To paraphrase Lahav Harkov, “If there were “more Poles that sheltered Jewish people during WW2″, how was 90% of Polish Jewry (who numbered 3 million before the Holocaust) murdered?
According to new research done in Poland, two thirds of the local Jews who hid there from the Nazis did not survive the war, mostly because of the actions of their non-Jewish neighbors.
The figure comes from a two-volume work of 1,600 pages that historians from the Warsaw-based Center for Research on Holocaust of Jews have compiled over the past five years. It covers nine out of Poland’s 13 regions, the Tok FM radio station reported Sunday.
Arriving amid a polarizing debate in Poland over a law that limits rhetoric on Polish complicity in the Holocaust, the study suggests Poles are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths by Jews in the Holocaust — a figure that is significantly higher than previous estimates.
…In one region, Miechów, more than 10 percent of the Jews in hiding were murdered directly by partisans who were members of the Polish underground, according to the study.
- Study says Polish neighbors betrayed more Jews than previously thought
But by the time that the death camps’ gas chambers became operational, approximately half of the Jews who would perish in the Holocaust were already dead. Many of these Jews were tortured or killed by “ordinary” non-Jews at close quarters: in apartments, in streets, in the woods and anywhere else Jews could be found. The perpetrators often knew or knew of their victims, and the means were often primitive: guns, axes, crowbars, bricks, fire, beating and drowning.
…Our book [Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust] examines a particularly brutal wave of anti-Jewish violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities on the eastern front in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. We document 219 communities of local non-Jews attacking their Jewish neighbors, nearly 10 percent of the 2,304 localities where Jews and non-Jews lived together. Ethnic Poles were the primary perpetrators in approximately 25 percent of these pogroms; in the remaining instances, ethnic Ukrainians predominated.
…In Wasosz, a small town in northeastern Poland, Szymon Datner’s testimony describes the events of early July 1941: … women were raped, their breasts cut off, little children were smashed on the walls, the fingers of the dead were cut off along with their gold rings, gold teeth were torn out of mouths; when in a house children were found with their parents, they would torture the children first, and then the parents.
- Nazi guards weren’t the only ones killing Jews during the Holocaust. Some — but not all — communities did it themselves first. Why?
But 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, “They were the exception rather than the norm.“
Over the years, Yad Vashem has recognized more than 6,700 Poles as “Righteous Among the Nations” – a designation for non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews without receiving any compensation whatsoever. “This is an impressive number,” acknowledges Dreifuss, “but it’s 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.”
…“During 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 – some of them sole survivors of their families – were murdered by Poles after the war ended.”
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. “The 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,” she says.
- “Death Camps Weren’t ‘Polish’ - but Poles Were Bad Enough to Jews Without Them, Holocaust Historian Says”
Over 6,000 Poles have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations (hundreds of whom were killed) for helping Jews. That’s 6,000 out of around 32 million. So, you know, demonstrably not more. Listen, the fact that there were so few Poles who were courageous enough to shelter Jews makes them more worthy of being celebrated. You should be celebrating those who did help us, not pretending that they weren’t the exception to antisemitic brutality.
How many studies and how much research do people need to do before gentiles accept that in general Poles did not assist, help, or shelter their Jewish neighbors; they participated in and/or were complicit in their genocide. You want us to remember the Holocaust accurately? You first.
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