Ep. 20- Polish Jewish Relations in the Holocaust with Jan Grabowski

The story of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust is an incredibly complex and difficult one.  On the one hand, Poles and Jews both suffered horribly under the Nazis.  On the other, however, the general climate in Poland was inhospitable to Jews and many Poles took advantage of the Nazi occupation to victimize their Jewish neighbors for a variety of reasons.

In this episode, I talked with Jan Grabowski about the history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust.  We talked about the role of the Blue Police in hunting down and killing the Jews and we also talked about the polarizing memory battles and weaponization of this history in Poland today.

Jan Grabowski is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.  He is a renowned scholar of the Holocaust and author of several important books on the topic.

Grabowski, Jan. On Duty - The Polish Blue & Criminal Police in the Holocaust (2024)Grabowski, Jan. Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland (2022)Grabowski, Jan. Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland(2013)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.388)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today I am really, really excited about this topic because it's a difficult one, but I think a really important one. And today we're gonna talk about the challenging history of Polish Jewish relations during the Holocaust. And I am very, very honored to have Professor Jan Grabowski on the podcast to lead us through this contentious topic. And I think you'll realize as we get started,

and why he's really one of the perfect people to talk about this topic. So, Jan, welcome to the podcast.

Jan (00:35.963)
Well, thank you very much for your invitation and hello everybody. I'm delighted to be here.

Waitman (00:42.052)
Can you start by just introducing yourself, tell us where you are, what you do, how you got interested in this topic in particular?

Jan (00:49.179)
Sure, I'm now and have been for the last 31 years a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. And for the last three and a half, four years, I have been spending most of my time in Warsaw, whenever I could. But since during the pandemic, I could teach online, so I spent more time in Poland. I...

I was actually trained as a 17th, 18th century historian and I sort of, as people sometimes say, you don't choose Holocaust, Holocaust chooses you. So Holocaust chose me about 25 years ago. And it was, I must, you know, it must have been somehow growing on me for some time. My father was a Holocaust survivor, which, which, which,

probably played a role. And I was, as this, let's say, child of a mixed Polish Jewish family, I was very early on exposed in Poland during my youth, so to say, to various kinds of antisemitism. So it sort of formed my perception of the world in a way and made me much more aware of the prejudice than otherwise I would have been. So, you know, this is the luggage with which I arrived at this station that we call...

the beginning of the study of the Holocaust.

Waitman (02:10.788)
I mean, that's a really great segue from your personal history into the actual history itself, because one of the challenges has always seemed to me with Polish memory, in particular of Polish -Jewish relations during the Holocaust. I mean, even saying Polish -Jewish relationships is already kind of making a distinction between Poles and Jews rather than Polish non -Jews and Polish Jews, which is already kind of an interesting conversation.

Jan (02:38.851)
Yeah.

Waitman (02:40.932)
you know, rhetorical problem to have, right? And there's lots of sort of questions, I think, you know, we can begin with, but I guess, you know, yeah, yeah, please, please, any.

Jan (02:43.547)
Right.

Jan (02:48.795)
Can I jump in before we can just for a second? Last year, I published, a year ago, I published an article together with my colleague from California, Shira Klein, about how Holocaust is being falsified on English Wikipedia.

And the article was pretty well read, 40 ,000 downloads in the course of a couple of months. In any case, the thing is that I discovered, or Shira told me, that there are three areas on the Wikipedia that require highest grade of, let's say, passage from the editors to be able to add anything at all. One is the Pakistani India.

Waitman (03:08.324)
Mm -hmm.

Jan (03:34.427)
conflict, the second one is the Israel -Palestine conflict, and the third one, you guessed it right, is Polish -Jewish relations during the war. Go figure, right?

Waitman (03:45.188)
Yeah, no, I've actually actually use that article. I'm writing an article on the current state of Holocaust denial in the U .S. and that was that was helpful as well, you know, in that in that area. And again, you know, this is the complex part, which is that. Non -Jewish Poles suffered greatly during the during the Nazi occupation and.

Jan (04:05.147)
I mean, please, let's go with Poles and Jews, because if you say non -Jewish Poles, it implies Jewish Poles, and there were no Jewish Poles before the war and during the war. I mean, there were Poles and Jews. I mean, we can get to this later on, but I am becoming very uneasy whenever I hear about non -Jewish Poles or Jewish Poles. They didn't exist, simply.

Waitman (04:17.316)
Okay.

Yay.

Waitman (04:28.548)
Fair enough. Yeah. So, I mean, again, it's one of those things where, you know, Poles suffer greatly under the Nazis. But Jews did obviously as well. And one of the challenges which I want to talk about today is how do we parse and how do we characterize the behavior and attitudes of Poles toward Jews during the Holocaust? And what is the impact of their behavior and their choices? Because on the one hand,

Certainly it's fair to say that Poland has the most right to some of the nations as rescuers, but there's another side to this too, right?

Jan (05:06.747)
Of course. I mean, the thing is that, you know, I have been studying this topic for the last 25 years and I have been thinking about this topic for last 50, perhaps six years to be more precise. So the thing is, I have no, I don't have all the answers, but this is a complex situation because also fairly rare one. And namely you have a poles, a society which is really steeped in own traditional victimhood.

It's so deep you cannot believe it. It's as if World War II ended yesterday basically. So the sense of the sense that World War II actually the ethics of ethos of World War II permits the Polish society to the bone, to the core.

and you basically assume being in Poland, a Polish child, you are being taught, trained to know, understand that World War II is the time when your nation, your grandfathers and grandmothers, or great grandfathers and great grandmothers, reached the pinnacle of human sacrifice and highest level of moral behavior. The whole society united against the Germans, true or nearly true, and the whole society holding out.

this high moral ground. And here, unfortunately, when you knock on these doors, it rings very hollow. And that's what I have been knocking on these doors for the last few decades. And indeed, this hollow sound is something that can wake you up in the night. Because what happens is that – and this is this painful part – that a society, victimized victim society, can also turn vicious against even weaker

and even more victimized part of the society, which is exactly what happened. And indeed, there are 7 ,000 plus...

Jan (07:01.243)
people who have been recognized as righteous and Poles, recognized as righteous among the nations. But one has to understand that there is a very, very sustained state effort to make these distinctions, let's say, research -wise available. And second is that there were three million Jews who wanted to be helped.

So when you actually divide the number of these medals by number of population, you'll find out that there is one person in 3 ,700 who was rewarded and in other countries it was so. In any case, we don't want to get to these numbers, but the problem is, going back to your question, is that there was a variety of attitudes to Jews. They shifted from one area to another, from one period of time to another.

One has to remember that occupation in Poland was absolutely vicious. I came across an interrogation of a German Wehrmacht soldier.

who was actually sentenced to prison term in Copenhagen in 1943 for killing a Dane on the street. And in his plea to a A, he said, look, what do you want of me? I mean, I just was transferred from Warsaw for shooting a pedestrian on the street. I would have been recognized as with some kind of honorable mention.

So this gives you an idea of this difference. So the attitudes of Poles, Polish society, to Jews shifted from time to time, from place to place. But generally what happened is that with the flow of time, this, even before the war,

Jan (08:51.195)
there was no love lost between the two nations, let's say, living inside the same state. The final years of late 1930s were particularly difficult. It was this height of fascism -driven nationalism that swept the land in Poland, Europe, basically, Central Europe, definitely, and Poland to an extent too.

Waitman (09:15.46)
And this is, this is Dmofsky, right? The Dmofsky era. Yeah.

Jan (09:17.883)
This is the Dmokvsk people, the Nationalist party, which was, let's say, they didn't hold power, but they were extraordinary, resourceful and influential. And so the economic boycott became practically a daily occurrence. The so -called numerus nullus or numerus clausus in the universities, excluding Jews, and so from professions.

So the situation was very bad before the war and simply it took a plunge during the war because the Germans, you know, many years ago I wrote an article about the German Nazi propaganda for Poles in Poland during the war. And the thing is that these German propagandists, which were able people, they were coming from Berlin, sent by, they were sent by Goebbels,

But they couldn't find those entry points because, I mean, Poles universally hated the Germans, especially after the conquest. And they said that there are only two areas in which they can really press. One is the hatred of the Soviet Union and communism. And the second is universal hatred of the Jews. And indeed, they use these two points of entry favoring the Jewish one from very start and with success. So attitudes, you can find all of them, but...

As one of my colleagues wrote recently in a very good article, she said, you know, very often you say that 5 % was against, 5 % was in favor. So 5 % harmed, 5 % helped and 90 % were indifferent. Well, not true. One would have wished for 90 % indifference. And that's at least what you could hear from very many survivors. But we also have to understand that...

the Holocaust in Poland has been the most horrifying genocide of all European genocides at the time. If you look at the Holocaust numbers in Poland, survival rate for Polish Jews who found themselves here, I'm speaking from Warsaw today, was 1%. So 30 ,000 out of 3 million. I mean, you are talking about a system which has been nearly perfect.

Jan (11:38.939)
in terms of German efficiency. However, this system relied on external actors and by external actors I mean various parts of Polish society. So, you know, this is a huge topic.

Waitman (11:52.164)
And I think this is the sort of heart of the matter, which is a lot of the sort of Polish nationalist, historian maker kind of people, right, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, a little bit later, like to make the argument that there was no collaboration by Poles with the Nazis as a sort of an institutional level, right, which is like, okay, fair enough, there's no Vichy Poland.

Jan (12:16.251)
Great.

Jan (12:19.803)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (12:21.444)
but i think as you're alluding to that doesn't mean that there was a spittle environment for jews in in occupied poland right and i think that's that becomes an area in which you know some polls may not have sort of said i want to do the nazis want me to do but there is a confluence of interests and you know it if they're getting to use them that's okay by me kind of thing

Jan (12:45.307)
Yeah. I mean...

Yeah, I mean, the thing is that you actually you press the right button here. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. The thing is that there was practically no political collaboration and the word to use might be here collusion. What you have when it's very interesting when you look at not so frequent, rather infrequent post -war trials of people who got in a pulse, who were involved in

some kind of anti -Jewish activities, a variety of them. What you can see, one thing is that whenever they actually were being sent and being there, their trials were held under an article for collaboration with the enemy. And they were very, most of them were deeply upset. I mean, they said, of course, yes, we did murder the Jews, but we're not collaborating.

We were not collaborating with the Germans. We did it because there was a higher good in our deeds and future Poland needed to be cleansed of the Jews or even more frequently, something which we'll discuss probably later, in the case of blue police, we just helped our Polish community to save itself from a danger. We removed the Jewish problem to save our people. So this...

collaboration, I wouldn't call it collaboration, I would call it rather working towards the same end from very different perspectives or collusion, if you will.

Waitman (14:20.1)
Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the salient points, you know, because I just did a podcast with Chad Gibbs talking about Treblinka and talking about the escape from Treblinka, you know, and unfortunately, a lot of the survivors who escaped from the camp don't survive the war. And part of that has to do with the behavior of the local population. And, you know, again, it...

Jan (14:30.331)
Great.

Jan (14:45.131)
yeah.

Waitman (14:48.868)
It doesn't mean that the local population is pro -Nazi if they are anti -Jewish, but the end result is the same, right? That's the point. The end result is the same for the survivor trying to find a place to hide or whatever. It doesn't really matter what the reason is.

Jan (14:54.267)
no, but they are very much. Yeah. I mean.

Jan (15:02.707)
yeah, I mean, if you look, sorry to jump in again before I forget things, but in my advanced age, people start to forget things. They don't have the chance to right away rush to the mic. No, but the thing is that I actually wrote about Treblinka neighborhood in my recent book, Night Without End. And actually I was looking at the area immediately surrounding Treblinka. So, I mean,

Waitman (15:08.676)
Yo!

Jan (15:28.507)
Of course, this is not a question of Jew hatred, although antisemitism, of course, helps. This is a, let's say, an area on which...

the deadly anti -Jewish actions grow. So antisemitism helps to let's say develop murderous designs and murderous actions. Of course there is no doubt about it. But around Treblinka what I found out was interesting is that Treblinka actually each and every labor camp or death camp or concentration camp in Poland produced, I call it, a zone of evil.

Zone of Evil, which means that, because imagine now if you have, you have about 900 ,000 people, Jews transported from all around Europe, mostly from Poland, but from all countries actually, from as far as Bulgaria, right? Greece, they are transported to Treblinka. So 900 ,000 people. Now these 900 ,000 people, most of them know only that they are going to the unknown.

What do you take with you when you are going to the unknown? Well, last belongings you have, everything valuable you still have. And now on their way to Treblinka, thousands upon thousands will break out of the wagons and they will rush through the forest. And of course, that would be fair game.

Because when you read the Polish resistance report, this is El Dorado for the local peasants. I mean, if you catch yourself a Jew in the forest, chances that he will have three so -called double eagles, which is 20 US dollars in gold. And this will buy you three cows or four cows or more. So there is this as the right span, for instance, one of the refugees fled from Treblinka. He said that there was a kind of a feeding frenzy.

Jan (17:20.859)
Glazar, another one, who fled Treblinka, Richard Glazar, rest a powerful book. Also the same thing. So this was, so the zones of evil, they are the murderous actions grow out of antisemitism fueled by greed and economic, let's say, you know, opportunities.

Waitman (17:39.14)
Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny because I took some friends to some of these places in Poland last year and we went to Belzec and the one of the sort of curators at what is what was Christian Wirtz house is now sort of an education center. Very nice woman. And she had sort of invited us in and answered our questions. And we were talking something about the buildings. What was what was still there? What wasn't there? And she said that basically, as soon as the Nazis left Belzec,

the locals came in and were just digging up all of the, you know, his, the yard of Christian Ferdinand because they, you know, and because of the same reason, you know, that they sort of see this as that there must be sort of valuables everywhere.

Jan (18:14.267)
yeah.

Jan (18:22.683)
In Belgium there is a very powerful book written by a very good journalist, but let's say Dublin is historian too. I don't know how to translate the... Yeah, it's like a sieve. The title is the sieve thing that you sift dirt through looking for gold.

Waitman (18:40.612)
Yep. Yep.

Jan (18:43.707)
he was actually researching this thing and he found still militia files from 1985 from Beaudet's area, still of catching people with you know other people's jaws in order to look for golden teeth. So this sort of commerce lasted until 1985, so you know I was in my mid -20s at the time. So just imagine.

And what happened after the war, Jan Grosz, in Treblinka for instance, Jan Grosz describes very well in his horrifying book, Golden Harvest, it's a detailed account of what has happened.

Waitman (19:22.852)
Yeah, and I think that's actually a great segue into this, maybe for our listeners who don't know all the history, because Jan Gross wrote another book before Golden Harvest called Neighbors, which is a great introduction and I think certainly for the English speaking world, brought the topic we're talking about today, exploded it on the world scene and obviously on the domestic Polish front.

it was just massively important and maybe you know if you didn't read the book obviously on the maybe you could sort of into introduce us to the advab na and situation and then sort of the impact it has in poland

Jan (20:00.699)
Yeah, sure.

It was actually year 2000 when Jan Tomasz Grosz, who at the time, now he's retired, but he was professor of history at, I think at CUNY at the time, later moved to Princeton. And so Jan Grosz published this small book, I mean booklet basically, a hundred pages perhaps, built around, to be honest, one Jewish testimony, which actually was known, but no one believed it.

There were a few historians who sniffed around as a testimony of a, I think, Wasserstein was his name, who survived in a pigsty, I believe, most of the two years, and saved by a kind Polish woman. And he described in very much detail, he described that, you know, as soon as the German invasion on the Soviet Union started, German forces moved to eastern Poland, chasing the Red Army, and in his fair

city of Jedwabne, which was a shtetl basically, half Polish, half Jewish, and the locals, with certain German encouragement but without actually German presence, decided to murder all the Jews they could lay their hands on.

And so it was it was it was preceded by torture, horrifying scenes of violence, people's head getting cut off. And then the rest of the Jewish population of this town has been herded into a barn by their Polish neighbors and the barn has been put on fire. So these people were burned alive. And and then.

Jan (21:41.307)
So the book sent shock waves, I told you in the beginning of our meeting that in Poland this is this victim, my victim of victim status and suddenly, you know, how to reconcile the situation with this horror staring you in the face. Okay, so it sent really tremendous, I would say, those tremors through the Polish society, discussions, debates.

And interestingly, it has been dismissed after two or three years. I had even hopes that it would somehow break through this silence or rejection. It didn't. Finally, the optimistic scenario that won was that, look, perhaps the Germans were involved more than we know. Second, you know, it's...

even if it happened, you know, it's a remote eastern Poland, these people are very strange over there, so it would not have happened elsewhere. And third, you know, Jews had it coming, to be frank, because they were collaborating with the communists before. So all these things overlapped and they became, I would say, the official policy of Holocaust denial in a way during last eight years, at least in Poland. And when historians came to the

for with the idea that it was not yet Wabna actually, it was 24 other places in the same neighborhood where exactly the same actions or mass murders took place, there was silence. And so when I started publishing my, let's say, my findings that actually these massacres were...

continued in 1942 and 1943 in various parts of Poland. Well then really the hate, the wave of hate campaigns, in this case against me but also Jan Gross, really began.

Waitman (23:33.828)
And if I remember correctly, you know, one of the criticisms of gross buys a lot of these sort of right wing historian people and pundits and things like this, you know, was that, the information is coming from Soviet slash communist interrogations and therefore, you know, it can't be valid, which sort of seems in some ways like you're again, again, playing to.

you what you're talking about in terms of this sort of victim mentality, because again, in some ways, and I'm an outsider to this, but it seems like that the Polish victim narrative sort of there's a continuity from World War Two through the communist period that sort of, you know, even in Lviv where, you know, I just finished a book on Janowska in Lviv and the museum there, which is, I think it's a good museum. I don't think it's, it's, it, it

Jan (24:07.483)
Hmm.

Jan (24:22.491)
yeah.

Waitman (24:33.412)
falls under this category but it's it's called the territory of terror museum but it's it's a it's it's everything it goes all the way through the communist period and there's no sort of there's a sort of break between the so it's just sort of bad things that happened in la vive all the way through the sort of period right

Jan (24:50.491)
This is a very East European phenomenon which is seeking to equal, to put the mark of equality between Nazi crimes and communist crimes. This is a part of a broader phenomenon which is called the Holocaust envy. However bad it sounds, it is something very old actually. In Poland, Holocaust envy started as soon as the Holocaust ended.

For instance, there is this number in Poland, which every child learns at school, that during the war, Germans murdered 6 million Poles, Polish citizens. And 3 million Polish Jews and 3 million Poles.

And now the whole thing was it was recently discovered that the whole story about 3 million and 3 million has been concocted by communist party officials in 1945 when they took over because they were informed that in reality the numbers were 3 million Jews, that's true, and 1 .8 million ethnic Poles.

And it was deemed not sufficient enough because the communists, and that's the irony of the thing, the communists when they arrived with the Soviet forces, right, they were perceived as Soviet lackeys.

and by extension Jewish lackeys, since everybody knows in Poland that Jews are called communists and vice versa and so on. So the communists were very wary of, let's say, underplaying Polish suffering or overplaying Jewish suffering. So the decision was to make them equal. And, you know, it has been now what, nearly eight years, and this is the still thing being taught in schools. And you mentioned now the question of

Jan (26:44.589)
sources which are seen in Poland as non -trustworthy because they were produced under the communist regime. You referred here to, actually Jan Grosz was basing his findings on Jewish testimony for the most part, but also on these post -war trials held under communism. But the thing is that I have been studying these files for now for years and years. I have read

well, tens of thousands of pages of these court proceedings from the late 1940s. The thing is, I call them orphan cases. Why? Because nobody was really interested in conducting these proceedings. One, Jews were already dead or gone from Poland after 1946 pogrom in Kielce. Two, the communist authorities were not really interested in pursuing...

Poles who hurt the Jews for the same reason, because they did not want to seem being Jewish lackeys, right? And third, ethnic Poles were not interested in these proceedings for obvious reasons. So you have this, you know, this coming together. But these proceedings were held in extraordinary circumstances, and usually they were actually abandoned halfway through. So they are actually very politically very neutral. They are very, I would say, trustworthy, especially on the level of early investigations.

Waitman (28:08.644)
how do they even, I mean, this is just an aside, but I mean, given all the obstacles you just mentioned and the reasons why nobody wants to do these, how do they come about in the first place?

Jan (28:20.027)
Well, okay, they come about if you have a murder which is witnessed by the entire community, right? Someone will report it because they just, people, you know, they tend, someone betrays someone. Usually the spurned wife will go to the militia and say, look, my dear husband.

cheated on me, but by the way, do you know that we have three Jewish women buried in our garden, right? So this is the kind of cases. So if you have violence which is witnessed by no one or nearly no one, chances are practically nil. If you have violence in the village, let's say setting or in the urban setting that has been witnessed by many, then of course someone will go through the motions in form of authorities. And then you have the proceeding, which has proceedings which are very...

reluctantly conducted by the prosecutor's office, they want to shut it down. The judges want to shut it down because the judges are for the most part pre -war nationalistic judges throughout the Stalinist period. They don't have the manpower or womanpower, the communists, to, you know, to staff the courts. So they use pre -war experts who are...

many of them deeply anti -Semitic. There is actually a very good book by Mr. Kornblut about this post -war justice in Poland and he came across a manuscript of a prosecutor who explained in this manuscript how they basically tried to derail these proceedings to make them disappear. So I know this is a whole interesting story too.

Waitman (29:58.212)
Yeah, I mean, I guess another question that that a raise it that rises up, right? Because there there there obviously are multiple motivations for why someone would turn on their Jewish neighbors, right? From sort of individual animosities, grudges, economic reasons, et cetera. But how do we explain these these massacres? I mean, these these sort of outright sort of vicious, violent and public.

killings in the context of sort of Polish history.

Jan (30:31.131)
This is something that actually, I am not at a loss because this is at the center of what I try to understand to do, right? This is what makes, propels my work, try to understand what, how such an unfathomable, absolutely unimaginable thing could have happened because, you know,

If you look at German policemen of Einsatzgruppen who are shooting Jews by hundreds of thousands, they are shooting people they have never met before, for the most part, and people who they have no relation with. Now here you are talking about people murdering their girlfriends, their colleagues from school benches, right?

And these, so what kind of explanation can you find? Well, the only convincing part that I'm coming up is that when you look at 1940, 41, 42, there is ghettoization, the all the addicts and regulations against the Jews, making them less and less human. And this grows on a ground which is well prepared by anti -Semitism from pre -war time, as I mentioned. So my idea is that by the summer of 1942, in eyes of very many

Jews' life was worth zero. The process of dehumanization of the Jews went very far and very quickly. And if you look at what these… I mean, this is a house of horrors. If you read a few thousand pages of depositions of these peasants who describe this in a matter of fact way what they did or what their neighbors did. If we have a moment of time, one more example.

Waitman (32:08.388)
yep, plenty of time.

Jan (32:09.915)
Okay, imagine I usually go to villages or to areas which I write about and there is less and less to be found but still a wealth of information on the ground. So...

I come to a village in which a horrible crime has been committed in November 1943, close to Krakow in southern Poland, in the forest, beautiful area. There were sizable Jewish communities which were destroyed by the end of 1942. So there is a group of Jews, I found even their names, six people, one woman, five men, and they are hidden by a Polish peasant in his house. He actually builds a very ingenious,

double walls inside and there is a chamber in which they hide and he gives them food. They pay him good money. It's a very it's a transaction based on exchange of services for money. But very soon the village knows because if your wife starts to hold two buckets of water instead of one bucket of water from the well and the well is being in sight of you know and so on. People know. And so this peasant

gets very, very, you know, worried. And one day he just out to his friends in Polish resistance and he says, look, I need you to solve my Jewish problem. And so there is a troop of Kedif Akka, Home Army Resistance People, local boys, and they come and they murder all these Jews and they rob their bodies. It's a horrible story. And...

Then after 1945 someone squeals and militia in 1947 to be more precise they dig up the remains and there is trial. Long story short I arrive in this village and I try to find out. Actually in one house they set dogs on me so I had to run back to my car but I thought a bit and then I went to local priest and the priest said no it's not true I have been here for 25 years.

Waitman (34:06.02)
Ha.

Jan (34:14.075)
And it's not true. Nothing like this happened. So I left him the copies of trial records. I said, look, good father, please have a look at this. Perhaps if you have any questions, this is my business card. Lo and behold, after half a year, I receive a phone call. And this is the father, Buczki, calling me from Poland. I was at the time in Canada. And he tells me that he was so intrigued that he started to...

to talk to people. And he said yes, that everything has been confirmed. And he gave me more details even. And then he was, but he was troubled mostly that he never knew about this thing. I said, look, I am giving my parishioners last rites, okay? The last sacrament that a Catholic church gives to the faithful. And there...

obligation is on their deathbed to admit to their sins. And I never heard, and these people, some of these people from my records, I gave them last rites. So what's going on? I said, dear father, I said, perhaps in their minds it was not a sin that what they did, killing a Jew perhaps was not a sin. So, you know, this is just a little, little example taken from, from, from, from the annals of history, so to say.

Waitman (35:28.164)
I mean, but it's a fascinating microcosm of sort of the phenomenon. I mean, it reminds me of a film which is one of my favorite. I think it's a really, really powerful film called Pocosi, right? The Aftermath, the Polish film, you know, which is a similar. I mean, I think it's really instructive. It's a really good film. It's sort of it basically and I recommend it to our listeners. You know, it it basically tells a story of these two Polish brothers sort of excavating the.

Jan (35:38.715)
What's the right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the same story, but...

Waitman (35:57.124)
both figuratively and literally excavating sort of the history of their little village and how it reacted to sort of Jews into the occupation. But I guess one of the questions you brought up, the Home Army, and I think it's interesting to ask the question then, what is the relationship between the Home Army and Zhegotah, which is sort of the Jewish wing of the Home Army, or the rescue organization? I mean,

What is the relationship between the Polish official resistance, right? Because one of the things that often comes up about with sort of the right in Poland is, you know, this sort of deification of the Home Army. And, you know, it's always, well, the Home Army tried to help choose, et cetera, et cetera. What's the sort of, what's the truth of that?

Jan (36:32.155)
Mm -hmm.

Jan (36:41.915)
The thing is that you have to understand that Zagota, this very unique organization to help Jews, belonged to the so -called civil part of the civil authorities of Polish underground. It had very little to do with the armed part, which was the Home Army.

and they were rather subject to so called delegatura, which was the civil part of civil authorities in the underground. There was a whole so called underground state in Poland. And now the problem with the problem with the Holma army was that was very, very distrustful of the Jews. And the best example is basically.

During the months leading to the uprising in Warsaw ghetto, so early 1943, last month of 1942, a desperate attempt has been made by Antek Cukierman and others from the Jewish underground, from the Jewish fighting organization to obtain some weapons and they received practically nothing.

And the reason that the leader of Home Army at the time said that, you know, it basically would be like throwing good money after bad. The Jews are not people to fight. Okay. They are.

tradition is in Polish culture, Jews means cowards. So you don't give them weapons because there are few weapons for our brave young boys. And if we give weapons to Jews, then my goodness, what will happen? They will lose the weapons. I mean, they will be killed and the weapons will be lost to Germans. A second part was that we don't give the weapons to the Jews because they are communists, of course, or they are in cahoots with the communists. So do we want and communists are our deadly enemy right after or perhaps even at par with the Germans.

Jan (38:24.443)
right? And third, do we want to arm the Jews who will now start their uprising and the German, the East, the Ostfront is still, you know, 1000 miles from here. So God forbid they will pull into their fight our own Polish population and who will get slaughtered because the Germans are still too powerful. So this basically explains the attitude, but it was more morbid than that because actually Home Army had standing policy of not accepting Jews to their ranks. It's not by chance that during the 1944

uprising in Warsaw, the so -called Polish uprising, and the Jews who took part in the fighting, they for the most part, they sought...

the very small groups of communist underground which tolerated them. An example once again is quite personal to me. My father was actually at the time 16, 17 and he was in Warsaw when the Polish uprising broke out hiding.

And he told me that on one occasion, one of the most dangerous moments in his career, so to say, during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, was when a staff sergeant of Home Army decided to kill him because he was a Jew and started shooting at him. And my father avoided trying to run through the ruins, avoided the shots, but these shots have been fired. So, you know, it's a very complicated story.

Waitman (39:55.236)
And it also leads in, you know, talking about institutions, you know, the because I many years ago, I tangled with the sort of Polish far right nationalists on Twitter about, you know, about the Holocaust. And so I feel like I have a yeah, I feel like I have a somewhat somewhat good understanding of their rhetoric. Right. And some of which some of it you already sort of mentioned, which is that, you know, whenever.

Jan (40:12.251)
Good luck. Good luck.

Waitman (40:23.844)
whenever you bring up anything related to this topic, you get Witold Pilecki, and then you get a list of prominent Jews in the Soviet administrative apparatus and in post -war Polish apparatus. And one of the things they always say is, unlike other countries,

Jan (40:39.387)
Yes.

Waitman (40:52.772)
Poland had no collaboration as organizations, which I've kind of alluded to already. But in a certain sense, that's almost true. But your work on the blue police sort of suggests that there is an organization, a pre -war organization that does, again, to use your words, colludes with the Nazis. And I think that...

Jan (40:56.731)
No kissling as it's called.

Waitman (41:22.34)
Can you talk about your work on the blue police and who they are and sort of how they fall into this into this rhetorical argument?

Jan (41:24.251)
Sure.

Jan (41:28.859)
Yeah, look, so I mean, the situation is fairly interesting. And I mean, for me, it was fascinating because when I was writing my previous book, Hand for the Jews, or previous previous book, Hand for the Jews, I was actually surprised at the size of the involvement of so -called Polish blue police, which was a it was a German organized, it was.

an organization, police organization force, organized early on in October 1939 by the Germans on the basis of pre -war Polish police. Basically what the Germans did is they said, look boys, we need your help. The country is in ruins. So we need to, well, basically, you know, we don't have enough German police forces to control criminality. So all Polish pre -war officers are requested to report for duty in this new form, blue police.

and they were under German control, but what I show is that in terms of anti -Jewish policies, these Polish officers enjoyed an enormous agency or this margin of own initiative. And when you look at, actually when you read,

Ringelblum, one of the most celebrated Polish Jewish historians who died and who was actually caught by the Polish police in 1944 and soon after murdered by the Germans. He says that these blue policemen, he writes a quote from memory, have blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews is on their hands. So what you have is...

The Ingo Domb actually knows his numbers. I mean, you can quarrel about that gives you a sense of the size of the phenomenon. Now, the fact that there was before I published my book, which I published in Polish four years ago, and it has been now published by Yad Vashem in English 10 days ago or two weeks ago. I haven't seen yet a copy, to be honest, but it's somewhere on the way. And so if you have a police organization or any organization.

Jan (43:37.467)
which is responsible for hundreds of thousands of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust and you don't have even one book about it. It means that something is really amiss. I wrote an article or two or three before I published the book, but when I looked up for the only book about the blue police, not about Jewish affairs, but just the police,

There was one book published in late 1980s, still under in the People's Republic, very, very poor scholarship, by the way. There were two pages about the anti -Jewish activities of this police force. And what they said, what the author said, you know, they had no involvement practically. They guarded from the outside the ghettos and that's it. Well, it's not it. I mean, when I, when I was digging my, over the years, my way, I made my way through the archives.

it became to me quite plain and obvious, is that this was a major part of German extermination policy. It was the reliance on this blue police. And then something the Germans had no idea about were the own actions of blue police about which the Germans had no clue, especially in the post -liquidation period. So mid -42 and after, during the so -called period of Judenjagd or the hunt for the Jews,

That's where the Germans, once the ghettos have been emptied in Poland, once their inhabitants have been put to death, there were still hundreds of thousands of Jews trying to survive in hiding. And the Germans had absolutely no clue how to look for them even. They didn't have know -how, but Polish police had the know -how. And they were using it for their own benefit, mostly financial benefit actually.

robbing the Jews and then robbing also their Polish helpers, assuming that the helpers were doing it not for altruistic reasons, but for financial reasons, which often was true, of course. And so I'm showing in this book this variety of ways in which these policemen, which was fascinating and horrible at the same time, I took several examples of these policemen. Imagine you are now in Great Britain, right?

Jan (45:52.891)
Imagine your friendly neighborhood cop who steers traffic, right? And now put him through this grinder and lo and behold, two years later, he is fond and happy of mass executing his neighbors. I mean, what happens in one's mind to make this transition possible? So I'm trying to show it on examples, how this progression is swift and there are certain, in French we call it les étapes or these, you know, phases.

And so the Germans initially ask the order, the Polish police, to enforce inhuman regulations which bring starvation around in the ghettos. So the Polish police is responsible for this curfews and arresting any kind of illegal commerce, basically supervising the Jewish behavior. And then, starting in November 1941, the Polish police is being tasked with...

forming execution squads to shoot once the legislation changes, regulations change in October, November 41, and now leaving the ghetto for a Jew carries death penalty. Now, who is going to shoot these Jews in mass executions? Polish officers across Poland. So these are the steps which make their involvement later in the liquidation actions and then in the Jew hunts. So perhaps...

more easily understood. So this was a quite a house of horror for me, to describe it. And I mean, the long story short is the book is out. I strongly recommend, if you are interested, get the book. But this is a story which I was amazed that has been completely untold, unwritten for these, you know, seven to eight decades.

Waitman (47:46.34)
Well, and always for our listeners, of course, I'll put links in the show notes to Professor Grabowski's books so you can you can find them and buy them there. And I do recommend them because they're very good. And I think one of the things that you're that you're adding to this conversation is this idea of initiative taking, which I think always is is important, right? Because, you know, working with, for example, working with the sources that I work with and probably work with as well, if they're judicial.

You know, it's sometimes difficult to get at someone's mindset. So I tend to sort of focus on what are they doing? You know, what are their behaviors? Because that's something that's sort of empirical. And I can sort of say that they did or they didn't do these things. And it sounds like what you're suggesting is that on the one hand, they were under a certain element of duress from the Germans. But on the other hand, there was a wide sphere in which they could have chosen to sort of be not initiative takers.

and let a lot of things slide and the Nazis would never have known about it. And so then it then begs this question that we've been talking about throughout, which is why are they taking the initiative to do a really good job at their job, you know, when it results in killing Jews?

Jan (48:44.079)
yeah, yeah.

Jan (48:55.835)
Yeah, I mean, the thing is quite obvious. Actually, for me, what was interesting is that... I was... And the thing is that we know that... Or I could... I found it out in any case that there was no penalty for refusing to shoot the Jews, actually. And the problem was that there were always enough volunteers.

to replace Polish officers who decided to say they were not interested. Now the thing is what made this situation so absolutely deadly was that the whole Corps had this ethos of let's say killing the Jews and in a few surviving testimonies by police, by blue policemen themselves, they said that you know helping the Jews was

practically a suicidal proposition due to the attitude of the rest of the Corps. And then you had simply greed. I mean, the thing is that the Germans, what Germans did was the salaries that communities had to, because the Polish blue police was actually funded by the, their salaries are paid by townships and by locals, not by the state.

but by the local communities. And these salaries were were awfully low.

So it was assumed that the policemen had to live on their bribes and then on this what they could take away from people who they could take things away from in the first place, the Jews. So what they did is very often they made fortunes and this is also something that's been documented. So greed mixed with anti -Semitism with opportunity. I mean, it was something. So what the Germans never learned about thousands of these murders because

Jan (50:52.253)
because had they learned they would have asked for, well, show us the money or tell us who was hiding these Jews. We want to make a real inquiry here. So these were things which Polish police wanted to avoid. So hence their enormous own initiative to solve, as they said, to solve the Jewish question on our own because we helped. Imagine you have a village of 2 ,000 people and there are

three Jewish families hiding. Everyone knows it's a question of time when they will be denounced and the Germans will descend on the village and perhaps, God forbid, they will shoot people, our people. So if we do it, if we solve the Jewish problem as they said ourselves, the Germans are not any wiser and the problem is gone. And we enrich ourselves in the process too. So this is the way it worked in hundreds of cases.

Waitman (51:48.1)
And how widespread is this? Is the blue police a predominately sort of town and urban phenomenon or is it really all across the country? I mean, how many people are in the blue police as an organization?

Jan (51:58.907)
We're talking all around the Guernheral gouvernement. So they are not in the Western territories which were incorporated into the Reich, but they are throughout the Guernheral gouvernement with the exception of district Galician, where is the Ukrainian auxiliary police. So there are about 20 ,000 people going through their ranks over the years of the war, and they are spread throughout the land in cities and they are actually what makes them so deadly in the rule area.

is that there is no Germans, okay? Very few and far between. But they are in the smallest, you know...

in towns, in villages, and they know everybody, and they know, and they are deadly efficient with their knowledge. And so, and actually one more thing I write in the book is the so -called Polish criminal police, which is a bit different animal, but not so much. They are structured, they are organizationally a bit different, but they do exactly the same things. Sometimes even the plainclothes officers who are...

extremely efficient killers of Jews, including the detection and murder of Emmanuel Ringelblum, who I mentioned before.

Waitman (53:15.172)
Yeah, I mean, and this is something that I had on the podcast several episodes ago, Machik and Tomek from the Auschwitz Jewish Center, who are great, great individuals keeping alive Jewish history in Ascension. And, you know, they had mentioned how happy they are, essentially, that the government has now changed. And I think that that's a segue in some ways into your

the challenges that you and your co -author, another great historian, Barbara Engelking, have had with the government and with the legal system in Poland. Can you talk a little about the ways in which history has been distorted, weaponized, et cetera, by both the state and also these sort of state -run official history -making kind of organizations?

Jan (54:13.627)
Yeah, well, you see, your people who you talk to at Auschwitz Museum, they are widely too optimistic. The thing is that what I try to prove in my writing, especially in my not historical writing, but in my public historians, so to say, publications, is that this defense of the so -called defense of the good name of the Polish nation,

is practically the only area where Poles come together from the left, from the center, from far right in one happy family. So when you look at what happened last half year, we have new, finally new government here, which is democratic, not the autocratic nationalists we had before for eight years. So when you look at this new government, you can clearly see that this...

this memorial policy or the historical history policy, it's called, it's not their priority. I mean, they change, few people lost their jobs. That's true. But the most hateful and Holocaust denying organization, which is the Institute of National Remembrance, which is like...

gigantic institution which is funded to the tune of 150 million US dollars per year in a fairly still poor country with you know 3 000 full -time employees. Nothing has changed, not even one person has been fired. So I am not very optimistic and Auschwitz museum has very very and I actually

You will hear about it more in July. There was a whole issue devoted to my one huge article of Jewish Quarterly where I speak.

Jan (55:59.355)
quite openly about Auschwitz Museum's behavior during the last few years. But I have this luxury position that I am a Canadian, okay? I am a Canadian, I have a permanent job in Ottawa, and I don't care what these fools think of me. Not one iota. And what they can do is, what they did in Poland was weaponize the law against the independent historians. And so the topic is way too broad, we're running out of time, just to tell you briefly.

that over the years laws have been instituted which make historians criminally responsible for...

for instance, it's called Slandering the Good Name of the Polish Nation, Article 133 of the Criminal Code. And then you have the Article 5055, which was this Polish Holocaust Law of 2018, which foresaw three years in prison for people like me or Jan Grosz, which has been decriminalized. But you have here the problem is that all of these laws have been voted massive, with massive support of the opposition. Okay.

So, go figure. So, the weaponizing of laws against historians became something of a Polish, not speciality de la maison, the French were doing it by the way too, on a different level, different aspects, but in Poland this pressure and if combined with the hate campaigns against historians, you could not, you would not believe between 2018 and very recently.

And it is something that, you know, is cause for another debate that we'll have to have another time.

Waitman (57:43.652)
I mean, I think it's worth delving a little bit into it, because one of the very minor ways in which I noticed it, and this is often from the Auschwitz Museum's social media account, where they will correct anybody who says, Polish concentration camps or concentration camps in Poland, right? And the correct nomenclature should be the Auschwitz camp in...

Jan (58:00.571)
Yeah. I know. I know.

Waitman (58:13.092)
Nazi German occupied Poland, right? And of course,

Jan (58:13.755)
Yeah, I am so tired sick and tired of this. You know, the thing is that I was last year on June 3rd, 14, I stood in front of this huge screen in the front of Warsaw Grand Station Central Station, the main part of the city.

with thousands of people milling around. And there is a film with people in striped uniform, with striped pajamas for Auschwitz prisoners saying that extermination camp Auschwitz has been built to exterminate Poles, which is of course a dumb lie because Auschwitz was not, Birkenau was not built for Poles, it was built for Jews and so on. And the whole country was exposed to these f****g

posters. I am a Polish railway worker. I was murdered by the Germans because I was a Polish railway worker. No, the Germans did not have a policy of murdering our Polish railway workers. And what did Auschwitz museum did? Nothing. Zero. Bupkes. Not a word. It was a scandal. And what they did was even more scandalous with the appropriation of death chambers for Polish martyrdom.

In a tweet, I have screens of this tweet, they came out on Twitter that it was in the midst of a very tense anti -Semitic campaign 2019 in Poland. They produced here a tweet that in the gas chambers of Birkenau, more Poles died than outside of them because many sick Poles from...

from hospitals in Auschwitz I were delivered to their deaths in, I'm sorry, it doesn't make sense, but it's appropriation of gas chambers for Polish martyrdom. And I could go on with these examples. So, you know, the thing is that this history has become a battleground and very few hostages are left alive, so to say.

Waitman (01:00:12.356)
I mean, yeah, and one of the things to point out, just to be clear, like I've never met anyone really, even unreasonable people, but certainly no reasonable person who thinks the Poles had anything to do with building the Nazi concentration camps in Poland, right? So if I say, you know, if I'm writing historically comparing sort of Polish camps to Ukrainian camps to, you know, everyone knows that I just mean a geographical distinction, right? Nobody thinks this, but the...

Jan (01:00:25.339)
Sure. It's a question of geography.

Jan (01:00:35.611)
Right, question on job.

of course.

Waitman (01:00:42.212)
So that, yeah, I mean, I guess that's sort of one of those, you know, it seems to me it's not the most useful fight, but it symbolizes sort of the obsession with, yeah.

Jan (01:00:53.307)
It doesn't cost anything and it plays well with the authorities regardless of what authorities are in power here. So, you know, it's just a question of politics.

Waitman (01:01:02.596)
And you recently actually prevailed in a court case where you were accused essentially of defaming somebody, is that correct?

Jan (01:01:09.787)
Yeah, it was a couple of years ago, but it was a long trial and we lost in the first instance. We won on appeal with my colleague. But the thing is, you know, so what? I mean, we won, but you can imagine the level of stress. You can imagine the expenditure, the cost of it and, you know, a few more victories like this and I will be, you know, I won't be a very happy camper.

Waitman (01:01:35.812)
Can you, I mean, to the extent that you're comfortable with, can you tell us what the context of it is? I think it's really interesting as an historical perspective, but also as a case study in sort of how people are trying to sort of manipulate the history.

Jan (01:01:45.307)
Yeah, wait a minute, but one thing is, because I have another commitment in a moment, I will have to run. So just let me briefly tell the story. I mean, I published a book called, I was an editor with my colleague and there were nine authors altogether, two volumes, huge book, academic book about the fate of Jews in nine counties of Poland during the war.

with statistics. I mean, my goal here was basically to test my methodology, which I deployed in my previous book, which was Hunt for the Jews. And well, the findings were very, very interesting about Jewish agency, about the percentages of Jews who were denounced by the Poles, who were killed with the help of their Polish neighbors. The book raised fury and then with an organization, NGO, we call them gongos, which means government organized NGO.

funded by the government, and went with fine toothbrush over all the footnotes, and finally they found something they thought was a smoking gun of a misquote or a problem with a misidentification of someone. And so they went to court and, you know, it was an exercise in, the thing is that the trial went way beyond anything that it started with.

The idea was simply to use civil litigation to muzzle historians for good. And so this fight was not about one person that has been or not, as we found out, misidentified, but it was a question simply of deploying the law civil procedure against historians.

Waitman (01:03:25.22)
Well, I know I would love to go longer, but I know you got to go. So let's close with the question that I always ask everybody on here, which is what is one book that you recommend people read about the Holocaust? I know that's a difficult question, but at this moment in time, in 21 May,

Jan (01:03:39.003)
Okay.

Yeah, I mean, I thought about this question because I mean, in light of our discussion and conversation here, and this is a book that certainly also inspired you in a major way to a major extent, correct me if I'm wrong, but definitely did inspire me. It's my good friend Christopher Browning's Ordinary Man, a small book, but I always say this is the way to understand what makes people tick in these extraordinary circumstances. So Christopher Browning Ordinary Man.

about 101 reserve police battalion in Poland. So this is my choice for today.

Waitman (01:04:16.036)
Well, thank you so much. And for all our listeners, I will put links to Professor Kravowski's books in the notes. They're very important. As always, if you are finding the podcast useful, engaging, please do leave us a comment, leave us a rating. It's really helpful. And once again, Jan, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experiences and your thoughts.

Jan (01:04:38.139)
Thank you very much, Wiedemann. All the best to you and thank you very much for your time. Thanks.