Israel, Poland in row over Holocaust bill

[Shahzaz ud din]

Israel, Poland in row over Holocaust bill
Reuters | Published — Sunday 28 January 2018

Israeli holocaust survivor from Auschwitz Vera Kriegel Grossman points at herself in a film showing the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945 on January 24, 2018 displayed at a new photography exhibition "Flashes of Memory: Photography during the Holocaust" at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem commemorating the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during WWII. (AFP)

JERUSALEM/WARSAW: Israel called on Poland on Saturday to amend a bill approved this week by Polish lawmakers that would make it illegal to suggest Poland bore any responsibility for crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany on its soil.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he instructed his ambassador to meet Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to express opposition to the bill, which would make using phrases like “Polish death camps” punishable by up to three years in prison.
“The law is baseless, I strongly oppose it. One cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied,” Netanyahu said, in comments mirrored by other senior Israeli officials.
Poland’s Deputy Justice Minister Patryk Jaki, who authored the bill, said on Twitter it was not directed against Israel.
“Important Israeli politicians and media are attacking us for the bill ... On top of that they claim that Poles are ‘co-responsible’ for the Holocaust,” he said, adding that “this is proof how necessary this bill is.”
The Polish government said the bill did not aim to limit freedom to research or discuss the Holocaust, or to restrict freedom of artistic activity related to the issue.
Poles have fought for years against the use of phrases like “Polish death camps,” which suggest the Polish state was at least partly responsible for the camps where millions of people, mostly Jews, were killed by Nazi Germany. The camps were built and operated by the Nazis after they invaded Poland in 1939.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem said it opposed the bill, even though it said Poland was justified in objecting to the term “Polish death camps” which it called a misrepresentation.
“Restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people’s direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion,” it said.
The Polish government did not surrender to Nazi Germany and its government did not collaborate with the Nazis.
Polish government spokeswoman Joanna Kopcinska wrote on Twitter that the legislation aimed “to show the truth about the terrible crimes committed on Poles, Jews, and other nations that were in the 20th century victims of brutal totalitarian regimes — German Nazi regime and Soviet communism.”

 

[Solomon2]

The story of Arnold
JANUARY 29, 2018, 1:48 PM

• 
  

Ariel Paz-Sawicki
Following undergraduate studies in Middle Eastern studies and economics, Ariel Paz-Sawicki worked as an analyst for the Israeli government for seven years, focusing on regional issues. He is currently in graduate studies in Johns Hopkin's SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies), focusing on strategic studies and Middle Eastern studies. American-Israeli, lover of hummus.


My grandparents survived the Holocaust in Poland. They survived by their wits. They were only in their early 20s when the war began. My grandfather managed to buy fake Catholic identity documents, the Schatzbergs became the Sawickis, and they were off. They traveled around Poland, never staying in one place for more than a couple of months. My grandfather played violin in street orchestras. My grandmother tutored in Polish underground schools. They lived in constant fear of someone recognizing them and denouncing them to the Germans, or to the Polish police, who would surely have handed them over to the Germans.

My grandmother’s wartime papers: the Jewish document is her initial one; ; the “good Catholic girl” is after my grandfather managed to get fake papers. (Courtesy)

My grandfather was the sole survivor of a very large family. My grandmother’s two sisters survived.

I am a parent now. My children will know their late great-grandparents’ stories when they grow up. They will share them with their children.

There is one story that I know especially well. When I heard the news that the lower house of the Polish parliament voted to criminalize any implication of Polish complicity in Nazi crimes, I decided to make sure that the story gets out.

The story is about Arnold. No one in our family, to our great regret, remembers his last name.

In the spring of 1944, my grandparents found themselves in eastern Poland. They found jobs as orderlies in a small hospital at the outskirts of the town of Bychawa, in Lublin County. By then it was already clear that the Nazis were going to lose the war. The Red Army was barely 100 kilometers away. It literally became dangerous for the Germans to come to the hospital at night because of the partisan fighters in the surrounding forests. Consequently, the hospital began treating underground fighters from different partisan groups.

Most prominent among the partisans was a large unit of AK fighters — the Home Army partisans, who received their orders from the Polish government in exile, in London. Their ultimate goal was to liberate Poland from the Nazis before the Soviets got there — the history is known; they ultimately failed.

One evening, my grandparents heard that the local AK were going to bring their wounded to the hospital. Someone mentioned to my grandparents that the unit had a doctor from Lvov. The Sawickis were not from Lvov, but the Schatzbergs were. Not only that, but my grandparents were doctors who had finished their medical studies in Lvov on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The chance that a doctor from Lvov would recognize them was very real.

Instead of tending to the wounded, my grandparents hid in the attic of the hospital. The partisans arrived close to midnight. Looking down at the group through the cracks in the roof, my grandparents recognized Arnold. Arnold, whose parents had owned a kosher butcher shop in Lvov. Arnold who studied medicine with my parents.

They slowly went down and began helping with the wounded. Arnold saw them, but behaved as if he had no idea who they were.

By the morning, my parents went back to their room. A sudden knock on the door woke them up. It was Arnold. After the three of them stopped crying, he told them how afraid he was of coming to the hospital because someone told him that there might be someone from Lvov working there. Although he had spent two years with the AK unit, he had never told them his real name, never told them he was Jewish. The AK fighters were members of the ND — “the National Democracy” — a strongly nationalistic and anti-Semitic movement. He did not want to take a chance, my grandparents remembered him telling them. My grandfather also remembered giving Arnold a pair of long underwear. They made plans to reunite after the war.

By the summer of 1944, the Red Army arrived and eastern Poland found itself free of the Nazis. As different underground units came out into the open, my grandparents started asking about Arnold. Finally, some of the AK fighters remembered. “Ah, that Zhid doctor” is what my grandparents heard. “When he told us he was Jewish, we shot him.”

When the AK fighters found out that Arnold was Jewish, they killed him. They killed a doctor who had tended to their wounded for two years. They killed someone who had saved many of their own lives.

Were the Poles complicit in the extermination of the Jews? The story of the village of Jedwabne, where the locals massacred hundreds of Jews, is well known. Did Polish police give up Jews to the Nazis during the occupation? They did. Did AK fighters kill Arnold? They did. And now the descendants of those Polish nationalists voted to criminalize those who suggest that Poles were complicit in killing Jews. According to that new law, I am guilty.

 

[Enigma_]

Cry me a river Israel, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

 

[Solomon2]

Cry me a river Israel, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

And when people like you merely pretend you live in a glass house, then what?

 

[Enigma_]

And when people like you merely pretend you live in a glass house, then what?

I don't get it?

 

[salarsikander]

Exactly. Total misrepresentation. The holocaust was carried out by Germans and not polish themselves as a state policy.

 

[Daghalodi]

Nothing but zionist drama!!!

The gas chambers at treblinka is a hoax

https://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=1005

Check out video before zionists take it down

 

[Dalit]

LOL Who are the Zionists going to blame now?

 

[Solomon2]

Nothing but zionist drama!!! The gas chambers at treblinka is a hoax -

“Who in their right mind would accept, sympathize or even diminish the extent of this brutal crime?”

- Dr. Muhammad Al-Issa, secretary-general of the Muslim World League​

 

[Daghalodi]

“Who in their right mind would accept, sympathize or even diminish the extent of this brutal crime?”

- Dr. Muhammad Al-Issa, secretary-general of the Muslim World League​

Time for you to take some zyklon b

 

[jewishm]

who cares ?