There is one crucial difference between Poland and the other nations of Europe that came under German occupation
The law passed by the Polish parliament, which calls for punishment of anyone blaming the Polish people for Nazi crimes, has stirred a debate about Poland’s role during the Holocaust. The debate is colored by the memory of the rampant anti-Semitism that existed in Poland before World War II, the widespread anti-Semitism that continued in Poland throughout the war, and the continuation of anti-Semitic outbreaks after the war when it was discovered that not all of Poland’s Jews had been exterminated during the Holocaust.
Yet it is important to differentiate between the behavior of individual Poles or groups of Poles and the actions of the Polish government-in-exile in London and the Home Army (AK) during the war.
The Polish government, which governed until the defeat of the Polish Army, and the government-in-exile which operated from London thereafter, not only did not collaborate with the Germans, but were engaged in fighting them until the end of the war.
The Polish government, which governed until the defeat of the Polish Army, and the government-in-exile which operated from London thereafter, not only did not collaborate with the Germans, but were engaged in fighting them until the end of the war.
The Home Army, under orders from the Polish government, was in contact with ZOB, a Jewish underground organization led by Mordechai Anielewicz in the Warsaw Ghetto and provided it with a limited quantity of pistols. A member of another Polish underground group delivered weapons and instructed ZZW fighters, the other Jewish underground organization in the ghetto, led by Pawel Frenkiel.
The Polish socialist underground and the People’s Army (AL) undertook a local action in support of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. As a matter of fact, Poles were the only ones to provide any assistance at all to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. The Allied Powers, the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union, just ignored the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
The German government, fully supported by the German people, perpetrated the Holocaust. In exterminating Europe’s Jews, Germany was aided by the Romanian government. When in June, 1941 the Romanian army joined Germany in attacking the Soviet Union, the Romanian government ordered its army to wreak destruction on the Jewish population in the areas it occupied, including Odessa. It is estimated that the Romanians were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
After the defeat of the French army, France’s government collaborated with the Germans by sending their Jews to the death camps. So did the puppet Slovakian government and the Hungarian one.
Organized groups of people living in some of the areas that came under German control, actively and enthusiastically participated in the extermination of entire local Jewish communities. These were the Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians. Lithuanian and Latvian units under orders from the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto forced Jews from their homes and herded them to the railroad sidings for transportation to Treblinka, during the months of the great deportations in the summer and fall of 1942. They were assisted by the “Jewish Police” under orders from the Germans.
Individual Poles reported Jews who tried to pass as Poles to the Germans, and surviving outside the walls of the ghetto was very hazardous because of such informants. In the Warsaw Ghetto, a Polish police (the “blue police”) under German orders also assisted in keeping order and bringing Jews to the railroad cars that took them to Treblinka. But the Polish government and the Polish underground armies did not collaborate with the Germans during the war. They fought the Germans.
That is the difference between Poland and the nations of Europe that came under German occupation. That may be the reason for the sensitivity of the present Polish government when it hears Poland accused of complicity in the Holocaust. These accusations are not justified. However, the law passed in the Polish parliament, making it illegal to cast any blame on Poles for the crimes committed during the Holocaust, is too far reaching and endangers free discussion and research about what happened on Polish soil during the Holocaust. It needs to be revised.
They abstained.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/12/21/here-7-nations-sided-u-s-and-israel-u-n-vote-over-jerusalem/974098001/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-invites-nations-who-abstained-or-rejected-un-vote-to-reception/
How about a new category of honorees at Vad Yashem.
The almost-righteous gentiles who at least just sat on their hands.
Oh, right, they already did that with Bulgaria, was it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olnLcJ0l46w
Yes, and what’s more, how can they take credit for not having a Quisling government when the Germans didn’t even give them the opportunity to but ruled Poland directly.
The French government in exile – that of De Gaulle — didn’t collaborate either.
So what?
They Poles must not be allowed to slide out from under their responsibility, their collective culpabity as a people. Especially not by blaming and prosecuting us for calling them on it.
Any more than the French.
The individuals who rescued us are honored as righteous gentiles for a reason. There weren’t all that many of.them.
And as for their support for Israel, does anybody know how they voted in the UN? I haven’t checked.
Words are cheap.
I couldn’t agree more. Arens doesn’t get it. If a few hundred or even a few thousand antisemitic Poles murdered a few hundred Jews then maybe Arens has a point. But that was not the case and he knows it. Thousands of Jews were murdered before, during and after the war by tens of thousands of Poles independent of any Nazi force.
I’m actually glad that Poland is showing her true colours on this. This is a great educational opportunity. The truth has been mostly silenced on Poland’s complicity on the Holocaust. We need to cancel the March of Living. Why are we continuing to reward Poland with millions of dollars annually by visiting the Polish death camps? Isn’t it enough that we paid with our parents blood and billions of dollars of stolen property? The Jewish bodies weren’t even cold after burning in the ovens when Polish neighbours, employees and business associates repossessed Jewish houses, factories and businesses.
Who says that the Holocaust was what the Nazis did to the Jews? Sure they planned it and meticulously so. But most European countries were also complicit. Poland was one of the worst. You tell me how 3.6 million Jews could disappear in Poland without any help from Poles? The Nazis couldn’t do it all by themselves. I’m still waiting for an apology in words and reparations (like Germany has done). The silence is deafening. In Germany it’s illegal to deny the Holocaust while soon In Poland it will be illegal to acknowledge it!
Any good that righteous Poles did when they risked and gave their lives to save Jewish lives has been evaporated by the Poles who are considering these dangerous, revisionist laws.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Article 55a of the law relating to the Institute of National Remembrance forbids to “ascribe to the Polish People or to the Polish State, responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.”
This act applies regardless of locally binding regulations at the place at which the forbidden act took place and this law applies to Polish citizens as well as to foreigners.
So this law purports to apply to this Website as well.
Polish institutionalized abuse of Jewish citizens already before the War served as an important lesson to the Nazis. Polish actions served as precursors along the slippery slope that led to the dehumanization of Jews until the Germans killed them off in the ‘final solution’.
Let us start with the pogroms incited by Polish soldiers and officials in Warsaw and in the Eastern provinces at the end of the First World War. This led to the Morgenthau Report and later to specific provisions in the Treaty of Versailles that sought to protect minorities in Poland.
To no avail. Ten years before Hitler assumed power, and twenty years before Germany launched the Second World War, Poland’s Prime Minister W?adys?aw Grabski initiated a series of discriminatory laws. Jews were subjected to onerous taxation, they were officially denied certain professions, they could not register a range of businesses and were excluded from public office, and they were also restricted in applying to academia. The few that were accepted as students were eventually relegated to “ghetto benches” at the back. These shenanigans resulted in the Fourth Wave of immigration to Israel in the 20s and 30s.
Germans took note of the racist laws in Poland, they caught on to it, saw that you were able to get away with it in the international arena, and the Third Reich applied some of the methods they learned. Furthermore, by the time the Nazis invaded Poland, an already weakened impoverished and demoralized Jewish community was lined up.
It is correct to cite the heroics of Polish resistance, as well as their support of some few Jewish individuals, however scant that was. It would also be helpful to latch on to Poland’s new awakening sympathy for Israel, the Jewish people, and Poland’s recognition of the threat of Islam.
But the sad fact is that the Polish nation as a whole was enthusiastically complicit in the Nazi murder of Jews. They were constantly ferreting out hideaways and stragglers, Poles were price gouging around ghettos and happily trading with camp guards around the Nazi concentration camps, and often they slaughtered off escapees with pitchforks and knives. This cannot be whitewashed.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-book-examines-poles-who-killed-jews-during-wwii/
I ask again, is a country represented more by its government or its people. Every country had rescuers as well as collaborators. So What? Does that mean the Poles did not collaborate hugely and murder Jews on their own initiative hugely? no.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0iAcQVIokg
Does a country merely consist of its government and not its people? And I have read that while some Home Army Commanders ordered weapons to be distributed to the Jewish underground, many of the officers under them refused to obey those orders. The Home Army waited until the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was crushed to rise themselves. The very fact that they are going to punish Jews for speaking while not suppressing anti-semitism speaks volumes. I wish Putin would just re-annex them already. Who says all peoples deserve to be free? Not I. All enemies of the Jewish people deserve to live under crushing foreign occupation until they disappear or the sun burns out, whichever comes first.