Jan Grabowski
Tanya Gold Interviews Jan Grabowski on His New Book “Whitewash: Poland and the Jews”
Tanya Gold | Interview with Jan Grabowski on His New Book “Whitewash Poland and the Jews
- Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Lockdown University’s event. Together with the Jewish Literary Foundation and the Jewish Quarterly Magazine, we’re here to discuss Professor Jan Grabowski’s superb new essay in the new edition of the Jewish Quarterly, “Whitewash Poland and the Jews.” I’m going to introduce myself. My name is Tanya Gold. I’m a freelance journalist. I’m particularly delighted to be doing this event tonight because I’ve just finished a 7,000 word essay for Harper’s Magazine about so-called Holocaust memorialization in Poland. My grandmother’s family were from woods. I had never been to Poland. I went to Poland for the first time three years ago to visit the sites of the murder of our people. And I was planning a scholarly article, but I was so shocked by what Professor Grabowski will describe so brilliantly in his book about the silence and the denial and the misuse of the Holocaust that I couldn’t write a scholarly article. And I just wrote a sort of incredibly wacky and heartbroken travel log instead. So a little about Professor Grabowski. He is an eminence in the study of Jewish-Polish relations during the war and the Holocaust in Poland. He is Polish-Canadian, and he has attached the University of Ottawa. His books include “Hunt for the Jews,” which won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize in 2014, “Night Without End,” and “On Duty,” which is about the Polish police and their complicity and their complicity and perpetration in the war. Professor Grabowski is, and I can think of no higher praise for a scholar, considered a very dangerous man by some elements of the Polish state.
Thank you Tanya for this very nice introduction. I feel very humble now.
Well I think you said in the essay that academics don’t expect to be threatened by politicians as you have been. They don’t expect to have national campaigns in right wing newspapers against them. They don’t expect to be taken to court. And so you’re a brave man. So let’s talk about it.
Yeah, sure. Go ahead, please.
Sorry, I’m going to let you talk in a minute. So “Whitewash” is about the corruption of memory, how the Polish nation chooses to remember or rather misremember or forget the Shoah. But before we come to the myriad ways in which it attempts to do this, before we address the lies, could we talk about the truth? And I know it is an enormous question because of course the Shoah happened in Nazi occupied Poland, but what is the truth of Polish complicity and perpetration, 1940 to 1945?
The thing what makes this entire topic so explosive is the fact, and I repeat it very often over and over again in Poland and abroad, is the fact that Polish society has been raised for now three, more than three generations in this extraordinary ethos and tradition of own martyrdom, of own victimhood, which is built entirely on true experience and undeniable facts. The problem however is that in this scenario, what people tend to overlook is that sometimes, sometimes a victimised society can also become a victimising society, basically victimising even more desperate victims of history and circumstances, in this case, Polish Jews. So there were various kinds of complicity about which we will talk and obviously, but the most important part is that, which everyone in Europe should understand and be silent about, not try to contest it, is that practically each and every society in occupied and even non-occupied Europe has been, to an extent, various extent, complicit in the Holocaust. Holocaust was this huge event, this huge tragedy which could not be overlooked, which simply pulled people’s attention, cooperation, collusion, you name it, on various levels. It could be an industrialist in France or it could be a banker in Switzerland, or it could be a peasant in Poland. The problem is the degree of complicity, but each and every European society nation went through this period without, let’s say moral high ground. So this taint of holocaust spilled all over the continent and then beyond. So the Polish case is so particularly explosive because it’s built on the ethos of own innocence, and unfortunately, martyrdom and victimhood, true, innocence, not.
I was very struck, one of the things that people like to say about the Poles during the war is their passivity. And that not more Jews were rescued because there was this polish passivity. And I was very struck by your comments that said it would’ve been for the better if they had been passive. I was completely shocked to hear about the active acts of perpetration that were conducted by elements of the Polish state and Polish people. For example, you said that around Treblinka, Terrible Treblinka from where there were almost no survivors, from where there is so little testimony, there are Jewish objects, Jewish money in the villages still around because as the people waited in the cars, they had no water and the peasants would sell them water, and they wouldn’t take paper money because they knew they could get more. So they took jewels and they took valuables. So would you be able to tell us a little bit about what you would considered to be, but not the worst, that sounds too…
No, I mean, I can talk about on a general level, the thing is the Polish issue is so burning and so urgent is because denial or somehow distortion of this greatest tragedy in European history or one of the greatest tragedy in world history has occurred on Polish territory. If you take the Holocaust and you look at pre-war map of Poland, you’ll find that on the pre-war Polish territory, close to 5 million Jews have been put to death. There have been 3 million plus Polish Jews, and there were so many other Jews brought to Poland to be murdered in so-called factories of death, such as close to half a million of Hungarian Jews brought in 1944 to Auschwitz, and thousands upon thousands of German, Greek, Bulgarian, you name them, Jews brought to Dutch Jews, French Jews brought to Treblinka and Auschwitz and other places. Now the thing is so the scale of the presence of evil was unparalleled, in France, people could see Jews being deported somewhere to the east, but people in Poland were in that particular East. So they saw it, and they had opportunities. If you look at the scale of murder, we are talking about more than 3 million Polish Jews put to death. And the thing is that about 30,000 survived the war, which gives you 1% survival rate. This was the most complete genocide you can possibly imagine, 1% survival rate.
And somewhere, this is the argument that I make often, which makes me very much, let’s say very much at odds with many other historians in Poland, most obviously with popular public opinion, is that some part, and I am not saying a major part, a minor part, but still a part of this perfected system was related to the attitudes of the Polish society, of the parts of the Polish society who took part, not as collaborationists mind you, but as people who were pursuing their own goals. The Germans had no political project for Poles. This is what make the situation also very distinct, very different. The Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Slovaks, you may you name them, all of them had vision of independent states dangling in front of them by the Germans offered by the Germans if you do something for us. So sometimes the Germans would say, “Please take part in solving the so-called Jewish problem, and then we will facilitate your access to independence for you.” In Poland, it never happened. The Germans had nothing but contempt and savage terror for the Polish society. So in order to take part in the German anti-Jewish activities, you have to understand or seize the depth of antisemitism and also greed, which of course was mixed in, meaning these elements came to the fore. And so this is what happened, this is what happened across occupied Poland, and we will never know what percentage of course of Poles took part because there were so many kinds of, as you mentioned, the scholars are writing that actually indifference would have been a sort of a blessing in disguise. Because what it meant, if you were a Jew in hiding, the last thing you wanted people was to recognise you as a Jew.
The Germans had no idea how to make apart Jews and Poles once the Jews took off their arm bands with the star of David. But Poles could tell them apart, starting with the accentuated language, right? I mean, Polish Jews were poorly assimilated. So if someone spoke with Jewish accent, in Polish, we call it Then immediately attention would be brought, even not hostile attention, but attention, which would be a beginning of detection of this Jew in hiding who tried to pass as a Pole. So there were so many different scenarios in which members of the Polish society could act or not act or close the door or simply refuse to assist or to betray. The scale of this participation has not been addressed. And this is what I and a small number of Polish historians, we tried to alert, let’s say reading audience, that there are whole areas of Polish history which have been obfuscated, which have been somehow distorted. So my essay is actually a result, this book was a result of nearly 10 years of thing, more than 10 years, but 10 years of let’s say trying to somehow, somehow move this message to show to the readers that there indeed is a problem. And I must tell you that it was an exercise in futility. This depth of refusal to acknowledge history as it actually happened is something that is, for a historian, is very, very bitter experience to accept.
I wonder if I overcomplicate this. When I travelled to Poland as somebody who’d grown up as a Jew who’d grown up in the UK as happy as a Jew can be, it sounds to me that what you are describing during the war the early Pogroms, the complicity, the very small number of rescuers of Jews compared to the general population is, really what we’re talking about is just a continuation of mediaeval Polish antisemitism, right? They behaved like that because they didn’t like Jews very much.
Well it is more than that because you have tradition, traditional antisemitism existed in Poland, of course, for centuries and centuries, but it existed elsewhere too. The difference of course were the numbers of Jewish population, but Polish Jewish population was the largest Jewish population in Europe prior to 1939. But what you have, what makes it very different was, let’s say merger of two kinds of antisemitism. So you have traditional Christian or Catholic antisemitism, which has been around for, as I mentioned, centuries, known quality, for the Jewish society, it was something they knew how to contend with, how to deal with it. Well there were ways how to tame perhaps to an extent. However, since the end of the 19th century in Poland and elsewhere, you have another stream, which is secular racial so-called scientific modern antisemitism, which is exemplified in Poland by a party called Endecja National Democracy, and its leader, one of the heroes nowadays in Polish history on the bank notes, his face is stamped on each and every Polish passport. I mean, every time I as a dual citizen, as I open my Polish passport, I stare in the face of Roman Dmowski, who was a vicious antisemite.
I mean, it’s not that he was only antisemite. Hatred of the Jews was the cornerstone of his political project. So now this party had tremendous following prior to World War II, prior to 1939. And now you have these two streams, the powerful let’s say old religious Christian antisemitism coming together with this so-called modern racial antisemitism embodied by Endecja and Roman Dmowski, and then you have the Germans. When the Germans arrive, it’s actually, I write about it briefly, Germans, when they arrive, they conquer Poland and they try to develop a language with which to talk to the conquered society. Not that they really, but they need for purposes of administration and so on. And very quickly, German propaganda people sent by Goebbels to Poland, they identify two areas in which they can find common language in Poland. One is the hatred of Bolshevism and Russia, Bolshevik Russia, and the second is the hatred of the Jews. And on the second pillar, they will build and build and build. So what you have during this brief period of time in 1939, ‘40, '41, '42, until the end of the war, you have a relentless barrage of German Polish language propaganda of hatred against the Jews, which simply plays very well with large audiences. So this is this message of hatred, which has been heard before, but has been fueled by the Germans, has a horrible, I would argue, impact on relations between the Polish society ethnically construed and Polish Jews. And one more thing I argue in this text and in other texts is that since the extermination of the Jewish people occurred in the middle of Poland, in the eyes of everybody, it was in plain sight.
The liquidations of the ghettos were done in the midst of Polish society. It’s not that you have walled in towns. You have simply open ghettos where Jews and Poles live side by side, street next to street, house next to house. So the moment the Germans start to liquidate these ghettos, in other words, mass murder people in the streets and herd all the others into the trains destined for Treblinka or elsewhere, Polish society, every single member of it sees it. And the thing is that somewhere I argue then the value of Jewish life in the eyes of very many Polish citizens simply was reduced to zero or close to zero. And only when we understand this fact, only then we can appreciate the absolute extraordinary sacrifice of the very few Poles statistically speaking who decided to help the Jews not only at this horrible moment, but in these horrible circumstances with vast numbers of their own countrymen somehow geared to act against the Jews and to denounce people who would hide the Jews. So we have actually political parties in Poland during the occupation with their own underground leaflets or newspapers. There was a huge underground newspaper and phenomenon in Poland where they actually denounce people who dare to hide the Jews in 1943, 1944. So all of this, simply we have to understand the realities of the time and not talk about only martyrdom and positive lessons, which we can take, before, and this is one of my core arguments, before we move to any kind of commemoration, we have to understand what really happened.
I just wanted to say one thing when you said, because I was so struck when you wrote this in the book, not worthless, I think you said 250 grammes of sugar the Polish peasant might get for a Jew. I was often told, when I travelled in Poland, I was often told that everything went wrong because of Stalin and the slight insinuation that if the Soviets hadn’t rolled in with their own monuments and their own agenda, then perhaps Poland would’ve been able to tell the truth to itself and moved on. What do you think Stalin’s period did for Polish memory, for the way in which they would process all this? Before we get onto what’s current,
Right, so the thing is the Soviets win the war, they arrive, they take over let’s say the rule in Poland, that’s for certain, they move with their proxies who are Polish Communists, who are very few and far between. And what happens is, it’s actually very interesting because as soon as the Polish Communists arrived in power in 1944, '45, they were acutely and profoundly conscious of the fact that they were considered not only Russian lackeys, but Jewish lackeys as well. This association of Jews with Communistm was so strong in the Polish, and is still so strong in the Polish society that what you have is the Communists had this burden to deal with, they had to prove that they were not Jewish lackeys actually, they couldn’t prove they were not Soviet lackeys because of course the Soviet guns were supporting them. But in 1946 in July, and I write about this as well, one of the most horrifying post-war events occurred in Poland, which is known as Kielce pogrom when this vicious mob of citizens of Kielce, incited to fury by the tales of Jews murdering Christian Polish children for their religious purposes, murdered 42 survivors of the Holocaust, you can see that at the same stage, everyone in Poland was interested in hiding the truth. Now the Communists were not interested really in prosecuting the issue because if they went after the Poles who were guilty of crimes against the Jews, the public opinion would only be, let’s say, sentiment would be confirmed.
They are Jewish lackeys, right? The Polish Patriots, so-called, they were of course not interested, no one was, and the Jews were on the run. We have to remember that the Kielce pogrom triggered this huge exodus of close to 200,000 Jews who before then still thought they could rebuild their lives. They came back from the Soviet Union, they never spent a day under the German occupation. So now they knew what it was, and they fled, and a stream of refugees from Poland after July 1946 was humongous, was huge. And so what the Stalinist period did was to freeze the debate, and it was conveniently accepted, as far as the Jewish question was concerned, actually, the silence was convenient from extreme right to extreme left. No one wanted to look at the body in the closet, in other words, or few million bodies in the closet. So what you have, the monuments which sprung up was Germans were guilty of everything. And every single victim not a Jew was a Polish citizen. And when I was still in high school, we were never told about, it was 1970s, mind you, we were never told about extermination camps. We’re told about concentration camps in which Polish citizens were put to death. Interestingly, in the 1967, '68 Polish Great Scientific Encyclopaedia, there was an entry which made a differentiation between extermination camps which were for Jews and concentration camps which were for everybody, so to say. Now the authorities were furious, the entire staff was fired. And the new volume of this particular volume starting with C, concentration camps was brought to light, where no more differentiation was offered. So this kind of obfuscation, denial, forgetting of the holocaust was done of course under the auspices of the Polish Workers Party and the Communists. But it was of actually very, I would say, convenient for all segments, political segments of the Polish society.
After the wall came down, there was, I was told, a Jewish renaissance in Poland, and I don’t know how many people listening have been to Kazmierz and eaten in the fake Jewish restaurants and looked at the toy Jews in the windows, extraordinary, toy Jews everywhere, in Krakow, you can buy them. And I found almost the attempt to reestablish Jewish life, even though only 5,000 Jews left in Poland out of the pre-war population, as you said, of 3 million, possibly more tragic than anything as an addendum. And I suppose that what you are writing about in this book, which is this new muscular, really quite dangerous denial, did that come as a response to this, what I will call a bogus Jewish renaissance? How did it begin to develop?
No, as you mentioned the bogus Jewish presence, it is a cultural phenomenon which I think is a pretty actually benign thing. I can share with you here one of my in the recollections from distant past. I was with my father who was a holocaust survivor in Krakow, must have been 1974, 1973. I was a young lad at the time. And we went to Jewish cemetery. I was not exactly sure what we are doing there. We’re visiting, as I understand, simply family graves. And by the exit from the cemetery, there was this group of old, old men. I mean, they might have in their 50s, from my vintage point, they were ancient. So in any case, they grabbed my father by the hand and they urgently asked him to do something. And my father told me that they need one more for prayer. They needed someone for menial, and in Krakow, they couldn’t find 10 Jews. And so this basically gives you an idea of what it was, this non-Jewish or lack of Jewish presence, especially in the 1970s and '80s after the 1968 antisemitic campaign, which threw out let’s say 20,000, last 20,000 Jews, and practically no one as far as Jewish society was left. And what happened, then you have this sudden revival.
And the thing is, well, is it toxic? I don’t think it is. If you see Klezmer band where there are no Jews, is there anything wrong? It’s not my style. I don’t like it personally. I think the problem is, once again, there is this appreciation of Jewish culture, which is done on the graves of unmourned people. And the thing is that once again, if I see people who in Poland nowadays try to discover their Jewish roots, it became very popular actually, which sounds surprising. But if you live in a 99 lily white percent lily white uniethnic society, actually finding distant relatives of the Jewish extraction and origin seems like a very interesting proposition. It’s exotic, practically. So you can see that this is what happened. But for me, as a historian of the Holocaust, the part that I find painful here is that this new, let’s say Potemkin Village, this new sort of show that has been created, has been done without mourning of the victims, without looking. And I’m talking now about Polish society, Polish society without reflecting upon own complicity in that horror which left the void, which now people try to people or to somehow fill in. So this is why I don’t think it’s a great evil. I am not a great fan of it either. But it’s something that happens and something that happened, started in 1990s, and this still remains today. So in Poland, there is absolutely no willingness to discuss own involvement in this tragedy. But there is a full willingness to appreciate the beauty of Jewish culture as long as it’s not threatening to the national Polish myths, or mythology if you will.
Can I just say something about that because I feel maybe I was a little bit unreasonable and I want to say I’m certainly not impugning people, Polish people who have discovered that they have Jewish descent, ancestors, which they covered up for security. I suppose my problem, and I accept that this is a very minor point when placed next to the Shoah But I suppose my point is, I think the people who go to Kazmierz, what they’re really seeking is a Jewish culture without Jews. I’m not sure they’re that interested in real Jews. I think they’re interested in the Jews of their imagination, of their event. And I think that disturbs me, though I also admit that I’m quite, and I’d love to know your view on this, I feel a little schizophrenic about Poland. I I feel very emotional about it, sometimes I remember my mother really telling me off once when I became angry about Polish complicity conversations we have in our house. And she told me about a woman who passed the Warsaw ghetto every day, a non-Jewish woman and threw some bread in, and of course the elements of and that people did risk their lives. But it seems to me this fictionalisation of the Jew has been a constant throughout the history of the Jew in Europe. So I accept it’s a minor point.
Yeah, but I mean you are right, and we meet here because the thing is that Jews are very popular, as I mentioned, are very popular in Poland as long as they are not threatening force to local myths, to local beliefs. So as long as they dance and as long as they perform their, let’s say, religious rights, they are benign. They are adding colour and tourist flavour to the neighbourhood. But this of course has nothing to do with what I am preoccupied and so many other people are preoccupied with. So for instance, in Poland nowadays, national, I would say, paranoia is centred around so-called Polish righteous. This has been going on now for about 50 years. It’s nothing new, more even than that. And this attempt to convince not only foreigners, but even own people that Polish nation that delivering help to the Jews during the war was something obvious, automatic, actually, believe me or not, there are Polish politicians and historians on the loose who are talking about millions of Poles involved in saving the Jews. Well, it sounds absolutely crazy, it sounds implausible, but this actually is what we hear. So when you go to Poland today, you will be surrounded with something that pretends to somehow relate to the Shoah, which is our righteous monuments. You have museums, you have, I mean, there is a growing industry of celebration of the righteous, to which I respond, and this is one of the points I’ll also raise in this text that we are discussing.
And this is that before, there is nothing wrong with commemorating courageous people who sacrificed everything they did for people sometimes they did not even know. However, the moment to celebrate them will be only when the Polish society, Polish institutions, Polish state will be prepared to recognise, to celebrate, or rather to commemorate, commemorate the Jews murdered by the Poles. And only then, only then can you start to praise your own kind, once you have recognised the suffering of people who died at the hands of your ancestors. And here I also fall back on my own family history, and I don’t know how frequent it is, but more than a thousand, between 1,000 and 2,000 Jews have been murdered in Poland after the war because they were Jews. And these are huge numbers. And in the time of peace. And in my own family, there is a Holocaust survivor, my grandfather’s brother who returns from hiding, he emerges from hiding, and he is murdered by Polish so-called Patriots who see him as a Jew and a wealthy Jew too. So they also not only murder him, but they rob him. And what drives me absolutely indignant is the fact that these people today are celebrated as heroes and examples for Polish youth. And this is something not acceptable, not acceptable. And the fact that they’re in Poland today, this is possible without an outcry of disgust and moral outrage is something that is very, very worse.
You and other courageous historians, you call this out. How do they treat you? What has happened to you because of the books that you have written?
Well, I cannot talk about my colleagues actually, because everyone, let’s say, everyone feels their own way. But I must tell you that last eight years have been very, very hard at least for this particular historian. We as historians are not trained to deal with level of officially, and I’m not talking about individual people having different opinions. That’s of course the natural, when we are seeing a machinery of the state geared to destroying reputations, peace, calm of scholars, it’s a different animal. We never had it in, let’s say democratic Europe before. This would happen and Poland should be noted because when historians like myself see their images in mainstream channels of TV such as equivalent of BBC1 with my unhappy face and signs, this is the falsifier of our history, enemy of the people and so on, these words tend to be translated into deeds. And so as court trials, hateful speeches by politicians all the way from Prime Minister down to ministers and their deputies, interrogations by some secret police, I mean, these things happen to me, and I have international standing. So you can easily imagine how intimidated our people, let’s say, were until recently, at least, until the government changed. People who were let’s say less internationally recognised. So this has been, not that I want to complain, but simply it is unusual to see this kind of hate machinery activated by a state in a member state of European Union. This is a club with certain to which you belong, if I understand until recently. This is a club with certain minimal standards of let’s say justice and morality, which should be somehow preserved. So this was completely out of order.
As far you as you’re aware, was there any pressure or sanctions placed on the elements in Poland, the Polish government that was doing this by the EU?
Well, in 2018. Polish government and Polish parliament voted itself this infamous Polish Holocaust law. It was this law which stipulated three years in prison for historians who write about Polish complicity in the Holocaust. And actually there were two other paragraphs, and there’s the R in the Polish criminal code, Article 133, the slander of the Good name of the nation and so on. So what happens is, when Polish parliament actually, and this is one more thing, can you imagine that this infamous Polish Holocaust law has been voted by, in the parliament that day, there were 400, I think, 10 members of parliament. Do you know how many voted against? Four, four. Four voted against, so either abstained or were in favour. So if you have this kind of national allegiance, alliance, unified front, it is very scary. So now you mentioned about the international pressures. Yes, there were tremendous pressures from Israel, from other countries, and the Polish government did not pay much attention to them. What did really count was huge American pressure. The US came hard and they said basically that as long as this article, this new Polish Holocaust law stands, Polish president or Polish Prime Minister will not be seen by Donald Trump at the time even in the White House. And then the Polish government folded. And in June, after six months in June 2018, they decriminalised the law and they said that they will move on the way of civil jurisprudence, basically to drag historians like myself to court trying to bankrupt us with different losses. And this is what happened. So basically, this is the scenario, that international pressure was of course important, but it did not solve the situation. You cannot save historical narrative by the way of sanctions. It is too delicate an instrument.
I think understand about the emotional need to do this. I think I wrote in my article, “You don’t want to look into a looking glass and see a reproachful Jew staring back.” I mean, I understand that, but there must be some political purpose in this. Why did the Law and Justice Party pursue these policies? I understand they took control of state museums. They toppled academics who didn’t agree with them, they persecuted others, they put up a sign at Treblinka of all places, which as you said, on one half of the sign were 900,000 nameless Jews. On the other half of the sign with equal weight of tragedy was one Polish railway worker who may or may not have helped to do. What is the purpose of this?
Okay, well the thing is, this is one part of this, and unfortunately national malaise or disease, if you will, the desperate need to reaffirm your belief in national historical innocence during World War II and especially during the Shoah. And if you look at the political debates, in 2015, there was a very important political debate between Polish presiding president in office and his contender coming from a right-wing party candidate. And imagine in a televised debate, the first question asked dealt with the Holocaust. Why did you ask the right wing candidate? He asked the sitting president, why did you agree to call us also a nation of victimizers? That sometimes, Poles also victimised the Jews during the war? And actually the employ of this question was fundamentally important. It drew away some voters from the democratic candidates toward the nationalistic one. So the idea of the nationalists that we need to reinforce the national pride through, let’s say contesting history of the Shoah or our participation or collusion, it was quite central. And what I find very disturbing is the fact that the democratic government today, well, basically buys into the narrative.
They of course don’t put historians in jail as the previous government tried to do, but they espouse a very similar point of view, meaning that we have national dignity, which we have to defend the good name of the nation regardless of what historical evidence shows. So this all is something which unfortunately carries from one, if you look from 1945 through 1968, through '89 until today, you can see this sad, sad, let’s say unity in the face of historical evidence. What was for me particularly striking was the fact that, can you imagine in 1968 during antisemitic campaign in Poland, Polish Communists and Polish expatriate soldiers and politicians living in exile in London, they come together in one chorus defending the good name of the Polish nation against accusations of antisemitism coming from international forum. This kind of immutable, immutable if I can use this expression, front of denial started right after the war, after with the Kielce pogrom and it’s vibrant still today. So 80 years, 80 years of denial of historical evidence.
Was the question put to the politician by his right wing rival, was that related to Jedwabne? And forgive me if I’m pronouncing it wrong.
Yeah, Jedwabne is fine.
And I understand that when Professor Gross wrote a book about Jedwabne, I think it came out in about 2000, this really brought all of this stuff to the fore> Was that significant do you think, that particular story at that particular time?
I mean for our listeners who are not that familiar with the history of the time, Jedwabne was a small town where, soon after the outbreak of German Soviet war in June, in July to be more precise, July 1941, local Polish citizens went after their Jewish co-citizens and they murdered as many as they could. And finally they herded all the others into their barn and they burned them alive. So Jan Gross’s book, which was published as you mentioned, 2000 erased a national debate, which I thought was an interesting debate, which petered out, which was finished sooner than it started. And the way the public opinion somehow avoided going after truth here was, Jedwabne was one place. It wasn’t actually, what the historians found out, there were 20 other locations in that area where local Poles murdered the Jews. And the other question was, but Jews had it coming because they collaborated with the Soviets between '39 and '41. So they had it coming. Why the babies had it coming, and why people believed it is something also I find troubling. And then the expression was, it was just one location. So in my work, I, among many other things, say that the horrors imposed or somehow acts of terror by Polish citizens against their Jewish neighbours occurred across the land, not only develop on a very scale, but especially in 1942. So this kind of refusal to acknowledge is something constant, and it deals, I would say, with the great majority of the Polish society.
So the changing government last year, we shouldn’t be too hopeful. What is happening now?
There is an organisation, an institution, official state institution in Poland, it’s called Institute of National Remembrance. It’s a huge institution, two and a half thousand, or now closer to 3,000 employees, 300 PhDs, dozens of professors. And the major of their duty is basically to reinforce the official narrative, historical narrative the way the state wants to see it. I don’t think in any other European country you have anything coming close to it. I don’t know Russia, but let’s look once again for the European Union scenery here. I don’t think there is anything coming close to it. So you have basically here huge machinery armed now with one, their budget has actually grown, and they are people responsible for so-called negationism of the Holocaust in Poland, co-responsible. Negationism is the attempt to say that, of course Jews were killed, but our people had nothing to do with the fact, so this is negationism. So this institution was deeply involved in this. And now imagine lo and behold, not only has nothing changed with this institution after the change of power, its budget has been increased. So this is something that really I found extraordinarily troubling. The glorification of Polish righteous still is the song sung by Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the outside and other institutions on the inside. So the one thing that really changed of course is now that there is no criminal interest that the state will, let’s say, withdraw the funding from the most toxic right wing organisations. So some things happened, but from my point of view, it’s woefully inadequate. And I would love to be wrong actually. I would love to think that things will change quickly. But as a historian looking at last eight years looking at how the current narrative was built in democratic post 1990 Poland, I am not optimistic. I mean, I prefer now, let’s say I’m a pessimist well-educated optimist. So that’s who I am right now.
I’ll ask one final question if I may, before I take some questions from the audience. It’s sounding as if it has similarities to me with our own Brexit, our own calcifying national myths that we think will save us and make us glorious, but actually keep us stuck where we are. And I was wondering whether you think that these lies and these repressions, do they prevent the idea of a sort of thriving progressive Poland for you? Do you think they’re destructive for the Poles themselves?
Well definitely, definitely there is a powerful element of people who are living in this optimistic past so to say or somehow falsified, denied past. They don’t like very much Polish presence in the European Union. There is a very strong trend among the nationalists in Poland, for instance, to base our trust in Donald Trump and Trump-esque states, somehow bypassing European ethos which is seen as corrupted, corrupted by the idea of modernity, progress, of multiculturalism, you name it. So in a way, it is associated with isolationism, a Polish way, but still even the nationalists never dared to go against the European Union knowing that economic benefits of this union are so huge and so hugely appreciated by Polish society, which grew rich actually over the last 20 years of presence in membership in the European Union.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - There’s a question about the museums in Poland, which I understand some of them are better than others. Could you tell us a little bit about the landscape of the major museums in Poland and what’s happened to them and how they’re being used?
A - I mean, what you have is the period between 2015 and 2024, which was the period eight years when nationalists were in power, actually triggered an unprecedented museum building frenzy. It is something unbelievable, and a part of this trend was that for the nationalists, historical memory, of course their version of historical memory was one of the crucial core parts of who they were and how they mobilised their electorate and how they went looking for votes outside their core electorate. So what you have are museums such as museum, I saw all of them, I actually made it travelling around these museums and appreciating complexities of the message they send was something that I spent a lot of time on. And many of them are toxic institutions. The museums like the Ulma Museum, which has been, I have to say, started under the democratic Polish regime before the nationalists came to power. The Ulma Museum is basically giving this wonderful story, selling this wonderful story, how Poles massively helped the Jews during the war, conveniently forgetting that in the location where the museum actually has been built, a local population solved the Jewish question without any German direct presence in 1942. And then you have the Museum of the Martyrdom of Polish villages, which is very nice, but there is not even a word about the martyrdom of Polish Jews in these particular villages. And then you move to museum which is now being under construction, Museum of Warsaw Ghetto, which is still under construction.
We don’t how the exhibition will look like, but the minister who actually created the museum, Minister of Culture, Glinski called it, it shall be a Museum of Polish Jewish love. And now when you look even to a museum which is hailed as one of the better ones, which is POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, you have a vision, they call themselves museum of life. Well, I’m sorry, if you sit… Your museum is built in the middle of ex Warsaw ghetto, you don’t call yourself museum of life, you call yourself any other thing. So what you have, 1,000 years of peaceful coexistence, and then suddenly there is a Holocaust. Nobody knows where it came from. It fell like from Mars with the Germans. It’s a German and it’s a German and Jewish affair. Poles had nothing to do with it. So even in these about Auschwitz, about Treblinka, museums attached to places of Jewish horrifying suffering. Don’t get me even started, I explain all of this in my book or in my essay. Especially if you look at the messages coming out of Auschwitz Museum, they are unacceptable. When you look at messages coming out Treblinka, Treblinka becomes a centre of Catholic suffering. I mean, these are things which, if I had any hair, they would be standing up. But hopefully I don’t. So in any case, this memorial scenery, the museums in the forefront very much works toward the same happy conclusion. Our history was a history of basically our own martyrdom. And that’s the end of the line.
Q - I hear you when you say you don’t want to talk about the Auschwitz and Treblinka museums, and it just made me think about something I’ve been hearing so much from the antisemites I listen to recently online, which is the Holocaust, how could we do that to the Gentiles, how could we make them feel so bad? There’s a question, a lot of the questioners are fighting amongst themselves, and some of them are being a bit rude, so we’re going to ignore them. But Shelly Shapiro has asked, can we compare this Polish denial with denial in other countries, such as, for example, Austria being a good example?
A - Well it’s not to be really compared because Austrians were completely involved with the whole process. As I mentioned, if you look for comparisons, perhaps look at Lithuania or Latvia or Ukraine. But even then, the comparisons fail, because as I mentioned, Polish example is so unique because in Poland, the Germans did not hang any carrots. If you joined, if you repressed the Jews, if you robbed the Jews, if you hurt them, harmed them in any way, you couldn’t argue that you were doing it in favour of promoting Polish independence because the Germans had no project, no political project in Poland. So that’s what makes this Polish case so unique. It has been antisemitism or involvement, collusion in the Holocaust without any German sponsored benefits.
Q - And there’s a question from Louise Sweet saying are there any progressive Catholic clergy who would support a more factual recognition of the historical and ongoing view of the majority of Polish people towards the Jews?
A - There might be some, I mean, I know one priest, Reverend Lamahiski who is very often seen in Treblinka for instance praying and trying to build bridges. But he was very much at odds with the higher hierarchy of the Catholic church. One has to remember that the Polish Catholic church during the last 10 years moved as far right as possible. I mean it became, not a hostage, but a willing hostage in the hands of the authorities, nationalist authorities. And the Catholic church was in large part responsible also for the development of this extraordinary, let’s say, negationist narrative. So there are individual priests of course, but the general or the general attitude espoused and promoted by the higher hierarchy is very different.
Q - And there’s also a question which I think is very interesting. What do you think of students going on the March of the Living to Poland?
A - Well, this is a problem for the Israeli society. This is a way in which I don’t think I am here the right person to answer this question. I’m dealing rather with Polish memory, Polish Jewish memory, the Holocaust. This is a part of Israeli so-called history policy of the Israeli state, which one has to say that the Holocaust has been used and is being used by Israeli authorities as a cornerstone on which nationalism is being built with all negative also consequences. So I’m not a great fan of these trips. On the other hand, well, this Holocaust has become, in many Jewish communities, a form of religious experience. In the same way you can see pilgrims going to the so-called sacred land, you can look at these pilgrims, at these young Jews as pilgrims for who history has become in part a form of religion. And it’s not very good of course.
Q - I think my last question to you, if I may, Professor, is going to be a rather personal question, maybe even whimsical because I’ve thought about this a lot since I went to Poland. And we’ve talked a little bit about the Auschwitz Museum. What would you think would be the most appropriate thing to happen to Birkenau?
A - What I would argue is that Polish institutions and Polish state and Polish authorities failed, miserably failed in their duty as custodians of these sites. And I know that my proposal will not have any chances of becoming reality. But what I propose in my text is that these sites such as Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec should be like embassies, should be ex-territorial with Polish government having nothing to say about them. There should be some kind of international, and I have no idea what, but international body which would supervise the way we have, let’s say, internationally recognised places of reflection and taken out from the authority of Polish authorities, once again, which failed so miserably to maintain their duty as custodians of the memory of 6 million dead Jews.
I’m not going to ask any other questions. I’d just like to say a few things. I would like to thank everyone on the thread who has offered testament, who’s offered testimony of their families, many lost in Poland during the war. I didn’t put them to Professor Grabowski because I was worried that he would not have detailed information about these people. But thank you for asking them. And I want to read out finally a comment from Natalia Sorell, and she says, and I wholeheartedly agree, “Thank you Professor for your unbelievable courage and dedication. You are for sure a huge inspiration.” I’m so grateful that you came to speak with us tonight. Buy his books, read his books.
Thank you very much for this, and thank you for being here. I will check out the ugly question later or questions later on, although I am used to them too. So thank you very much.
Perhaps I overreacted just one or two.
And thank you very much, and I appreciate your questions, and I appreciate the audience participation. Thank you.
Good night, Professor Grabowski. Good night, everyone. Thank you.