Long time lurker, first time poster. Hope I did it right.
So I was reading the wikipedia page called "The Holocaust in Poland" and it has this paragraph under the header "Antisemitism":
"Polish antisemitism had two formative motifs: claims of defilement of the Catholic faith; and Żydokomuna (Jew-communism). During the 1930s, Catholic journals in Poland paralleled western European social-Darwinist antisemitism and the Nazi press. However, church doctrine ruled out violence, which only became more common in the mid-1930s. Unlike German antisemitism, Polish political-ideological antisemites rejected the idea of genocide or pogroms of the Jews, advocating mass emigration instead.[a] Joseph Stalin's occupation of terror in eastern Poland in 1939 brought what Jan Gross calls "the institutionalization of resentment",[169] whereby the Soviets used privileges and punishments to accommodate and encourage ethnic and religious differences between Jews and Poles There was an upsurge in the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as Communist traitors; it erupted into mass murder when Nazi Germany invaded Soviet eastern Poland in the summer of 1941. A group of at least 40 Poles, with an unconfirmed level of German backing, murdered hundreds of Jews in the racially aggravated Jedwabne pogrom. There was a rash of other massacres of Jews across the same formerly Soviet-occupied region of Łomża and Białystok around the same time, with varying degrees of German death squad incitement or involvement: at Bielsk Podlaski (the village of Pilki), Choroszcz, Czyżew, Goniądz, Grajewo, Jasionówka, Kleszczele, Knyszyn, Kolno, Kuźnica, Narewka, Piątnica, Radziłów, Rajgród, Sokoły, Stawiski, Suchowola, Szczuczyn, Trzcianne, Tykocin, Wasilków, Wąsosz, and Wizna.[170]"
The text straight up blames Polish antisemitism and violence on Stalin and the Soviets. Obviously, this made me very suspicious. Does anyone know what it refers to, what the supposed evidence that the Soviets stoked antisemitic violence is, and have any alternative sources I can read?
Thanks!
EDIT: link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Poland#Antisemitism
rejected the idea of genocide or pogroms of the Jews, advocating mass emigration instead
You know I'm pretty sure the name for forcing a bunch of Jews to "emigrate" is pogrom.
We don’t want you to die here, we just want you to not live here.
:is-this: Is this the common European values that I've heard so much about?
It is so disgusting they try to paint Polish anti-Semitism as this civil and moderate antisemitism as opposed to the extreme German version. The German Nazis didn't start out with building death camps, they started out pissing and moaning about how foreign the Jews were and how it would be in everyone's best interest if they just moved somewhere else under various degrees of compulsion. As that policy proved inefficient both in the material removal of Jews from nazi-controlled areas as well as in the ability to satisfy the fascist mind's hunger for ever-increasong cruelty, the Nazis switched to other methods like deliberate murder of all Jews.
Polish and German antisemitism shares exactly the same rotten core, the only difference was that he German variant had progressed further down the path than the Polish one.
Joseph Stalin’s occupation of terror in eastern Poland in 1939 brought what Jan Gross calls “the institutionalization of resentment”,[169] whereby the Soviets used privileges and punishments to accommodate and encourage ethnic and religious differences between Jews and Poles
this seems like a weird way of framing giving Jews rights if that's what this means
it's exactly the way they talk about "not being racist" today lol
The Polish government was explicitly anti-semitic but of course the Poles had nothing to do with the holocaust :very-smart:
The Holocaust was done by the Germans and the Germans only. Everyone else was just minding their own business when the Soviets came to oppress them.
This makes me think of the type of historian that will put "class enemies" in scare quotes when writing about Soviet repression of rightwingers.
And it was only the bad Germans, who completely disappeared after the war and were never seen again.
Someone correct me if I am wrong here, but isn't it basically a crime in Poland to say that Poland contributed to the Holocaust (which, as a Polish-American with family who were in the camps, is objectively true).
The Polish government was a flawless bastion of liberty, democracy, peace, and tolerance. I have been told as much by many, many Polish nationalists on Twitter, usually after I mock them for complaining that Stalin didn't let Hitler exterminate them.
I just want to note that there's an active group of Polish nationalists working on this part of the English Wikipedia who downplay Polish antisemitism and emphasize (real or imagined) Soviet and Nazi violence against Poles instead, so this is certainly an area where you shouldn't trust Wikipedia.
very cool that in US politics poland has the reputation of being the Big Time Victims of both the Nazis and the Other Nazis.
Thanks for this info, that really explains a lot of the weirdness I got from trying to collect info there.
Shameless self promo: I’m probably going to do a post all about the Khmielniki massacres in the 1600s as part of “Gehenna on Earth” but Poland has a long history of antisemitic violence tolerated and at time expressly encouraged by the Catholic Church.
This contempt was bred by familiarity. By the early 20th century Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw were 25-50% Jewish by population. Jews became a major ethnic minority because Pagan Poland and Lithuania granted them more rights than any other European kingdom of “Empire” beginning around the 1400s.
“Hitler’s willing executioners” focuses largely on the Poles. And the put things in perspective 3 of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were from the pre-war area defined as Poland.
This is the paper I read to learn about the subject https://www.academia.edu/32895094/Local_Collaboration_in_the_Holocaust_in_Eastern_Europe
Also by "stoked violence" I think they mean Jews opposed the antisemitic pro-nazi government, which thus made them more pro-Soviet. So from Polish nationalists POV the Soviets supporting Jews made them "have to" murder them.
In explaining these local excesses at the start of "Operation Barbarossa" reference is frequently made back to the mass deportations conducted by Soviet forces a few days earlier and the alleged role of Jews in the NKVD and as informers. In particular, the warm welcome given by many Jews to the Red Army in 1939(mostly out of relief at escaping German occupation) served to reinforce German and local propaganda that accused all Jews of sympathizing with the communists. The work of Bogdan Musial has demonstrated the close links between the uncovering of victims of the Soviets in towns liberated by the Germans and the outbreak of local pogroms and massacres against the Jews, who were often rounded up to bury the corpses.^* There is a danger, however,that this explanatory schema can be used to 'excuse' the anti-Jewish actions as an 'understandable' revenge measure. The truth is that the vast majority of those Jews killed had nothing to do with Soviet atrocities. The perpetrators had mostly fled with the Soviet forces. Yet there was clearly an element of 'hotblood' in some of these early and improvised outbursts.
This is essentially the attitude they have, and still have. That it was "defense" against Bolsheviks, Its the same line in Ukraine, and the Baltic states
I've heard great, haunting things about both of those. Both got raked over the coals in Poland which should tell you they are on the right track.
Eastern Europe was a hotbed of violent antisemitism since the late 19th century. I'm half Jewish and my ancestors came to the USA for two reasons: opportunity + lynch mobs would kill them if they remained in Eastern Europe. As an example, I think on Wikipedia I read that the Black Hundreds would pull out people's tongues. Some family lore has survived about the Cossacks being vaguely bad.
A book that really put things into perspective to me was Abram Leon's The Jewish Question. I haven't read the whole thing and it was written by a Trotskyist (who risked his life as an organizer and was killed by the Nazis) but the thesis seems pretty solid to me. Why, the author asks, did Jews survive the Middle Ages while other ethnic groups were assimilated? Leon argues that Jews were necessary to feudalism as moneylenders (since the New Testament forbids lending money while the Old Testament specifies that Jews can lend to the goyim); once capitalism began destroying feudalism, once the ruling class figured out that they didn't need Jews to lend money, Jews were either expelled, assimilated, or exterminated. The vast majority of American Jews I know are non-practicing because capital has no need for us to practice our faith, but it seems like these days capital has found a better use for some Jews, at least, as the colonial occupiers of Palestine, though the majority of the world's Jews do not live in Israel.
This wasn't really your question, though. "Sir, this is a Arby's." I think Maus might be what you're looking for, if you haven't read it. The race reification there is weird and the Soviets have zero presence—Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, the French are frogs, but Soviets apparently don't exist, even though the story takes place in Auschwitz, which was liberated by the Soviets. (The hero of the story, the author's dad, was death-marched out of Auschwitz before the Soviets liberated it IIRC.) The funny thing about the author is that, although he's a lib, he was publicly against the Iraq War, which meant that he was basically erased from the corporate press—until relatively recently, when some chud school board decided to get rid of his books, and libs decided they would own the chuds by buying Maus and displaying it on their coffee tables. A relative of mine knows his wife and says she's not nice. Anyway, Poles are definitely in Maus. Some help the main character, and some help the Nazis.
Although The Pianist was directed by a sexual predator, I think it's a really great movie, and it takes place entirely in Poland during the Holocaust. Spoiler alert, it libs out at the end—the main character is helped by a good Nazi who later dies in a prison camp because of those nasty Soviets—but otherwise I think it's fantastic, and it also shows some Poles risking their lives to help Jews, while other Poles go out of their way to harm them.
It is insane how many acclaimed films and books about the Holocaust literally have "the good concentration camp guard" who is killed by the soviets. Didn't JoJo Rabbit do that? I know Boy in the Striped Pajamas did
I don’t think JoJo Rabbit did that? I don’t think it showed the camps at all, and from what I remember the Nazis are pretty universally shown to be a combination of evil and completely incompetent morons
I thought JoJo depicted Nazis as extremely loud dudes who keep losing the lower half of their body.
I saw an interesting critique of Maus which said that by depicting Jews and Poles as separate species it buys into the anti-semitic narrative that Jews cannot truly belong to their home countries and are thus not to be trusted.
That narrative probably affected every aspect of daily life in Poland (and might still be the default position there today) so it'd be a bit weird to just paper over it.
The majority of Europeans certainly thought it was true. You can't blame a Jewish author for accurately portraying how Jewish people were and are treated in Europe. Depicting the different nations as different species conveys in very clear terms the realities of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Never ask a man his salary.
Never ask a woman her age.
Never ask a Polish Nationalist how Trans-Olza came to briefly be a part of Poland between 1938-1939.
Joseph Stalin ’s occupation of terror in eastern Poland in 1939
Are they talking about the liberation of west Belarus and west Ukraine, or the few strips of ungoverned Polish land they arrived at before from the invading nazis?
Found a PDF of the book that is quoted in case you're curious. Download link here.
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