Jo Harper
21 April 2023•Update: 21 April 2023
WARSAW
Poland’s premier on Friday blasted remarks by a well-known Polish historian of the Holocaust, calling them “scandalous.”
Rebuffing the televised remarks by historian Barbara Engelking, Mateusz Morawiecki said “scandalous words were spoken that have nothing to do with reliable historical knowledge. As the prime minister, as a historian and, above all, as a Pole, I feel obliged to refer to these words.”
The reaction comes two days after commemorations in Warsaw of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It is part of an ongoing struggle in Poland to determine the collective narrative about culpability for crimes committed against Jews during World War II.
In 2016, Polish authorities accused Polish-American historian Jan Tomasz Gross of "insulting the Polish people” for saying Poles killed more Jews than Germans during the war. In 2018, a backlash forced the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party to drop legislation making it a crime to suggest Poland bore any responsibility for Nazi atrocities. The PiS line is that Poles were co-victims of the Nazi occupation, not collaborators.
In 2021, a Polish court ruled that Engelking, director of the Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski – the editors of a book on the fate of Jews in occupied Poland – had to apologize for writing that one Pole had given up Jews to the Nazis, but stopped short of ordering them to pay compensation.
Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial expressed anxiety that the trial would undermine freedom of research, and Engelking said that was actually its aim.
'Disappointed'
“Jews were disappointed with Poles during the war," Engelking told local channel TVN. She spoke about the widespread use of Poles who sold Jews to the Germans during the war. "Jews were largely self-sufficient and would have been even more if it had not been for them,” she said.
“Of course, the mere fact that there was a death penalty (for hiding Jews) was reason enough to be afraid,” she added. “This fear was absolutely justified and people who decided to risk their lives to help Jews were truly heroes and there were really few of them. Fear is not an issue, people had a right to be afraid, no one can blame them. The Jews understood it perfectly.”
“The Jews knew what to expect from the Germans. The German was the enemy and this relationship was very clear, black and white, but the relationship with the Poles was much more complex … and one could hope that they would behave differently … and not take advantage of the situation to such an extent,” she said.
In a 2019 interview with the Polish press agency PAP, Grzegorz Berendt, then deputy director of the Museum of the Second World War, estimated the number of Poles helping Jews in the tens of thousands, but the number of Poles murdered for helping Jews at 700-1,000. In his opinion, many Poles caught helping Jews were not murdered on the spot, but ended up in prison or a concentration camp.
"So the president is not telling the truth when he says that the death penalty for helping Jews was carried out 'absolutely', that is, in every case. It was not, although of course it was a threat," he said.
