‘Unfortunately, the politics of memory pursued and enforced in Poland are nowadays best described as Holocaust distortion.’
A University of Ottawa professor wants the United Nations to take over Poland’s major Holocaust sites in order to preserve their tragic history and prevent the “distortion” of that history by Polish nationalists.
Holocaust scholar Jan Grabowski makes the argument in an essay, “Whitewash: Poland and the Jews,” recently published in The Jewish Quarterly, a publication that explores Jewish issues.
“Unfortunately, the politics of memory pursued and enforced in Poland are nowadays best described as Holocaust distortion,” Grabowski writes.
“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 six 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.”
Grabowski’s work has previously highlighted the complicity of individual Poles in the killing of Jews during the Holocaust, the vast majority of which was conducted inside Poland.
The Nazi SS established six extermination camps in Poland — Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chełmno, Sobibor, Majdanek and Bełżec — where five of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were put to death. The Holocaust wiped out all but a fraction of Poland’s pre-war Jewish community, which numbered just over three million.
“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,” Grabowski writes.
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Those facts, he argues, impose on Poland “a unique obligation of memory,” and a duty to care for the spaces that commemorate the Holocaust.
But Holocaust distortionists, he contends, are increasingly using Auschwitz and Treblinka to valourize those Polish gentiles who sought to help Jews, while ignoring those who assisted the Germans in wiping out the country’s Jewish population. Distortionists, he said, shift the entire blame for the historic crime to the Germans.
Distortionists, Grabowski said, also conflate the experience of those Poles who suffered, and sometimes died, in concentration camps at Auschwitz I and Treblinka I, with the experience of Jews, who were slaughtered en masse in adjacent extermination camps known as Auschwitz II and Treblinka II.
(According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 90 per cent of the one million people who died at the Auschwitz camp complex were Jewish.)
The distortionists, Grabowski said, blur the distinction between concentration camps — essentially slave labour camps — and extermination camps, where people were sent to die.
“They’re using them (Auschwitz and Treblinka) as platforms of Polish martyrdom,” he said in an interview, “and I find that obscene.”
In his essay, Grabowski argues that Poland’s major Holocaust sites should not be subject to the designs of Polish nationalism.
“Given the apparent unwillingness of the Polish authorities to act as honest custodians of the memory of the Holocaust, perhaps the time has come to place these sites under European, United Nations or other international jurisdictions,” he writes.
“Auschwitz and Treblinka could become places in which humanity can reflect unhindered on one of the greatest catastrophes in history, on its own tragic heritage, and its own moral condition, past and present.”
Grabowski has estimated that about 200,000 Jews were killed because of the direct or indirect involvement of their Polish, gentile neighbours.
For years, Grabowski and his work have attracted fierce criticism from Polish nationalists, led by the Polish League Against Defamation. Nationalists believe that highlighting the complicity of some Poles in the killing of Jews does a disservice to the country’s gallant wartime history and the enormous suffering of its people.
Initially hired at the University of Ottawa in 1993 as a colonial historian of New France, Grabowski began his Holocaust research after visiting the Polish archives and discovering a large cache of German wartime records that offered new revelations about the Jewish experience in Poland.
His 2014 book, Hunt for Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize.
In February 2021, a Warsaw court ruled that Barbara Engelking and Grabowski, editors of Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, must apologize for saying villager Edward Malinowski gave up Jews to the Nazis.
That decision was overturned on appeal.
Andrew Duffy is a National Newspaper Award-winning reporter and long-form feature writer based in Ottawa. To support his work, including exclusive content for subscribers only, sign up here: ottawacitizen.com/subscribe
