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The New Wave of Polish Holocaust Revisionism

(New York Times) Jan Grabowski - 925,000 Jews were slaughtered at Treblinka in eastern Poland. In November, I saw Magdalena Gawin, the Polish deputy minister of Culture and National Heritage at the time, at the Treblinka train station flanked by a Polish Army honor guard, unveiling a monument honoring Jan Maletka, a Polish railroad worker shot in 1942 by the Nazis for giving water to the Jews as they waited in locked cattle cars outside the camp. A false equivalence of victimization is but one hallmark of the new Polish historical revisionism that downplays anti-Semitic terror at the hands of the Poles. Fewer than 100 Jews who arrived in Treblinka survived the war. They recalled groups of Polish railway workers and Polish youths who stood close to the cattle cars ready to hand over water - in exchange for gold or cash. Abram Jakub Krzepicki remembered that people in the wagon were dying of thirst. He described terrible scenes of Jews pleading with the workers, handing over fistfuls of money for a mere half cup of water. Markers to Poles killed by Nazis for rescuing Jews have been proliferating in the Polish countryside for several years. A new historical narrative depicts the rescue of the Jews as a default position of Polish society during the Holocaust, intended to paper over the tragic legacy in which some Poles turned over Jewish fellow citizens to the Gestapo. Adam Starkopf, who looked "Aryan" enough to pass as a Pole, describes a group of Polish villagers who invited him into their plan to hunt down, rob and then turn over to the Gestapo a group of Jews who had escaped from a cattle car. "Just think - all these Jews lying on the ground, ready for the taking! It's a windfall!," his neighbors said. "We'll take their clothes, clean out their pockets and on top of that we'll get a reward from the Germans for bringing them in." (Starkopf declined to participate.) The writer is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.
2022-02-10 00:00:00
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