Which of German death camps was Polish ???

[_Metrick]

Thanks guys for explanation. I see your point Micheal and from that perspective it makes much more sense although I'm pretty skeptical about figures like Jan Tomasz Gross. BTW. Were there any difference in opinions of Poles toward Jews in former German respectively Soviet occupation zone?

[henryk]

I suspect that the intention of the Polish nationalist politicians who drafted this law is not just to make it illegal to use the phrase "Polish death camps", but to make any claim that during the Second World War Poles killed Jews on their own initiative, without being forced to do so by the German occupiers, in other words, to make it impossible for a book such as Jan Tomas Gross's "Neighbours" to be published in Poland.

Such an outcome would be a perversion of historical truth, since it is an undeniable historical fact that there were cases where Poles killed Jews on their own initiative, for various reasons. Jedwabne was not an isolated case; there were other towns in the part of Poland formerly under Soviet occupation where the inhabitants took advantage of the flight of the Soviet authorities to take revenge on the local Jews whom they blamed for collaboration with the Soviet occupiers. There were also cases where Polish peasants banded together to hunt down Jewish escapees hiding in the forests, because those Jews were raiding their villages to steal food.

http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/3474 ... ote]Polish president’s aide writes US Congressmen amid spat over anti-defamation law
Polish Radio 03.02.2018 08:47

A senior aide to the Polish president has written a letter to a group of US Congressmen amid a dispute over an anti-defamation law that has soured relations between Poland and Israel.
Krzysztof Szczerski, chief of staff for President Andrzej Duda and his top foreign policy adviser, wrote to the US Congressional Bipartisan Taskforce for Combating Anti-Semitism in reply to its letter of January 31 concerning the contested Polish legislation, which could penalise anyone who publicly ascribes blame to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by Nazi Germany.

In Poland, the proposed new law is seen as a way of stamping out the use of the phrase “Polish death camps,” which many say implies Poland's involvement in the Holocaust.

........................................
Szczerski argued: "Nobody in Poland who has elementary knowledge of history denies that there were instances of Polish people behaving disgracefully towards Jews during World War II.

“We condemn such acts and we do not intend to erase them from our past. However, unlike in several other European countries where governments cooperated with ... Nazi Germany, such actions were never part of the official policy of the Polish government-in-exile. Poland did not collaborate with the Germans in any form. On the contrary, the Polish Underground State made effort to punish all instances of persecution of the Jewish population.”

According to Szczerski, "we cannot accept" accusations against "the Polish State or the Polish Nation as a whole of being responsible for or complicit in the genocide of the Jewish population during World War II. Such suggestions deny the truth about the Holocaust.”
[/quote]

[Sergey Romanov]

I would have understood the prohibition of accusing a people - any people - of complicity in the Holocaust (that this law only prohibits doing this to the Polish people stinks to high heaven), but protecting a *state*? That's the usual right-wing/nationalistic shenanigans. Yes, people should f be able to accuse states (even if falsely).

[wm]

It's all politics, rational thinking doesn't apply.
But now it's personal - the battles on jpost, timesofisrael, WaPo and others are glorious. It's ww3 over there.

[wm]

I suspect that the intention of the Polish nationalist politicians who drafted this law is not just to make it illegal to use the phrase "Polish death camps", but to make any claim that during the Second World War Poles killed Jews on their own initiative, without being forced to do so by the German occupiers, in other words, to make it impossible for a book such as Jan Tomas Gross's "Neighbours" to be published in Poland.

The law is stupid, but in Europe such stupidity is prevalent (hate speech laws, internet censorship). Gross is old news.
They really were offended by the Polish death camps, it wasn't about Gross.

Bear in mind that in his 1940 report on the situation of Jews in the German and Soviet zones of occupation in Poland, Kozielewski-Karski stated that there was a danger that the anti-Jewish policies of the German occupiers could form the basis on which a de facto collaboration of the Polish population with the occupiers might be formed. That part of his report was suppressed by the Polish Government-in-Exile in Angers.

By people who knew more than a 26-year-old man.

Later, on 30 September 1941, the then commander of the AK, Grot-Rowecki, sent a message to London asking the Government-in-Exile not to make statements of support for Jews, since that was unpopular with the Polish population. He went so far as to say that "the whole country is anti-Semitic now".

whole country is anti-Semitic now = offended by the support the Jews were given at their expense.

[Yuli]

Michael mills:

There were also cases where Polish peasants banded together to hunt down Jewish escapees hiding in the forests, because those Jews were raiding their villages to steal food

Raiding villages? The peasants were driven to hunt Jews mostly by pure antisemiticm and lust, as they were rewarded for that by the Germans and also could rob and occupy more Jewish properties.

According to the Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski, of the 5,000 Jews living in rural Dąbrowa County, all but 500 were exterminated in Belzec. Of the 500 who fled deportation and hid in the region, only 38 survived the war. All others were murdered or captured and turned over to the Germans by their Polish neighbors. That is, Poles were responsible for about 9% of murders of their Jewish neighbors. This estimate does not include Poles assisting in the deportations to Belzec. If these numbers are representative and can be extrapolated to whole Poland, it would mean that complicity of Poles accounts for the death of about 300,000 Jews during WWII (and some additional antisemitic killings also after the war). This is at least an order of magnitude higher than the number of Jews saved by Poles.

P.S. This is not to justify the reflexive overreation of some Israeli government ministers.

[wm]

Please Yuli, I'm sure you a good person, but what you've written is wrong. Sorry about that.

Have you ever lived in a bad neighbourhood? Have you ever lived in a desperate poor place?
The answer is no and no.
It was both there.

It's true that they looted, rob and steal. But in war those things happen frequently, in genocidal wars they are basically mandatory.
Those people probably didn't even know the word anti-semitism. It's a fact that the Polish peasants were neutral towards Jews, for them they were a part of the landscape.

At the beginning it was all easy, and everybody expected the war to end quickly - maybe a few months and it would be over.
But it was almost three years. With a Jewish family in a tiny, rickety house.
The Nazi were maniacally obsessed the "Jewish menace" - turned up the heat quickly, searches were common, they created extensive and redundant informant networks.
Survival in such circumstances was impossible - in hiding or in the forests.
In those villages privacy didn't exist, everybody knew everything. And solidarity between peasants basically didn't exist either, you neighbour frequently was your worst enemy.

The fear was such intense that many eventually killed "their" Jews. I don't know what I would do in such circumstances. And really you don't know too.

That Jews weren't able survive in hell three years, doesn't mean the Poles killed them - it means it's not possible to survive three years in hell.

Not every place was like that, and not everywhere the Nazi were so obsessed with the "Jewish menace", there were villages where life was much easier. There were villages where Jews lived openly. So all the extrapolations are nonsense.

As they say never judge people until you have walked a mile in their shoes.
And don't kid yourself - in a next shtf situation we won't be much better. We the people are not basically good.

Do you want a proof?

"Mothers and children wander around like lost sheep – where is my child? Weeping. Another wet day with heavy skies: rain is falling. The scenes on Nowolipie Street. The huge round up on the streets. Old men and women, boys and girls are being dragged away. The Police are carrying out the round up, and officials of the Jewish Community wearing white armbands are assisting them.

The savagery of the police during the round up, the murderous brutality. They drag girls from the rickshaws, empty out flats, and leave the property strewn everywhere. A pogrom and a killing the like of which has never been seen.

Today leaflets were distributed against the Jewish police who have helped to send 200,000 Jews to their deaths."

[Yuli]

wm

Please Yuli, I'm sure you a good person, but what you've written is wrong. Sorry about that.

The first part of your sentence is true, but I don't see how your following long lecture discredits the estimation, based on Grabowski's data, that Poles are responsible for about 300,000 Jewish deaths.

Where in Poland "were villages where Jews lived openly" in WWII, as you claim? Is there a significant Jewish community that was left intact? And if so (I doubt) what are the proportions?

I agree that many illiterate peasants didn't know the word "antisemitism", but illiterecy did not preclude them from hating, turning up and murdering Jews.

The complicity of the Jewish police, together with the Polish police, in the Ghetto roundups is another disgraceful issue, but is not the topic of discussion (there is no law prohibiting such a discussion).

[snpol]

As for the law in question then - Something is rotten in the state of Poland.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... peech-nazi

Advocates for the law say their chief target is the phrase “Polish death camps”, which they insist is a slander because Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór and the rest were established and operated by Nazi Germans, albeit on Polish soil.

That’s all correct: we should speak of Nazi, not Polish, death camps. But the new law goes much wider than this.

And it is im my opinion a matter for concern.

It seeks to outlaw any suggestion that “the Polish nation”, undefined, was “responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich”. And here is where things get tricky.

For this seeks to cast Poles as blameless in the slaughter that took place in their midst, to hand them a “certificate of virginity”, in the words of Konstanty Gebert, a journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza whose most recent column dared prosecutors to come after him. “I hereby state,” he wrote, “that numerous members of the Polish nation are co-responsible for certain Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.”

What does he mean?

What he has in mind is, for example, Jedwabne, where in 1941, one half of the town murdered the other half, the non-Jewish Poles turning on their Jewish neighbours – people they’d known for ever, people they had sat next to in school – eventually herding hundreds of them into a barn and burning it to the ground. All told, they murdered 1,600 people. Only seven of the town’s Jews survived.

Indeed, if it can not be called as a part of the Holocaust then what name it has?

Jedwabne is a singular case, but of the 3.2 million Jews who were murdered in Poland a sizeable number died at the hands not of Nazi Germans but of their fellow Poles. In Hunt for the Jews, the Polish-born historian Jan Grabowski estimates some 200,000 Jews met their end that way.

So would be mr.Grabowski detained in Poland for violation of the law?

And let’s not forget the Polish Blue Police, who stood guard outside many of the ghettoes and who, according to contemporaneous testimony, were responsible for many, many more Jewish deaths.

[GregSingh]

All old news - Jedwabne, Polish blue police, villages killing neighbours.
But, please "which German death camp was Polish" ?

[Yuli]

It has already been said that Yair Lapid made an idiotic statement (not the first one and probably not the last one) and everybody here, and I believe everywhere, agrees that the death camps in Poland were German camps on Polish soil. "Polish death camps" is a misnomer and should not be used. That is not the problematic part of the new law and not the issue of discussion here.

[GregSingh]

That is not the problematic part of the new law and not the issue of discussion here.

Totally confused now. Name of the topic here is "Which of German death camps was Polish", not the issues with a new law, which is not a new law yet ?

[snpol]

All old news - Jedwabne, Polish blue police, villages killing neighbours.
But, please "which German death camp was Polish" ?

My answer - I'm unaware about such a camp. All of them, including ones on Polish soil were Nazi death camps. So the expression 'Polish death camps' has only one meaning - Nazi death camps on the Polish soil.
At the same time the text of the legislation doesn't contain the very phrase 'Polish death camps'. The essential points of the legislation are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendment ... emembrance

1. [Anyone] who, in public and against the facts, ascribes to the Polish People or to the Polish State, responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich, [as] defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, attached to the International Agreement on the prosecution and punishment of major war criminals of the Axis Powers, signed in London on August 8, 1945 [...], or for other offences which are crimes against peace [or] humanity or [that are] war crimes, or who otherwise grossly reduces the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of said crimes, is subject to a fine or [to] imprisonment for up to 3 years. The judgment shall be made public.

2. If a perpetrator of the act referred to in paragraph 1 has acted unintentionally, [such person] shall be subject to a fine or community service.

3. No offense referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 shall have been committed if the act was performed as part of artistic or scholarly activity.

So a journalist who (apparently intentionally) tries to discuss some allegations (yet not proven facts) about possible involvement of the Poles in the Holocaust could be jailed for 3 years.

[snpol]

That is not the problematic part of the new law and not the issue of discussion here.

Totally confused now. Name of the topic here is "Which of German death camps was Polish", not the issues with a new law, which is not a new law yet ?

The question in the title contains 3 question marks. It denotes a question with selfevident answer. As there was no Polish state run death camps then the term 'Polish death camps' has only meaning - Nazi, German state run death camps.
So why do Polish politicians instigate this controversial and (at the first glance) useless legislation?
It looks as the law goes far beyond the ban of the phrase 'Polish death camps'.

[wm]

So a journalist who (apparently intentionally) tries to discuss some allegations (yet not proven facts) about possible involvement of the Poles in the Holocaust could be jailed for 3 years.

The law is stupid, but still artists and researchers are excluded.

Totally confused now. Name of the topic here is "Which of German death camps was Polish", not the issues with a new law, which is not a new law yet ?

It will be.

As there was no Polish state run death camps then the term 'Polish death camps' has only meaning - Nazi, German state run death camps.
So why do Polish politicians instigate this controversial and (at the first glance) useless legislation?

The term is widely misunderstood in the Western countries. And they have the data to prove it.
They instigated it because they were constantly triggered by news of such a misuse.