Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Why Should We Teach About the Holocaust, by Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs. 2004

Holocaust Supremacism in Action: Promoting the Preeminence of the Holocaust, at Polish Expense, to Polish Children and Teens. Neo-Marxism Thrown In 

The author is with the UNESCO Chair for Education about the Holocaust at the Institute for European Studies at the Jagiellonian University:

https://en.uj.edu.pl/en

Unfortunately, there is almost nothing new in this book. Thus:

SHOAH: THE INSTILLING OF SHAME IN POLES

There is the usual PEDAGOGIKA WSTYDU: the complaint that Poles are not being taught enough, in school, that Poles “did not do enough” to rescue Jews [never mind the Poles’ own daily battle to survive the murderous Nazi German occupation], and that some Poles had betrayed fugitive Jews or killed them. [Since, in virtually every war since the beginning of time, there had been traitors amongst virtually all peoples, why (other than Judeocentrism) is this supposed to be such a profound matter?]

As usual, Poles are called to “coming to terms with the past”. As always, this is selective. Jews are exempt from this requirement. And whoever heard of the British and Americans “coming to terms with the past” about the shameful Churchill-Roosevelt betrayal of Poland at Teheran and Yalta?

Twenty years later, author Ambrosewicz-Jacobs is still obsessed about Poles not feeling guilty about this or that regarding the Jews. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/09/27/emerging-holocaust-memory-wars-and-uplifting-national-flags/

RATIONALIZING HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY: THE PREEMINENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST OVER THE GENOCIDES OF ALL OTHER PEOPLES

Various canned moral abstractions are brought up to justify the preeminence of the Holocaust, just as in the USA. This includes “never again genocide”, “fighting intolerance”, “preventing fascism”, and other quasi-magical properties ascribed to Holocaust education. Apart from the fact that Holocaust education has not stopped a single post-WII genocide from happening, it is unclear [Judeocentrism aside] why these moral abstractions would not also apply to teaching about the Polokaust or Polocaust (the genocide of 3-8 million Poles at the hand of Nazi Germany), not to mention all genocides in general.

To top it all off, we are told that teaching about the Jews’ Holocaust supports what Tanna Jakubowicz-Mount calls “the spirit of the new times is the spirit of reconciliation.” (p. 41). Really? Isn’t it the exact opposite? What could possibly be more divisive, not to mention potentially racist, than the elevation of one particular genocide (the Jews’ Holocaust) over the genocides of all other peoples? Now more than ever, we need Genocide Recognition Equality.

VICTIMHOOD COMPETITION: THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST MUST BE THE WINNER

The authors repeat various canned memes about the exceptionality of the Holocaust, and why Poles need to fall in line with this kind of thinking. Jewish-centered meritocracies are presented as fact, and repeated. Thus, we hear to the effect that the Holocaust was the greatest crime in history (e. g, Zdzislaw Mach, p. 26; Robert Szuchta, p. 52) [Who determines that?] and that the Jews were targeted for total elimination (e. g, Stanislaw Krajewski, p. 33). [Not true: For example, Hitler deliberately spared thousands of German Jews and made them into Honorary Aryans.] In any case, why must an inferred [not actual] total genocide be one iota more significant than “only” a partial genocide? Does the body of a German-murdered Pole burn any less odoriferously, in the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, than does the body of a German-murdered Jew?

We are reminded, once again, that whereas 95% of Poles [much too high] survived the German occupation, only 2% of Polish Jews did (Feliks Tych, son-in-law of the super-Communist murderer Jakub Berman, as quoted Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, p. 14). This creates an artificial meritocracy of victimhood. It also conveniently treats Poland’s Jews as if they were the world’s only Jews. [Note also that 2/3rds of the world’s Jews were out of reach of the Nazis, so did not directly suffer at all. In contrast, the vast majority of ethnic Poles remained in German-occupied Poland, and suffered greatly, almost without exception.] But say we play along and adopt percentages as a means of erecting a meritocracy of genocides. Should we tell China that the Communist genocidal murder of 35 million Chinese is less significant than the Nazi German genocide of Poles [Polokaust or Polocaust] because, after all, 96% of Chinese survived their genocide and “only 4%” of them were murdered?

Finally, if there is to be a [necessarily arbitrary] meritocracy of genocides at all, why can other criteria not determine the rules–say the magnitude of suffering? Thus, whereas most Jews, in the Holocaust, had the “luxury” of dying quickly from gunshots or poison gas, the Ukrainians (in the HOLODOMOR) had to die, in agony, over weeks and months, from starvation. So why not the HOLODOMOR as “the greatest crime in history”?

THINLY VEILED CULTURAL MARXISM

The Holocaust is smuggled-in to repeat the buzzwords about Poland being “too homogenous”, “intolerant”, “not pluralistic enough”, etc. Can forced immigration, as per the European Union or the globalists, be far behind?

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Ambrosewicz-Jacobs has published a much newer work on Holocaust education in Poland. In it, she is even more strident. See:

Holocaust Leverage (jewsandpolesdatabase.org)