Poland saw the extermination of nearly 3-million of its 3.3-million Jews during the Holocaust. After the war, only 380,000 Jews remained in the country. The victims were murdered by the Nazis in extermination camps like Auschwitz on Polish soil.
Though the lion’s share of guilt for this crime against humanity rests with Nazi Germany, Poles were not innocent bystanders as the current far-right Polish government would have us believe. Some Holocaust historians estimate that up to 200,000 Jews were murdered directly or indirectly by Poles. But the current Polish government, which has already succeeded in emasculating both the media and the legal system, now seeks to emasculate history itself by criminalizing any historical research or publication which blames Poland in any way for the Holocaust. It passed a law which threatened imprisonment for individuals found to have defamed the nation with such claims.
The law raised a storm of protest among Israelis, historians and human rights groups who protested not only that it impinged on free speech and academic freedom, but that it defiled the memory of the six-million victims of the Holocaust and the survivors as well. Protests were heard around the world, including inside the European Union, where Poland has proven to be an irascible and unruly member.
That’s how an unholy alliance developed between Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party and Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu. They both needed each other to advance their own separate, but parallel political agendas. Poland needed the cover provided by Israel’s acquiescence to the new law. And Netanyahu has continuously sought foreign allies who could help advance his own foreign policy goals. In this case, he faces an increasingly united European Union, whose protests against Israeli Occupation and ongoing violence against Palestinians have added to Israeli isolation on the world stage. As a result, he’s forged new alliances with insurgent right-wing movements, which in some cases rule their nations (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia), and in others are challenged the prevailing center-left democratic governments (UK, France, Germany).
Viktor Orban is another example of a right-wing politician ruling Hungary whose views are implicitly, and at times explicitly anti-Semitic. But as Orban is a devout opponent of Islam and rising immigration, Netanyahu has made fast friends with him. Netanyahu visited Hungary several months ago, just after Orban launched an anti-Semitic campaign against his one-time patron, George Soros, as a tool to advance his electoral prospects (he won a massive victory).
Now Orban plans to return the favor. For possibly the first time in its history, Israel will welcome an avowedly anti-Semitic head of state on a state visit. Ironically, all such visits involve a pilgrimage to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum. It will be interesting to see how the institution responds to this visit and whether it welcomes him as it would any other world leader. To do so, would in my opinion amount to whitewashing Orban’s repugnant views and be an insult to the 400,000 Hungarian Jews murdered with the collaboration of Hungary’s then-fascist leaders, whose reputation has now been revived by Orban’s political movement.
Yad Vashem, the pre-eminent Holocaust research center, has issued a public statement denouncing the Polish-Israel Holocaust agreement:
Its “highly problematic wording … contradicts existing and accepted historical knowledge in this field,” Yad Vashem said of the agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki.
The wording, the center said, in effect supports “a narrative that research has long since disproved, namely, that the Polish government in exile and its underground arms strove indefatigably — in occupied Poland and elsewhere — to thwart the extermination of Polish Jewry.”
The June 27 agreement between Netanyahu and Morawiecki stated that the term “Polish death camps” is “blatantly erroneous” and that the World War II Polish government in exile “attempted to stop this Nazi activity by trying to raise awareness among the Western allies to the systematic murder of the Polish Jews.”
The center said the agreement contradicts “decades of historical research [that] reveal a totally different picture: Poles’ assistance to Jews during the Holocaust was relatively rare, and attacks against and even the murder of Jews were widespread phenomena.”
Reading this passage, brought me back to one of the themes I’ve written about here a number of times: the degree to which Bibi Netanyahu falsifies Jewish history in service to his political interests. His are sins of omission and commission: like the false claim that the original idea of exterminating European Jewry came not from Hitler, but from Hajj Amin al-Husseini.
A few years ago, I wrote this post about the distortions and errors in a book that Bibi wrote:
…The book portrays alleged Arab collusion with the Nazis. A sharp Israeli, living in Germany no less, printed a page from the book on Facebook and noted that in just a single sentence Bibi made no less than three errors. Bibi’s sentence reads:
“Egypt can boast of a worthy trove of war criminals, like the SS Gen. Oskar Derlewanger, who murdered thousands of Jews in Ukraine and was made Nasser’s chief of security.”
Ron Leyser retorts that Derlewanger was a colonel, not a general. That the SS officer never stepped foot in Ukraine (though he did murder Jews and Poles elsewhere). And finally that Derlewanger died in 1945, well before Nasser ever came to power. If there ever was a politician who murdered truth, it has to be Bibi.
In one of Bibi’s more outrageous historical equivalences, he likened the BDS movement to the anti-Jewish blood libel. Here he lectured his cabinet as his historian father, Ben Zion Netanyahu once did to his students:
They accused us of being the source of the world’s evil, they said we poison the wells of humanity, that we drink the blood of little children. All these things are said about us today as well. It wasn’t true then and it’s not true now…
This week we had to fight off a great international effort to expel us from FIFA. I’m happy that we succeeded in this. This will be part of a continuing effort [against us]. I won’t pretend that these efforts will end soon. We will have to act against them on many fronts. But the main thing that must fortify us is the truth, and the inner pride that we know who we are, what we are, and what we represent. We will not surrender to libels.
Singling out Bibi Netanyahu from all the world’s politicians for mangling historical facts is problematic, since politics forces most of them to lie in order to promote their particular ideology or political platform. But in some cases, these lies lead to massive bloodshed and human catastrophe. Adolf Hitler was one such figure. Donald Trump may be another, although that remains to be seen. One can make a credible argument that Bibi’s record of repeated distortion of historical reality in favor of his anti-democratic, intolerant, racist views incites a good deal of the violence inflicted on both Palestinians and, to a lesser extent, Israelis.
One of the great ironies here is that Bibi’s father was a renowned historian of the Jewish Middle Ages who taught at Cornell University. Earlier in his career, the elder Netanyahu served as personal secretary to Zeev Jabotinsky, founder of the Zionist Revisionists, the leading political opponents of Avodah, which became the Labor Party. One of the prevailing criticisms of Netanyahu’s historical scholarship is that he offered a revisionist view of the traumas of Jewish history filtered through the lens of the Holocaust. This is, in many ways, what his son does as a politician and it is what many Israelis themselves do. They cripple themselves in the face of current reality by reverting to old archetypes and expecting they will repeat themselves.
The fact that such an eminent historian can produce a son who dishonors the Jewish historical record so flagrantly and repeatedly is a depressing phenomenon.
Orban’s visit to Yad Vashem should be viewed in the context of a learning experience.
That’s a good thing.
@ Peg: Oh yeah sure, Israelis are going to learn a lot. How to harrass, smear and torment fellow Jews for the sake of political gain. How to bully immigrants and turn your state into a police state. Oh, but Israelis already know how to do that. So where’s the learning? And if you think Orban is going to “learn” anything on this trip, you’re out of your mind. This is a grand victory lap for Bibi and Orban. They are proto fascist birds of a feather.
“That’s how an unholy alliance developed between Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party and Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu. They both needed each other to advance their own separate, but parallel political agendas”
Well. Israeli Minister of Education, MK Bennett, didn’t get the memo. He is making Poland’s role in the Holocaust, mandatory study for Israeli students.
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5305320,00.html
@ Peg: That’s after Bennett erases homosexuality and Palestinians from the textbooks; and forbidden novels from the curriculum. No thank you. If you want to lionize anyone it will have to be someone else.
excellent article and don’t forget the attempt to blame the Mufti for the Holocaust and the attempt by Netanyahu to exonerate Hitler of this matter. Hitler was apparently bullied by said Mufti
@ Tony Greenstein: Thanks. The mufti episode is in the article.
excellent article don’t forget that according to Netanyahu’s speech to the 2016 WZO Congress it was the Mufti who was responsible for the holocaust when he bullied Hitler into carrying it out
I’ll be tactless enough to note that Jews themselves led the way here with Holocaust Denial laws and such.
The general principle seems to be that free speech is totally last season.
@ Colin Wright: Holocaust denial? Really? Don’t go there. Just don’t.
People advocate all kinds of things I think are utter nonsense — that includes, you will be reassured to hear, denying that the Holocaust occurred.
However, free speech is meaningless if we restrict it to only utterances we agree with and find congenial. If France et al can outlaw Holocaust Denial, how can we seriously object to Poland outlawing whatever they find upsetting?
Worse, of course, Poland isn’t actually advocating Holocaust denial — far from it. They just wish to deny any complicity in the Holocaust — when the truth is decidedly more complex and not very flattering to the Poles.
@ Colin WRight: I’ve argued before here that Poland’s fascist government’s attitudes toward the Holocaust are a form of Holocaust denial. You can call it denial-lite or whatever you wish. But it IS a form of denial.
So no, I see no need to facilitate this garbage. Democracy is not evergreen. It cannot withstand every outrage perpetrated against it. I’m sorry, but after what Putin & Trump together have done to this country, political speech needs to be regulated. At the very least, such speech must be completely transparent including who is speaking and who is paying for the speech. And of course private social media companies are entitled to regulate speech on their networks as they see fit.
‘…I’m sorry, but after what Putin & Trump together have done to this country, political speech needs to be regulated…’
Comment is superfluous.
@ Colin Wright: You conveniently omitted everything else I wrote in that post in order to create a straw-man.
In hindsight, I’d change what I wrote to requiring that political speech be regulated during elections. I don’t think political speech outside of elections needs much regulation.
And as for regulation of political speech, we do it all the time. That’s why there’s an FEC. Not that the commission has any teeth thanks to Congressional, Supreme Court, and GOP emasculation. But it exists and at one time did take serious action to ensure elections were fought fairly.
A Polish colleague of mine told me that a German soldier came to the door of her Jewish grandmother, telling her: “Madam, you have to go into hiding, because you are being betrayed by your own family”. Her husband’s brother had reported her as being Jewish! She got away in time. I asked if they had cut ties with the family after the war. Apparently not. It is all so hard to imagine…
Just a note to point out:
If 380 000 Jews remained in Poland after the war, this means that 380 000 Jews found shelter and support between Poles ( these were Jews who were NOT found by Germans, and many more were, which means that the true number of Jews who found shelter, assistance and support amongst Poles was much higher) , and if 200 000 were killed directly and indirectly by Poles, then this statement does not reflect realiy:
“Poles’ assistance to Jews during the Holocaust was relatively rare, and attacks against and even the murder of Jews were widespread phenomena”.
My “back of the envelope” calculations indicate that one non-Jewish family in 35 gave (successfully) shelter to Jews. Not a lot? Maybe not. But it means that there was no street, no village and no townhouse that did not have Jews being sheltered over the period of 5 years.
Also, bear in mind, that supporting and sheltering Jews was punishable with instant death sentence for whole Polish, as well as Jewish family – extreme measure against such help which was applied by Germans to Poles only, and not to any other occupied country)
@ Eva Smagacz: Not quite. It means that 380,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust. It is by no means certain that any of them received any help from Polish non-Jews. Tens of thousands of Jews were partisans who defended themselves. Tens of thousands more survived the camps and returned to Poland. No Pole helped any of them.
I don’t trust back of the envelope calculations on matters as serious as how many Poles helped Jews. That isn’t a serious calculation and you know it.
Of course some Poles did help. There were Righteous Gentiles among the Poles. But for every one of these there were probably five or ten who would just as soon betray a Jew for gain as save one.
That’s not true. Germans punished villages in other countries which harbored Jews. This happened, for instance, in France. But it may not have been an overall policy in these other countries to murder those who tried to save Jews as it was in Poland.
Richard, I understand your point about back of the envelope. But in terms of survival of 380 000 Jews the points you make about partisans and survivors of camps, support my point about help from Poles completely.
Take partisans:
All food produced by polish farmers was controlled and Germans confiscated majority of it for its war effort. Illegal handling/commerce in food was punishable by death or labour camp. (my family in Warsaw survived partly because the former lady’s maid of my grandmother smuggled the food from her village to them). How do you think partisans survived 3 continental winters in Polish forests when temperature would drop to -30 degrees Centigrade without support of Polish villages? Also, I am genuinely curious of the data or sources you have on Jewish partisans in Poland. I never heard of tens of thousands Jews being partisans in Poland (excluding Ghetto Uprising, but fighters there were in hundreds not thousands)
Take survivals of camps:
I agree that there were easily tens of thousands Jewish people who survived camps, but they were rarely there for duration of the war. Labour camps were better for survival than concentration/extermination camps, but Jews were rarely sent there. Jews sent to camps, those who survived, usually arrived very late in the war. And those in ghettoes were getting food from Gentile side, officially, in the deliveries sanctioned by Germans and unofficially, by smuggling food and medicines in. My grandparents were, in a small way, part of such resistance in Warsaw. My grandmother smuggled information and medicine to and from Jewish work groups in German controlled factory in Warsaw. Her mother in law was killed by gestapo in Pawiak for her part in resistance movement.
@ Eva Smagacz: I think the reality was different than you describe. Here is the Holocaust Museum description of the life of a partisan and how s/he survived:
As for the number of partisans, here is another source:
Given that Poland had by far the largest Jewish population in Europe it stands to reason that while there were thousands of Jewish partisans in other countries, the majority would have been in Poland. My claim of “tens of thousands” may have been a bit broad. But I’d guess there would have been at least 20,000 Polish Jewish partisans.
I certainly honor the courage and sacrifice of all non-Jews who helped Jews survive. It was a brave act of humanity in the face of evil. But I think we also have to look at conditions as they were, rather than as we wish they were.
I thought only Poland had the death penalty for anyone caught hiding or helping Jews.
@Elisabeth: Nope. Serbia too. https://www.jta.org/1942/01/13/archive/nazis-decree-death-penalty-for-serbs-found-hiding-assisting-jews
And France too: Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis? https://nyti.ms/2cXeSed