Poland ... Begs To Differ....

Poland ... Begs To Differ

US Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence, right, stand with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and his wife Agata Kornhauser-Duda, left, under the gate during their visit at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, February 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

"[Poland is waiting in] expectation that the Israeli side will say in a clear way what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meant when he said the words that were quoted by the Israeli media."
"[Explanations from Israel are] unclear, [leaving Warsaw awaiting clarification]."
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szykowski vel Sek

"The Prime Minister's comments concerning Poland were misquoted by the Jerusalem Post, which quickly issued a correction clarifying that an error had been made in the editing of the article."
"Netanyahu spoke of Poles and not the Polish people or the country of Poland. This was misquoted and misrepresented in press reports and was subsequently corrected by the journalist who issued the initial misstatement."
Office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"I am a son of Holocaust survivors and I was even born and grew up in a community made up of Holocaust survivor. The memory of the Holocaust is something we cannot compromise about; it is clear and we won’t forget or forgive."
"In diplomacy you try not to offend, but nobody will change the historical truth to do something like that. Poles collaborated with the Nazis, definitely. As Yitzhak Shamir [former Israeli Prime Minister] said, 'they [Poles] suckle anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk'."
"No one will tell us how to express ourselves, or how to remember our fallen."
Israel Katz, recently appointed acting Israeli Foreign Minister 

Holocaust survivors hold banners and wave an Israeli flag during a protest in front of the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv, on February 8, 2018. (Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/Getty Images/File)

Nazi Germany set up its death camps in every European country it occupied. Poland's concentration camps and death camps held and destroyed half of all lost Jewish lives; three million people. In all occupied countries nationals of those countries as citizens, along with their national police and military became voluntarily complicit with the Nazi killing machine, from France to Ukraine, Lithuania to Poland, sometimes with great helpful enthusiasm going beyond what their S.S. over-masters anticipated in usefulness in rounding up and dispatching Europe's Jews.

Some, but not all of those European countries have admitted their complicity while some, like Poland, stuck with the historical record it doesn't much care for, goes out of its way to try to exonerate itself and its citizens from claims it and many of its citizens were unusually helpful to the extermination work of the Final Solution. Last year, when Poland officially passed a law making it unlawful, a criminal offence, to speak of 'Polish death camps', rather than 'German death camps', an outcry from Israel and Holocaust survivors forced Poland to withdraw.

The killing camps located in Polish territory were often the last stop where Jews were collected from holding camps in other countries; the crematoria in Polish death camps were kept extremely busy. The European rail system transported Jews from across Europe -- from Greece and Holland, France and Italy -- into Poland where they were gassed, their bodies incinerated, the particulate matter that ensued up the smoke stacks and scattered around the countryside, enriching the soil for agricultural purposes.



Israel often goes out of its way to diplomatically placate the injured feelings of countries like Poland and Ukraine when the issue of death camps and the willingness of their populations to deplete their countries of Jews led them to volunteer their help, in service to the Final Solution. This time around Poland once again making an effort to distance itself from the horrors of the Holocaust points out that it too lost millions of its people killed by the Nazis. As did Russia, when they turned against one another, Russia opting out of the Axis pact.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife and retinue were on a visit to Poland to take part in the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Vice-President Pence and his wife were there for the solemn ceremony, as were Polish officials. The Warsaw Ghetto saw Polish Jews gathered within a geographic square in the city, off-limits to any but Jews, crowded together, living in squalor awaiting their final disposition. And when the transports began, and the rumours of death camps began circulating, the knowledge of their future in death camps spurred young Jewish men and women to rise against their oppressors.

Using the underground sewer system young Jews had for years smuggled themselves out of the ghetto to bring back food, medicine, and whatever arms they could find. Of the tens of thousands of Jews still left in the ghetto out of their total of 300,000 who had been steadily deported to death camps, an estimated 500 representing two defensive groups armed themselves and plotted the uprising. They built bunkers where the resistance could hide, they contacted the Polish underground which supplied them with some guns. Then they mounted their resistance and stopped the deportations temporarily.

Instytut Pamieci Narodowej 

Entrance to the gas chamber in Auschwitz IThe entrance to the gas chamber in Auschwitz I, where Zyklon B was tested on Soviet prisoners of war. The building in the background is a hospital for SS members. Auschwitz, Poland, date uncertain. 

Most of the resisters were killed by the Germans who had been forced out of the Ghetto. Individuals held on, refusing to surrender, until they were all killed, the rest of the Jews placed on transports to death camps, and the Warsaw Ghetto was demolished and razed, the uprising over; 1943. But they had managed to keep fighting for a month against the mighty German S.S. troops, a rag-tag band of desperate Jews using old, dilapidated weaponry and sacrificing themselves to restore hope and dignity to others.

Photograph from SS General Juergen Stroop's report showing the Warsaw ghetto after the German suppression of the ghetto uprising. Stroop, commander of German forces that suppressed the Warsaw ghetto uprising, compiled an album of photographs and other materials. This album later came to known as "The Stroop Report." The right of this image from the album shows a column of Jews being transported out of the ghetto for deportation. Warsaw, Poland, April–May, 1943.

• National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

"To symbolize the German victory, Stroop ordered the destruction of the Great Synagogue on Tlomacki Street on May 16, 1943. The ghetto itself was in ruins. Stroop reported that he had captured 56,065 Jews and destroyed 631 bunkers. He estimated that his units killed up to 7,000 Jews during the uprising. The German authorities deported approximately another 7,000 Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka killing center, where almost all were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival."
Holocaust Encyclopedia

While in Poland for the memorial ceremony, Netanyahu commented that "Poles co-operated with the Nazis", meaning that some Poles were invested in killing Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. While the Prime Minister specifically did not indict all of the Poland, the Jerusalem Post article that has so enraged Poland, quoted him as saying "the Poles", a sweeping condemnation of all of Poland and its people. Mr Netanyahu, of course, is quite aware that over 6,800 Poles have been recognized for their help to Jews at risk of their own lives, recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial.

Poland's underground resistance fought the German occupation, and some Jews fought with them. The truth and reality are never clear-cut, however. The indisputable fact is that there has always existed anti-Semitism of a virulent, brutal and violent nature in Poland. Pogroms occurred as regular as clock-work over hundreds of years in Poland against Jews whose homes were established in Polish towns and villages. And that some -- a large enough number to be in the majority -- Poles approved of Jews being rounded up and shipped out, considered unwanted, foreign elements.

Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki, left, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at a conference on Peace and Security in the Middle East in Warsaw, Poland, February 14, 2019. (AP/Michael Sohn)

Poland was sufficiently affronted by these declarations from Israelis in their views of Polish action during the Holocaust years, to threaten to pull out of a scheduled meeting of Central European leaders, the  Visegrad Group representing an alliance of nationalistic countries within the European Union supporting Israel; Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia more strenuously supportive of Israel than countries of Western Europe. That meeting was to have taken place today, Monday, but was cancelled when Poland withdrew.

"Accusing all Poles of anti-Semitism offends the Righteous; it also offends all those who today want to see in them the true representation of Polish society. And it also offends us, Polish Jews, who are a part of that society."
"One does not clarify lies by another set of lies. It is not honest [and] it is not moral to fight lies with another set of lies. What do you want? [Katz] functionally said that all Poles are anti-Semites. So how do you expect the Poles to react? There are irresponsible people on both sides and when an irresponsible statement is made it empowers other irresponsible people to react. This in no way justifies anti-Semitism in Poland, just as it does not justify distortion of the truth by Israeli leaders."
Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Union of Jewish Communities in Poland