Ottawa professor calls for UN to take over Poland's most important Holocaust sites

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A professor at the University of Ottawa is calling on the United Nations to take over Poland's most important Holocaust sites in order to preserve their tragic history and prevent it from being “distorted” by Polish nationalists.

Holocaust scholar Jan Grabowski makes this argument in an essay titled “Whitewash: Poland and the Jews,” which recently appeared in the Jewish Quarterly, a publication that covers Jewish issues.

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“Unfortunately, the memory policy pursued and enforced in Poland today can best be described as Holocaust falsification,” writes Grabowski.

“Unlike the Holocaust deniers of yesteryear, states, institutions and people who distort the Holocaust do not deny the fact of the Jewish catastrophe. They freely admit that the Germans murdered six million European Jews.

“But they refuse to acknowledge that their people, their nation, had anything to do with this event. That their ancestors were involved in the German genocide project.”

Grabowski's work has previously pointed to the complicity of individual Poles in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, which was largely committed within Poland.

The Nazi SS built six extermination camps in Poland – Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chełmno, Sobibor, Majdanek and Bełżec – where five of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust were executed. The Holocaust wiped out all but a fraction of Poland's Jewish community, which numbered just over three million before the war.

“Nowhere else in Europe was the Holocaust so complete, so total; nowhere else was the annihilation of the Jewish people carried out with such nightmarish perfection,” writes Grabowski.

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These facts, he argues, impose on Poland a “unique obligation to remember” and a duty to care for the places where the Holocaust is commemorated.

But Holocaust distorters, he claims, are increasingly using Auschwitz and Treblinka to praise those Polish non-Jews who tried to help the Jews, while ignoring those who helped the Germans wipe out the country's Jewish population. Distorters, he says, place all the blame for the historic crime on the Germans.

According to Grabowski, distorters also confuse the experiences of the Poles who suffered and sometimes died in the concentration camps Auschwitz I and Treblinka I with the experiences of the Jews who were slaughtered en masse in the neighboring extermination camps Auschwitz II and Treblinka II.

(According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 90 percent of the one million people who died in the Auschwitz camp complex were Jews.)

The distortion fanatics, says Grabowski, blur the distinction between concentration camps – essentially slave labor camps – and extermination camps where people were sent to die.

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“They use them (Auschwitz and Treblinka) as platforms for Polish martyrdom,” he said in an interview, “and I find that obscene.”

In his essay, Grabowski argues that Poland's most important Holocaust sites should not be subjected to the agenda of Polish nationalism.

“Given the apparent unwillingness of the Polish authorities to act as honest guardians of the memory of the Holocaust, perhaps it is time to place these sites under the jurisdiction of Europe, the United Nations or other international organizations,” he writes.

“Auschwitz and Treblinka could become places where humanity can freely reflect on one of the greatest catastrophes in history, on its own tragic legacy and its own moral condition, past and present.”

Grabowski estimates that about 200,000 Jews were killed due to the direct or indirect involvement of their Polish, non-Jewish neighbors.

Grabowski and his work have been heavily criticized for years by Polish nationalists, most notably the Polish League Against Defamation, who believe that highlighting the complicity of some Poles in the murder of Jews does a disservice to the country's brave wartime history and the enormous suffering of its people.

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Initially hired as a colonial historian of New France at the University of Ottawa in 1993, Grabowski began his Holocaust research after visiting Polish archives and discovering a large cache of wartime German records that offered new insights into the experiences of Jews in Poland.

His 2014 book “Hunting Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland” was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize.

In February 2021, a Warsaw court ruled that Barbara Engelking and Grabowski, editors of Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, must apologize for claiming that village resident Edward Malinowski handed over Jews to the Nazis.

This decision was overturned on appeal.

Andrew Duffy is a National Newspaper Award-winning reporter and long-form feature writer from Ottawa. To support his work, including exclusive subscriber-only content, sign up here: ottawacitizen.com/subscribe

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