The Polish corrosion of Holocaust history

The question of Polish complicity in the Holocaust has become more contentious and divisive the further we are removed from the event.

The history of the Shoah in today’s Poland is being corroded by the toxic mix of government policies of negationism and distortion willingly accepted by the broader public.

Poland has become a champion (worldwide) of Holocaust relativisation, Holocaust de-judaisation and Holocaust envy, insisting on Jewish–Bolshevik collusion and conspiracy, and blaming the victims for their own demise.

The success of these memorial policies over the years, have transformed how Poles see their own past and how they construe their own identity.

Why is the Polish case so vital to the memory of the Shoah? First, Poland is the place where the Holocaust was perpetrated; it’s here, on pre-war Polish territory, that close to 5 out of 6 million Jews were put to death. The Jewish community in Poland was the largest in Europe, and second largest in the world, after the United States.

Second, out of 3 million Polish Jews who – at some point – found themselves under German occupation, fewer than 30,000 survived the war. The survival rate for Polish Jews was, therefore, close to 1 per cent. Nowhere else in Europe was the Holocaust so complete, so total; nowhere else did the destruction of the Jewish people proceed with such nightmarish perfection.

Third, Poland is where the Germans established all the extermination camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chełmno, Sobibor, Majdanek and Bełżec. This, in turn, imposed on Polish society and the Polish state a unique obligation of memory, a duty of caring for the spaces of horror and for the symbolic commemoration of one of the greatest human catastrophes in history. That’s why Poland, despite itself, has become a reluctant custodian of the memory of the Shoah.

These three reasons alone are enough to make us consider Poland, in matters of memory and commemoration of the Shoah, a place of unique importance.

Unfortunately, the politics of memory pursued and enforced in Poland are nowadays best described as Holocaust distortion. Unlike Holocaust deniers of yesteryear, states, institutions and people engaged in Holocaust distortion do not deny the factuality of the Jewish catastrophe. They freely admit that the Germans murdered 6 million European Jews.

What they refuse to acknowledge, however, is that their people, their nation, had something to do with the event. That their ancestors took part in the German genocidal project.

Holocaust distortion (or negationism) is a particularly insidious threat to our collective memory, as it is partially based on truth: no one denies, for instance, that some gentiles helped the Jews. The negationists insist, though, that helping Jews was the default position of their nation. They claim that Polish (or Hungarian, or Lithuanian, or Romanian, or Ukrainian) society did all it could to save its Jewish co-citizens in their moment of need.

Israeli author Manfred Gerstenfeld called this memorial strategy “Holocaust deflection”: [I]t entails admitting that the Holocaust happened while denying the complicity or responsibilities of specific groups or individuals. The Holocaust is then blamed on others. This, to a large extent, concerns those countries where, during the war, Germans were helped greatly by local citizens in the despoliation, deportation and killing of the Jews.”

In practical terms, in Poland, it means shifting the entire blame to the Germans, regardless of the level of complicity of local gentiles. It was best summed up by the Polish writer and historian Kazimierz Wyka, who, shortly after the war, referring to the massive amount of Jewish real estate left in the hands of the Poles, wrote: “For the Germans, all the blame. For us – the keys and the cash.”

In terms of advancing Holocaust distortion, Poland is ahead of the pack, but it is not alone. In Budapest, the local authorities erected, in 2014, a monument called the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation. The Memorial of Hungarian Innocence would be a more appropriate name for the structure, which features Archangel Gabriel (patron saint of Hungary) attacked from above by a German eagle. The eagle has the date “1944” etched on its ankle. The message the monument wants to convey is simple: it was the Germans, and not us, who delivered, in 1944, 430,000 Hungarian Jews to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. This claim is a bald-faced lie. True, Adolph Eichmann and his people ordered the deportations, but the planning, the concentration of Jews in the ghettos, the robbery of their property and their subsequent transportation to the border with the Generalgouvernement, was prepared and executed by Hungarian civil authorities, police and the military.

In Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia, dozens of anti-communist and patriotic fighters are now hailed as national heroes – including Jonas Noreika, Kazys Škirpa and Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejys in Lithuania, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych in Ukraine, and Herberts Cukurs in Latvia – despite ample evidence of their involvement with the Einsatzgruppen, the German mobile killing units responsible for thousands of Jewish deaths.

 In Bulgaria, the official historical narrative paints the country as a safe haven for Jews, conveniently forgetting the more than 11,000 Jews deported, in March 1943, by Bulgarian military authorities, from Macedonia and Thrace to Treblinka. The list goes on.

Deflecting and distorting the history of the Holocaust allows governments today to construct a new, positive and usable narrative.

People and institutions engaging in Holocaust distortion tend to spotlight the Jewish police or the role played by the Jewish councils ( Judenräte), inflating the scale of Jewish complicity Stressing the importance of the alleged Jewish collaboration with the communists is another technique often used by Holocaust distortionists. “The Jews had it coming,” they claim, discussing the wave of anti-Jewish violence and pogroms in Eastern Europe, which started in the summer and autumn of 1941, after the German attack against the Soviet Union. This assertion not only relies on antisemitic stereotypes but also overlooks the reality that Jews were targeted irrespective of their political beliefs, and the perpetrators were drawn from diverse strata of society, including even those who earlier cooperated with the communists.

The negationists strive to elevate the wartime suffering of their own national group to the desired “Jewish” level, a phenomenon known as Holocaust envy.

This article is an edited extract from Whitewash: Poland and the Jews by Jan Grabowski. Subscribe here to read the essay.