Very cautious with the vocabulary
But Poland was in Hawaii the whole time.
Historians fear that mounting pressure against scholars who implicate Poles in the Holocaust is having a chilling effect on research across Europe, with one France-based researcher saying she will tone down her upcoming book and shy away from naming names.
Audrey Kichelewski, an associate professor of contemporary history at the University of Strasbourg who is writing a book about postwar trials of Poles, said she would be “very cautious with the vocabulary” she used and would not cite defendants’ names for fear of being sued by living relatives.
It is the latest episode in what critics say is a concerted effort by Poland’s right-wing government and supportive groups to aggressively enforce a narrative of exclusive victimhood, stressing the heroic stories of Poles who risked their lives to save Jewish compatriots but downplaying accounts of complicity in the Holocaust unearthed by some historians.
It’s a familiar pattern. White people in the US would rather say pious things about Doctor King (as they love to call him) than talk about the post-Reconstruction laws and regulations and real estate maps that entrenched racism for generations.
A 2018 legal amendment would have threatened jail for those who implied the Polish “state” or “nation” was complicit in Nazi crimes, although the law was repeatedly watered down after an international outcry and stripped of its criminal component.
In February, a Warsaw court ordered two scholars — Barbara Engelking, director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, and Jan Grabowski, professor of history at the University of Ottawa — to apologize after they detailed the case of a mayor of a Polish village who allegedly betrayed a group of Jews to Nazi occupiers.
Because that sort of thing never happened. Right? Because there never was any anti-Semitism in Poland, right? Because majority-Catholic countries are never the slightest bit anti-Semitic, right?
And last month, an ultraconservative Polish Roman Catholic group threatened to sue a French radio station for “infringing the reputation of the republic of Poland” by supposedly implicating Poland in Nazi war crimes during a program.
Poland as a nation was certainly an early victim of Hitler’s plan for world domination, but that doesn’t rule out ideological overlap.
The Polish League Against Defamation, which backed the case against Engelking and Grabowski, has launched lawsuits against newspapers and broadcasters in Germany, Italy and Spain, invoking concepts such as a right to “national pride” for Poles.
It sounds a bit trans activismy now, doesn’t it. “We have a right to see ourselves as fabulous! You are putting painful dents in our ability to see ourselves as fabulous! You are a criminal!”
A country or government that feels compelled to enact legislation to protect its “reputation” against the truth probably has good need to do so.
Actual academic research is in jeopardy unless we get some sense soon.
I don’t think it’s sufficiently well-known that Poland was the most pro-Jewish state in Europe, over the course of many centuries, and at one time had 80% of the world’s Jewry living in peace and tolerance. Over the course of Poland’s history, Jews always fared worse during the many occupations and partitions of Poland. Making “Poland” synonymous with “anti-semitism” is mistaken.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/poland-virtual-jewish-history-tour
It’s certain that there were Nazi collaborators among the Poles during the German occupation, and also that Poland was experiencing waves of home-grown anti-semitism between the wars. However, Poland was probably still not as bad for Jews as were Germany, Russia, and Ukraine – which is how Poland ended up with such a big Jewish population in the first place. Calling the genocide of Polish Jewry a “Polish Holocaust” seems like passing the buck, because the ghettos and concentration camps were created in Poland in the name of German Lebensraum.
That said, the historical policy of the current Law and Justice Party (PiS) is awful, and based on denial. It’s similar to what the right wing wants to do in America, weaponizing history in the name of a “pedagogy of pride” as opposed to a “pedagogy of shame.” It’s kind of like how the Republicans want to cancel the 1619 Project.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
It’s not a terrible thing to be conscious of history. Sure, my forebears were too poor to own slaves, but I still benefit from a system that oppressed, and continues to oppress, Black people, and it’s fair I should know this. Likewise, most of today’s Poles might not be directly related to anybody who actually collaborated with the Nazis in the Polish Holocaust, but there are still the bones of three million Jews under their feet, and actively ignoring that fact does nobody any good.
As in the case of the American Right, it would be much better to create pride with actions, rather than merely outlawing words that express shame.
Part of the impetus towards the denial of responsibility for the destruction of Polish Jewry, during and after WWII, may come from Polish resentment that the West sold them down the river at Yalta.
Fair points. I did know that it was the Germans who built all those camps in Poland, and who sent all those trainloads of Jews to them, so I should have mentioned it. Lebensraum and totesraum.
That’s almost exactly the words I was saying to my husband last night! We must be thinking along the same lines.
Marcus Ranum has an excellent column about how he was BORN a winner. White male to middle class parents, in a system that celebrates and empowers this population.
Yeah, Brian, I wasn’t born a winner, as a white female born and raised in squalor, filth, and poverty, but when compared with people of color in my same socioeconomic class, I definitely did have a benefit over them. I do think at some point class should enter the equation, but even a middle to upper class person of color experiences racism that those of us who are poor and white do not.
It shouldn’t be controversial to cite any population as having collaborators within them. Hell, there were Jewish collaborators, either who hoped to shield their communities from the worst atrocities by acting servile to a relentlessly evil occupier, or who decided to try to save their necks at the expense of those same communities–and it can also be difficult to tell which individual had which motive. And of course, the pressure to collaborate is ironically worse for those who have been openly supportive of the targeted community prior to the full occupation. A suspected [blank]-lover is going to be under much greater scrutiny, and thus their families will be in much greater danger, than that of a guy who was casually indifferent to the evils of the incoming regime. So you have the tragedy (which I’ve often heard of in personal accounts of genocidal occupations) where a merchant or neighbor who always seemed friendly and supportive suddenly turns on the shocked victims–because if they didn’t, then their own families might be hit the same way. The odds, then, that some residents of other communities suffering under Nazi occupation would make the same devil’s bargain are almost 1:1.
And I’ll be honest–if we had such a government in place in this country, I don’t know that I’d be strong enough to resist the danger to my wife and my brother’s children simply to take the moral high ground. It’s a choice I hope to never have to make.
1939 Poland was no democracy. The Poles had gladly annexed territory from Czechoslovakia when the Germans tossed them some scraps. Unlike the Netherlands or France, the Poles lacked any exile government with widely accepted authority. So even the most active Polish resistance forces were as much against each other as they were against the Germans.
AND…it still seems that most in the West have amnesia about the Ribbentrop Pact, and the fact that Poland was invaded by the Russian too.