Implying Polish Guilt in Holocaust To Be Outlawed

First, let’s avoid word games and focus to the essence. The subject is too serious for pretending – we are talking about the murders of unprotected innocent civilians. Let’s also assume that not a single Pole was involved in murders of Jews. Now, a simple question: then who has murdered all these Jews after the war has ended and who has burned to death all these Jews in Jedwabne? Martians?
Who benefits from hiding the truth? Why should one protect a murderer just because he is of the same ethnicity? Who benefits from the false collective innocence?
Just one digression: if a black-and-white perception of events before, during and after the war falls, then the whole story of a just war falls too. Britain and France went into a (phoney) war because of Poland. Or?

 

Well, I would have thought that as an owner of a business entity called sole proprietorship I would have known something about it .
The requirement is/was to attach your name to your company name on any document the Polish IRS could be interested in.
"Non-soles" don't have/didn't have to bother with this.
And there must be a small placard stating your company name, your name, and the address somewhere visible to everybody.
Actually you can change the name of you business everyday - they don't care about it.

Maybe you should call the police, or reach for a gun? Hide your placard, or simply go home?
What are you doing in the middle of a riot in your closed shop?

What a strange idea, a common language. What you need that for?
Poland was a multinational country by design, many of her kings didn't speak Polish. Your own language was sufficient for anything.
Even in the interbelum period the Jews enjoyed self-government, they had their own schools, newspapers (and lots of them), books, even some programs on the radio if I'm not mistaken.
And as you said they didn't believe in integration, at all.

Thinking about it, do they have self-government in your country?

Of course. A Jew personally selling things to the Poles would knew Polish, a Jew selling to the Polish Ukrainians would knew Ukrainian and so on...
Most likely he wouldn't speak it well but that's was ok, people liked Jewish accent and mannerism.

I've heard about those people with armbands. The problems is, in comparison they lived in their own Shangri-La, isolated from horrors of the occupation. It was easy to be brave when the Nazis treated you with respect, it was a little harder when you were a disposable sub-human.

Most of them still existed. Actually the Hague Conventions required they were preserved as much as possible. It would be a war crime to replace them or abolish.
Working in them wasn't collaboration, after all life had to go on.
But some people overdone this "working", the Underground had to execute a few thousand of them, and the state sentenced a dozen or so thousand after the war.

Poland was the only country where people generally didn't collaborate for political reasons. It was mostly for personal gain.

 

There is no enough historians on this planet to investigate every case of mass-murder of innocent civilians that happened in Poland during the WW2. So maybe the question is why do you care about a single one from tens of thousands.

It was done by a some kind of volksdeutsch and, using modern language, local Polish gangbangers at the prodding of the Germans. They claimed it was an act of vengeance for Jewish collaborations with the Soviets which resulted in many Polish deaths.

Well, I sincerely hope the British and the French soldiers died in that war because their countries or their countries' interests were threatened. It would be stupid of them to die for people in distant lands they knew nothing about.
The Poles weren't white baby seals to be protected because of their cuteness. They didn't need or asked for British/French pity.

 

No. A crime in Jedwabne is well documented - Poles did that. Please, don't blame the Germans for everything. Murders of Jews continued in Poland long after the end of the war and there were no Germans left to blame. You still can deny, but that is also well documented. Esentially, the proposed law would outlaw and criminalize expressing historic facts.

 

short of making the holocaust or any regime of persecution an heritable condition for all living jews, i fail to see the importance of this whole thing. nearly all denominations and minority groups have suffered at one time or another and many would rather not look back.

 

What is known is that shortly before the WW2 started a man arrived there, presumably from Silesia. The locals suspected he was a German spy. When the Germans arrived there he legally declared himself a German and was installed as the Mayor of that town.

He organized the massacre with some locals wanting to avenge deaths of their relatives, or sometimes forced to do it. But most of the those taking part was motivated by sheer greed and did it on their own free will.

The perpetrators were tried and sentenced shortly after the war. Over 70 people were interrogated, 22 charged, 10 sentenced for long prison terms, one for death.
The depositions and records of the investigation and trial are the only documents available. Although numerous they are frequently contradictory because both the investigation and the trial were conducted sloppily and unprofessionally. The Mayor disappeared without a trace after the war.
So no, it's not very well documented, and there are lots of unknowns.

 

If just a fraction of the story were true it is horrible enough to start questioning what we really know about the real nature of human beings. The way that the murders were committed is so repelling that I had difficulties even to bear reading about it. And, as George Steiner from the Observer states:

"The joyous, demented sadists of Jedwabne were Poles to a man (and woman)."

Defendants of such gruesome murderers line-up with the perpetrators.

By the way, that wasn't an isolated case. Jan Gross, an author of the book that revealed that crime has stumbled on the documents only some 20 years ago. Before, it was a secret and now, evidence surfaces about similar events at nearby Radzilow and Wsosz.

 

Maybe you should call the police, or reach for a gun? Hide your placard, or simply go home?

What are you doing in the middle of a riot in your closed shop?


The shop can't run away from the riot, that's the problem. If you've ever seen a riot up close you might have noticed people throw rocks and anything else they can lay hands on. So you barricade the shop to protect the windows from all that flying stuff and hope for the best. A big insigna stating "jew here" is not going to help the shop survive. BTW I was not thinking of people, the average "rioteeers" will vandalize a shop but probably stop short of pursuing anyone that just runs, of course if you try to face them off with a gun you just upped the stakes and put your life on the line.

AFAIK shop signs are not tax records by any stretch (though when dealing with the likes of IRS I would not exclude any strange "interpretation" of reality). Adding the owner's name on tax records is not a big risk, having it painted in big letters on the shop's front wall is a different story..

Thinking about it, do they have self-government in your country?

We have enough problems with religious orders having some sort of "self govermenment", no way we can afford more of that .



Most of them still existed. Actually the Hague Conventions required they were preserved as much as possible. It would be a war crime to replace them or abolish.

The likes of Himmler respecting the Hague convention? not likely, and I believe the Hague applied to "occupied" territoty, from a German perspective Poland was "liberated" not "occupied". Not replacing the "low level" bureaucrats was a necessity. Many of them just tried to survive, some went beyond that, my point was that what they did is rrrelevant to any accusation made against "Polish institutions" as there isn't any continuity with either previous or successive "Polish institutions", those people acted as individuals.

 

The Polish IRS was collecting taxes, municipal governments were doing their things, as the Polish "Obama care" did, Polish police was fighting crime, courts were resolving property disputes and so on and so for.
What they did or decided was legal and binding after the war.
It was like that in every occupied country, in Russia even kolkhozes/sovkhozes were operating.
More or less there some continuity, the Polish Government in Exile said it's ok, so it was ok .

As I said it was their choice, nobody forced them to do it. It is/was like a car registration number and of the same size, even its purpose was the same.

 

Then there is the story of Salomon Morel...

A peculiar story indeed.

"... as commandant of the Zgoda camp at Świętochłowice, he created for the prisoners in this camp, out of ethnic and political considerations, conditions that jeopardised their lives, including starvation and torture. The charges against Morel were based primarily on the evidence of over 100 witnesses, including 58 former inmates of the Zgoda camp. In July 2005 this request was again formally refused by the Israeli government."


We need to stop blaming entire ethnicities, and seek perpetrators.

 

Judging by the napalm grade adjectives used, Mr George Steiner is one of those click bitters writing for Internet news sites. Today it is Polish monsters, tomorrow a woman with three boobs.

Maybe someone should tell him that there were three major investigations in Poland of this case, in the forties, seventies and in 2001. Although of course only the first had access to the real perpetrators and is the most interesting. And there are tons of documents and hundreds of depositions available; of Poles, Jews, Germans.
Nothing there about unusual cruelty.
His informations about those monsters come from some obscure sensationalist booklet published in San Paolo in Spanish in 2000.

And tell him that Jan Gross is a leftist publicist who cherry picked some of those documents and loosely interpreted them in his book, with the aim of creating as much sensation as possible. His book is of no value for anything but entertainment.

The events in Radziłów, Wąsosz and a few others never were a secret, there were obscure. Most of the information available about them is from the trials of their perpetrators.
There were obscure because they are small scale events, some people exacted their vengeance on families of Soviet collaborators who fled with the Soviets and that's all. Even in large monographs of Holocaust there were/are just footnotes to other more important and dramatic events.

 

Exactly

There are tons of stories like that.

There was 400 men strong Jewish Gestapo in Warsaw hunting Jews for the Nazis.
Another group was hunting both Jews and Poles.
There were numerous Jewish Police Services which it was said were more cruel than the Nazis. Those are the people who literally with their own hands sent many of their own brethren to the gas chambers. Only in the Warsaw Ghetto there was over 1000 Jewish policemen.
The Jewish collaborators in Kraków were especially murderous and cruel. To bad many of them escaped with Schindler.

Just food for thought for dogmatic, cartoonish history aficionados.