PMI’s statement on derogatory and historically false accusations made by Yad Vashem
Polish Media Issues, a leading international group fighting against anti-Polish bias in the media, condemns derogatory and historically false accusations made by some Israeli historians in an official statement issued by Yad Vashem on July 5, 2018.
The statement reads among others: “Poles’ [sic] assistance to Jews during the Holocaust was relatively rare, and attacks against and even the murder of Jews were widespread phenomena”. In fact, the reverse was the truth. As Yad Vashem itself acknowledges: Poland has the most RIGHTEOUS. According to the Israeli War Crimes Commission, less than 0.1% of Polish citizens (including Polish Germans) collaborated in some way with the German occupier. Between 3-4% of Poles were actively involved in the rescue of Jews despite the fact that Polish citizens were hampered by the most extreme conditions in all of German-occupied Europe. Occupied Poland was the only territory where the Germans decreed that any kind of help for Jews was punishable by death for the helper and their entire family.
According to the American historian professor Richard Lukas, of the estimated 3 million non-Jewish Poles killed in World War II, up to 50,000 were executed by Nazi Germany solely as the penalty for saving Jews. After the War, most of this information was suppressed by the Soviet-installed satellite regime in an attempt to discredit Polish prewar society and its wartime government as reactionary. Yad Vashem should remember that Poland was the only country where Christians died for Jews!
The signatories of the Yad Vashem statement falsely quote non-existing documents to support their offensive remarks. According to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), the Polish government in exile, the files of the Wiener Library in London record, supplied extraordinarily detailed descriptions to the UNWCC of concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, where nearly 2 millions of Jews were killed. It was the Auschwitz volunteer Witold Pilecki who provided to Allies eyewitness testimonies of the industrial extermination of Jews committed by Germans in the death camp Auschwitz. It was the Polish courier Jan Karski who provided eyewitness testimonies from the Warsaw ghetto to world leaders in Western Europe, the governments of the USA and UK, and to members of the Jewish diaspora in the USA. None of them did anything to save the Jewish people. The Polish accounts of the atrocities and genocide being perpetrated by Germany were not believed. On 28 July 1943 Karski personally met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office, telling him about the situation in Poland and the Jewish Holocaust. During their meeting, Roosevelt asked about the condition of horses in Poland. Roosevelt did not ask one question about the Jews.
In contrast to Poland, other countries such as France or Romania voluntarily sent thousands of Jews to the German death camps. Unlike in other German-occupied European countries, where Nazi Germany installed collaborating authorities, in occupied Poland, there was no puppet government or collaboration by Polish authorities. The simple reason being these Polish authorities had been destroyed by the brutal invaders. The first inmates in the German concentration camps were Poles.
Moreover, Yad Vashem seems to ignore and whitewash the complicity of the Judenräte, Jewish Ghetto Police, Kapos, Sonderkommando and Jewish collaborators such as Żagiew (“The Torch”). Why are high and unachievable standards retrospectively applied only to Poland and Poles?
The vandalization of Poland’s national remembrance, a total ignorance of obvious historical facts and twisting German perpetrators with Polish victims by “renowned” Israeli scholars not only puts into question their personal integrity but destroys the efforts made by Polish and Israeli leaders to implement a policy of reconciliation and respect between Poland and Israel.
We appeal to Yad Vashem to refrain from spreading historical falsehoods, manipulating public opinion, stirring-up anti-Polish sentiments and to desist from trying to rewrite Holocaust history.
References:
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/apr/18/opening-un-holocaust-files-archive-war-crimes-commission
https://msz.gov.pl/en/ministry/polish_diplomacy_archive/75th_anniversary_of__raczynski_s_note_
https://view.joomag.com/memoria-en-no-9-june-2018/0172082001529903315/p12?short