Polish legislature tries to erase complicity in Holocaust

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Yep....that's a hard one. Kids do need some sort of "role model."

They need to experience truly "great" people.

Although there was some level of resistance to Nazi Germany in many countries, it was rarely directed at helping Jews. And although some individuals risked their lives to save Jews, they constituted a very small minority. The Germans were relentless in pursuing their goal, but without widespread collaboration the murder of six million Jews and millions of others in just four years would not have been possible.

Prior to World War II, antisemitism in Poland had been growing, and Polish authorities had taken various measures to exclude Jews from key sectors of society. Some Polish politicians pressed for the mass emigration of Poland’s Jewish population.

Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the country was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. Then in 1941, after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, all of Poland came under German control.

Poland was brutally occupied by the Germans. The Nazis viewed Poles as racially inferior and targeted Poland’s leadership for destruction, killing tens of thousands of Catholic priests, intellectuals, teachers, and political leaders. Over 1.5 million Poles were deported as forced laborers. In total, at least 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish civilians and soldiers perished.

With the occupation of all of Poland, Germany now had more than three million Polish Jews under its control. The Germans established close to 700 ghettos throughout occupied Poland where tens of thousands of Jews died due to harsh conditions of starvation, overcrowding, and disease.

After killing in mass shootings almost 1.5 million Jews in hundreds of locations in occupied Soviet territories, the Germans decided to construct stationary killing centers in occupied Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau being the most well known. The ghettos became “holding pens” for Jews before deportation to a killing center.

As German forces implemented the killing, they drew upon some Polish agencies, such as Polish police forces and railroad personnel, in the guarding of ghettos and the deportation of Jews to the killing centers. Individual Poles often helped in the identification, denunciation, and hunting down of Jews in hiding, often profiting from the associated blackmail, and actively participated in the plunder of Jewish property.

There were incidents, particularly in the small towns of eastern Poland, where local Polish residents—acutely aware of the Germans’ presence and their antisemitic policies—carried out or participated in pogroms and murdered their Jewish neighbors. The pogrom in the town of Jedwabne in 1941 is one of the best-documented cases.

The Polish Government in Exile based in London sponsored resistance to the German occupation, including some to help Jews. For example, Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, saved a few thousand Jews, even though helping a Jew in occupied Poland was punishable by death. Yad Vashem has identified more rescuers from Poland than any other country—6,532.

I saw those films, too, at summer camp when I was 12. The crematoria.

I had to go into the infirmary (the sick bay). I got a fever from seeing them. And I wasn't the kind of kid who got affected by things; I was rather cold in those days.

I imagined, upstairs from the dining room of the camp, that the people marching were marching into the gas chambers.

You just can't make this stuff up.

I believe there were Poles who had collaborated with the Nazis - as there were collaborators in every country conquered by Hitler - and there were those Poles who had watched in silence and approved.
That's not to forget the Polish resistance that had saved Jews from extermination.

To be fair to the Poles they never collaborated to the same level as Ukraine, Croatia or France where the Germans were able to set up puppet governments who were eager to apply Nazi policy at both national and local level. The Ukrainians and Chetniks were particularly brutal to civilians and had a worse reputation than the SS einsatzgruppen

If they've got a worse rep than the Einsatzgruppen, that's pretty bad!

That's just nuts; sending someone up the river just for saying something. Didn't Poland learn anything from years of Nazi and later Communist rule???

That's just nuts; sending someone up the river just for saying something. Didn't Poland learn anything from years of Nazi and later Communist rule???

Yep, they learned that if you repeat a lie often enough and loudly enough, people will believe it's true.

Poland’s president on Tuesday signed legislation that outlaws blaming Poland as a nation for Holocaust crimes committed by Nazi Germany, defying both criticism from Israel and a warning from the U.S.

But in a move that appeared designed to soften the impact of his decision, President Andrzej Duda said he would also ask Poland’s constitutional court to evaluate the bill — leaving open the possibility it could be amended.

As written, the legislation calls for prison terms of up to three years for falsely attributing the crimes of Nazi Germany to Poland. The law takes effect 14 days after it’s officially published, but it wasn’t immediately clear when that will be.

Poland’s authorities have described it as an attempt to protect the country’s reputation from what it believes is confusion about who bears responsibility for Auschwitz and other death camps Nazi Germany set up in occupied Poland. They say it was modeled on anti-defamation laws in many other countries, including laws criminalizing Holocaust denial.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it would continue to communicate with Poland despite its reservations about the law. It said it hopes Duda’s decision to ask the constitutional court to evaluate the bill will allow both sides to “agree on changes and corrections.”

That language seemed more conciliatory than earlier statements, suggesting the sides are seeking compromise.

Duda acknowledged there were doubts about the legislation’s intent, leading some observers to interpret his request for a constitutional review as a way to save face while calming the storm.

But critics say it was a diversionary tactic.

Slawomir Neumann of the centrist Civic Platform party accused Duda of giving in to the pressure of nationalists and anti-Semites and said his signing “deepens the diplomatic crisis.”

After Duda signed it, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the new law “adversely affects freedom of speech and academic inquiry.”

Secretary of State Tillerson said that while “terms like ‘Polish death camps’ are painful and misleading,” they are best countered through “open debate, scholarship, and education.”

Defending the law, Duda said it would not prohibit Holocaust survivors and witnesses from talking about crimes committed by individual Poles.

“We do not deny that there were cases of huge wickedness,” he said in a speech.

But he said the point of the law is to prevent the Polish nation as a whole from being wrongly accused of institutionalized participation in the Holocaust. He recalled that the Polish government at the time had to go into exile and Polish officials were those who struggled to inform the world that the Germans were putting Jews to death on Polish soil.

“No, there was no systemic way in which Poles took part in it,” Duda said.

The legislation hasn’t only sparked a bitter dispute with Israel. It also has caused division within Poland, where anti-Semitic rhetoric moved quickly from the political fringes into the mainstream over just a few days.

Beata Mazurek, the spokeswoman for the conservative Law and Justice and a deputy parliament speaker, tweeted a quote by a Catholic priest who had said that the Israeli ambassador’s criticism of the bill “made it hard for me to look at Jews with sympathy and kindness.”

Many conservative lawmakers and commentators are now accusing Israelis and American Jews of using the issue as a pretext for getting money from Poland for prewar Jewish property seized in the communist era.

Jerzy Czerwinski, a senator with the ruling party, said on state radio Monday that he saw a “hidden agenda” in the opposition.

“After all, we know that Jewish circles, including American, but mostly the state of Israel, are trying to get restitution of property or at least compensation,” he said.

On Monday evening, a small group of far-right advocates demonstrated in front of the presidential palace demanding that Duda sign the law. They carried a banner that said, “Take off your yarmulke. Sign the bill.”

Jan Grabowski, a historian at the University of Ottawa in Canada who studies Polish violence against Jews during the war, called Duda’s signing of the law “further proof that the nationalists now in power in Poland will do anything to cater to the hard, right-wing core of their electorate.”

“Unfortunately, it is not only the nationalists but also the whole Polish society which will have to pay the price,” said Grabowski, who is also a member of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw.

France has joined the US and Israel in criticising Poland's new Holocaust law, describing the text as "ill advised".

"You should not rewrite history, it's never a very good idea," Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said.