<haaretz.com/hasen/spages/976270.html
Tel
Aviv, Israel
April 18, 2008
It's
unlikely that April 14 will become a national
holiday in Poland in the future, but I have
no doubt that this past Monday provided much
cause for jubilation in Warsaw. Sixty-three
years is a long time to wait for exoneration,
but on this April 14, the Poles finally
received it - from none other than our own
[Israeli] President Shimon Peres. In
a speech at the site of the Treblinka death
camp, where 875,000 Jews (most of them
Polish), many of whom were caught with the
help of their neighbors, were murdered over a
15-month period, the president of the State
of Israel declared that the tragedy that took
place there "was not the fault of the Polish
people."
There
is in fact a kernel of truth to that
statement, but anyone acquainted with the
history of the Holocaust in Poland knows very
well that such a presentation of events
grossly misrepresents the historical record.
So while it is true that the Poles did not
build or run the death camps operated by the
Nazis on their territory, and that Poles -
unlike Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians,
Belarusians and Estonians - were never
integrated into the mass-murder machine that
carried out the Final Solution, numerous
Poles bore a heavy share of responsibility
for the fate of Polish Jewry, approximately
90 percent of whom were murdered during the
Shoah.
In
this respect, who can forget the notorious
Polish informers who helped the Nazis find
Jews in hiding, who were so numerous that
they were even known by a special name -
shmaltzovniki? Or the many Jews murdered by
the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) underground,
affiliated with the Polish
government-in-exile in London, which was
notorious for the refusal of many of its
units to accept Jews into their ranks, in
better cases, and for murdering them, in
worse ones. And then there were the Polish
killers of Jedwabne and other nearby towns,
who were unwilling to wait for the Nazis to
transport their Jewish neighbors to
Treblinka, and so undertook to murder the
Jews themselves. In Jedwabne they did this by
locking 1,600 of them in a barn, which they
then set on fire.
A
typical case, one that can serve as a
metaphor for Polish complicity in the murder
of Jews, is that of the Lerner family of
Komarowka. The episode came to light two
years ago, in the wake of the efforts of
their grandson and nephew Roni of Tel Aviv to
find his family's remains and bring their
killers to justice. On October 30, 1943,
Gitel Lerner, her daughters Miriam and Chana,
and her sons David, Zvi-Hershel and Chaim, as
well as two other Jews, were tortured and
murdered in the village of Przegaliny. Their
killer was Jan Sadowski, who had agreed to
build them a hiding place, at their expense,
in return for a hefty monthly sum for rent
and food. The Lerners, incidentally, kept
their part of the bargain, but the temptation
to rob them was apparently too great for
Sadowski and his four accomplices.
Unfortunately such incidents were quite
common in World War II Poland.
Had
the Poles been making a serious effort to
honestly and courageously confront their
complicity in the Nazi war crimes, the damage
caused by Peres' distortion of the history of
the Shoah in Poland would not have been so
significant. But Poland, like most of its
post-Communist neighbors, has not been
particularly zealous in uncovering the crimes
committed against Jews during the Holocaust,
preferring to concentrate on those carried
out after World War II by the Communists
against Poles. Neither Poland nor its Baltic
neighbors have a problem commemorating Jews
murdered during the Shoah, but they lack
virtually any political will to identify and
expose, let alone prosecute, those who did
the murdering. This serious failure helps to
pave the way for the cover-up of crimes by
Poles and the presentation of a guilt-free
narrative of the history of World War
II.
This
phenomenon, which is prevalent to varying
degrees throughout post-Communist Eastern
Europe, worsens as the passage of time
reduces the opportunities to bring previously
unprosecuted criminals to justice.
(In
Poland,
for example, only one such perpetrator has
been prosecuted and punished since 1989.)
Soon there will be no one left to put on
trial, which will make it even easier to cast
the entire blame for the murders on the
Germans and Austrians. They were indeed the
primary guilty parties, but that fact should
not free their local collaborators of
responsibility for their crimes, or their
societies of the necessity to tell the truth
and confront the often widespread complicity
of locals in the mass murder of the
Jews.
In
recent years, the phenomenon of Holocaust
denial has gained widespread public
attention, and aroused sometimes-hysterical
reactions. And while it is understandable
that the attempts to claim that the Shoah
never took place should prompt genuine
concern, the truth is that, at least at this
point, it hardly poses any serious danger to
Holocaust memory and has had little success
in arousing anti-Semitism, which is its real
goal. On the other hand, the growing
manifestations of the deflection of Holocaust
guilt and/or attempts to distort its history,
problems that have received almost no serious
attention in the Jewish world or elsewhere,
constitute a serious danger. Distortion of
the record can cause irreparable harm to the
memory of the Holocaust, and prevent the
creation of a solid and genuine basis for
true reconciliation between the Jewish people
and the peoples of post-Communist Eastern
Europe.
It
is for this reason that President Peres'
blanket dismissal of Polish guilt is so
unfortunate and mistaken. More than anything
else, it will strengthen the contemporary
Polish tendency to ignore the role of
individual Poles in Holocaust crimes and
provide convincing ammunition for all those
seeking to whitewash Polish complicity. After
all, if the president of Israel absolves the
Poles, how can anyone even think that some of
them might be guilty? In that respect Peres
provided the Poles with the ultimate
exoneration.