âŚBut while the death camps were not a Polish invention or initiative, notes [historian Havi Dreifuss, a leading authority on relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust], that does not absolve the Poles of responsibility for atrocities committed against the Jews on their soil. Although Poland has tried to play up the role of its Holocaust rescuers in recent years, she says, âThey were the exception rather than the norm.â
Over the years, Yad Vashem has recognized more than 6,700 Poles as âRighteous Among the Nationsâ â a designation for non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews without receiving any compensation whatsoever. âThis is an impressive number,â acknowledges Dreifuss, âbut itâs important to remember that in most cases, Jews in Poland and their rescuers were hiding what they were doing not only from the Nazis, but also from their Polish neighbors who might turn them in.â
Many Jews in Poland, she adds, were murdered not in the death camps, but at the hands of Poles.
âThis is something that Poland doesnât want to own up to and apparently what this new law is trying to cover up,â she says. âDuring the Holocaust, in quite a few small communities in the Lomza district of Poland, the locals murdered their Jewish neighbors. And Kielce was not the only place where Jews â some of them sole survivors of their families â were murdered by Poles after the war ended.â
Citing new research by Polish scholars, Dreifuss also notes that of about 250,000 Polish Jews who tried to escape death and seek shelter in the Polish countryside, fewer than ten percent survived. âThe vast majority of them perished not because of German efforts, but because they were killed by locals or because they were handed over to the Germans or the Polish police, who then killed them,â she says.
Read Judy Maltzâs full piece at Haaretz.
