On Saturday, March 27, I first learned of a little controversy
regardingMasha Gessen’s article
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-historians-under-attack-for-exploring-polands-role-in-the-holocaust>that
appeared the day before in The New Yorker. I had already read the piece,
though not closely. I saw it as important for disseminating information
about the Polish government’s reprehensible crackdown on critical (i.e.,
non-heroic about Poles) holocaust research. But to anyone who already
knew anything about the matter, in Poland or outside, Gessen offered
nothing new. That was fine. She is a journalist who focuses on global
authoritarian trends, and is allowed not to be a specialist. But on that
Saturday, people alerted me to a couple of lines in the piece (which
have now been revised), saying the government was trying to “exonerate
the nation of the murder of three million Jews.” Oh no, I thought, such
words will only let the Polish government off the hook, allowing it to
pose as the maligned victim when the point is to highlight its
pernicious behavior trying to repress the honest study of history. The
book that the government has been attacking – Barbara Engelking and Jan
Grabowski’s edited collection, “Night Without End” – documents in detail
the complicity of a certain, though unknown percentage of Poles in the
killing of Jews. But “three million” is the number of Poland’s total
Jewish holocaust victims. An insinuation that Poland bears
responsibility for the deaths of all of them is something no one has
ever alleged (and no one would ever believe). And isn’t it best to leave
vague but emotional concepts like “the nation” out of this?
https://lefteast.org/gessen-critique-polish-trap/
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