Impressions from the conference “New Polish School of Shoah History”
SCANDAL! Anti-Polish attack during a pseudoscience conference in Paris – as revealed by a participant and video.
Impressions from a participant at the conference “New Polish School of Shoah History” in Paris on February 21-22, 2019. Video recorded during scandalous treatment of Poles protesting against slanders directed against Poland and Poles by the panelists after the conference.
I knew that it would not be a factual, neutral and scientific description of historical facts. I knew from Youtube about Bikont’s speech at a meeting with readers in the USA, where she gave a show of lies and insolence. But I did not expect such a concert of hatred. Everything served one purpose: to present Poles as wild beasts hunting for those wishing to save Jews. It was no longer a belittling of German crimes; from the general discourse Germans had completely disappeared. The main heroes, and therefore the authors of the holocaust against Jews, were Poles. The narrative has reached absurd peaks in the PhD student from Africa’s speech, which compared the Jewish genocide to the Rwandan genocide. One had the impression that he did not know that the main perpetrators were Germans. He tried to show how myths and various beliefs contribute to the rise of hatred leading to genocide. According to the speaker, in Poland, anti-Semitism was powered by the myth of ritual murder and the words of hatred heard in the church. It should be noted that the promoter of this work is none other than Jean-Charles Szurek himself. Was he the source of information for a young PhD student?
In none of the papers was there any opinion about the situation of Poles during the occupation; about rationing of food, unemployment, hunger, lack of food and medicines, diseases, the Poles struggle for survival. The number of 200,000 Jews who escaped from the ghetto, from which 30-40,000 survived, was given. Nothing was mentioned about the Poles’ commitment to the survival of those 40,000. If they survived, it was thanks to the branches of communists operating in the forests or in the labour camps to which the Jews went. Even the mention of the “few” Righteous was an opportunity to emphasize Polish anti-Semitism (a deadly threat from the neighbours).
On February 13, 2011, in a religious program on French television, La source, the rabbi explained to his Jewish viewers that every Jew had first and foremost obligations to his own life and had no right to expose himself to save his neighbour. When, during the discussion, I mentioned this Talmud instruction, I was deprived of the microphone and told that I was casting invectives at them, and one of the listeners approached me and called me an anti-Semite.
In all the presentations, the situations described were taken out of context. Grabowski said that the blue policemen are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, but he did not say that they were pre-war policemen forced under penalty of death to follow orders. Speaking also of the horror that prevailed in the liquidation of the ghetto, he did not say anything about the Judenrat [Jewish councils].
From the papers, Poles were the most terrible anti-Semites in Europe. They talked about the social and geographical dimension of Shoah (Potel).
Joanna Tokarska-Bakir stated that in contrast to Poland, in Germany everyday violence did not exist, forgetting to add that in Germany the Jews were assimilated. I got the impression that the situation of Jews in Germany was better.
Tokarska -Bakir states that the Kielce pogrom was not a provocation of the NKVD, but also she said nothing about who initiated the massacre, dealing rather with the past of militiamen. (This is the prewar blue police). When, after the lecture, I approached her and asked about the principal, she gave me a very evasive answer, but in the end she admitted that he was in the UB [Communist Secret Police] militia command of a Russian named Kupcza. She did not say that in the paper.
However, the greatest disgust in me was the appearance of Bikont. If deliberate omission of facts relevant to the matter can be called a lie by omission, the journalist of “Wyborcza” is a master of lies. Speaking of Sendlerowa, she questioned the number of children she had saved, she sought out the smallest details in her biography that could obscure her heroism. (She was not a gentle old lady, but a person who was eagerly building up her legend by adding to it bogus facts – she was not tortured by the communists). Bikont hid that Sendler was tortured and condemned to death by the Gestapo. Just as it was in the USA (the film on Youtube), she acknowledged in one sentence the Soviet occupation in Jedwabne. (From September 1939 to June 1941, Jedwabne was under Soviet occupation). Not a word about the deportations of Poles and the occupation of their positions by Jews.
Bikont loves using the descriptions of the almost sadistic persecution of Jewish children by Poles. She uses images that strongly affect the imagination and senses. She says that the biggest threat to Jewish children were Polish adults and children. With such statements she concludes her presentation about a woman who was tortured for these children and almost sacrificed her life.
It was with great astonishment I received Persak’s statement that Poles do not want to plead guilty in Jedwabne because of the “myth” about the claims of American Jews demanding $60 billion. Does Persak not know that this is not a myth and it is much more than 60 billion? Or maybe he just did not want to offend his Jewish friends from Paris?
I also expected that perhaps, speaking about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, at least one person would mention the Evian conference in 1938 where 32 countries debated the granting of asylum to German and Austrian Jews who were in mortal danger. No country agreed to accept them. But only Poland is anti-Semitic.
Urszula Vittoriani
PS. The new Polish school is in fact an ANTI-POLAND school.
The original article in Polish appeared on the website of Solidarni 2010.