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.