February 1st, 2018
"I would like to express myself on the current issue of the IHRA’s position regarding the amendment to the law, passed by the Polish Parliament, concerning the alleged protection of the national honour of Poland from the Holocaust.
The mission of the IHRA, as defined by the Stockholm Declaration, is to transmit the memory of the Shoah and promote research and studies on topics related to this genocide. Poland is committed to this declaration, which forms the basis of its IHRA membership. Beyond the verbiage, the legislation in question refers to at least three distinct problems.
The first concerns the refusal to call the concentration and extermination camps in Poland during the Second World War “Polish camps,” an obvious and justified requirement: these were German camps, set up on occupied Polish territory. There were no Polish guards, only Polish prisoners and victims. But this is a false problem: no researcher, politician or serious government will find fault with this claim of the Polish government. IHRA fully supports Poland’s position on this issue. However, the fact that the Polish government insists on repeating a claim accepted by almost all research centers and Holocaust memorials – and certainly by all major centers in Jerusalem, Washington, Amsterdam, Paris (and elsewhere in the world), affiliated with the IHRA – seems to obscure the legislation’s true purpose of attacking freedom of Holocaust research in Poland. I am deeply wary of notions such as “national honor,” especially when applied to entire nations or ethnicities.
The second problem is that this legislation makes it a crime for anyone to hold the Polish nation or government responsible for crimes committed on national territory during the war. Here is a very strange argument. The Polish nation or state could not commit any action on Polish territory during the war, since Poland was then occupied and terrorized by a foreign power. To be sure, there was anti-German political and military resistance, which obviously could not act as a recognized government. The Polish government-in-exile controlled resistance only to a limited extent. It is true that, unlike other countries, Poland did not cooperate politically with Nazi Germany. Nothing very surprising about this, since Nazi Germany did not seek to establish or negotiate with any Polish political group – the Nazis wanted to eliminate Polish nationality as such and reduce the Polish people to slavery. National pride is thus, again, a false problem.
The third point, fundamental, concerns the question of relations between Jews and Poles on the Polish territory occupied during the war. Establishment historians in Poland claim that the Poles tried to save the Jews. According to them, there was a plethora of Polish rescuers, the typical example being the Ulma family in the small town of Markowa. The Ulmas had tried to save two Jewish families, they were denounced and murdered with the Jews they had wanted to hide. The museum built in this small town describes the Polish nation as a nation of rescuers. This is a barefaced lie, which masks the fact that in the villages and small towns around Markowa, peasants, armed with pitchforks and clubs, were hunting Jews, killing those who tried to flee or handing them over to the Polish police, who fully collaborated with the Germans, or even delivered them directly to the latter. This state of affairs was repeated throughout the country. The participation of Poles in the murder of Jews was widespread. The rescuers – not 60,000, as some Polish pseudo-historians put it, but perhaps a third or even less of that number out of some 21 million Poles – were real heroes, who had to protect the Jews not only from the Germans, but very often also from their Polish neighbors. However, beyond the rescuers properly speaking, a significant minority expressed a positive attitude towards the Jews and many were those who brought them their help. Some resistance movements were well disposed towards the Jews; most, however, were not. But no Jew could survive in Poland without the help of the Poles.
It is this complex reality that is now at the heart of the debate. The legislation is intended to make research on this difficult subject impossible: it supposedly protects scientific and artistic works from any criminalization. But who determines what such works are? What about an investigative journalist? An aspiring artist, but not (yet) recognized? Or a tourist guide explaining how the local population cheerfully plundered Jewish property, while their owners were gathered to be murdered? Or a simple undergraduate student, writing an assignment as part of a course, and who would ask to consult archives – when they submit their copy, will they have to serve three years in prison for discovering that a group of villagers murdered their Jewish neighbors? I suppose they would prefer not to write this assignment. Freedom of research or publication cannot exist in such an atmosphere, such an authoritarian and intolerant climate. Some excellent Polish historians are openly and courageously opposing it, mainly but not exclusively around the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, including prominent professors such as Barbara Engelking, Dariusz Libionka and many others. On January 28, they published their own statement (in fact, the re-publication in 2016 of a very strong opposition to the legislation). The government policy also meets the opposition of the director of POLIN, the museum of the history of the Polish Jews, in Warsaw.
The IHRA demands, in the most vehement way possible, that this type of legislation, which could not be recognized by a civilized society, should be annulled. Poland is a major member of the IHRA and relations within the IHRA with Polish colleagues have always been nothing less than excellent. But the Polish government must make a decision: in favor of freedom of investigation, research and publication, for the right to make mistakes as well as to be right, or against, which then means going against the Stockholm declaration and the IHRA.”
Professor Yehuda Bauer, honorary president of the
