EXCLUSIVE. Prof. Jan Żaryn critically about the Israeli journalist

In my opinion, it does not matter whether it is ignorance or deliberate manipulation and lying to people. The point is that a journalist has a profession of public trust and is a representative of some part of public opinion, therefore his statements, regardless of whether they are based on ignorance or cynicism, prove that there is some part of the Jewish community interested in untrue statements

— said Prof. Jan Żaryn in an interview with the portal wPolityce.pl, referring to the scandalous statement of an Israeli journalist who suggested that Poles participated in the extermination of Jews.

It is known that Polish lands were under German and Soviet occupation during the Second World War; the borders between the two occupations were changing, which was a result of the variability of warfare, while in no part of those years 1939-45 there was any Polish state that would collaborate with the Third Reich or the Soviet Union until 1944 at least as far as the Soviet Union was concerned.

The only representation of the Polish nation in those years was the Polish Underground State and the Polish government in exile. In the case of Polish-Jewish relations - we repeat this again and again, because for us Poles it is obvious - that both the Polish Underground State, its civil and military structures, including judicial ones, and the Polish government in exile, its financial structures concerning the budgeting of the Polish Underground State, diplomacy, the Ministry of Information, i.e. the whole sphere of information, all the institutions of both these structures, at least from 1942, were included in the goal of the war to help Jews

— he recalled, adding that „there is no other such state or nation that could give such synthetic information to the world”.

The reluctance of Jewish communities to keep this truth alive - and to maintain and emphasize it - is disgusting from the point of view of historical truth and the lack of reaction from the Jewish side of journalists condemning this type of journalism is also disgraceful, because it does not facilitate Polish-Jewish relations, and what I said about the role of the Polish Underground State and the Polish government in exile is a canonical knowledge for Poles. Nobody can undermine it, because the obvious cannot be undermined

— he informed.

Tłum. K.J.