This is what the Polish historian Jan Grabowski writes. The article was published on The Conversation Canada website on February 14, 2023
By Jan Grabowski, Professor, Department of History, University of Ottawa
In January 2018, the Polish Parliament passed Law which imposes prison sentences of up to three years on anyone who claims that the Poles have any responsibility or complicity in the crimes committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
The law was designed to silence historians, and indeed it created a chilling atmosphere in academia and beyond.
my research Focuses on the relationship between Polish Jews and the surrounding non-Jewish population.
In my case, the Polish government (acting directly or through emissaries) decided to use civil legal procedures. I was sued for libel And Polish organizations sought to remove me from my position as professor of history at the University of Ottawa.
I was recently interrogated by Internal Security Agency of Poland and minister The state's courts expressed outrage about my work
These are just some of the legal and extra-legal challenges associated with writing the history of the Holocaust in Poland today.
A monument to the memory of Janusz Korczak, who perished in the gas chamber in the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942, together with the children of the Jewish orphanage he ran in the Warsaw ghetto. (Photo: AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
history and nationalism
The idea that parts of Polish society were complicit with the Germans in the Holocaust has long been considered taboo.
In 2015, the far-right party came to power in Poland.law and justice". the defense of her good name of the nation has become one of the pillars of its political platform and a sure way to consolidate its electoral base.
As a result, independent historians and educators, And I am among them, became the target of brutal hate campaigns in state-owned and state-controlled media.
There is a saying among Holocaust researchers: "I didn't choose to study the Holocaust, it chose me."
In my training as a historian of the 17th and 18th centuries, I came to the study of the Holocaust rather surprisingly, at the beginning of the century, during a trip to Warsaw visiting The patient's father, a Holocaust survivor.
With a little bit of free time I did what most historians do: I went to the local archives. So I came across thousands of German court files from occupied Warsaw.
What intrigued me was the fact that hundreds of cases involved Jews From the Warsaw Ghetto. I learned that the Germans prosecuted them for violating various Nazi regulations: refusing to wear Armbands with Star of David, leaving the ghetto without permission, breaking curfew, buying and smuggling food from the "H" sidelion" to the ghetto or "defaming the good name of the German nation" - which usually means telling jokes about the occupation.
"Those who stand by" in the Holocaust
The great Holocaust researcher, Raul Hilberg, divided the human landscape of the Holocaust into three categories: Performers, victims and bystanders. Over the years we have learned a lot about the German perpetrators of the Holocaust and the Jewish victims, but much less about the last undefined category.
Who were the onlookers? Were these people who knew nothing about the ongoing Jewish disaster? Or people who were aware of the event but chose indifference?
Poland was a focus of the Holocaust. It was a place where the Nazis built extermination camps, and in Most of the Jewish population was murdered. In my research I discovered that it was simply impossible - I saw it clearly - for people to remain detached or distant from the genocide.
Not all Jewish ghettos (And there were hundreds of ghettos in Poland) were isolated from the outside world. Most of the ghettos were open (without walls) or with rickety fences that did not prevent contact between the Jews and other Poles.
Then, in 1942, the liquidation operations began. The Germans, together with local helpers, gathered the Jews and drove Jewish families to the nearest train station, where they were put on death trains destined for the extermination camps Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Auschwitz.
All this happened in front of the surrounding non-Jewish population. After the masses of Jews were deported to their deaths, the emptied ghettos became sites of mass robbery. Tens of thousands of houses, apartments and furniture were all targeted for looting.
Then thousands of Jews who chose to hide were located in sophisticated hiding places Under their houses and inside them, they were pulled out and handed over to the Germans for immediate execution.
Some of the Jews escaped the ghettos and sought refuge in the forests, often with locals who offered help for a fee or for altruistic reasons.
In the last phase of the Holocaust - a phase that the Germans called Judenjagd or "hunting the Jews" - the hidden Jews became largely invisible from the German point of view. In this final phase (which lasted until the end of the war) it was often their non-Jewish neighbors who decided who would live and who would die.
It is my research into this phase of the Holocaust that has led me to believe that being a bystander in Eastern Europe, and most of all, in Poland, was simply impossible. The whole idea of "standing on the sidelines" had to be re-examined, investigated and maybe even dismissed as a claim of ignorance.
My research sparked a debate among historians, but at the same time, in Poland, He also sparked outrage among nationalists.
Endless Night by Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking. (Indiana University Press)
Within such a political context it was published In 2018 "Night without end", a book that I co-wrote and edited. The two-volume study that includes 1,600 pages is a special investigation of the fate of Jews in selected areas of Poland during the war. We examined the struggle for Jewish survival and the German policy of genocide.
We also tried to understand the attitude of the Polish society around us to the Jewish catastrophe. The results were grim: the results of many years of research indicated that at least two-thirds of the Jews who hid were either murdered or handed over to the Nazis by their Polish neighbors.
The authorities' response was swift and furious. My writing partner and I We were denounced in the press. An unprecedented hate campaign, followed by civil lawsuits and criminal charges, ensued.
Attacks on historians and history itself go hand in hand with attacks on other vital parts of the open and democratic society. The protection of history and the struggle to preserve our right to know what happened are the foundations of the democratic system.
"He who controls the past controls the future" George Orwell wrote on"1984 His words have never sounded more true.
to the article on The Conversation website
More of the topic in Hayadan:
- On the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day: the annual report "For a noble cause"
- Personal identification tags worn by four children sent to the extermination camp in Sobibor, Poland, were uncovered in an archaeological dig at the site
- A creepy children's game from the time of Nazi Germany
- How the Jews stopped the typhoid epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto, under the worst conditions imaginable
- Survival and revenge
