On a purely conceptual level, molding a particular historical event to fit a particular interpretation always involves simplification. Look at our own Civil War 150 years later \u2013 as we often do, and with great anger \u2013 and we still see it as North against South, a society of free individuals against a society built on slavery. All that is basically true, and yet it doesn\u2019t easily explain why there were so many Northern Democrats more loyal to Jefferson Davis than Abraham Lincoln, or why the citizens of Eastern Tennessee threw in their lot with the Union.<\/p>\n
This is why the study of history is only possible in free societies where all avenues of inquiry are open, and where knowledge is \u201cowned\u201d by all. Here in the West, our understanding of the Holocaust\u2019s complexities has been hugely enriched by the histories, bibliographies, oral testimonies and images patiently collected and interpreted by scholars in Israel, the U.S. and Europe. But in the nations that were until 1989 under the boot of the Soviet Union, like Poland, the situation is the exact opposite; over there, \u201cHolocaust education\u201d for decades consisted of lies, distortions and shameful cover-ups.<\/p>\n
It began with the Soviets, for whom there was no ideological or political room for something called the \u201cHolocaust\u201d in their account of the \u201cGreat Patriotic War.\u201d In his monumental poem \u201cBabi Yar\u201d \u2013 a searing critique of the official Soviet representation of the Nazi massacre of 33,000 Jews by a ravine in Kiev in September 1941 \u2013 the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko summoned up the ghosts of native Russian anti-Semitism when he imagined himself as young Jewish boy in the midst of a pogrom. (\u201cTo jeers of \u2018Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!\u2019\/My mother\u2019s being beaten by a clerk.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Yevtushenko\u2019s goal was to remind his readers of the difficult, painful truth that the Communist Party\u2019s enforcers sought to suppress. The Holocaust was defined by the anti-Semitic legislation, persecution and eventual genocide \u2013 under the gaze and sometimes with the active participation of their non-Jewish neighbors \u2013 that defined the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule.<\/p>\n
But just as the Communists sought to undermine this core truth at every turn, so do today\u2019s ultranationalists. It\u2019s not just Poland, after all. Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Latvia are just a handful of the other European countries where similarly ugly disputes have arisen, always involving ultranationalist political leaders promoting the deceitful rewriting of history. In all these cases, the end has been the same: to portray the occupied non-Jewish populations as facing exactly the same trials and perils as their Jewish neighbors, and thereby launder their own soiled records of past Nazi associations.<\/p>\n
Here, I believe, is where the rub lies. The Holocaust scholarship engendered in the open societies of the west is robust enough to withstand these political campaigns to rewrite history. In that sense, the current Polish dispute is just a particularly nasty example of a clash we\u2019ve seen before, and not much more than that. The real losers in all this are the very people these ultranationalists claim they represent.<\/p>\n
Consider the following sentences. \u201cThe conditions in those trains defy coherent language\u2026They were packed in a standing position in sealed, windowless, and unheated cattle wagons, for a winter journey of thousands of miles.\u201d You might well think that the subject here is the deportation of the Jews, but in fact, it is the eminent historian Norman Davies\u2019 description of the 1940 deportations of thousands of Poles by the Soviet NKVD to gulags in Siberia. So, as we see plainly here, the historical record rarely gives comfort to our preconceived notions and prejudices.<\/p>\n
If the Polish government\u2019s goal was simply to encourage greater awareness and education about Polish suffering under the Nazis, that would be a laudable goal. But by tying that aspect of Nazi rule so explicitly to the mass enslavement and extermination of the Jews, and by willfully misrepresenting documented evidence of Polish anti-Semitism and collaboration with the Nazis as a slander upon the Polish nation as a whole, they are engineering their own deserved failure, to the detriment of Poland\u2019s people.<\/p>\n
For instead of enlightening the world about how the Soviets and the Nazis collaborated to crush the Polish national movement \u2013 and why that matters especially today \u2013 Poland\u2019s leaders are disgracing themselves by uncomplicatedly claiming three million Holocaust victims murdered because they were Jews for the general record of Polish wartime suffering.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d have thought that the Soviet Union was the last country they would want to emulate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n
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