By Rabbi Zev Meir Friedman
Rosh Mesivta, Rambam High School
Approximately 3,500,000 Jews lived in Poland before the start of World War II. They constituted 10% of Poland’s total population of 35 million. When the Nazis invaded Poland in September of 1939, the Polish government surrendered a short 26 days later. A campaign of terror was unleashed against the Jewish communities of Poland. Jews were routinely beaten or shot on the street, rounded up, and sent to forced labor or concentration camps. In some cases, Jews escaped by successfully seeking refuge with their Polish neighbors. In others, Polish citizenry turned their back on the Jews, engaged in anti-Semitic acts, and even turned Jews over to the Nazis knowing that certain death would ensue.
Polish authorities boast of the fact that 6,706 Polish citizens (less than 0.02% of the population) have been acclaimed as Righteous Gentiles for risking their lives in trying to save their Jewish neighbors.
Sadly, those brave individuals were the exception rather than the rule.
Recently, the Polish government has sought to whitewash the complicity of Polish citizenry in the persecution of the Jews during World War II.
In January 2018, the Polish parliament initiated the process of passing a bill criminalizing the description of any of the concentration camps in Poland as “Polish.”
Many people familiar with the Holocaust assert that the main killing centers were established in Poland by the Germans specifically because Poland was fertile ground for anti-Semitism. The Germans knew that their attempt to murder the Jewish population would be met with little resistance in Poland.
President Obama, a skilled diplomat and a graduate of both Columbia University and Harvard Law School, spoke of “Polish death camps” in May 2012, only to backtrack under political pressure. The Polish government plans to sentence someone for up to three years in prison for using such a reference.
Furthermore, even crimes committed by Poles against their Jewish neighbors are to be whitewashed and expunged from the record.
J’ACCUSE… Why don’t you take responsibility for the collaboration and participation of so many Polish citizens against their Jewish neighbors?
J’ACCUSE… Why do you engage in Holocaust denial, seeking to change historical reality and distorting matters for future generations?
J’ACCUSE… Why didn’t more Polish citizens help their Jewish neighbors who faced certain death, torture, and annihilation during the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which lasted 27 days?
J’ACCUSE… Why have you tried to silence world-renowned historian Jan Gross of Princeton University when he speaks about Poles who murdered close to 70,000 Jews during World War II while only succeeding in killing 30,000 German enemy occupiers during World War II?
J’ACCUSE… Why did a recent study of anti-Semitism commissioned by the University of Warsaw find that 25% of Polish citizens are anti-Semitic?
J’ACCUSE… Why did that same study find that more than 50% of Polish youth visit anti-Semitic websites that glorify Hitler and the Nazi era?
The current Polish government would want the public to believe that their hands were clean in dealing with the Jewish neighbors during World War II. In reality they helped ensure that their land was clean of Jews during World War II—consistent with Nazi policy of making Europe “Judenrein.”
