German occupation: Poles were expelled from their homes, hundreds of thousands were sent to Germany do to forced labor, many of them did not return. That does not justify collaboration with the Nazis, not even the killing of one person! He paused for breath, and I also breathed for a minute. An hour had passed and I hadn’t yet spoken a word.

    I understand the terrible pain and powerful urge not to forget what happened, Kaczynski said, but you forgave the Germans. You forgave because they had money to pay you; they bought their forgiveness with money. We were poor. We were under the Soviet juggernaut, so we couldn’t offer you a thing, and you cynically made a decision to divert your fire to us. You send your high school students to Poland, they march in our streets, waving Israeli flags, exuding hatred and fear; they look at us as though they’re seeing Satan, and then they go to Berlin to have a good time. And they have it good in Berlin, they sit in the cafes next to Gestapo headquarters and feel good. In Germany, they see culture and art; in Poland they see only bodies.

    You are rewriting history – he raised his voice and suddenly looked worn out and angry. You are deliberately blurring the difference between the horrific testimonies about Poles who murdered and massacred Jews, and the fact that the Polish people and its government never declared a war of annihilation on the Jews – the annihilation policy was official German policy. I respect and understand the pain of the victims, but we too were victims. Our whole history is a history of defeats: Poland was conquered, divided, united, passed from hand to hand. Now it is independent and will write its history anew, as befits a free nation.”

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