Poland’s move to ban the term ‘Polish death camps’

CNAAN LIPHSHIZ

Following the bill’s passing on Friday in the Sejm, or the lower house of Poland’s Parliament – it awaits the approval of the Senate and the president – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the bill “baseless”. Historians, including some from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, joined him in opposing it.

Yad Vashem said while “there is no doubt that the term ‘Polish death camps’ is a historical misrepresentation”, the intended law nonetheless was “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust”.

Less guarded protests in Israel alleged that some of Poland’s critics of the term ‘Polish death camps’ were blurring historical truths, and called for a better understanding of sensitivities around the issue in Poland, Israel and beyond.

Israeli centrist politician Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid opposition party – and, according to recent polls, the lawmaker lmost likely to replace Netanyahu if elections were held now – had a lot to say on the topic on social media.

In a series of posts, Lapid said: “There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that.” He added: “Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German.” And: “Poland was a partner in the Holocaust.”

His statements were historically inaccurate on several levels, according to Efraim Zuroff, a prominent historian on the Holocaust and the Eastern Europe director of international Jewish human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

“I understand his anger, but Lapid fell in the trap that the Poles made for him, in a sense,” Zuroff said.

The claim that there were Polish death camps is “misleading”, Zuroff said. The statement is true only in that there were Nazi death camps on Polish soil.

“Polish individuals may have been responsible for the deaths of many thousands of Jews,” he said, “but Polish state apparatuses were not integrated into the Nazi machine of genocide against the Jews, and in that Poland is actually an exception to many other countries in Nazi-occupied Europe.”

Claiming that Poland was a partner in the Holocaust was also untrue, Zuroff said, because “there was no Poland” under German occupation. Polish sovereignty was dismantled and the country’s territory was co-opted under Nazi rule.

He said Lapid’s claim that hundreds of thousands of Jews died in Poland without seeing a German was “absurd”, adding: “I don’t know where Lapid got that figure from.”

According to Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, no more than 2 500 Jews died at the hands of Poles during the Holocaust or immediately after it. Zuroff disputes the estimate. He believes the correct figure is “many thousands” of people, including those in at least 15 towns and cities in eastern Poland, where non-Jews butchered their Jewish neighbours.

Zuroff said Lapid’s claim was offensive to many Poles because, in addition to killing three million Polish Jews, the Nazis killed three million Polish non-Jews. The remaining millions of Jewish Holocaust victims were killed either in the former Soviet Union or at camps outside Poland.

“The Nazis considered the Poles lesser humans,” Zuroff said, adding this was part of the reason that the “Polish opposition to the term ‘Polish death camps’ is justified”. However, said Zuroff, he did not support attempts by Polish lawmakers to criminalise the term.

So, why are Israeli politicians and authorities on the Holocaust so outspoken in opposing it?

The reason, according to Zuroff, is that the bill is part of a larger effort by Poland’s right wing government, led by the right wing Law and Justice Party, to dismiss “any criticism of how Poles behaved during the Holocaust”.

According to Zuroff, with the exception of the Netherlands, Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where resistance activists set up a special organisation dedicated to saving Jews. But at the same time, Polish resistance groups, such as the Home Army, refused to accept Jews in many cases – and in others, killed them.

“Everybody knows that many, many thousands of Poles killed or betrayed their Jewish neighbours to the Germans, causing them to be murdered,” Zuroff said. “The Polish state was not complicit in the Holocaust, but many Poles were. The country was a hotbed of anti-Semitism before the Holocaust, too. It’s foolish to ignore it.”

If that’s true, it hasn’t stopped Polish historians and officials from doing just that.

In 2016, a year after Law and Justice’s big election win, Polish Education Minister Anna Zalewska said there were “different scenarios” about what happened in Jedwabne, a town in eastern Poland where, in 1941, locals butchered 1 500 to 2 500 of their Jewish neighbours, reportedly without interference from the Germans (revisionist historians in Poland have disputed this for decades).

In 2001, the publication of a book on Jedwabne by Princeton historian Jan Gross triggered public debate on the issue. In 2016, he was summoned to appear before police for saying that Poles killed more Jews than they did Germans during the Holocaust. Gross was suspected of insulting the honour of the Polish nation, which is illegal in the country.

In a separate but not entirely unconnected debate, some leaders of Polish Jewry have accused the Law and Justice Party of ignoring the rise of ultra-nationalists in Poland, saying this creates a security concern for the community and is a “low point” in its history. Other Polish Jewish leaders have dismissed the claims as part of a “political war” against the government.

“Before Law and Justice won the election, there was a feeling that progress had been made, with successive Polish heads of state recognising that, alongside the heroism of some Poles who saved Jews, others murdered them and betrayed them,” Zuroff said. “But it seems that now the Polish government is reversing course, and it’s generating a lot of anger, as is visible in Lapid’s reaction.”

Poland’s embassy in Israel quoted what it called Lapid’s “unsupportable claims” on social media. They showed, an embassy spokesman said, “how badly Holocaust education is needed, even here in Israel”. (JTA)