This assertion is based on a cacophony of obvious lies.
One of these is a gigantic, monstrous and vile falsification of the truth. Another of these lies is completely far-fetched, but impossible to trace for the casual American reader.
First of all, the Polish nation did not murder 3 million Jews. This is just a giant falsehood. Secondly, the Polish government has not prosecuted any scholars for defamation.
The author of the article is Masha Gessen, a Russian American journalist (with dual citizenship), a writer and LGBT activist. Her article, entitled “The Historians Under Attack for Exploring Poland’s Role in the Holocaust,” refers to a recent court ruling in which two Polish historians, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, were ordered to apologize for defaming a deceased Polish village official named Edward Malinowski. The lawsuit had been brought by the official’s niece.
Gessen's words "To exonerate the nation of the murders of three million Jews” suggest that the Polish people were responsible for murdering 3 million Jews.
Gessen repeats this lie later in her article: "The two historians’ legal troubles stem from the Polish government’s ongoing effort to exonerate Poland—both ethnic Poles and the Polish state—of the deaths of three million Jews in Poland during the Nazi occupation.”
Is it possible that Masha Gessen, whose grandfather was a Holocaust victim (murdered in a death camp or in the Białystok ghetto), is simply unaware that it was the Germans—acting on behalf of the German state under Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP , i.e. the Third Reich—who were the murderers, genocidal killers, and the architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust?
No, that’s not possible. Her statement is not a result of ignorance or coincidence.
It is a conscious, calculated and premeditated lie aimed against the truth and against Poland, and an attempt to not just downplay but conceal the role of the German Nazis in the genocide. This is tantamount to denying the truth about the Holocaust and the real responsibility for it.
And it is the Germans who are responsible. The entire Holocaust machine was a German creation. Millions of innocent Jewish men, women and children gassed in the death camps, shot by special units of Einsatzgruppen murderers, starved to death in the ghettos and devastated by slave labor in the concentration camps—they were all victims of the German state and of German executors of decisions made in Berlin in January 1942 at the so-called Wannsee Conference, which was attended exclusively by high-ranking German government officials.
This lie from Gessen should be viewed in a broader context. It coincides with a growing tendency to blur the German guilt, manipulate historical lies and distort the historical truth so as to create the impression that it was the Polish state and Poland as a nation that were jointly responsible—if not wholly responsible—for the Holocaust.
The attention-grabbing accusation phrased in the introduction of Masha Gessen’s article crosses yet another boundary amid the escalation of a propaganda campaign aiming to replace Germany with Poland, and Germans with Poles in the minds of the Western public as those guilty of genocide against Jews from 1939 to 1945.
This latest accusation is not only against individual Poles, but Poland as a state.
All this is a monstrous lie because the Polish state did not aid the Germans in the genocide in any way, but tried to save Jews in a variety of ways—by feeding information to an indifferent West about the crimes committed by the Germans; through the efforts of Polish diplomats (who issued documents to enable Jews to escape); and finally through the establishment of the underground Council for Aid to Jews, which operated under the auspices of the Polish government-in-exile at the time.
After the failure of the 1938 Évian Conference, when the West rejected the idea of helping Jews for the first time, followed by the United States’ refusal to save Jewish children in 1939 (the fiasco of the "Wagner-Rogers" Bill), and the West’s symbolic decision at the 1943 Bermuda Conference to wash its hands of the fate of murdered Jews, Poland was the only nation that behaved decently, especially considering that the country was under occupation and a reign of terror at the time.
Masha Gessen pretends not to know about all that.
The director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Piotr Cywiński, reacted strongly (over the weekend) to Gessen's article, which appeared on Friday, March 26. The same is true of David Harris, the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, who said that the introduction of the article was "defamatory."
The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also vowed to take action.
I will be waiting for more reactions—to see which Jewish organizations in Poland respond to this utterly despicable piece of writing by Masha Gessen, and how they will do that? Will they stand up for the truth and in what way? After all, it's their duty.
It would be unforgivable to remain silent or fail to be firm in the face of this lie.
The author is a current-affairs commentator with the Forum of Polish Jews, forumzydowpolskichonline.org.
(gs/pk)
Source: forumzydowpolskichonline.org