Jan Grabowski, the Polish Canadian historian, grapples with an extremely sensitive topic in his latest book, Whitewash: Poland And The Jews (New Jewish Press/University of Toronto). A specialist in Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, he examines the degree to which the previous right-wing government in Poland attempted to control the narrative regarding the role of Poles during the Holocaust.
This highly-charged topic encompasses themes such as the German occupation of Poland, Polish nationalism and antisemitism. It is bound to elicit strong emotions in both Polish and Jewish circles.
Two years ago, Grabowski was invited to deliver a speech on this theme at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. As he spoke, Grzegorz Braun — a member of the Polish Parliament whom he brands as a “militant antisemite” — jumped to his feet, grabbed the microphone from the podium, shouted “Enough!” and smashed it. As mayhem erupted, a journalist who had arrived with Braun hissed, “Jewish lies.”
Braun targeted Grabowski because he rejects the “official, state-approved historical narrative” of the Holocaust as formulated by the Law and Justice Party and its allies, which ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023.
As he acknowledges, he should not have been surprised by Braun’s outburst. Two weeks before he delivered his lecture, a Polish newspaper published a story critical of Grabowski’s finding that around 200,000 Jews had been killed, directly or indirectly, by Poles during the Holocaust.
It was not exactly a novel revelation. A decade ago, the Princeton University Holocaust scholar Jan Gross claimed that Polish Catholics killed more Jews than Germans during the Nazi occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945.
And in 2021, a Polish woman filed a civil lawsuit against Grabowski and his co-author, Barbara Engelking, claiming that their book, Night Without End, had slandered her deceased uncle, who was accused of betraying Jews in hiding to the Germans.
“In the end, we won on appeal,” writes Grabowski, but the legal process took almost three stressful years, cost them dearly financially, and had a chilling effect on scholars who seek truths about the Holocaust.
This is obviously a fraught subject, and Grabowski, a professor of history at the University of Ottawa, handles it with professionalism. The argument he makes in this substantive and persuasive volume is that the previous Polish government, in downplaying the participation of Poles in the mass murder of Polish Jews, twisted and distorted the history of the Holocaust in Poland.
As he points out, Poland is vital to the memory and memorialization of the Holocaust.
Prior to 1939, Poland was home to 3.3 million Jews, comprising about ten percent of its population. By his estimation, only about 30,000 survived the Nazi occupation on Polish soil. Upwards of 250,000 fled eastward to the Soviet Union, or to countries relatively near Poland.
Of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust, five million were murdered in Poland or in extermination camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Majdanek, that the Germans expressly built in Poland.
Due to these factors, Grabowski argues, Polish society and Poland itself bear a unique “obligation of memory” to care for the “spaces of horror” and commemorate one of the greatest human catastrophes in history.
In his opinion, Poland has not lived up to these expectations. “Unfortunately, the politics of memory pursued and enforced in Poland are nowadays best described as Holocaust distortion.”
Poles freely admit that six million European Jews were murdered during this period. They are not Holocaust deniers. “What they refuse to acknowledge, however, is that their people, their nation, had something to do with the event. That their ancestors took part in the German genocidal project.”
“In practical terms, in Poland, it means placing the entire blame on the Germans, regardless of the level of complicity of local gentiles,” he adds.
Poles who subscribe to this version of events seek “to elevate the wartime suffering of their own national group to the desired ‘Jewish’ level, a phenomenon known as Holocaust envy.”
According to Grabowski, the Polish government gained control over the Holocaust narrative by coopting several institutions. The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a right-wing body, is the largest producer of historiography in the country. The Pilecki Institute and the Roman Dmowski Institute for the Legacy of Polish National Thought work cooperatively with the IPN in promoting the myth of an “innocent” Poland. The Foreign Ministry sells it to foreign audiences.
From 2015 onward, Grabowski notes, memorial museums were drafted into what he calls “the state-sponsored assault on history.”
Two of these institutions, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, have fallen into line with the preferred narrative, as has the Markowa Ulma Family Museum of Poles Who Saved Jews in World War II, which opened in 2016. Grabowski believes that the forthcoming Warsaw Ghetto Museum, which is scheduled to open this year, also will adopt this narrative.
Grabowski singles out the Markowa museum, which I visited on its opening day, as a “model of Holocaust distortion.” Named after a Polish family that was murdered by the Germans after hiding Jews on its property, it showcases “the courageous acts of a few … as the moral choices of the masses.”
“Holocaust distortion thrives on omission, half-truths, and lack of context, leaving us with a deeply flawed historical narrative. Markowa, for instance, was a large village of about 5,000 people where (the Holocaust) was executed by the locals in the fall of 1942, without the Germans being present in the area … Unsurprisingly, the museum in Markowa has nothing to say about this aspect of Polish-Jewish relations. The museum is there to convey a message of friendship, sacrifice, and virtue.”
Having been there, I tend to agree with Grabowski’s assessment.
Grabowski makes another important point with his observation that there is not a single comprehensive museum of the Holocaust in Poland. This, truly, is shocking. The mitigating factor here is that Poland has several museums broadly devoted to the wartime period.
Apart from having pressured museums to conform to its one-sided perception of the Holocaust, the Polish government passed legislation in 2018 threatening critics with prison terms of up to three years if they had blamed Polish society for crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany.
The net effect of this law is that 50 percent of Poles now primarily associate Auschwitz with Polish suffering rather than the genocide of Jews, says Grabowski. This misperception flies in the face of the facts. While this concentration camp claimed the lives of about 1.1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles perished there.
Grabowski, in passing, charges Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, with aiding and abetting the Polish government in disseminating falsehoods about the Holocaust in Poland. Two of these are that Poles and Jews suffered equally and that antisemitism was a marginal phenomenon.
He discloses that Jakub Berman, the Jewish director of the Polish security apparatus immediately after the war, deliberately inflated the number of ethnic Poles who died at the hands of the Germans so as to deflect widespread resentment that the new communist regime was an alien/Jewish implant.
In 1946, when he announced that Jewish and Polish losses were identical, the Catholic intelligentsia tried to downplay the scale and importance of Polish antisemitism. This occurred in the wake of the pogrom in Kielce, which resulted in the deaths of 49 Jews and in the emigration of tens of thousands of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
The “feel-good” narrative promoted assiduously by right-wing Polish nationalists hit a bump in 2000 with the publication of Jan Gross’ book Neighbors, which examined the massacre of Jews in the northeastern town of Jedwabne in the summer of 1941. Drawing heavily on the testimony of Jewish survivors, Gross concluded that the atrocity was carried out by local Poles rather than German soldiers.
Jedwabne was not an aberration, he notes. It was one of more than 20 towns and villages in eastern Poland where Poles murdered Jews.
Grabowski points out that around 250,000 Jews fled the Nazi ghettos and went into hiding, but only 30,000 survived. The rest were hunted down and killed by Poles. Still other Poles, known as shmaltsovniks, preyed on Jews by means of blackmail. In exchange for money or property, they agreed not to betray Jews to the Germans.
A few courageous Poles tried to help Jews. More than 7,000 of these Righteous Among the Nations have been recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial/museum in Jerusalem.
While Poles were united against the Nazi occupation, there was no widespread condemnation of the German mistreatment of Jews, he claims.
After the war, from 1945 to 1947, upwards of 2,000 Jews reclaiming homes and properties were murdered by Poles. One of these unfortunates was Jozue Abrahamer, Grabowski’s grandfather.
Prior to the pogrom in Kielce, pogroms broke out in Rzeszow and Krakow in June and August of 1945.
In closing, Grabowski claims that Holocaust distortion goes hand in hand with “the growing authoritarian and populist assault on democracy” and is bound up with an incremental process to move Poland toward “a fascist form of government.”
This is an exaggeration and I disagree with it. Polish democracy remains vibrant despite attempts to whitewash the behavior of some Poles during the Holocaust.
Despite his hyperbole in this instance, Grabowski is not a sensationalist. His writing is measured and backed up by meticulous research. Whitewash: Poland And The Jews conforms to his rigorous standards and provides readers with a sophisticated appraisal of a highly emotive topic.