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Poland's New Restitution Law Isn't about Property, but about Rewriting History
(Algemeiner) Ben Cohen - The controversy on Polish approval of legislation that shuts down Holocaust-era restitution claims should be understood as part of a campaign by the Polish state to rewrite the history of World War II as a narrative of Polish victimhood, a group of leading historians concluded. The four scholars have all published extensively on the Holocaust in Poland, where over 90% of the country's Jewish population were exterminated, accounting for nearly half of the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide. They observed that transforming the Holocaust from a Jewish trauma into a Polish one depended on excluding from historical inquiry the topic of collusion between elements of the population in Poland, a country with a long history of anti-Semitic agitation, with the Nazi persecution of the Jews. As a result of this campaign, many ordinary Poles believe that Auschwitz, where 1.1 million Jews were exterminated, is "primarily a place of Polish suffering." Jan Gross, emeritus professor of history at Princeton University, said, "One hears from the right-wing nationalists that the Jews are trying to seize property....At the same time, the Polish government is demanding restitution from the Germans for damages incurred during the Nazi occupation, which they estimate at $850 billion." "When this issue is brought up, you hear that the number of Poles killed [in World War II] was six million - that number is not a coincidence. However, the real number is under five million, and that is when we include the three million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust. So the...Polish regime intends to request compensation from Germany for Jewish property that was destroyed during the war."