My grandmother survived Auschwitz. This week, the Auschwitz Museum blocked me on Twitter for challenging their denial of Polish anti-Semitism
This week, I got into a Twitter war with Auschwitz. Yes, really. I sparred with @AuschwitzMuseum, the official Twitter account for the memorial at the concentration camp in which my grandmother was once an inmate, which ended in them blocking me.
For months now, Auschwitz Museum’s Twitter account has promoted a narrative that Polish non-Jews were in no way complicit in the Holocaust.
It frequently challenges tweets that note that Polish anti-Semitism predated and contributed to the atrocities, and pushes the line that indigenous Polish anti-Semitism has no relevance to Auschwitz: “Talking about complicity between the occupiers and local civilian population in the history of Auschwitz is false.”
This behavior is in accordance with a law passed early last year in Poland, and amended (with the Israeli government’s blessing) in June 2018 that made it illegal to claim Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. It is an attempt, in particular, to prevent people saying that the Nazi death camps located in then-Nazi occupied Poland were Polish concentration camps.
I reached my boiling point when the account criticized an article from The Jewish Voice entitled “Auschwitz-Birkenau & Its Polish Roots.” The piece examines how the new law is part of a wider attempt by the Polish government to relinquish any responsibility for how local anti-Semitism contributed to the murder of 90% of Poland’s Jews.
Auschwitz did not happen in a vacuum. The persecution of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish peers predated and outlives Nazi Germany. After WWI, Poland became a hub for nationalism, pogroms, and discriminatory laws against Jews. It was fertile ground for the Nazi slaughter.
Yes, many Poles acted incredibly heroically to save Jewish lives; I’m still mad that Irene Sendler didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, Polish-Jewish historian Szymon Datner estimated Polish people directly caused the murder of 200,000 Jews during the Holocaust by handing them over to Nazis, informing authorities where they were hiding, and straight up murdering them. Datner, who himself survived the Holocaust, published the study in 1970. In 2019, doing so could be an offense.
“The people running the @AuschwitzMuseum are promoting a narrative that Polish anti-Semitism did not contribute to the Holocaust, erasing the reality that denying Polish complicity in violence against Jews contributes to anti-Semitism today,” I declared to my meager 1,600 followers. Then, I was blocked.
This experience – of the naked politicization of Holocaust memory at the ground zero of Jewish extermination – has led me to fear the current political situation in Poland could compromise Auschwitz’s historical preservation. Could the Auschwitz Museum regress back to the spirit of the times of its founding by Polish parliamentary decree in 1947, when it was established as a “Monument to the Martyrology of the Polish Nation and other Nations,” with Jews out of sight and mind?
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki is a right-wing nationalist who has stated that Jews were also “perpetrators” of the Holocaust and has been accused of being a Holocaust denier.) He also has an unfortunate habit of complaining about “greedy Jews.”
By refusing to critically reflect on their role in the Holocaust and instead clinging solely to the fact they were victims of Nazis, most Poles have never confronted their anti-Semitic past. Now, it’s no surprise Jew-hatred has reemerged in their present.
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