Holocaust Distortion Shunts Aside Jewish Suffering
Holocaust denial has mutated into an equally dangerous phenomenon known as Holocaust distortion, warns the Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski.
This insidious process, which originated in the now-defunct Soviet Union, shunts aside the suffering of Jews during the Shoah and highlights the plight of non-Jews during this period, he said in a lecture during Holocaust Education Week.
A specialist in Polish-Jewish relations at the University of Ottawa, he delivered his lecture at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in Toronto. His speech, “Holocaust De-Judaization,” was sponsored in partnership with the University of Toronto Press.
A leading expert on the Holocaust in Poland, Grabowski is the co-founder of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw and the author of, among other books, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, Night Without End and Whitewash: Poland and the Jews.
His award-winning books have aroused indignation and anger among Polish nationalists, who have accused him of smearing his former homeland.
Born in Poland, Grabowski lived there until his immigration to Canada in the late 1980s.
Grabowksi said that Holocaust distortion coexists alongside attempts by certain European countries, such as Hungary and Lithuania, to shift all the blame to Nazi Germany for the mass murder of their Jewish citizens.
Describing Holocaust distortion as a world-wide phenomenon and a kind of “Holocaust envy,” he said it has acquired momentum in recent years. The period of “grace” accorded to Jews immediately after the Holocaust has reached its end, he said.
By his reckoning, this particular variety of Holocaust denial was devised and perfected by the communist regime in the Soviet Union. Jewish victims of the Holocaust were “relegated to the margins” and lumped together with everyone else persecuted and killed by the Nazis.
In passing, he noted that only one percent of the Jews who remained in Poland during the six-year German occupation survived. A further 250,000 were spared because they fled to the Soviet Union.
Soon after World War II, Polish losses were placed at 1.8 million, but this figure was revised to three million at the suggestion of Jakub Berman, a Jewish figure in the ruling communist government until he was purged, said Peter Jassem, the former chairman of The Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation, after Grabowski’s speech.
Grabowski charged that efforts have been underway in Poland to equate the mass murder of Poles with the extermination of three million Polish Jews, which he called “the greatest tragedy in Polish history.”
He cited examples.
A mural in Jedwabne, a village in northern Poland whose Jewish community was wiped out by locals in 1941, extols Polish martyrdom.
A museum in the southern Polish village of Markowa honoring Poles who saved Jews ignores the inconvenient reality that the murder of Jews here was carried out by some of their neighbors.
In Plaszow, a former German concentration camp near Krakow, a monument in honor of the Nazi-created Blue Police competes for attention with a memorial honoring Holocaust victims.
Grabowski said that this campaign of Holocaust distortion is evident in Hungary and Lithuania as well.
The Memorial For Victims Of The German Occupation in Budapest holds Germany solely responsible for the annihilation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in 1944.
In fact, Hungary’s pro-German fascist regime played a central role in the massacre. According to the Holocaust Memorial Trust, the Hungarian government “fails to recognize that almost all Hungarian citizens murdered during the Holocaust were Jews,” and deflects responsibility for the Holocaust by suggesting that “all Hungarians were innocent victims of the Nazi occupation.”
In Kaunas, Lithuania, a monument is dedicated to the “victims of Nazism,” thereby downplaying the immense Jewish death toll during the Holocaust.
Grabowksi, in a succinct but vivid history lesson, pointed out that Holocaust narratives are managed and manipulated by those who control territory.
