wPolityce.pl: What do you think about the conference “New Polish School of Shoah History”?

DR PIOTR GONTARCZYK, historian of the Institute of National Remembrance, investigating German crimes from the period of World War II, as well as the fate of Poles and Jews and mutual relations between these nations in occupied areas by Germans and Soviets:

What happened there was, on the one hand, a rather embarrassing spectacle and, on the other hand, an extremely dangerous one. We are dealing with attempts to rebuild the history of Poland, in which Poles are widely accused of participation in the Holocaust. The demonstration of this school is a book published a year ago entitled “Ahead is the Night - the Fates of Jews in Selected Districts of Occupied Poland” edited by Prof. Barbara Engelking and Prof. Jan Grabowski.

What is being made in this book has nothing to do with science. Poles are credited with participation and co-responsibility in deportations and murders of Jews on a mass scale.

The most important tools of this operation are scissors for cutting the content of sources and cutting out the described facts from the historical context and landscape; we also have a whole range of other methods of manipulation. Sometimes up to a dozen or so on the page. All this gives rise to a suspicion of planned, mass mystification. For most authors, before opening their own „research school”, I would rather recommend using already existing institutions in order to get acquainted with the basic arcana of the scientific workshop. For some, it would be useful to learn how to assign quotations from sources without making a few mistakes and adding what is not there. Some lessons in mathematics, grammar and spelling would be useful as well. Because for now it is just embarrassment and disgrace.

wPolityce.pl: Could you comment on the statement made by Professor Jacek Leociak, who endeavours to prove that Poles are responsible for Jews and now the Polish government is trying to whitewash the Poles in this regard.

Let’s quote: „Building an alternative vision of the history of extermination, in which millions of Poles save Jews in large numbers, risking their lives and dying, and Jews live as snug as a bug in a rug in their autonomous provinces, i.e. ghettos, given to them by the Germans. To finally burn their Jewish brothers and sisters. Such filthy, anti-Semitic jokes can be heard on state television in Poland”!

DR PIOTR GONTARCZYK: So if we do not accept the narration offered to us by the new Polish school of the history of the Holocaust, we are in a hypocritical world where we replace the truth with „counterfeits”; we are outside the world of documents and accounts.

How to comment on it? If one cannot say anything wise in the field of logic and factography, one cannot defend this whole operation of reconstruction of the vision of history with arguments from the world of science, then one reaches for religious mysticism, curses and Jewish bones. Then one imposes one’s vision of history by means of blackmail and power.

The problem is that it is exactly the other way round: the people gathered in Paris have little to do with truth and science. Reading their works it is impossible to resist the impression that in this book the fate of the Jews matters to them about as much as a June bug in July. They simply couldn’t care less.

Here, the main goal and object were Poles: those who really committed evil deeds against Jews, and above all those to whom - in the collective and individual dimension - such guilt could be imputed by means of mass manipulation.

In this way, the authors of this book attribute to Poles on a large scale crimes and guilt which they have never committed. I can give you dozens of names of people to whom this book attributes the killing or denunciation of Jews, and who did not commit these crimes. In addition, this society happens to be quite often silent about, in all available ways, about the cases of help provided by Poles found in sources. What is particularly embarrassing, thieves and murderers are also made here of those who helped Jews and who saved them. Without any reliable basis.

In one of the texts I even found words, which I and other scientists clearly read as a mockery of the medal awarded to Yad Vashem, that he did not really deserve it.
wPolityce.pl: So, in your opinion, is it difficult to treat this meeting seriously in scientific terms, and to take the calculations made there as reliable?

DR PIOTR GONTARCZYK: All calculations, data of scientific statistics provided by the aforementioned authors are devoid of elementary scientific credibility. By various key tables, calculations of killed or denounced Jews, there are stars with the inscription ” self-assessment”. Some of the tables, their columns, the ways of qualification in terms of logic and the general intellectual level resembles a typical humour from school notebooks. And then this „scientific sham” is followed by very heavy accusations.

That is a bit like a conversation with cloakroom men in the film “Miś”: „I am saying that you killed one million Jews, and what are you gonna do about it, huh??” It’s hard to resist the impression that it’s completely without foundation.

Let’s take the monograph of Bielsk Podlaski county, which was also confused on the map with Biała Podlaska (luckily not with Bielsko-Biała). It turned out that the alleged crimes of Poles against Jews described there often did not take place at all, the same with denunciations. It also seems that the author counts the same people twice under slightly changed names. And so in general, Poles who were to commit crimes turned out to be… Belarusians.

The whole text by Prof. Engelking is simply a scientific farce. In this and a few other cases of founders of new scientific schools, I would again recommend a solid training in the basic elements of scientific workshop and credible footnoting. wPoliytce.pl: What is the source of this wave, repeated once again, aimed at attributing German crimes to Poles?

wPolityce.pl:How to defend against this?

DR PIOTR GONTARCZYK: This question can only be addressed to the authors of this book and representatives of this community. However, I cannot help remarking that it is possible to live off the Holocaust and somehow to function thanks to it. If you wrote something credible, reliable, about German crimes in Poland, who do you think would be interested in it? However, things are quite different when you make an important discovery of „Polish mass participation in the Holocaust”. Oh, then it may even give rise to setting up a new „research school”.

It’s a bit like in communist times: if you are nobody and you want you to make a career and become popular you should discover something new about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. So they are doing their best. Especially that there is a clear demand for such activity. You would not believe what they cut out, removed and threw out of history in this book. The fact that the real role of Judenrats and the achievements of the Jewish police has been removed or reworked on a large scale, that Germans disappear from the descriptions of German crimes in a broader historical perspective and Poles are replacing them, is basically all in line with the logic of this environment. But certain modifications introduced to the descriptions simply make your hair stand on end.

In one of the court cases after the war there is a witness who said that during the events he described he played football with his friends next to the Jewish cemetery. In his book one of the masters of the „new Polish school of Holocaust research” Dariusz Libionka wrote that this young boy, Piotr Sosnowski, played football at the Jewish cemetery (T. II, p. 160-161). This change is not accidental here, as the author made dozens of similar changes. Historical truth is not important here. It is important to adapt it now to one’s own expectations and ideas about Poles. From this point of view, it was probably decided that it would sound better if Poles were playing at the Jewish cemetery.

wPolityce.pl: How to defend against this?

DR PIOTR GONTARCZYK: In the only way possible in science: the more solid research and publications, the less field for scientific charlatanry.

Rozm. M.K., Tłum. K.J