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The Poles don’t seek
kindness, but they deserve
better than trite slogans
Victor M Woldanowski
A reply to Marc Lambert’s recent SR article, ‘Were we too kind to the Poles?’, on Poland’s record in the second world war.
The casual reader of Marc Lambert’s piece (8 June), seeing an apparently balanced argument, will on second reading, admire the skill and subtlety of this equivalent to close-up magic, where the effect depends entirely on what is concealed from the observer.
‘Poland was a country which suffered like no other in Europe’, could be open to debate, but only until data is considered, at which point the statement becomes factual on a per capita basis. Mr Lambert’s mis-direction is the reference to Belarus, and omitting to say that losses generally quoted for ‘Belarus’ include people that were Polish citizens on Polish territory under Russian occupation. This omission is tantamount to a denial that the USSR’s attack on Poland on 17 September 1939 was an act of aggression contrary to international law.
The attempted sleight of hand in the ‘status of Polish Jews’ is more obvious. There was no ‘compact’ with Poland, no covenant or concordat of ‘we will settle here if our conditions are met’. Rather, there were rights freely granted by Polish rulers to Jews (amongst others), starting with the Statute of Kalisz in 1264. In the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Polish-Lithuanian state, the concept of a nation within a state was not unique to Jews, it being usual for people to describe themselves as Natione Polonus, gente Ruthenus, Lithuanus, Judaeus, etc. From the perspective of the Polish state, Jews were as much its citizens as any other ethnic group, so there is no question of status whatsoever.
The ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’ trick is all about overlooking context. What Mr Lambert masks is that Karski, while undeniably a heroic individual, did not act alone or on his own initiative, but was fulfilling a mission for the Polish Government (in exile in London). And, he would have found it impossible to undertake it without the planning and active involvement of the Armia Krajowa – the military wing of the Polish underground state, comprising some 400,000 people that swore allegiance to the legal government. The aim of all their joint efforts was to inform their supposed allies about the ‘terribly complex matter of what happened in Poland’ under occupation, a scope that Mr Lambert would prefer us to disregard.
Mr Lambert then sheds the conjuror’s cloak to reveal his true purpose, in the banal observation of ‘abundant evidence that many Poles were enthusiastic collaborators in…Jewish extermination’. Yes, there were some ethnic Poles that denounced Jews to the Germans but they were not many nor is their demeanour known. Indeed, Mr Lambert’s weasel-worded allegation is very easily refuted.
The major risk to Jews within ghettos was the collaboration of the Judenräte (Jewish councils) and their Jewish police in the selection for deportation of their brothers and sisters in faith to extermination camps. The major risk to Jews in hiding outside the ghettos were the Jewish Gestapo agents known as Greifers (catchers) whose role was to hunt out and betray them. Does Mr Lambert need reminding that working against them was Zegota, founded and run by the Armia Krajowa as the largest organisation in Europe dedicated to saving Jews?
Nor is Poland particularly unusual, since in the USA and then in the Western world generally, ‘the holocaust’ became a topic of wider interest only from the late 1970s onwards, some 30 years after the events occurred.
Victor M Woldanowski is the son of Polish citizens deported to the frozen wastes of the USSR in 1940. Born and educated in the UK, he is a graduate of the London School of Economics
