Yad Vashem slams Israeli-Polish statement on Holocaust

Yad Vashem on Thursday rejected the joint declaration on the Holocaust issued by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki last week as part of an agreement whereby the Poles would amend their controversial law criminalizing assertions that Poles were complicit in the Holocaust.

Israel urges Poland to change bill regarding its role in Nazi Holocaust, January 28, 2018 (Reuters)

“A thorough review by Yad Vashem historians shows that the historical assertions, presented as unchallenged facts, in the joint statement contain grave errors and deceptions,” a statement issued by Yad Vashem asserted.

The statement came following publication of the joint declaration translated into English Hebrew and German that appeared in newspapers in Israel and Germany on Thursday, paid for by the Poles.

The Yad Vashem statement also said that even though under the law the sections dealing with criminal sanctions will be rescinded, the statute will still have a chilling effect on research since civil action still can be initiated against those impugning the “good name of the Polish State and the Polish Nation.”

The Yad Vashem communique said that the joint statement “contains highly problematic wording that contradicts existing and accepted historical knowledge,” and “effectively supports a narrative that research has long since disproved, namely, that the Polish Government-in-Exile and its underground arms strove indefatigably—in occupied Poland and elsewhere—to thwart the extermination of Polish Jewry.”

The Yad Vashem statement said that existing documentation and decades of research refutes claims in the Polish-Israel statement asserting that the Polish Government-in-Exile attempted to stop Nazi activity “by trying to raise awareness among the Western allies to the systematic murder of the Polish Jews.”

“Much of the Polish resistance in its various movements not only failed to help Jews, but was also not infrequently actively involved in persecuting them,” the Yad Vashem statement said.

Yad Vashem also took sharp issue with a clause in the joint statement that said. “We are honored to remember heroic acts of numerous Poles, especially the Righteous Among the Nation, who risked their lives to save the Jewish people.”

By contrast, Yad Vashem wrote: “On the question of the balance of forces between aid and persecution, too, the past three decades of historical research reveal a totally different picture: Poles’ assistance to Jews during the Holocaust was relatively rare, and attacks against and even the murder of Jews were widespread phenomena.”

Further, Yad Vashem stated,  “The statement also illegitimately uncouples the disaster that befell the Jews from its concrete historical context and the reality of occupied Poland during the war by claiming that during the war ‘some people, regardless of their origin, religion, or worldview, revealed their darkest side at that time.’ Beyond the outrageous insinuation that Jews also revealed ‘their darkest side at that time,’ those who revealed this side, in the context of the specific amendment at issue—one that proposes to fight those who defame the ‘Polish Nation’—were not devoid of identity. They were Polish and Catholic, and they collaborated with the German occupier, whom they hated, in persecuting the Jewish citizens of Poland.”

The joint statement also placed antisemitism and anti-Polonism in the same clause, condemning antisemitism and rejecting anti-Polonism.

Yad Vashem “vehemently” rejected the “attempts to juxtapose the phenomenon of antisemitism with so-called ‘anti-Polonism.’ While we should put an end to the use of the misleading and ill-conceived concept of ‘Polish death camps,’ calling the use of such terms ‘anti-Polonism’ is fundamentally anachronistic and has nothing whatsoever to do with antisemitism.”