May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

Sharon Pulwer, Haaretz, December 22, 2015

Benzi Gopstein, leader of the extremist anti-assimilationist group Lehava, has called for the prevention of Christmas celebrations in Israel and the expulsion of Christians whom he compared to “vampires.”

“Christmas has no place in the Holy Land,” Gopstein wrote in an article posted a few days ago on the Haredi website Kooker.

Gopstein wrote in the article that he is disturbed by “the fall of the line of defense of the Jewish people against our deadly enemy for hundreds of years – the Christian Church.”

He said the Church had used “the maximum tools at its disposal to destroy the Jewish people,” and that today “the Church has been defeated roundly when the Jewish people has one of the strongest armies in the world and they have no chance any longer of destroying our body.”

However, Gopstein said, the Church has not given up. “A last hope remains to those vampires and blood suckers – the mission. If Jews cannot be killed, they can still be converted.” …

Gopstein said that the “fear that every Jew felt, the disgust that we described above at Christianity – disgust that was the only thing that saved us from the dark days in Europe – has disappeared with the ‘good life’ of the democratic age…and the missionary is on the prowl for prey.”

Gopstein ends his article by writing: “I call on everyone to raise a cry and fight this corrupt phenomenon in the best tradition of Judaism, before we all, including those who observe the commandments among us, become a community of sycophants.”

“Christmas has no place in the Holy Land,” he wrote, adding “Let us remove the vampires before they once again drink our blood.” …

The center’s letter to the prosecution and the police joins a number of complaints against Gopstein that are still waiting to be dealt with. He is still being investigated for statements made in 2012 which became public when he was arrested together with other activists in December 2014, after Lehava members torched the bilingual school in Jerusalem. The findings were turned over to the prosecution in May. However, indictments have not been served, and according to a report earlier this week on Channel 10, it seems the case is going to be closed.
In a sermon delivered on March 26, 2016, Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef stated: “According to Jewish law, gentiles should not live in the Land of Israel. If a gentile does not agree to take on the seven Noahide Laws, we should send him to Saudi Arabia. When the true and complete redemption arrives, that is what we will do.” According to The Times of Israel (“Chief rabbi: Non-Jews shouldn’t be allowed to live in Israel,”March 28, 2016),
The only reason non-Jews were still allowed to live in the Jewish state was the fact that the Messiah had yet to arrive, he said. “If our hand were firm, if we had the power to rule, that’s what we should do. But the thing is, our hand is not firm, and we are waiting for the Messiah,” he added.

Yosef added that gentiles who do agree to take on the Noahide Laws — a basic moral code that includes prohibitions on denying the existence of God, blasphemy, murder, illicit sexual relations, theft, and eating from a live animal, as well as a requirement to instate a legal system — will be allowed to remain in the land and fulfill roles reserved for gentiles in the service of Jews.
Controversies that have erupted in the United States rarely get any mainstream media attention. Rabbi Saadya Grama, a graduate of the Beth Medrash Govoha yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey, published a book, arguing that gentiles are “completely evil” and Jews constitute a separate, genetically superior species. The book included endorsements from several of the top rabbis of the yeshiva, to which the U.S. Congress allocated $500,000. Surprisingly, even after the book was exposed, Agudath Israel of America, a leading ultra-Orthodox organization, refused to condemn the book and others came to its defence.⁵²⁴ Some of the statements contained in this book (under the Hebrew title of Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut) and its endorsements included the following:
Gamma has written “on the subjects of the Exile, the Election of Israel and her exaltation above and superiority to all of the other nations, all in accordance with the viewpoint of the Torah, based on the solid instruction he has received from his teachers.”
“The difference between the people of Israel and the nations of the world is an essential one. The Jew by his source and in his very essence is entirely good. The goy, by his source and in his very essence is completely evil. This is not simply a matter of religious distinction, but rather of two completely different species.”
It is an indisputable fact that Jewish persecution of Christians predated any such actions by Christians toward Jews. According to Rodney Stark,
An immense amount has been written about the Roman persecutions [of Christians], but it is difficult to find more than a few lines here and there about the Jewish persecutions of the early church, whether in Palestine or in the Diaspora. Of the few studies written on this matter, some dismiss the claims that Jews persecuted Christians as fantasies and falsehoods. … Others indict the claims about Jewish persecutions of the early Christians as further proof of Christian anti-Semitism. Still others quibble that these conflicts were “intra-Jewish” and therefore cannot be identified as Jewish mistreatment of Christians. But most writers simply ignore the entire matter. That may be politique, but it is irresponsible.

These very early persecutions not only happened; they probably were a far more dangerous threat to the survival of the faith than were those by the Romans, given how very few Christians there were when these events occurred.⁵²⁵

Israel Shahak, an Israeli human rights activist, explored the origins of Jewish-Christian animosity in a broader context in his seminal study, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, where he wrote:
Judaism is imbued with a very deep hatred towards Christianity [manifested most prominently in the Talmud and Talmudic literature], combined with ignorance about it. This attitude was clearly aggravated by the Christian persecutions of the Jews, but is largely independent of them. In fact, it dates from the time when Christianity was still weak and persecuted (not least by the Jews), and it was shared by Jews who had never been persecuted by Christians or who were even helped by them.”⁵²⁶
Thus Jewish attitudes towards Christians predated the arrival of the first Jews in Poland (as mentioned, one of their earliest activities was trading in Christian slaves) and predated the attitudes vis-à-vis the Jews which Poles acquired by virtue of their Christian indoctrination. In the aforementioned book, Shahak described various traditional manifestations of Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews:
Let us begin with the text of some common prayers. In one of the first sections of the daily morning prayer, every devout Jew blesses God for not making him a Gentile. … In the most important section of the weekday prayer—the ‘eighteen blessings’—there is a special curse, originally directed against Christians, Jewish converts to Christianity and other Jewish heretics: ‘And may the apostates have no hope, and all the Christians perish instantly’. This formula dates from the end of the 1^st century, when Christianity was still a small persecuted sect. …

Apart from the fixed daily prayers, a devout Jew must utter special short blessings on various occasions … Some of these occasional prayers serve to inculcate hatred and scorn for all Gentiles. … [such as] the rule according to which a pious Jew must utter curse when passing near a Gentile cemetery … while seeing a large Gentile population he must utter a curse. Nor are buildings exempt: the Talmud lays down that a Jew who passes near an inhabited non-Jewish dwelling he must ask God to destroy it … Under the conditions of classical Judaism, however, [this rule] became impracticable and was therefore confined to churches and places of worship of other religions (except Islam). In this connection, the rule was further embroidered by custom: it became customary to spit (usually three times) upon seeing a church or crucifix, as an embellishment to the obligatory formula of regret. Sometimes insulting biblical verses were also added.⁵²⁷

Jewish animosity toward Christianity ran deep and was enduring. Moreover, some of its manifestations were undoubtedly palpable to the Poles. The cross was particularly loathed as an evil omen. A Jew from Nowy Sącz recalled how mischievous Jewish children from cheders (religious schools) would beset pious, elderly Jews, show them two crossed fingers, and taunt them by calling out, “a tsailim” (Hebrew for “crucifix”). The enraged, elderly Jews would respond with dire warnings, the traditional spitting, chasing, and even rock throwing.⁵²⁸ In a similar vein, Roman Polański recalls how, during the German occupation, he and other children chased after and taunted a Hasidic boy (there were few Hasidic families in the Kraków ghetto), pulling his peyes (side curls) and calling him names. One of the Jewish rascals even inquired how holy water is made because he wanted to “baptize” the Hasidic boy.⁵²⁹ A Jew who attended a Jewish high school in Lublin recalled the mocking and jostling a new Hasidic student had to endure from his fellow students. That student eventually discarded his traditional garb and mannerisms in order to fit in.⁵³⁰ When the author Jerzy Kosiński (Lewinkopf) pretended to be a Catholic Pole during the German occupation of Sandomierz, his Jewish playmates were baffled:
Hearing this astonishing falsehood, the other children naturally mocked him, calling him “Josek.” … Taunted as “Josek,” he struck back at the smaller and weaker children of the Lewinkopfs’ fellow Jewish tenants. He whacked one younger boy and spat on little Rebeka Blusztajn, calling her “a durty Jew.”⁵³¹

There were, of course, Jews who tried to shake off this legacy. One witness recalls his father telling him and his siblings “to respect Gentiles, especially good Christians. [He] did not want us to refer to them in the derisive word ‘goy’, but that it should rather be ‘Krist’ for a man and ‘Kristen’ for a woman.”⁵³² As the following account illustrates, good relations depended on an attitude of openness of both sides.

Mila grew up in a happy home in Zaleszczyki, Poland, a beautiful and prosperous summer resort town near the Romanian border. … The family was well-to-do and traditionally Jewish. Her father, Zygmund, was an industrialist who owned several flourmills and some property, while Mila’s mother, Fanny, chaired a Jewish organization that helped the poor and the sick. The family spoke Polish at home … they had a kosher cook who prepared their Shabbat dinners and a large seder meal at Passover. Mila remembers that Zigmund went to synagogue every week.

Zaleszczyki’s population was evenly divided between Jews, poles, and Ukrainians. Mila, who considered herself assimilated, attended the Polish gymnasium where she had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends. Her childhood and adolescence were marked by good relations with non-Jews … Not only did the family have a number if non-Jewish friends and neighbors, they also participated in Christian Polish culture, attending Christmas dinners at the homes of Christian family friends who, in turn, were invited to the family’s Purim celebrations. One year, on All Saints’ Day, Mila’s family had gone to the Christian cemetery to see the graves lit up by candles, honoring the dead.⁵³³

At home, our Jewish cook and Catholic maid were both loved and respected by us, the children. Our Polish friends invited us to their Christmas dinners. Mrs. Nedilenko used to send us a plate of Christmas goodies, and my mother reciprocated with an equally elaborate plate of sweets on Purim. In our home, I don’t ever recall hearing a derogatory remark about other people’s religion or customs. Overall, we were quite at ease in the homes of our Polish friends and did not feel out of place among them. It would be difficult to overestimate how this ease in our relationships and familiarity with Polish life helped to ensure our survival later on, when we had to pass for Catholics and live under assumed Polish names.⁵³⁴
When the Russians liberated Lvov [Lwów] in July 1944, Mila. Lola, and Jasia decided to return to their home in Zaleszczyki. … Mila stayed in Zaleszczyki for a few months, and recalls that she was received warmly and treated well by her neighbors. Some of them gave her food and furniture.⁵³⁵
As could be expected, there was also an infusion of racist stereotyping on the part of the Jews which accentuated, beyond all proportion, certain negative qualities found in Polish society. Historian Celia Heller states: “It was considered repulsive and un-Jewish for a man to get drunk. Of anyone who did, it was said, ‘He drinks like a gentile.’”⁵³⁶ British-Jewish intellectual Rafael F. Scharf recalls a popular Jewish folk song from his youth, spent in Kraków, that “ran something like this: Shiker is a goy—Shiker is er—trinken miz er—weil er is a goy (A goy is a drunkard—but drink he must—because he is a goy.)”⁵³⁷ Many Poles would have undoubtedly been aware of the way they were viewed by Jews, as Yiddish was comprehendable to people who knew German and some Poles even learned Yiddish. Scharf also underscores the sense of self-imposed separateness and isolation that, on the whole, historically divided the Polish and Jewish communities:
… many Jews, if they spoke Polish at all, spoke with a funny accent. …

Even in a small place like Cracow, where Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter, existed cheek by jowl with the non-Jewish, the lives of those neighbouring communities were, in many important senses, separate. It was possible for a Jew to grow up in a family circle, study, or prepare for a trade yet not cross the border dividing the Polish and Jewish communities. A great many Jews, in the district of Nalewki in Warsaw, in the hundreds of “shtetlach”, besides a sporadic contact with a supplier or a client lived thus—not together, but next to each other, on parallel lines, in a natural, contented isolation. During my whole life in Cracow, till my departure before the war, I was never inside a truly Polish home, whose smell, caught in passing, was somehow different, strange. I did not miss it, considered this division natural. I also do not remember whether in our home, always full of people, guests, visitors, passers-by, friends of my parents, my brother’s and mine, there ever was a non-Jew, except for one neighbour and the caretaker who would come to collect his tips, and, of course, the maid who inhabited the kitchen.⁵³⁸

Traditional values were also passed down to younger generations through Jewish schools. In the cheder in Drohiczyn, as Rabbi Shalom-Shahne Poley (Polakewich) recalled, “At the beginning of the school year, Reb Nachshon would divide his students into two groups: the bright ones and the slow ones. Sitting himself at the head of the table, he placed on one side, the bright pupils, and on the opposite side, the ‘thick heads.’ … Usually this test [on Thursday] took the form of oral recitation. First the more intelligent would be called on to recite their lessons. After this group finished, our master would turn to the other half of the class and sighingly would remark: ‘Now we shall have to turn to the goyish section.’ (The term goyish, meaning Gentiles’, also means the ignorant and slow learners.)”⁵³⁹ Isaac Bashevis Singer also went on record to criticize the cheders, Jewish religious schools, for instilling in young Jews the notion that Poles were inferior and deserving of contempt.⁵⁴⁰ A scholarly Jew who made his living as a teacher of the Talmud in Szczebrzeszyn would bang on the table and shout at the top of his lungs: “Rambam said as follows, and R’Pappa said thus, and what do you have to say, you goy gammur?” In Hebrew, the phrase meant “complete gentile,” the implication being that the target of the question was totally bereft of any knowledge having to do with the question.⁵⁴¹

In short, there are many accounts attesting to the fact that Jews displayed a broad range of attitudes and emotions concerning the Poles, as undoubtedly Poles did toward the Jews, and, because of their traditional upbringing, often these were very negative. As historian Richard Lukas correctly points out, “Life in Jewish communities had a self-perpetuating quality that made Jews dependent on traditional norms. Inevitably Polish Christians were outsiders, whom Jews often regarded suspiciously, if not contemptuously.”⁵⁴² To this he adds: “The more that is said about Polish anti-Semitism, the less understanding we have about the subject. Conversely, we hear or read virtually nothing about Jewish antipathies toward the Poles, a topic that needs to be explored to bring much-needed balance into the discussion of Polish-Jewish relations.”⁵⁴³

Lukas expanded on these remarks in an important polemic with Jewish historian David Engel about the wartime era which has not lost any of its currency:
It is quite clear that no amount of evidence suggesting that Jewish nationalism was a major factor in explaining Polish-Jewish tensions…will be accepted by Engel [here we can readily substitute a litany of names of Jewish historians—M.P.] because of his obvious preference for a monocausal explanation—namely, Polish anti-Semitism. Throughout his polemic, Engel clearly reveals his acceptance of the conventional stereotype about the Poles, which obviously does not allow for other factors in understanding Polish-Jewish wartime relations. It is very troubling that Engel and others like him are unwilling to analyze Jewish conduct before and during the war in the same critical terms in which they discuss the conduct of Poles. It is even more disturbing to me how such a one-sided interpretation could attain the degree of academic respectability it obviously has. If historians in any other field of study offered a monocausal explanation of a complex historical situation, they would be laughed out of the profession. David Engel’s sad and desperate display confirms the criticism about the state of historiography on Polish-Jewish relations that I voiced in my book [The Forgotten Holocaust]:

Unfortunately, it is disquieting to read most writings on the Holocaust, because the subject of Polish-Jewish relations is treated so polemically. Preoccupied with the overwhelming tragedy of the Jews, Jewish historians, who are the major writers on the subject, rarely if ever attempt to qualify their condemnations of the Poles and their defense of the Jews. The result is tendentious writing that is often more reminiscent of propaganda than history.⁵⁴⁴

An entirely different, and one-sided, portrayal of Polish-Jewish relations is relentlessly disseminated by Jews in the West, especially in relation to the Second World War. The image of Poles in Jewish writings in North America and Western Europe is almost uniformly negative. According to historian Max Dimont, “Poland’s action was the most shameful. Without a protest she handed over 2,800,000 of her 3,300,000 Jews to the Germans.”⁵⁴⁵ (The Poles, of course did not “hand over” the Jews to the Germans. The Germans put almost all of Poland’s Jews in ghettos, which were run on a day-to-day basis by Jewish councils and policed by the Jews themselves.) Historian Nora Levin writes: “The Nazis were well aware that Jews in Poland lived precariously in the midst of widespread popular anti-Semitism. Their laboratory of Jewish destruction could not have succeeded anywhere in Europe as successfully as in Poland. Here began the experiments in ghettoization; here were established hundreds of forced labor camps; and here were established all of the extermination camps.”⁵⁴⁶

Historian Helen Fine states: “Among populations with a strong anti-Semitic tradition or movement, there was little need for distancing. Extermination camps’ odors wafted into the Polish countryside, yet guards could be recruited and killers enlisted. … Jewish victimization can be adequately accounted for only be [sic] relating it to the success of prewar anti-Semitism.”⁵⁴⁷ (Poles, it should be noted, were the first victims of Auschwitz and many other Nazi camps and did not serve as guards in these camps; the Holocaust was implemented as thoroughly in Holland and Norway as it was in Poland.) Historian John Weiss postulates that “it seems likely that without the alliance with the West and the murderous policies of the Nazis toward the Poles, a majority [sic] of Poles would have been willing participants and not simply indifferent bystanders during the Holocaust.”⁵⁴⁸

Popular writing echoes these same sentiments. Elie Wiesel has long been on record for holding Poles co-responsible for the Nazi death camps. “As for the Poles,” he wrote in 1968, “it was not by accident that the worst concentration camps were set up in Poland, worse than anywhere else.”⁵⁴⁹ Elsewhere, this Nobel Peace Prize laureate wrote:
You may at times, be seized by rage. We had so many enemies! … the Poles betrayed them. True, here and there a “good” citizen was found whose cooperation could be bought [sic] with Jewish money. But how many good-hearted, upright Poles were to be found at the time in Poland? Very few. And where were the idealists, the universalists, the humanists when the ghetto needed them? Like all of Warsaw they were silent as the ghetto burned. Worse still: Warsaw’s persecution and murder of Jews increased once there was no longer a ghetto … Who most earns our outraged anger—the murderers, their accomplices, the szmalcownicy—the blackmailers or the common citizenry pleased in their hearts that Poland will be rid of her Jews.”⁵⁵⁰
Wiesel even extended his contempt for Poles onto Pope John Paul by hurling totally baseless charges against him.
Jewish feeling toward Pope John Paul II may have been summed up by Elie Wiesel… Writing in the New York Post, Wiesel accused the Pope of wanting to “dejudaize the Holocaust” with his “strange and offensive behavior whenever he is confronted by the crudest event in recorded history.” … “It is now clear: this Pope has a problem with Jews, just as Jews have a problem with him. His understanding for living Jews is as limited as his compassion for dead Jews,” wrote Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor. … Wiesel accused John Paul of wanting people to believe Christians suffered as much as Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps.⁵⁵¹
Other Jewish community leaders have frequently joined in this anti-Polish rhetoric. When, in 2006, the Polish government requested UNESCO to change the official name of the “Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp” to “Former German Nazi Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau,” Maram Stern, Deputy Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, protested, claiming that “they wanted to redefine history by changing the name.” He added by way of “explanation”:
Although the camp had been built and run by Nazi Germany, everybody in the area had known about its existence and workers were recruited from the Polish population in the neighboring village. The government in Warsaw wants the history of Auschwitz, which is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, to be separated from Polish history and make it clear that Poland had no involvement in the death camp.⁵⁵²

Equally offensive, if not worse, is the statement by Joël Mergui, the president of the Israelite Central Consistory of France, made during a television broadcast (“Le Grand Décryptage”) on January 6, 2016:

I would now like to remind you, as representative of the Consistory and the Jewish community, that the Jews went through history experiencing all sorts of hatred, all sorts of massacres. And, in the name of Judaism, the Jewish community never rose up to destroy Spain, which had expelled the, or to destroy Poland, which has gassed them.
Maintenant, je voudrais rappeler, je représente le Consistoire et la communauté Juive, rappeler que les Juifs ont traversé l’histoire en subissant toute sorte de haine, toutes sortes de massacres, et qu’au nom du Judaïsme, jamais la communauté Juive ne s’est levée ni pour détruire l’Espagne qui les avait expulsés ni pour détruire la Pologne qui les avait gazés.
While not aimed at destroying Poland in a physical sense, these words are certainly calculated to castigate Poland in a moral sense. It is important to note that they were not spoken not by some fringe element of Jewish society, but by its representative mainstream. These are not isolated cases: they occur with alarming frequency in the public domain and bear the hallmark of a broad-based political agenda.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (who was rescued by his Polish Catholic nanny), is one of the worst offenders. Typical of his many anti-Polish outbursts is the following, where he compared the incomparable: conditions in occupied Poland to Denmark.

While other European governments under German domination … Poland … betrayed or abandoned their Jewish populations … Where I was born, in Poland, Jews were not so lucky. Fifty years ago, the Polish government failed to halt the methodical liquidation of its Jewish population.⁵⁵³
Of course, it is trite knowledge that no vestiges of a Polish government or autonomy existed under German rule and that it was Poland’s government-in-exile that brought the news of the Holocaust to a disbelieving world. One would think that every historian would know this and the fact that the Germans did not rely on the Poles to carry out the “Final Solution” in Poland and did not man their camps with Poles. But apparently Jewish-American historians like Max Dimont (cited above) and others do not. Norman Cantor, for example, writes:
The complicity of the … Poles … was very great, and indisputable. Without their help the Germans would logistically not have been able to annihilate as many as six million Jews … The same indictment pertains to the Catholic Church in Poland, which was thoroughly inhibited by its centuries-long hostility to the Jews from doing anything significant to oppose the Nazi death camps. Polish Catholics worked in the concentration camps and for the death squads by the thousands. The Church hierarchy never advised them not to accept such employment. Poland was turned into the most savage killing field in modern history while the Church hierarchy looked on quietly.⁵⁵⁴
The teachings of these historians and “moral” authorities are not lost on the younger generations of Jews, both in Europe and North America. On October 6, 2009, Stephen John Fry, a well-known British actor, author, and television presenter of Jewish origin, said on the British TV Channel, Channel 4: “There’s been a history, let’s face it, in Poland of a right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on and know the stories, and know much of the anti-Semitic, and homophobic and nationalistic elements in countries like Poland.” He seemed to think that the death camps were rooted in Polish “right-wing Catholicism,” rather than a creation of Nazi Germany built, initially, to terrorize the Polish population in general.

As one honest observer noted, “You cannot grow up Jewish in America and not imbibe hostility toward Poles. It is a cliché for a survivor to claim, The Poles were worse than the Germans, an assertion full of bitterness.”⁵⁵⁵ Jerome Ostrov, a member of the American Jewish Committee, expressed views about Poland and the Poles typical of many North American Jews:

I had spent a lifetime developing negative views of Poland. My prejudices were very clear, well defined and unequivocal—probably, identical to most of you who are reading this article. As I saw it, Poland was the monster nation of World War II, perhaps, even more so than Germany. Why? Poland was where the extermination camps were located. Poland once proudly boasted the largest population in Jewish Europe and its loss still remains unbearable in the Jewish psyche. Finally, Poland had a history of pogroms and of segregating its Jews, and, as I saw it, the Nazi atrocities perpetrated on Polish soil would have been impossible without Polish complicity.

Strangely, my contempt for Poland even exceeded the harsh place in my mind reserved for Germany.⁵⁵⁶

Film director Steven Spielberg, who had a typical Jewish upbringing, stated in an interview published in the December 12, 1993 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer:
As a Jew growing up, I learned this in Hebrew School, in Saturday School. It was always in my mind that the Jews were both the chosen people and the persecuted people. The Poles had been persecuting the Jews long before Hitler came into power, centuries before. The Jews had to build ghettos around themselves to protect themselves from the Polish population, so that they would have their own Jewishness, their own culture.⁵⁵⁷
More recently, in a 2012 rant, radio talk show host and columnist Debbie Schlussel voiced an even more extreme version of widely held and entrenched views:
Barack Obama has done enough legitimately bad things that we don’t need to manufacture phony outrage over things he does that really aren’t so bad. Such is the case with the feigned shock and fake moralizing over his comments, yesterday, about German Nazi death camps in Poland being a Polish death camp. Here’s a tip for Poland and ignoramuses in the lumpenconservatariat who now engage in revisionist history: Poles murdered millions of Jews, they maintained several death camps, and they wiped out … hundreds of thousands of other Jewish families. This wasn’t just the Nazis. It was tens of thousands of eager Poles and more. Obama made no gaffe here. Poland’s willing executioners took their significant place among Hitler’s willing executioners.

There is a reason why Poland was so easily occupied by the Germans. Yeah, I know–they were “just taking orders.” Just taking orders when they helped round up Jews and helped man gas chambers. As if Nazis from Germany did this alone! Polish police all too happily worked with the SS to round up Jews. Polish police all too easily took their place in helping run and operate the death camps. Facts are stubborn things. …

Someone needs to remind Mr. Tusk that his people were the ones doing the hurting and the turning over to the Nazis and the mass murder of at least half of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, some of them from my family. You are “hurt” by calling Nazi death camps, “Polish”???? Um, where were they? Who helped operate them and round up and turn in the camps’ Jewish occupants, soon to be turned into ash and fumes?⁵⁵⁸
As David Samuels, the literary editor of Tablet Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, aptly summed it up: