{"id":30946,"date":"2018-11-23T03:59:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-23T11:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=30946"},"modified":"2018-11-20T15:54:10","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T23:54:10","slug":"revealing-truth-elicits-threats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2018\/11\/23\/revealing-truth-elicits-threats\/","title":{"rendered":"Revealing truth elicits threats"},"content":{"rendered":"

University of Ottawa\u2019s Prof. Jan Grabowski delivered the Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia Nov. 15.\u00a0(photo by Pat Johnson)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Jan Grabowski, a University of Ottawa professor who is a leading scholar of the Holocaust, delivered the annual Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia Nov. 15 \u2013 the same day he filed a libel suit against an organization aligned with Poland\u2019s far-right government.<\/p>\n

The Polish League Against Defamation, which is allied with the country\u2019s governing Law and Justice Party, initiated a campaign against Grabowski last year, accusing him of ignoring the number of Poles who saved Jews and exaggerating the number of Jews killed by their Polish compatriots. Grabowski\u2019s book, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland<\/em>, won the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. An English translation of an even more compendious multi-year analysis undertaken by a team of researchers under Grabowski\u2019s leadership will be published next year. His Vrba lecture provided an overview of some of the findings in the new work. It is a harrowing survey that brought condemnation from Polish-Canadians in the Vancouver audience.<\/p>\n

The new book, which does not yet have an English title, is a work of \u201cmicrohistory,\u201d Grabowski said. Holocaust studies is one of the fastest-growing fields of historical research, he said, partly because it got off to a slow start and really only picked up in the 1980s. Much of the written work being completed today is in the area of survivor memoirs, second- and third-generation experiences, including inherited trauma, and \u201cmeta-history,\u201d the study of the study of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis assumes that we actually know what has happened,\u201d he said. Grabowski maintains there is still much primary research to be done. \u201cWe are still far away from knowing as much as we should about this, one of the greatest tragedies in human history.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are millions of pages of relevant historical documentation almost completely untapped \u2013 primarily in provincial Polish archives, police records and town halls \u2013 that spell out in detail the often-enthusiastic complicity of Poles in turning on their<\/p>\n

Jewish neighbours. By combing through these previously ignored records, Grabowski and his co-authors have amassed evidence of widespread \u2013 and eager \u2013 involvement of Polish police and other Poles in assisting Germans to identify, hunt down and murder Polish Jews.<\/p>\n

The work has been met with official condemnation. Earlier this year, the Polish government adopted a law that would expose scholars involved in the study of the Holocaust to fines and prison terms of up to three years. The criminal component of the law, including imprisonment, was rescinded after international backlash, but the atmosphere around Holocaust inquiry in Poland remains repressive.<\/p>\n

Grabowski said that the \u201cexplosion of right-wing extremists, xenophobia and blatant antisemitism\u201d in Poland is related to the \u201cundigested, unlearned and\/or rejected legacy of the Holocaust\u201d \u2013 the fact that Polish society has, by and large, refused to acknowledge the wounds of the past or to deal with its own role in the extermination of three million of its Jewish citizens between 1939 to 1945.<\/p>\n

The concept of microhistory, which is the approach Grabowski\u2019s team uses, is not local history, he said, \u201cit is an attempt to follow trajectories of people.\u201d He instructed his researchers to focus on the exact day, often hour by hour, when liquidation actions took place in hundreds of Polish shtetls and ghettoes. To do so upends a conspiracy of silence that has existed for decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy the silence?\u201d he asked the audience. \u201cThere were three parts to the silence. One was the Jews. They were dead. They had no voice \u2026 98.5% of Polish Jews who remained under German occupation, who never fled, died. You have a 1.5% survival rate for the Polish Jews. So, the Jews couldn\u2019t really, after the war, ask for justice, because they were gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The communist regime that dominated Poland for a half-century after the war was viewed not only as a foreign power inflicted on Poles from the Soviet Union, Grabowski said, \u201cbut, more importantly, as Jewish lackeys \u2013 that was a term that was used.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, it wouldn\u2019t really stand to have trials of those accused of complicity with the Germans for murdering the Jews,\u201d he said. \u201cThat would only confirm the widespread accusations that the communists were here doing the Jewish bidding.\u201d<\/p>\n

The third factor in the silence were the interests of Polish nationalists, whose ideology is inherently antisemitic, and who are the dominant political force in the country today.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>
Hunt for the Jews<\/em>\u00a0won the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While clearly not all Poles were collaborators, it would have been impossible for almost anyone in the country to claim ignorance of what was happening.<\/p>\n

\u201cMass killing was taking place in the streets,\u201d the professor said. Researchers found bills of sale charging city officials for the sand municipal workers needed to cover the blood on sidewalks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you say that blood was running in the streets, it\u2019s not a metaphor, it\u2019s just a description of what really happened,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In some ghettos, as many as half the Jewish population was killed on the day of the action, with massive participation from Polish society.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne area more, one area less,\u201d he said. \u201cUsually between 10 and 20% of Jews were slaughtered simply in order to frighten the remaining 80% to go to the trains, to be herded to the trains,\u201d said Grabowski.<\/p>\n

In Poland\u2019s smaller communities, centuries of Jewish and Polish social, commercial and civic interactions did not result in camaraderie \u2013 on the contrary.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe deadliest places of all [were] small shtetls, small towns, where anonymity was not available when the authorities were not far away,\u201d he said. In one instance, a Jew in hiding heard his neighbour assure the Nazis he would return with a hatchet to help them break into the hiding place seconds before the door was axed down.<\/p>\n

In another example, Grabowski described in minute detail the atrocities committed by Germans, Poles and Ukrainian recruits in W\u0119gr\u00f3w, a town in eastern central Poland with a Jewish population of about \u201c10,000 starving Jews who have been terrorized for nearly three years and now the final moment has come.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rumours of liquidation swirled for months, as Jews fleeing neighbouring communities brought narratives of destruction. In the day or two before the liquidation, wives of Polish military and other officials rushed to their Jewish tailors, shoemakers and others craftspeople to obtain the items they knew would soon become unavailable.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith mounting panic, people started to prepare themselves for a siege,\u201d said Grabowski. \u201cThey built hideouts to survive the initial German fury, they started to seek out contacts on the Aryan side of the city, looking for help from former neighbours, sometimes friends and former business partners.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the eve of Yom Kippur in 1942, Polish officials in the town were instructed to assemble horses, wagons and volunteers. A cordon of Nazis and collaborators surrounded the city at intervals of no more than 100 metres.<\/p>\n

The mayor of the town wrote: \u201cJews who woke up to the terrible news ran like mad around the city, half-naked, looking for shelter.\u201d The same leader noted that, when the Germans demanded he produce volunteers to help with the task of rounding up their Jewish neighbours, he feared he would not be able to meet their needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore I was able to leave my office, in order to assess the situation and issue orders for the removal of the bodies,\u201d the mayor testified, \u201cremoval of the bodies had already started. There were carts and people ready. They volunteered for the job without any pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Jews, the Germans were to be feared, but their Polish neighbours were also a threat.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe greatest danger was not associated with the Germans, but with the Poles,\u201d said Grabowski. \u201cUnlike the former, the latter could easily tell a Jew from a non-Jew by their accent, customs and physical appearance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Poles were rewarded with a quarter-kilo of sugar for every Jew they turned in.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe searches were conducted with extreme brutality and violence \u2026 the streets were soon filled with crowds of Jews being driven toward the market square, which the Germans had transformed into a holding pen for thousands of ghetto inmates,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On the streets, \u201cthe cries of Jews mixed with the shouts of the Germans and the laughter of the Poles,\u201d according to an eyewitness.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of this was done in a small town where everybody knows each other,\u201d said Grabowski. \u201cIt\u2019s not only the question of geographic proximity, it\u2019s social proximity. These people knew each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

People were taking clothes, jewelry and other possessions from the dead bodies. A husband would toss a body in the air while the wife pulled off articles of clothing until what was left was a pile of naked cadavers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey even pulled out golden teeth with pliers,\u201d said Grabowski. A court clerk responded defensively to accusations that the gold he was trying to sell was soaked in human blood. \u201cI personally washed the stuff,\u201d he protested.<\/p>\n

The prevalence in the Polish imagination of a Jewish association with gold partly accounted for the actions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis betrayal, due to widespread antisemitism and hatred of the Jews, was combined with the seemingly universal conviction that Jewish gold was just waiting to be transferred to new owners,\u201d Grabowski said. \u201cThe myth of Jewish gold was so popular and so deeply rooted among Poles that it sealed the fate of [many Jews].\u201d<\/p>\n

The historical records indicate many Poles saw no need to cover their collaborationist tracks. Police and others who took it upon themselves to aid the Nazis without pressure defended their actions.<\/p>\n

One policeman, after the war, depicted the killing of Jews as a patriotic act, one that saved Polish villagers from the wrath of the Nazis, who would have learned sooner or later about Jews in hiding and who then, he claimed, would have burned down the entire village.<\/p>\n

As efficient as the Nazi killing machine was, Grabowski contends it could not have been as effective without the enthusiastic complicity of so many in Poland and other occupied countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was their participation that, in a variety of ways, made the German system of murder as efficient as it was,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

With trepidation, Grabowski and his fellow researchers followed the documents and met with people in the towns. They would review documents from a 1947 trial, for instance, then go to the village in question.<\/p>\n

The entire village would be conscious of its war-era history, he said. And the people who are, decades later, ostracized by their neighbours are not those who collaborated in the murder of Jews.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe person that is ostracized is the family who tried to rescue the Jews, because they broke a certain social taboo and it still visible 75 or 76 years after the fact,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cEvery time I present a speech to a Polish audience, the question of Polish righteous is presented as if it is a fig leaf behind which everyone else can hide.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the question-and-answer session, Grabowski shut down a persistent audience member who identified as Polish and who took exception with Grabowski\u2019s research, arguing that Poland has more Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem than any other country.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time I present a speech to a Polish audience, the question of Polish righteous is presented as if it is a fig leaf behind which everyone else can hide,\u201d said Grabowski, who was born and educated in Warsaw. \u201cThe thing is, do you know how many Jews needed to be rescued? Poland had the largest Jewish community and using today Polish righteous as a universal and, let\u2019s say, fig leaf behind which situations like I described here can be hidden is absolutely unconscionable. I protest against any attempt to overshadow the tragedy of Jewish people [with] the sacrifice of very, very few Poles.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Poland\u2019s far-right government removed the mandated jail sentence for anyone found guilty of \u201cslandering\u201d Poland or Poles with complicity in Nazi war crimes, acknowledging the participation of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust remains a civil offence and Holocaust scholars in the country \u2013 and in Canada \u2013 face death threats and intimidation.<\/p>\n

In introducing Grabowski, Richard Menkis, associate professor in the department of history at UBC, paid tribute to Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who escaped Auschwitz and brought to the world inside information about the death camp, its operations and physical layout. Vrba, with fellow escapee Albert Wetzler, warned in 1944 that Hungarian Jews were about to face mass transport to the death camps. The news is credited with saving as many as 200,000 lives.<\/p>\n

Vrba migrated to Canada and became a professor of pharmacology at UBC. He died in 2006.<\/p>\n

The Vrba lecture alternates annually between an issue relevant to the Holocaust and an issue chosen by the pharmacology department in the faculty of medicine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

University of Ottawa\u2019s Prof. Jan Grabowski delivered the Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia Nov. 15.\u00a0(photo by Pat Johnson) Jan Grabowski, a University of Ottawa professor who is a leading scholar of the Holocaust, delivered the annual Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia Nov. 15 \u2013 the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[4242,53,8500,54,2038,4582,3597,8501,3556],"class_list":["post-30946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-jan-grabowski","tag-memorial","tag-nazis","tag-poland","tag-politics","tag-rudolf-vrba","tag-ubc"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}