Israeli Haaretz manipulates historical data
In an offensive story falsely accusing the Auschwitz‑Birkenau Memorial and Museum of rewriting history, the Israeli daily Haaretz misquoted the historical data of a renowned Polish historian Szymon Datner:
“However, Polish-Jewish historian Szymon Datner estimated Polish people directly caused the murder of 200,000 Jews during the Holocaust by handing them over to Nazis, informing authorities where they were hiding, and straight up murdering them. Datner, who himself survived the Holocaust, published the study in 1970. In 2019, doing so could be an offense.” (Haaretz, February 14, 2019)
In the above mentioned document Datner actually said:
“I estimated the number of surviving Jews – chiefly thanks to assistance provided by the Polish population – at approximately 100,000. It may be similarly estimated that another 100,000 Jewish victims were captured by the occupying authorities and murdered.”
It is a fundamental difference to state that Poles killed 200,000 Jews (manipulation of Haaretz) and that Poles provided assistance to 100,000 Jews, while another 100,000 were captured and murdered by Germans (original historical source)! The hoax of 200,000 Jews apparently killed by Poles originates from professor Jan Grabowski, a scholar of the University of Ottawa. Exactly one year ago he provided the misquoted data to Amanda Borschel-Dan, a journalist of Times of Israel who stated in her article:
“According to a 1970 article, 200,000 Jews died at the hands of their Polish neighbors. A new law in Poland could make it difficult to publish these findings.”
Both Jan Grabowski and Amanda Borschel-Dan have neither officially corrected the error nor apologized for it. They allow their fake news to proliferate and to become a part of information warfare directed against Poland.
The manipulated article in Haaretz of February 14, 2019, misused the hoax again, this time to blacken the Auschwitz‑Birkenau Memorial and Museum and its staff. The museum’s employees dedicate their lives to preserve the memory of thousands of innocent victims who were killed at the hands of Germans. However, Ariel Sobel, the uncouth author of the Haaretz story, believes herself to be at the center of the world, a center so big as the universe, where there is no place for the Auschwitz Museum, its employees, for the Polish people and for historical truth.
Copyright notice: The picture of Haaretz originally from Wikipedia; CC BY 2.5.