Polish prime minister, education minister slammed Dr. Barbara Engelking for saying Poles “failed” Jews in WWII, threatening to defund her institute.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Over 300 institutions and academics from around the world have risen to defend a noted Polish Holocaust historian from her government’s attack on her after she stated that Poles “failed” their Jewish fellow citizens during World War II.

The historical groups and professors, including Yad Vashem, the foremost Holocaust documentation, research, education and commemoration institute in the world, issued a statement Thursday condemning Warsaw for its threats against Dr. Barbara Engelking, founder and director of the Polish Center of Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

“We regard such censorious tendencies and the notion that the continued financing of academic institutions should be conditional upon whether the research produced within them meets the expectations of politicians, as extremely dangerous and unacceptable,” the statement says in part.

“Such actions are aimed at discouraging other scholars from undertaking research that might be met with a similar hate campaign.”

Engelking condemned Poles for their antisemitic behavior after the Nazis took over their country in an interview on Poland’s largest private channel, marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19th. She said that her countrymen often “falsif[y] history” in overstating how much they helped Jews when the Germans were hunting them down, and that Jews were “unbelievably disappointed with Poles during the war.”

“Poles had the potential to become allies of the Jews, and one would hope that they would behave differently, that they would be neutral, kind, that they would not take advantage of the situation to such an extent and that there would not be widespread blackmailing,” she said in another part of the interview.

“Poles simply failed,” she said.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki slammed the noted scholar, who has published several books in multiple languages on such subjects as the survival strategies of Jews in Warsaw and on the fate of Jews seeking refuge in Polish villages during the Holocaust. In a tweet of well over 800 words, he criticized her “scandalous opinions” regarding her coreligionists’ behavior, firing back that “We know that there could be tens, if not hundreds of thousands” of cases where Poles saved Jews.

Her statements were part of “an anti-Polish narrative,” he said, as blame for the murder of Polish Jewry rested squarely on Germany.

The Nazis held Poland in their totalitarian grip for over five years.

Education Minister Przemysław Czarnek threatened to defund Engelking’s institute, saying, “I will not finance an institute that maintains the kind of people who simply insult Poles.”

Poles “were the greatest allies of the Jews, and if it had not been for the Poles, many Jews would have died, many more than were killed in the Holocaust,” he claimed.

Of the 3.3 million Jews who lived in pre-War Poland, only 380,000 survived, according to Yad Vashem’s research.

The state broadcasting authority jumped into the act as well, opening legal proceedings against TVN, because “if the guest on a program is lying, the journalist must tell viewers that it is a lie.” TVN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered in New York.

Morawiecki and his nationalist Law and Justice Party made a point of passing a law in 2018 that prescribes criminal proceedings for individuals or organizations who allegedly defame the “Polish nation” by assigning guilt or complicity to Poles for Holocaust crimes committed on Polish soil.

It was widely condemned at the time as an attempt to portray Poles solely as Nazi victims and whitewash the role so many of them played in aiding their oppressors’ mission to wipe out the Jewish people.

While readily acknowledging the heroism of over 7,000 Poles in saving Jews during the Holocaust, who are documented by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, the Israeli government also saw the law as a distortion of the truth. Knesset members across the political spectrum called it an attempt to deny the Holocaust, and tensions arose between the countries’ administrations.

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Merkel noted that her visit comes amid rising anti-Semitism and historical revisionism and vowed that Germany would not tolerate anti-Semitism.

By Associated Press

German Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced a feeling of “deep shame” during her first-ever visit on Friday to the hallowed grounds of the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Adolf Hitler’s regime murdered more than a million people.

She said Germany remains committed to remembering the crimes that it committed against Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and others.

Speaking to a gathering that included former Auschwitz inmates, she said she felt “deep shame in the face of the barbaric crimes committed by Germans here.”

“Nothing can bring back the people who were murdered here. Nothing can reverse the unprecedented crimes committed here. These crimes are and will remain part of German history and this history must be told over and over again,” she said.

She called such responsibility a key element in German national identity today.

Merkel also brought a donation of 60 million euros ($66.6 million). The money will go to a fund to conserve the physical remnants of the site — the barracks, watchtowers and personal items like shoes and suitcases of those killed.

Together, those objects endure as evidence of German atrocities and as one of the world’s most recognizable symbols of humanity’s capacity for evil. But they also are deteriorating under the strain of time and mass tourism, prompting a long-term conservation effort.

Accompanied by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Merkel began by seeing a crematorium and walking under the gate with the notorious words “Arbeit Macht Frei.” That was a cynical phrase that meant “work will set you free,” when the truth was that inmates were subjected to either immediate execution, painful scientific experiments or forced labor.

Merkel and Morawiecki went next to the site of executions, where they bowed their heads before two wreaths bearing their nations’ colors.

The stay lasting several hours also included a visit to the conservation laboratory, where old leather shoes were laid out on a table, and a laying of candles at Birkenau, the part of the vast complex where Jews were subjected to mass murder in gas chambers.

The donation to the Auschwitz Foundation comes in addition to 60 million euros that Germany donated when the fund was launched a decade ago, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

That brings the total German donation to 120 million euros and makes Germany by far the most generous of 38 countries that have contributed. As with the earlier donation, half comes from the federal government and half from the German states, an acknowledgement of the German nation’s responsibility.

Since becoming chancellor in 2005, Merkel has paid her respects at other Nazi concentration camps, and she has been five times to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial.

Still, Poland’s Foreign Ministry called her visit “historic,” in an obvious acknowledgement of the unique status Auschwitz has in the world’s collective memory. The ministry also noted that it was just the third visit of an incumbent head of a German government.

Nazi German forces killed an estimated 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex during their occupation of Poland during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews transported from across Europe to be killed in gas chambers.

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“The Polish leadership is again trying to distort history,” charged Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that his country will never provide restitution to Jewish citizens who were dispossessed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Speaking to audiences in various cities during campaign rallies for his nationalistic Law and Justice Party in the upcoming European Parliament elections, Morawiecki insisted that Poland was the victim and Germany the sole aggressor during World War II.

Speaking in Lodz on Friday, he said, “If this terrible injustice will ever happen – when the executioner and victim roles are reversed – it would be Hitler’s posthumous victory.”

The issue of compensation has been a popular topic of discussion in Poland recently. Last Monday, Morawiecki’s government canceled a meeting with an Israeli delegation when “last minute changes in the composition of the delegation suggest[ed] that the talks would primarily focus on the issues related to property restitution,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

A new law passed by the U.S. Congress, known as the Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act, requires the government to report on properties forcibly taken from Europe’s Jews during World War II. Several thousand Poles marched to the American embassy in Warsaw on Saturday to demonstrate against the perceived pressure being applied to their country through the legislation.

“Today, there are those in the world who have the nerve to ask compensation from Poland for German crimes. There is no agreement for such compensation and such behavior,” Morawiecki said in a speech in Cracow on Sunday.

“Germans murdered and looted Poles in a unique way,” he added.

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein was outraged at what he called the Polish prime minister’s “provocation.”

“The Polish leadership is again trying to distort history,” he said. “It wants to thwart the justice that would come from returning the property of Holocaust survivors.”

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Israeli politicians and historians slammed a joint declaration absolving the Polish people from responsibility for the destruction of Polish Jewry.

By: Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Huge ads in Israeli and European papers bearing a copy of the joint Israeli-Polish declaration on the Holocaust reignited an attack on the Israeli government for purportedly helping the Poles downplay their role in the destruction of Poland’s Jewish community.

Yad Vashem said in a statement that “the [Israeli-Polish] statement contains highly problematic wording that contradicts existing and accepted historical knowledge in this field.

“The joint statement’s wording effectively supports a narrative that research has long since disproved, namely, that the Polish Government-in-Exile and its underground arms strove indefatigably—in occupied Poland and elsewhere—to thwart the extermination of Polish Jewry.”

Yad Vashem noted that “Poles’ assistance to Jews during the Holocaust was relatively rare, and attacks against and even the murder of Jews were widespread phenomena.”

Yad Vashem “vehemently” rejected the “attempts to juxtapose the phenomenon of anti-Semitism with so-called ‘anti-Polonism.’”

The declaration called to denounce both anti-Semitism and “anti-Polonism.”

“While we should put an end to the use of the misleading and ill-conceived concept of ‘Polish death camps,’ calling the use of such terms ‘anti-Polonism’ is fundamentally anachronistic and has nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Semitism.”

Education Minister Naftali Bennett called the declaration a “disgrace saturated with lies that betrays the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust.”

“As minister of education, entrusted with passing on the memory of the Holocaust, I reject it completely. It has no factual basis and won’t be learned in the education system,” Bennett tweeted on Thursday.

Zionist Union MK Itzik Shmuli said that the ad campaign “is the height of insult and disgrace, and Holocaust deniers must send a huge bouquet of flowers to the Israeli government and its leader, who put the memory of those who perished up for negotiations and sale.”

The Prime Minister’s Office said in response that Yad Vashem’s chief historian, Dina Porat, accompanied the process that led to the joint statement from the beginning, and that the “historical statements that appear in the declaration were approved by her.”

The PMO further stated that the joint declaration approved by the Polish government includes a clear statement that the freedom of researchers to conduct research on all aspects of the Holocaust will be preserved.”

Noted historian: Israeli government accepted Polish position

Noted Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer went much further, however. In an op-ed in Haaretz published last week he charged, “We accepted the false Polish narrative, and swallowed it.”

“If we now come to the Americans or the Europeans to complain against what is happening in this area [Holocaust denial] in Poland, we will be rightly told that the Israeli government has accepted the Polish position. I do not know what it was – ignorance, stupidity, or a clear anti-moral victory of fleeting interests that will remain with us forever. Or simply: betrayal,” Bauer said.

He also believes that the way the law stands now, historians and others who write the truth about what Poles did during the Holocaust will still be able to be sued in civil court even if they won’t be able to be fined (or jailed) by a criminal court.

The understanding reached last week between the Polish and Israeli governments led Warsaw to revise its Holocaust law. The Polish parliament agreed to drop the penalties (which could reach up to three years in jail) for those who blamed the Polish government for the Holocaust, or said that Poles as a nation had collaborated with Germany after Israel agreed to the joint declaration.

Here is a video of journalist Ronen Bergman confronting Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki:

This week a Polish NGO took out large ads in “the world’s largest daily newspapers,” including Thursday’s Israeli papers, with the text of the declaration. Fiery reactions swept in immediately.

Critics, point to the number of sentences in the declaration that extol Polish behavior under Nazi control, thereby downplaying the part so many Poles played in either directly harming their Jewish neighbors or turning them over to the Germans.

Holocaust researchers in Poland were “stunned”  that the Israeli government “fell in line with the Polish line that diminishes or downplays the part played by the Poles in the Holocaust,” reported Kan Israel News on Thursday.

And Yad Vashem was not consulted at all by those who negotiated the text with the Poles, according to Kan, which “shocked them” no less than the final wording of the declaration itself, which they say minimizes Poland’s role in the Holocaust.

When the declaration was signed, Prime Minister Benjamin  Netanyahu had also stressed the importance of defending academic freedom regarding the events of World War II.

“We stood up for defending the truth and fulfilled our chief duty: To guarantee the historical truth of the Holocaust,” he said. “This is how we’ll continue to act.”

According to Netanyahu’s statement, “We support free and open historical expression and research on all aspects of the Holocaust so that it can be conducted without any fear of legal obstacles,” adding that those who talk or write about it “will not be subject to any legal charges for using the right to free speech and academic freedom with reference to the Holocaust.”

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The Israeli prime minister lauded the removal of parts of a law that threatened criminal charges for individuals who blame Poland for Holocaust crimes.

By: World Israel News Staff

In a statement issued on Wednesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Poland’s decision to alter a controversial law that criminalized accusations of Polish complicity in Nazi crimes.

“We upheld our duty to protect the historical truth about the Holocaust,” said Netanyahu in a Hebrew statement.

“I am happy that [Poland] decided to completely cancel the clauses that caused … dissatisfaction in Israel and the international community,” he added.

In his comments, Netanyhau referenced task forces that Israel and Poland had formed to hammer out a compromise on the legislation, which was purportedly designed to address anti-Polish sentiment.

Critics in Israel and throughout the Jewish diaspora slammed the law for minimizing the complicity of Polish actors in Nazi war crimes and for whitewashing history, including the fact that many of the Nazis’ genocidal facilities were located in Poland.

In response to outcry generated by passage of the statute, changes to the law were made, including the removal of jail terms for mentioning Polish-Nazi collaboration, the Polish presidential chancellery announced.

In comments issued by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki while Netanyahu spoke, the Polish leader continued to distance his nation from the Jewish genocide.

Morawiecki stated, “It is obvious that the Holocaust was an unprecedented crime, committed by Nazi Germany against the Jewish nation, including all Poles of Jewish origin. Poland has always expressed the highest understanding of the significance of the Holocaust as the most tragic part of the Jewish national experience.”

Netanyahu for his part stressed the importance of academic freedom and free speech to research and discourse related to the Holocaust, which he said must proceed “without any fear of legal obstacles.”

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