I had planned a visit to the
Illinois Holocaust Museum sometime this year but the Polish actions accelerated
my timetable. I needed to connect with
those events—to see the photos, the film clips, the artifacts, and hear the
testimonials to make the Holocaust as tangible as possible for me. The museum has such artifacts as an actual
boxcar used to transport Jews to the camps, a pajama-like striped uniform emblazoned
with a yellow star and a bowl and wooden spoon used by inmates at Auschwitz and
the red, white and black swastika armbands worn by the guards. One of the most interesting film testimonials
was of an African American soldier from a black regiment that liberated one of
the camps. He astutely made the connection
between slaves and the camp inmates that were wholly dependent on, and at the
mercy of, their overlords. The other
testimony that made it real for me was the hologram testimonial of camp
survivor, Sam Harris. In a 45 minute Q
& A, Sam described life in his poor little Polish town before the Nazi
invasion, and then his life as a little boy in one of the camps, his story of
survival, liberation and eventual transport to America. His personal story was the strongest evidence that the Polish government
is dangerously misguided with this law.
The law is a direct and egregious
affront to Western principals of free speech.
It is a ham-fisted measure that attempts to control the narrative of the
events surrounding the Holocaust in Poland.
Most troubling is that it tries to whitewash the complicity and
sometimes participation of some of the Polish people with this horrible stain
on human history. Sam Harris’s
testimony is a sobering reminder that some Poles (but not all, and not the
official Polish government) were hardly innocent bystanders in the Nazi
crimes. The resentment of Jews by some of Poland’s
citizens sometimes led to collaboration and complicity with the Nazis and
sometimes some of the Poles themselves were perpetrators. Mr. Harris stated that after liberation, “We
were not welcome back in our own town.
Some (but not all) said to us, ‘What, they didn’t kill all of
you?’” The persecution of Jews by a
number of Poles was unearthed in 2000 with the publication of the book
Neighbors by Jan T. Gross which recounted the horror of the massacre at
Jedwabne in 1941 (along with other atrocities), where townspeople murdered
their own neighbors wholesale, without the help of the Nazi regime.
As a side note, Lithuania appears
to now be going in the opposite direction.
After decades of foot-dragging on identifying and prosecuting
collaborators, Lithuania finally published a list of known collaborators a
couple of years ago largely as a result of thet work of (non-Jewish) novelist
Ruta Vanagaite (https://www.timesofisrael.com/is-lithuania-ready-to-own-up-to-its-holocaust-past/). Rita Gabis’s (who is part Jewish) meticulously researched
book, A Guest at the Shooter’s Banquet, explored her grandfather’s SS past and
collaboration with Nazi crimes in Lithuania.
Although the events in Lithuania
and Poland are nearly 80 years old, many truths are just now being
revealed. And the Polish people should
not turn to denial. If Rita Gabis can come to terms with participation
in the Holocaust in her own family, surely a proud nation should be able to
within its citizenry as well. History
must be told, even the ugly parts- especially the ugly parts. To be sure, Poland was traumatized by the
Second World War. It was occupied by two
totalitarian states, losing 20% of its population, and roughly half of its
professional class.
The Poles as a people should not
be exonerated nor condemned with respect to the Holocaust. The response of the
Polish people was not uniform. In his
recent book, The Holocaust: A New History, Laurence Rees, for instance, singled
out the Poles for being the people that were most likely to take personal risk
to save or shelter Jews from the Nazis. But
there were also incidents like Jedwabne.
Actions were highly individualized and those individuals should be held
to account.
Poland should not take action to obscure
the truth of those nightmare years. The
Poles, like the Lithuanians have a complicated history with Jewish oppression
and the Nazi regime. To place all blame
on the Germans is to not fully disclose the truth, and not all of the truths
have yet been revealed or told.
Before we get too sanctimonious
about the Polish government’s action, I believe it carries with it a warning
for the U.S. as well. Immediately
following the shooting at the South Carolina church by Dylan Roof, whose Facebook
page depicted him with a Confederate flag in the background, Confederate flags
were torn down across the nation. Nikki Haley led the charge where the flag was
removed from the statehouse in South Carolina.
Removing the flag from the statehouse was appropriate, yet things went
even farther. Ebay and Amazon stopped
selling any items carrying the Confederate flag (although the hammer and sickle
didn’t seem to bother them), and even reruns of The Dukes of Hazard ceased to
be shown on cable because the car sported a Confederate flag.
But then things went
further. The mobs took over soon
thereafter and began to tear down statues of Confederate generals in acts of
vandalism. The destruction then
extended to statues of Christopher Columbus.
In New York, Bill De Blasio even considered removing Columbus’s statue,
but finally relented when he discovered that he could lose the Italian-American
vote and opted to keep Columbus and put markers about indigenous people
instead. In Chicago, even the statue of
Abraham Lincoln was defaced in the frenzy.
Protesters covered the statue of Thomas Jefferson in black at the
University of Virginia and placed a hood over it at Columbia University. Colleges across the country went on a
renaming binge, eradicating the names of any person that a connection with slavery. A pastor in Chicago even demanded the removal
of George t Washington’s statue from Washington Park. The memorial of the all-black 54th
Massachusetts and Robert Gould Shaw was vandalized in 2017 and just a few days
ago a Civil War memorial in Maryland was defaced with Antifa logos.
While the push to remove statues
seems to have died down, it leaves many questions. Like the Poles, are we in danger of taking
things too far? Are we really rewriting
or editing history? While slavery was a
principal reason the Civil War was fought, it was not the only reason, and
regional tensions still exist and some of those frictions have gotten worse
over the past decade. Do we really want
to pick at old scabs?
As the Holocaust is to Europe,
slavery is to America. It is a painful
and ugly part of our nation’s history.
We cannot and should not edit it out.
Over time, the narratives and interpretations evolve. Books are still being written about the Civil
War, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and the institution of slavery. More recently, there are still survivors of
the Holocaust that are giving their oral histories and we are learning more
about events all the time. There are
hundreds of individual stories like that of Rita Gabis’s grandfather.
Once again, Poland lies in the
precarious place between an overbearing Germany and an aggressive Russia. But I decry the recent actions of the Polish
government on several fronts. This
measure is an affront to free speech. Citizens
of modern Western liberal societies must be free to construct their own
narratives and interpretations of events from a set of facts. The measure
is a thinly veiled attempt to obfuscate history and shift all blame. The events of those years are too complicated
and facts simply do not support such an approach. But while it is appropriate to criticize the
Polish government over this action, we should also look in the mirror. There have been recent instances in which we
in America have started to show signs that we might be willing to head down the
same path and engage in a little rewriting ourselves.
Sam Harris’s message was powerful,
“A bully must be stopped. There are
bullies in the world and we need to stop them before they become Hitler or Stalin.”
And it is true whether the
bullies come from the left or the right.
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