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Whitewash: Poland and the Jews
Author(s): Grabowski, Jan
Date: 2024
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Nationalism, National Identity, Politics, Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration
Abstract: This issue of The Jewish Quarterly explores the failure of modern Poland to reckon with the nation's role in the Holocaust. In this ground-breaking essay, Jan Grabowski, a world-renowned Holocaust historian, examines how the government, museums, schools and state institutions became complicit in delivering a message of Polish national innocence during the Holocaust. He recounts his own experience as the victim of smears and a notorious lawsuit for questioning the complicity of Poles in the destruction of the country's Jews, and examines the far-reaching consequences of Poland's historical distortions, which have been repeated and replicated worldwide to challenge the truth of the Holocaust.
Polish Memory Laws and the Distortion of the History of the Holocaust
Author(s): Grabowski, Jan
Editor(s): Barkan, Elazar; Lang, Ariella
Date: 2022
Topics: Antisemitism, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Communism, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Law, Nationalism
Abstract: This chapter discusses the controversial January 2018 “Holocaust Law,” which the nationalist Polish government introduced, and which calls for prison terms of up to three years for those found guilty of “slandering the good name of the Polish nation” and implying that Polish society and its institutions were in any way complicit in the Holocaust. The law was speedily approved by the Parliament and signed into law by the Polish president. Shortly thereafter, Polish nationalists rescinded the criminalizing provisions of the law, in an effort to quiet international criticism of the law. The issue is far from being settled, however, and this chapter provides a larger historical perspective about national Polish discourses, and in particular those narratives that stress the citizenry’s foremost opposition to communism, their victimization at the hands of the Nazis, and an emphatic denial of any collaboration with Nazis in their annihilation of Polish Jewry.
Legislating and Distorting the History of the Holocaust
Author(s): Grabowski, Jan
Editor(s): Rosenfeld, Alvin H.
Date: 2021
Topics: Antisemitism, Holocaust, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Law