Discussion for article #235488
Sorry, but the story is not as black-and-white as the Polish government insists. Take for example the historical account of how the entire Jewish community of Jedwabne being murdered on July 10, 1941 not by the Nazis, as was once asserted by official Polish history, but by their Polish neighbors.
Perhaps the AP might want to also read Polandâs Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947 and include a little more context in to this ongoing struggle for Poland to come to terms with the complex, and troubling milieu of anti-Semitism before, during and after the war and the not so clean lines of demarcation between victim, bystander and perpetrator that people want to neatly sweep history into said specified categories.
Such inclusion might help better inform the reader of the complex nature of the issues at hand, and not simply reporting it as a mindless âgaffeâ reportage narrative.
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The Teabaggers would complain but they agree with the notion that the Poles deserved it.
Well said. I donât think the director meant to imply that all Germans, all Poles, and all Hungarians were complicit. That is clearly not the case. But for the Polish government to insist on a very one-sided history is a bit revisionist, to put it mildly.
Iâm reminded of some Germans in the DDR after the war and the war crimes trials erecting monuments highlighting their (now Communist) struggle against the Nazis. It was if the Iron Curtain and the blanket of Communism absolved all those in the East of Nazi complicity, by the simple fact that they were now Communists.
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The virulent raging anti-semitism in early twentieth century Poland is an established Historical fact, and stands by itself without reference to any collaboration with Nazis. Weâre fluffing up a mole hill here.
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W. Shirerâs Rise and Fall goes into some detail on this subject as well.
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But collaborating was never the official state position, as it was with Vichy France, for instance.
Yes, letâs say something totally historically illiterate in a story sneering at someone elseâs historical illiteracy.
There was no âofficial state positionâ because there was no fucking state to have a position. There was no puppet regime, nor was there any occupation of enemy territory some of which might, or might not, someday be given back as in France. Instead, Germany and the USSR partitioned the state of Poland and liquidated the government.
Germany declared its halfâand ultimately most of the entire country along with parts of Ukraineâa separate administrative region of the Reich governed by the General Government, basically a colonial regime whose job was to prepare the territory for eventual colonization by Aryans. Eventuallyâmost likely about the time the extermination of Eastern Europeâs Jewish population was approaching completion, a huge proportion of the Poles were to be exterminated and the remainder reduced to serfdom. Auschwitz wasnât projected to go out of business anytime soon.
But obviously, the Germans werenât sharing these plans with the Poles and were more than happy to have the assistance of any Polish anti-Semites who wanted to help advance the extermination of the Jews, and hence unknowingly advance their own date with the ovens.
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Quite correct. There was no entity called âPolandâ during the war. From Wikipedia:
The area was a colony rather than a puppet state; its rulers had no goal of cooperating with Poles or Ukrainians throughout the war, regardless of their political orientation. The authorities rarely even mentioned the name âPolandâ in government correspondence. The only exception to this was the General Governmentâs Bank of Issue in Poland (Polish: Bank Emisyjny w Polsce, German: Emissionbank in Polen). The government and administration of the General Government was composed entirely of Germans, with the intent that the area was to be colonized by German settlers who would exterminate most Poles and reduce the remaining population to the level of serfs before their final genocide.
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Lestatdelc and jimolson said nicely what I have been thinking, angrily, since this story came out. It is possible for people to be a victim (of the Nazis) and a perpetrator (of atrocities against their Jewish minority) at the same time. People in Poland are well aware of this unsavory aspect of their history, there has been a great deal written about it in Poland, and it is pretty disingenuous for the Polish government to dismiss Americans as âignorantâ of this. THAT comment pissed me off. Where do they think the handful of Polish Jews who werenât killed ended up for the most part? Things are never black and white and many Americans are acutely aware of the Jewish history in Europe in those times.
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The Teabaggers will buy into any narrative that has the word âObamaâ and âgaffeâ in the same sentence. As to Polish complicity in the Holocaust, mostly I rely on the words of family members who were there. The gist is that the Polish did nothing to resist the Nazis until after their country was conquered. When it came to killing Jews, they found all the energy they needed. The Warsaw ghetto, in my familyâs telling, was the apotheosis of noble Jewish resistance. After the war, Jewish D.P.'s (Displaced Persons) who returned to Poland were murdered. It was not until much later that I heard of the Warsaw Uprising (to be distinguished from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising).The battle of who writes history is a constant, as we see in Turkeyâs objection to being reminded of the Armenian genocide. In the case of the denail of responsibility for the attempt to eradicate the Jewish people, there are current international policy considerations because the undeniable fact that the Shoah happened during a time when the Jews had no home of their own is part of the raison dâetre for the modern state of Israel, in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. And, perhaps more relevantly, we see contemporary manifistations of the desire to exterminate the Jews.
They protest too much, Poland is a neighbour and there is still a lot of traditional anti-semitism around, and lots of stories from WWII, where Poles helped round up or indeed kill their jewish neighbours. This it not new and it doesnât go away just because the Polish Government throws a tantrum. The post-war communist regime did also persecute jews, some of the ended up as refugees in Denmark. Anti-semitism is very much a part of Slavic culture.
I donât know why this guy decided to put things as he did. Mentioning Germany, and then Poland and Hungary directly after, and not mentioning anyone else specifically, tends to put these three on a par. He could have ticked off a list of everyone who had any part in the affair, and it would have included the Allies and the Vatican, fer cryinâ out loud.
His assertion that the perpetrators and accomplices of the Holocaust didnât think they were doing something evil, and felt that they had to do this thing, is also up for grabs. Most of them are gone now, but talk to the then-residents of Dachau (the town) and theyâll give you all sorts of different points of view.
The speech, at least in this part, was poorly written, to the point where it seems to be catering to its audience at the expense of others. I donât think it should have been written this way.