A recent poll, as reported in the Times of Israel, provides new verification of one of the main points of Bieganski.
From the Times of Israel article
Asked whether “the Polish people [are] responsible for their Jewish neighbors being destroyed in the Holocaust,” 47% of Israelis replied: “Yes, exactly like the Germans,” and another 25% said “only partly.” Only 11% of Israelis surveyed said that the Polish nation was also a victim of the Holocaust, and another 18 gave no answer.
Full article is here
Given the amount of effort - (dis)courtesy of the most powerful media and academe in the world - that has gone into moving Poland onto the Axis Side I guess this isn't too surprising.
ReplyDeleteThough it does still shock me how easily history can be turned on it its head, and reminds me to be very careful about believing anything "the world" tells me.
If this article will allow me to post a comment, I ought to have a go I suppose. And try to do a bit better than "AND we shot Bambi's mother", which is pretty much all I find myself wanting to say about WW2 these days.
And given Polonia's declining to take effective action. And please no back and forth. You've stated your view -- that the problem is because of someone else -- and I've stated mine. That Poles would benefit from taking action. I won't debate this with you I think your approach is incorrect and unhelpful, and no doubt that is what you think of my approach.
DeleteAND we shot Bambi's mother, I guess.
DeleteWell at least if this is all our fault, we must deserve it. In which case why bother about it, or bother protesting it? To be continually told how useless we are from all sides is a little discouraging, to say the least. I would be more than happy to retire from this thankless arena.
I hope to continue working on this till the day I die. I have read about too many heroes, like Irena Gut Opdyke, like Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, like the Ulma Family, and thousands of nameless others, to throw in the towel.
DeleteI am as shocked and surprised as can possibly be!
ReplyDeleteYou and me both Jan - although, having said that, I am genuinely surprised at the headline about the French. The reason being that in the Official Version of WW2 haven't the French always been Gallant Resistance Heroes - haven't they been pictured that way in so many books, TV programmes, Movies?
DeleteJust as the Dutch are all the Gallant Rescuers of the Frank family.
I guess in a few more years - if I survive that long - I will be shocked to find any suggestion that Germany was on the Axis Side. Its all politics, and isn't politics a devious business?
I am not surprised about the frogs. While the French do exaggerate the size of their wartime resistance and downplay their massive collaboration (Vichy, SS-Charlemagne), that question in the survey refers to antisemitism in the present-day. Of all the European countries, France easily gets the most antisemitic incidents that get coverage in the international news, followed by Germany, Sweden, Britain, etc. While it would be convenient for the inhabitants of those nations to blame this on Muslim immigrants, remember that a few years ago in Halle in the former GDR a young gunmen shot a couple Jews in a syngagogue. He was not of Turkish or Moroccan descent but was named Stephan Balliet, an ethnic German neo-Nazi in his twenties whose great-grandfather probably served in the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, or Waffen-SS.
DeleteIn present-day Poland, there aren't very many antisemitic incidents, so naturally contemporary France is seen as more antisemitic. One could argue that this is related to Poland's small Jewish population: in a nation of 37 million people, just 15,000 declared their ethnicity as Jewish in the last census. Yet there are plenty of Jews in Poland. If you go to Krakow (where I live; especially in Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter, there are many Jews walking around on any day), Warsaw, Leżajsk, or Auschwitz, seeing Jews with yarmulkes and prayer shawls, yet with rare exceptions nobody bothers them. Especially under the former Russian and Austrian partitions of Poland, virtually every town in Poland had a Jewish community. Today, many descendents of those communities come to revisit their past. There are many museums related to the Holocaust and Jewish heritage/history across Poland, too. Most Poles today have never had a a close acquaintance with a Jew, but many, possibly most, have seen one.
This poll is not the first time anti-Polish views have been documented among Jews. Bieganski contains survey material and iirc Robert Cherry and Anna Maria Orla Bukowska also conducted polls.
DeleteSeriously, now, we can see, for the first time, that the vast majority of Jews have Polonophobic views. It is not a matter of a few Jewish individuals here and there having such views. Nor does it stem from the bitterness of war survivors. It is a cultural consensus that spans multiple Jewish generations.
ReplyDelete„Exactly like the Germans” is sad and disappointing, and shows that Israeli historical education sucks, as everywhere. At least the assessment of the current relative level of anti-Semitism is more realistic.
ReplyDeleteJan Peczkis, I often have to delete your posts rather than post them because they are overtly antisemitic. You just submitted a post that is so antisemitic that I don't want to read another post by you for the next month, at least. So don't expect your posts to appear here for the next thirty days, minimum.
ReplyDelete