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.
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"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...
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"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?
