History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]


How do you define the "Polish population"? Along the ethnicity, or citizenship lines?
If the pre-1939 citizenship counts, then the proportion was fairly large - Poland had a substantial German minority, which actively assisted the German Army in 1939 (the Fifth Column), and then defined themselves as Volksdeutsche (in some cases it was even possible for individuals to apply for the Reichsdeutsche status).

Also, the collaboration of the Ukrainian and Lithuanian minority is well documented. Jews preferred to collaborate with the Stalinist regime that occupied parts of Poland (although if we define the Blue Police as collaborators, then the same definition must apply to ghetto police units, if we want to avoid using double standards).

As for ethnic Poles, the willingness to collaborate, in a strict sense, was low and can probably be best illustrated by the German attempts to form the Goralische Waffen SS Legion. The 300 volunteers (out of whom 1/3 was unsuitable for military service) may very well just represent the population of village idiots.

If the term "collaboration" is less strictly defined, then you can also count the Blue Police, tasked mainly with enforcing criminal law. The less strict definition is necessary, because this wasn't a voluntary collaboration - pre-war police officers were ordered to report to work under the threat of the death penalty. As a whole, the Blue Police was not considered a collaboratory unit by post-war Polish courts (which were usually strict with regards to cases of collaboration). On an individual level, cases of collaboration by Blue Policemen were prosecuted. On the other hand, the Blue Police had strong ties with the Polish underground (est. 25-30% officers were members of the underground).

I think the most substantial cases of collaboration involved denouncing Jews. The problem was real enough to force the Polish government in exile to announce that:


Death sentences for such collaboration were served by the Home Army (although, according to W. Bartoszewski, the number of such sentences was not sufficient to end the practice, due to the limited investigative capabilities of the Home Army). Also, after the war such collaboration was routinely prosecuted.

The bottom line: the collaboration was present, but nowhere near the European average. There was no institutional collaboration, originating from any Polish level of government, whatsoever. The individual collaboration was considered a crime, both during and after the war.

Life / Why is circumcision not practiced in Poland? [701]


Because we have learned how to wash these body parts and don't have to mutilate them instead. Try some day some warm water and soap, it really isn't all that disgusting.

:)

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]

@Lyzko, #85.


I do, in a certain sense. In another thread yesterday I was discussing with someone interested in the ratio of interfaith marriages between Poles and Jews in the pre-war period. I quoted an opinion with regard to such marriages from a present-day rabbi. First the quote, then a discussion.

Now, my points:

1. If a contemporary Catholic priest or a Protestant minister wrote such garbage, he would be branded a medieval bigot. Just as we brand the mullahs in Tehran. Yet this is the official position of Judaism, in contemporary America. Can you believe this?

2. What the quote directly illustrates is that it is Jews who have been and still are reluctant (to put it mildly) to integrate into the non-Jewish society, not the other way around. Sure, thank God, such attitudes slowly disappear, but I dare to say that another 40 years in the desert still won't be enough to eradicate them completely.

3. If anti-semitism is a unique phenomenon, qualitatively different (and worse) than attitudes in the U.S. toward Koreans, in Poland toward Vietnamese, in Britain toward Pakistani etc., then we need to find a similarly unique, qualitatively distinct factor responsible. Now we have a choice between (a) finding such factors for each and every ethnicity where anti-semitism occurs, or (b) assuming that some unique to them factor makes Jews particularly disliked. Occam's razor, Lyzko, and I don't care how much politically incorrect this is - the Jewish exceptionalism (translated into relationships with the host populaces) is the root of the problem.

Is this enough to "bring on their own misery"? Sometimes not at all, but under certain circumstances - absolutely. The former case is the pre-1939 situation of Jews in Poland. Jews had a substantial autonomy, and formed (voluntarily!) a parallel, closed society. Then 1939 came, and now, in this context, Jews ask the following question:


The answer is two-fold.
1. As an organized society, Poland could not. Poland fought a war against the Nazi Germany, and lost 3 million of her non-Jewish citizens, in addition to 3 million Jews. The Polish government in exile introduced laws protecting Jews and enforced them, within the available means, on the territory occupied by Germany. No level of the Polish government ever collaborated with Nazi Germany. Not the central government, not the voivodships, not the counties, not the municipalities. Poland was alerting other Allies about the genocide, and this was met with indifference (in particular, when Szmul Zygielbojm, a Bund leader and a member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile, was committing suicide, the U.S. Jews couldn't care less.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szmul_Zygielbojm
It took them around 50 years to wake up and now accuse Poles of the complicity in the Holocaust). What else could have been done?

2. At the individual level, sure, even more Poles could have risked their own lives and the lives of their families to defy the occupiers' policies and try to save their "better" neighbors. But here is the catch: Why should they take this risk, in a situation when the MAJORITY of their "better" neighbors had persistently refused to ask themselves the following question: "Could I be a better citizen and neighbor?" When the highly visible minority of Jews actually actively assisted the Soviet occupiers? The rest is history - many Poles risked their lives to save Jews. Many refused, but Jews have no moral right to blame them for this. Selfless heroism is never an obligation, and asserting the existence of such obligation by representatives of a nation that has its own hands rather dirty is a hypocrisy.

What I wrote is brutal, but logical and based on historical facts. Perhaps the biggest disservice done to Jews by other nations is not explaining these things openly, but rather pu$syfooting (Admin - this is NOT a "bad" word, update your dictionary) around the subject, out of some silly, gentile "sensitivity". I don't believe in any genetic traits responsible for any nation's misery. But I do believe that certain cultures may have certain rotten aspects, and it's karma's nature to eventually bite.

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]


To a large degree, this is a Jewish myth. The small degree to which this is true is the role of the individuals who were denouncing Jews to Germans. This was a supplementary only role, however. Germany had full control over the Polish territory, Germans were able to implement the genocide using their own means, and the role of the "szmalcownik" was inherently limited to denouncing the limited number of the escapees. Interestingly, Jews always omit one fact: that for any such escapee to survive more than one day, an infrastructure of non-Jewish helpers (risking their lives to help!), both individual and institutional (Żegota) had to exist in the first place.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBegota
To provide food (normally rationed). To provide shelter. To provide false documents. Right? But, of course, this obvious fact is incompatible with the Jewish myth, hence we have the theory of "a few who helped, and the majority who threatened".

The persistence of this myth is responsible even for attacking the Jews who dare to tell about their own experience. Szpilman and Polanski's account (they were both saved by Poles, "The Pianist" is a movie directed by Polański and based on Szpilman's memoirs) had been criticized for non-compliance. A couple of days ago, as a fan of Warehouse 13, I was doing some reading about Saul Rubinek. To my not-so-great surprise I found out that his account of his parents' survival (saved by a Polish farmer) generated a resounding 'oy-vey', and the guy was forced to explain himself ("I am not a historian"). Now, believe in what you want, but please be advised that it is precisely such attitudes and false accusations that are responsible for the miserable state of the Polish-Jewish relationships, including the phenomenon of 'anti-semitism without Jews'. The theory of the Polish complicity in the Holocaust is a nonsense totally equivalent to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and we hold those who are peddling it responsible.

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]


In the mid to late 1940s, there was a considerable interest in Poland in (1) prosecuting people who collaborated with Germany, and (2) using the pretext of collaboration to prosecute political opponents of the communist government. So, if there was anything to be prosecuted, it was prosecuted (and this includes the collaborators from Jedwabne, for example). And much more.

60 years later Jan Gross woke up and decided to make himself a nice career by catering to the bigotry of descendants of the people, who spent the war comfortably in Brooklyn. His sources are no better than the sources available to Polish prosecutors immediately after the war. If he derives more conclusions from them, it's based on his creativity, selective approach to sources, subordinate to proving his thesis, and (last but not least) the corruption of the witnesses' memories after decades of exposure to certain myths, persistent in the Jewish community. I want to illustrate the latter with a personal experience:

A Jewish man called "Dentist from Auschwitz" came with a lecture to a university where I was working. The lecture started with an account of his pre-war life, he told about studying dentistry in Warsaw, about deciding if he wanted to be religious or not, et caetera. Just a typical account of a life of a wealthy, moderately spoiled kid from a privileged family. And suddenly he probably reminded himself that he forgot something important, and felt obliged to add that "pre-war Poland was unlivable for Jews". See my point? To hell with facts. "Unlivable". Forget about being a student, and about living comfortably enough to preoccupy himself with philosophical problems. 60 years later "everybody knows" that streets in Warsaw were filled by fascist thugs with baseball bats, hunting Jews. Right? The same mechanism is responsible for the historical revisionism of Gross and his faithful readers. You guys just "know"... Perhaps it's time to address the bigotry within your community? Or perhaps you guys simply need this false history, for nation-building purposes or something else?

In 1943, the people who started the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, raised two flags above the Ghetto: the one with the Star of David, and the white and red Polish flag. Are you suggesting that they knew less than American Jews?

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]

See what I meant? The myth is so persistent that JonnyM uses (in #105) an example of a family friend who "wasn't even Jewish" to illustrate the alleged persecution of Jews in Poland! Guys, hate blinds you so much that you don't even notice that your arguments are at the Alice in the Wonderland level of absurdity. Forget about historical facts. You know better.

Now, if you really want to hate Poles, then feel free. But what goes around, comes around. You probably wonder what may be responsible for the phenomenon of "anti-semitism without Jews"? Here you go - the hateful historical revisionism, by descendants of people who spent the war comfortably in Brooklyn and L.A., for example.

This concludes my participation in this thread. Thank you for the discussion.

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]

P.S. Numerus clausus is just a synonym of affirmative action, by the way.
Pre-war admission system in Poland wasn't banning Jews. It simply adjusted the number of admissions to the proportional representation in the population. As much as I personally disagree with ANY quotas, the quota system in pre-war Poland (introduced in a situation where Jews were already well represented among doctors and lawyers, and constituted over 50% of these professionals) was no different than, for example, what the American Jewish Committee advocated in the amici brief regarding some high profile AA cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. You guys not only can live with the quota system in the present-day U.S. You guys actively support it! Now, think a moment what makes your attitude toward the quota system in pre-war Poland so vastly different. There are several possible answers, and you are not going to like any of them, because they ultimately boil down to Jewish exceptionalism.

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]


Please try to tell the truth: it was technically impossible for a professional self-government organization, where Jews constituted 65-70% (as in the case of the Lwów bar, see the reference in my above post) to introduce anti-Jewish policies out of anti-Jewish sentiments. There were university admission policies equivalent to affirmative action (introduced in 1937, if I am correct), but this neither constitutes making any country "unlivable" for the affected group, nor was unique to Poland or to the pre-war period.

I am happy that you don't support the present-day U.S. AA policies. Neither do I. Nevertheless, AJC does, and this substantially weakens the case of Jews against the Polish quota system.

There was no particular love in the pre-war Poland for the non-assimilating Jewish minority. However, this had NOT translated into genocide or a substantial participation in it during the war. The pre-war Polish solution was two-fold. 1. Assimilation (Tarski, Ulam etc.); 2. Actively supporting the establishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine. You may find this Israeli source interesting, albeit it is yet another thing incompatible with the revisionist version of history most American Jews subscribe to.


You forgot to add that these children were actually eaten by Polish anti-semites. Come on, there is no absurd you guys cannot say with a straight face.

In Poland there were no laws or institutional policies barring Jews from any public sector posts.

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]


Ok, this is really off-topic, but I'll bite. The AA system in the U.S. actually discriminates against a formerly downtrodden minority (Asians) for the sake of achieving strictly numerical quotas. The current "underrepresented" minorities' "downtrodden" status is attributable to cultural factors characteristic to these communities. All arguments to the contrary disintegrate when they are confronted with the success of East Asians, who don't fail to achieve, in spite of the past discrimination.

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]

Lyzko: as I already have illustrated (post #88) with an example from contemporary America, it is Jews who don't want to assimilate, and who treat assimilation as an antithesis of Jewishness. Definitely, such attitudes slowly vanish, but this has nothing to do with the basic observation: Jews in the past didn't want to assimilate at all, and the cultural bias against assimilation is so strong that to this day it produces uniquely bigoted opinions from rabbis in America, such as the one that I quoted in #88.

Jews in larger urban centers were less dominated by religious factors, and thus more open to assimilation (prominent examples, in re: #106, include the already mentioned mathematicians Tarski and Ulam, also Artur Rubinstein, Julian Tuwim, Jan Kiepura).

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]

There is a huge difference between patriotism and exceptionalism. Patriotism is not based on the principle of denying others their fundamental rights. Exceptionalism makes the rights of others outright subordinate to the needs of the group that considers itself exceptional.

As for "uniquely bigoted" and examples from other faiths: absolutely! Mullahs from Iran and Pakistan immediately spring to mind.

History / What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis? [125]

Pretty close. Similar traits that define individuals as criminals are responsible for the exceptionalism of groups/ethnicities.

Law / Weapons laws in Poland. Carrying a concealed handgun? [918]

I apologize if I post redundant information - I don't have time to browse through previous pages. You may find my own experience useful.

1. As for a handgun - technically, if you have a permit in Poland, the law does not distinguish between concealed or not. The social expectation would be that you actually carry concealed.

Getting the permit, however, is next to impossible. Poland's laws are extremely prohibitive, compared to the rest of Europe. You need to provide a compelling reason (e.g. receiving threats).

2. There is a loophole with respect to long guns though. If you have a hunting license in the U.S., you can apply for a membership in the Polski Związek £owiecki, without the normally required 1 year training period - foreign hunter licenses, per PZ£ regulations, waive this requirement. You just need to take a hunter education class (a few months), pass an exam, and you will be free to bring your long guns to Poland. This is costly, compared to hunting in the U.S., but at least doable.

3. The process is NOT friendly, in any case. Actually, a couple of years ago I tried to return to Poland after some 8 years in the U.S. All the problems with bringing my guns to Poland constituted about 30% of the reasons why I gave up and moved back to the U.S.

History / Polish inventors - what have they ever given to the world? [101]


How about the hydrogen bomb? :)
Google Stanisław Ulam.

History / Polish inventors - what have they ever given to the world? [101]


Actually I did, in #36. I have no duty, however, to refrain from contributing to other subjects within this thread.

History / Polish inventors - what have they ever given to the world? [101]


Science in itself is neutral from the ethical point of view. It's the application that counts. A bomb based on the Teller-Ulam design may vaporize a city, but it may be also used to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. Even the former application is not entirely bad: the MAD doctrine (although seemingly literally mad) has kept the two superpowers from unleashing the World War III.

Also, the same scientific approaches that have been used by Ulam for the modeling of thermonuclear reactions can be used for other purposes. The Monte Carlo method (it was Ulam who proposed this name) is used, for example, in drug discovery.

UK, Ireland / Raising Bilingual Children - How are you teaching your children? Your experiences? [74]

I have a comfortable situation: my wife is Asian, I am Polish, so we have adopted English as the primary language at home, and the "English first" principle with regards to our daughter.

I am aware of Chomsky's linguistic theories, but I observed that the early attempt of multilingualism has simply failed: the child was becoming a dictionary, capable of translating a very limited vocabulary between the three languages, to the insane joy of the grandparents. Yet the real language development (assembling words into phrases and sentences) just didn't want to happen - when the development of these skills lagged for about 5-6 months, I said "enough" and focused solely on English, before it became really too late. Our daughter is now within the top 1 percentile in the Iowa standardized test. If the extended family feels offended, it's their problem.

P.S. Naturally, opinions with regard to multilingualism will vary. The primary factor is the expectations. If by "proficiency" we understand being capable of communicating at the level "please hand me the TV remote", then, of course, multilingualism is possible. But if we want the child to think, reason and properly articulate, the brain power, IMO, should not be wasted on handling several languages.

Life / Why is circumcision not practiced in Poland? [701]


All this evidence becomes irrelevant once you note that you can simply wash these body parts, instead of mutilating them. The benefits of washing are comparable to the benefits of mutilating, without the side effects. You know, some warm water, soap...

Speaking of hygiene - google the NIH grant 3U01MH066701-07S1. :)

Life / Why is circumcision not practiced in Poland? [701]


It does not prevent, but statistically it somewhat reduces the risk. Nevertheless, the same benefits are available through proper hygiene. So, here is my point: circumcision may be a good solution for people who have problems with maintaining hygiene. There is an appropriate saying in Polish: "to się myje, a nie wietrzy".

Life / Why is circumcision not practiced in Poland? [701]


There are valid medical factors, IMO. Without the foreskin, it is easier to wash that body part, or, even without washing, the virus is more exposed to the environment and "dies" more quickly. If proper hygiene is maintained, however, both these mechanisms are moot.

P.S. "To się myje, a nie wietrzy" means "You are supposed to wash this, rather than ventilate".

Life / Why is circumcision not practiced in Poland? [701]


According to what mechanism? As far as I know, the thing one washes away provides nice, semi-liquid, anaerobic conditions for the virus, facilitate the opening of skin pores (or even the formation of lesions, facilitating the viral entry).

Life / Why is circumcision not practiced in Poland? [701]


A virus is not a higher organism. It does not need to process energy to remain infective (in a broader sense "alive", although the term is disputable with respect to a virus). As for the pH - it is relevant to the cell entry of influenza (the conformational rearrangement of the hemagluttinin is pH-triggered), but HIV relies on a different mechanism, and the "very precise pH" is not necessary.

History / Poland and Britain started WW2 [307]

DougTales
"Poland and Britain started WW2", murdered the Jews, raided Pearl Harbor, and finally helped the Nazis launch their Moon rockets from the secret Antarctic base. Yeah, we rule!

Genealogy / I have Jewish DNA, but only know of Polish ancestry . [120]


Intermarriage was uncommon (for religious reasons - non-Catholics could not marry within the Catholic faith, and, of course, interfaith marriages are even now an absolute no-no for religious Jews), but it wasn't necessary for mixing the DNA. :)

Life / Why is circumcision not practiced in Poland? [701]

In Poland not practiced, in Germany now outright illegal:

foxnews.com/world/2012/06/26/german-court-circumcision-on-jewish-boys-assault/

"German court: Circumcision on boys an assault"

Time to get rid of this ritual mutilation. All the claimed medical benefits can be just as well obtained through elementary hygiene.

History / What do Poles owe to Jews? [586]


Instead of playing the anti-Semitism card, you could simply type "Skidel uprising" or "Skidel revolt" in Google to corroborate. Reference to the revolt and to the participation of Jews in it can be found in: Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve. Also, you may find sources describing the town of Skidel as a shtetl. Your response, Harry, indicate that you are not interested in facts, just in peddling your anti-Polish bigotry and hatred.

History / What do Poles owe to Jews? [586]


How do you define "owe"?

History / What do Poles owe to Jews? [586]


Ahem, ahem, a complete truth?

When I report some elements of the truth and support them with legitimate sources, you call me an anti-Semite...

History / What do Poles owe to Jews? [586]

Then, the complete truth also involves such elements as:
- The willingness (or a lack thereof) of the Jewish minority to integrate with the Polish society
- The level of participation of Jews in the totalitarian Communist apparatus
- The loyalty of Jewish citizens to the Polish state (or a lack thereof)

Are you sure that you want the complete truth? Based on my prior experience, you rather prefer a cherry picked subset of the truth, where the above listed subjects are carefully suppressed. You just want one element: the dislike of Jews by Poles (and its real and imagined consequences) to be emphasized, generalized, and stripped of context. But if you really want the whole truth, then I am ready to discuss.

History / What do Poles owe to Jews? [586]

OK, Harry, one by one.
- Considering that the Polish army relied on conscript, this 100,000 number is hardly an evidence of any loyalty.
- The word "some" is (arguably intentionally) misleading. The unwillingness to integrate was a predominant trend, mandated by cultural factors that are visible even among present day Jews (consider, for example, the staunch opposition to inter-faith marriages expressed by rabbis, extrapolate this to the times when rabbis held absolute religious and substantial civil authority).

- The same criticism applies to your statement that "some Jews were communists or that some Jews showed no loyalty to the Polish state". It wasn't just "some". Jews constituted about 50% of the KomPartia in pre-war Poland, and this is not a statistical outlier. The trend continued until the Jewish faction within the Party lost the internal power struggle in 1968 (after which they mostly emigrated and found new occupations as denouncers of Polish anti-semitism, by the way). The trend was also visible among the early Bolsheviks, see, for example the dispatches by Capt. Schuyler from the U.S. expeditionary forces in Siberia (be warned, these dispatches are VERY politically incorrect).

- The statement that "some Jews did want to integrate and that some Jews did show loyalty" is absolutely true, on the other hand, and the word "some" is used correctly. There were such prominent examples as mathematicians Tarsk and Ulami, or Artur Rubinstein. The existence of such examples show that the Polish society made the integration possible, and if other Jews didn't integrate, it was primarily attributable to their choices and to the pressure of their own ethnic group.

- "the percentage of Jews in the Polish army matched the percentage of Jews in the Polish population as a whole"- again, when the army is conscripted, I expect nothing else. But you know, why don't you look at the pictures of the war cemeteries in Normandy and attempt a statistical sampling of Stars of David among crosses? You may like neither the result nor the conclusion...

- "some people try to claim that all Jews greeted the Red Army with joy" - you can always find people expressing fringe views, but while correctly dismissing them as fringe, the opposite side wants to also conveniently sweep under the carpet the true statement that the support for the invading Soviets was substantial among Jews.

Now, in this context we can state facts that the Poles "owe"

- Indeed, Jews were quite universally disliked, but don't cherry pick this statement, read to the end! Jews were NOT disliked based on genetic factors, as the denouncers of Polish anti-Semitism love to claim to create a straw man of a brute, primitive Pole. Jews were disliked as non-integrating aliens, not sharing the aspirations of the rest of the nation. On the other hand, a Jew could simply make a small effort to integrate and become recognized as a Pole. Just like that.

The example of Mexicans in the United States springs to mind: a person of Latino descent, speaking English and holding a regular job is considered a compatriot, and nobody makes any issue of his name ending with -ez. On the other hand, there is a rather universal dislike for people expressing allegiance primarily to Mexico, not bothering to learn English, gouging the welfare system (yes, this means that they formally are U.S. citizens) and claiming to be a poor, oppressed minority, discriminated against by Caucasian racists just "for being brown".

- The dislike indeed translated into anti-Jewish practices, but again, don't cherry pick: these were practices of individuals, never endorsed by any level the Polish government, either before, during or after the war (until the 1968 intra-Party power struggle, when the Gomulka's faction used anti-semitism as a state-sanctioned tool to secure the monopoly). On the contrary, occasionally the dislike manifested itself as pro-Jewish policies. Hard to believe? Consider, for example, the support of the Polish state for the establishment of Israel.

etzel.org.il/english/ac16.htm

- Some of the anti-Jewish acts crossed the line of crime. Such acts were duly, timely investigated and punished by Polish authorities. It is definitely hurtful when they are now regurgitated as "discoveries of new facts from the Polish history that should make Poles reconsider their role during the war". What am I supposed to reconsider, that a Volksdeutsch mayor of Jedwabne, together with German gendarmerie, gathered a group of Polish village idiots as supporters, other inhabitants as observers, and under the auspices of the German government organized a pogrom? While true, is this any rational basis for reconsidering the role of Poland and Poles played in World War II, as Jewish ethnocentric historians propose?

Harry, nobody is saying that individual Poles never committed any crimes against individual Jews. BUT practices such as: artificially inflating the numbers of incidents, manipulating facts to overemphasize the complicity of Poles, presenting Soviet occupiers and their collaborators killed by the resistance as innocent victims of ethnic hate, cherry picking incidents and bundling them together to create a clear victim/perpetrator perception (the Pole being given the latter role, naturally), has the following effects:

- Such historiography feeds the bigotry among Jews (well, perhaps this is an intentional, nation-building policy, but I see no reason to be forgiving)
- Such manner of discussion provokes in-kind responses, and then you are surprised that, in the context of the same discussion, Poles emphasize Jewish crimes.

I think the Jewish fighters who started the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising were uniquely entitled to expressing the truth, and they did so by displaying the Polish flag alongside the Star of David - a fact that must be incredibly hard to explain for the proponents of the thesis that Poles were just as complicit in the Holocaust as Germans were. Why should I rather believe in the ethnocentric version of history peddled from Brooklyn, by descendants of schmucks who spent the war comfortably in the United States?