North Star with Ellin Bessner What's behind the recent flare ups of Holocaust denial in Poland?
Over the last two weeks, the Polish government has been doubling down on its official narrative that, during the Second World War, its own people were the victims of the Germans—not responsible for collaborating in the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.
That policy has been law since 2018, and has led to strained relations with Israel, Holocaust survivors and academic scholars, including award-winning Canadian professor Jan Grabowski. Grabowski, a historian at the University of Ottawa and the child of a Warsaw Holocaust survivor, has spent years researching how ordinary Poles denounced, betrayed and helped carry out the murder of 200,000 Jews—mostly without any prodding from the Nazis.
That’s why Grabowski, who has been sued by the Polish state over this issue, has been closely monitoring the recent flare-ups involving Poland, Israel, and even Germany, which began at the end of November.
It started on Nov. 19, when the new U.S. ambassador to Poland—an observant American Jew who used to run the Jerusalem Post—told a startled Warsaw conference that it was “a grotesque falsehood” and a “historic injustice” to blame Poland for Holocaust crimes committed by others.
After that, a popular far-right member of the Polish parliament stood outside the gates of Auschwitz to oppose the country’s plan to adopt a new antisemitism strategy. He called for Jews to be kicked out of the country.
Then, on Nov. 25, the Israeli ambassador to Poland was summoned over a social media post from Yad Vashem.
On today’s episode of The CJN’s flagship news podcast North Star, Grabowski joins to unpack why his native country continues distorting the truth about its past involvement in the Holocaust, and how Polish officials are dismissing the historical records he’s unearthed, which tell a more nuanced story of who killed Poland’s Jews.
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