Friends of Israel are right about this issue but they are not being consistent when they abuse in every way what they call 'Holocaust deniers'.
Whatever you think of Israel and Mr. Netanyahu, the new Polish law is completely unacceptable.
History should not be rewritten.
9
Quote: "Mr. Morawiecki said it would remain legal 'to say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian, not only German perpetrators.' The reference to “Jewish perpetrators” infuriated Israelis…”
Why are Israelis, alone among humanity, exempt from imputation of having committed war crimes?
Rendering Jews as absolute angels or absolute devils are two sides of a counterfeit coin.
Every race, nation and religion has been guilty of terrible crimes. Attempts to impose megalomaniac exemptions to that truth about human beings deny Jews their humanity and are doomed to failure and derision.
14
Not withstanding those very righteous Poles who saved Jews, the simple fact is that Polish actions and hostility against Jews were not just a result of wartime German coercion was most vividly illustrated, in the many deadly encounters, well before, during and after the end of the N@zi occupation. Many surviving Jews were brutally murdered by Poles individually and as a group. The most infamous and widely reported of these events occurred in Kielce on July 4, 1946, in which at least 42 Jews were murdered. Some Holocaust survivors, friends of my survivor parents, told me of similar chilling episodes, albeit on a smaller scale, which occurred to them or their remaining family members all of whom fled poland for their lives after the war when no n@zis were to be seen. www . youtube . com/watch?v=gowqJgdSAIw&feature=youtu.be re
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Not withstanding those very righteous Poles who saved Jews, the simple fact is that Polish actions and hostility against Jews were not just a result of wartime German coercion was most vividly illustrated, in the many deadly encounters, well before, during and after the end of the N@zi occupation. Many surviving Jews were brutally murdered by Poles individually and as a group. The most infamous and widely reported of these events occurred in Kielce on July 4, 1946, in which at least 42 Jews were murdered. Some Holocaust survivors, friends of my survivor parents, told me of similar chilling episodes, albeit on a smaller scale, which occurred to them or their remaining family members all of whom fled poland for their lives after the war when no n@zis were to be seen.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gowqJgdSAIw&feature=youtu.be re
5
Estimates vary of the non Jewish Poles killed during the WW2 occupation of Poland - from 1.9 million to 3 million. Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe and although there was antisemitism within elements society, Poles were not trying to wipe them off the earth. There were laws all over the USA at that time forbidding Jews from living in neighborhoods and joining clubs. Hitler considered both Jews and ethnic Poles to be sub human. He was the one responsible for the widespread death of Poles of all religions. No doubt that there were collaborators but the entire country was under siege and Warsaw was reduced to rubble by the Germans. I am dismayed to see Poles supporting Trump and his dog whistle white Christian supremacy comments just as we are seeing a surge of the same boldness against ‘the other’ here in the USA.
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Warsaw was indeed bombed during the German invasion of Poland. "Reduced to rubble"? Not so. By later Nazi standards, the bombing of Warsaw was light. Shall we talk instead about the Battle of Britain?
2
It takes chutzpah for Netanyahu to oppose polish law while he pursues his bds gag laws in Israel. I think he will find Poland is not the West Bank.
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Ms. Stupnicka-Bando said she hoped the current tensions were a result of a “misunderstanding and not ill will.” She added, “We, the righteous ones, are optimists.”
This does indeed seem to be a matter of misunderstanding. The Poles rightly do not want to be put in the same category as the Nazis. I understand that this came about mainly because the media blurred the truth for the sake of convenience e.g. - by constantly referring to the death camps in Poland as 'Polish death camps' instead of 'Nazi death camps in occupied Poland'. Poland wants to correct the record. I do not see it as mean-spirited, but an overcorrection for sure.
Another example of the media conflating the truth is by not distinguishing the important difference between illegal and legal immigration and disingenuously lumping the two together as immigration.
The press partly created this problem but would never in a million years admit to it.
It is a shame that Poland did not consult with Israel when the law was drafted, it must have been possible to have written the law to be sensitive to both Israel and Poland. And it is not too late to do so.
8
Actually, Israel knew about this law in 2016 and not only raised no objection then, but promised to refrain from such offensive terms as "Polish death camps." What happened? Look into Israel's official protest in October of a Polish plan to offer compensation for property seized by Soviets and US bill S447, approved by the Senate in December, that mirrors the Israeli position.
As for sensitivities, a Polish delegation is in Israel now, looking for compromise wording. If you read the Israeli press, you just might get the impression that while pointing to Polish anti-semitism (which indispuitably did exist), many of the most vocal are blind to their own, deeply held knee-jerk anti-Polish bigotry. There is no attempt to buffer that hatred with, say, the more accurate assessments of such historic keepers of the flame as Yad Vashem.
7
In the article the authors say: "But the role of Polish collaborators, participants and enablers in the Nazi-run system of mechanized death..." Please provide some evidence for this statement. I myself know of none. Informers, and other bad people yes - and they were executed by the Polish Home Army. I know of one Home Army soldier (still alive today - Wotld Kiezun) that participated in the Home Army execution of a Pole that gave away Jews. The Poles, after the Jews, were the greatest victims of German nazism.
13
Poland can deny whatever it wants. 54 years ago I worked with a man, born in Poland, who as a young adult during the Nazi/German occupation of Poland, hunted Jews and traded/sold them to the Germans for food.
I also had a Jewish neighbor, who as a teenage girl was caught with 2 other girls and put in front of a firing squad. The officer in charge sent the troops for a smoke and told the girls that he had daughters their age. He let the girls flee.
Life and truth are not simple.
25
Sadly I think we have become a world where if the comment or the action does not affect us personally, we cannot relate or sympathize. In this article I read: "The reference to Jewish perpetrators infuriated Israelis and others. Mr. Netanyahu called the comments "outrageous", lack of sensitivity. etc."
But when Polish people whose families sheltered Jews at that time have a problem with "the lack of sensitivity" or accuracy of hearing or seeing the words:
"Polish death camps"--different reaction. I don't agree with the law but I do find it necessary to eradicate these words via sensitivity and knowledge and humanity.
12
Enactment of this gag law is just a cynical attempt by the right wing government to rally political support by stoking ethnic tensions. Same old same old.
16
Folks..the white elephant in the room is really where the attention needs to be addressed. Austria, Poland, Lithuania, Bavaria..all rabid anti Semitic and All Catholic majorities. Thanks to years of indoctrination against the "Christ Killers" by the Vatican you get the culmination of the death camps.
21
No coincidence that the Vatican (Rome) was the first "nation" to recognize the legitimacy of NAZI Germany? No coincidence that members of the Vatican helped thousands of NAZI war criminals escape to South America after the war?
13
All this referring to Israel and Poland and the Holocaust, made me think about my parents in different parts of Ukraine and their flights from Cossack attacks to their villages in the early 1900's. (The Cossacks were mercenaries.) These attacks were all about religion and against those "others" who had finally found sanctuary from terrible experiences previously. None of this is new and keeps returning, even in Poland. A peaceful discussion about past history might be helpful for future discussions.
11
The simple fact is that the Holocaust was purely a German idea and a German operation from start to finish. They built their death camps on the soil of a conquered nation, and any Poles who provided labor for the camps did so as slaves. Were there collaborators and informers? Of course there were. There were collaborators in every conquered nation. If the United States had been conquered by the Nazis, there would have been tens of thousands of collaborators here too.
The history of relations between Poles and Polish Jews is a long and often unpleasant one, but the extermination of European Jewry was an exclusively German project.
29
Are you kidding? Have you ever investigated what happened to the Jews that returned to Poland after the war to reclaim their homes? Many who survived the terrors of the war were tortured and/or killed. And at that point, Poland was not an occupied nation. In addition, check out anti-Jewish acts in Poland by Poles long before the Nazis came. The fact that the nation was occupied by Germany was just the cherry on the cake that gave many Poles license to legally increase their anti-Jewish actions. As to people in the US who you claim are potential collaborators--I am sure that there are some. There are unethical cowardly people everywhere. It takes ethics and bravery to be decent sometimes. Hopefully it will never come to having to find out which of our neighbors in the US are decent and which are not.
7
Thank you, Paul Gottlieb. How rare to hear non-extremist views anymore.
1
Your argument that Poles were simply victims and share no guilt ("slaves") is ridiculous and belied by the active resistance in other countries (e.g. Denmark, Bulgaria). There's a reason the kill rate of Jews was 95% in Poland, among the very highest in Europe.
There is a spectrum of moral culpability, with the architects of the Final Solution on one end and those who put their lives at risk to save Jews at the other end. Without tacit support and widespread collaboration, the architects could not have executed their plan.
Sure, the Poles didn't come with this specific terrible idea. but many of them sure embraced it. And that makes those who stood up against it even more heroic.
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