Books, films and public debates touching on the role of Polish people in the Holocaust have often been accompanied by controversy or outcry. Well-known examples include the books of Jan Tomasz Gross (e.g. "Neighbours"), Pasikowski's 2012 film "Pokłosie" ["Aftermath"] or the debates surrounding the 2018 academic publication "Dalej jest noc" ["Night Without End"].
In contrast to the heated debates in Poland, major international authorities such as Raul Hilberg and Timothy Snyder have tended to place Polish crimes in the context of larger-scale atrocities in neighbouring countries and the brutality of the occupying Nazi and Soviet regimes.
The cooperation of the Polish police (the "Blue Police"), for example, was described by Hilberg thus: "Of all the native police forces in occupied Eastern Europe, those of Poland were least involved in anti-Jewish actions... They [the Polish Blue Police] could not join the Germans in major operations against Jews or Polish resistors, lest they be considered traitors by virtually every Polish onlooker."
In recent weeks, public debate in Poland has been intensifying with the upcoming release (8 March) of the film Biała Odwaga ["White Courage"] about the wartime life of Polish mountain people ("górale"), including collaboration with German occupiers.
The collaboration has been discussed before in Poland, for example in this 2018 article in Rzeczpospolita describing the "Goralenvolk" as the "most spectacular example of collaboration of Poles with the German occupiers. (Perhaps "spectacular" because the Nazi-German term "Goralenvolk" was an integral part of Nazi ideology - according these people German ancestry and thus higher ethnic status than "regular" Poles.)
The Institute for National Remembrance describes the collaboration thus, emphasizing the execution of the leader of the collaborating mountaineers by the Polish Underground State:
"On the 20 January, 1945, following the judgment of the Polish Underground State, the leader of the "Goralenvolk" - an organisation collaborating during WWII with the German occupiers - Wacław Krzeptowski was hung not far from his own home by the AK's [Home Army's] execution division "Kurniawa""
A linguistic expert, Jan Karpiel-Bułecka, who was consulted by the makers of Biała Odwaga on issues related to the local dialect used in the mountain region, has said that although the main events in the film are historical "there are scenes that did not and could not have happened."
The film presents a division of recruits to the SS drawn from Polish mountaineers who then receive a mission from the SS to murder Polish resistance members. Karpiel-Bułecka says that the mountaineers who joined the SS later deserted in significant numbers making their "unit" insignificant.
The Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) has also issued a statement distancing itself from the film. The Institute's statement says that while it was consulted at the early stages of production and thanks to this cooperation "many mistakes were removed", it was not consulted at later stages.
Sources: PAP, Rzeczpospolita, IPN, "Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders" (R. Hilberg)
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