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

Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration With Occupying Forces, and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947, by Tadeusz Piotrowski. 1997

A Solid, Objective Introduction to the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939), and to WWII Collaboration By ALL Nationalities. Polish-Jewish Relations: In 20 Years Nothing Has Changed

This book, now written over twenty years ago, uses the term Holocaust not only to refer to the Jews, but also to all the victims of the Nazis AND the victims of Soviet Communism. (Nowadays, the term Holocaust has been largely monopolized by the Jews. For this reason, the term Polocaust can be used to refer to the Nazi German genocide of ethnic Poles.)

COLLABORATION WITH THE NAZIS. ZYDOKOMUNA DENIALISM REJECTED

This book has separate chapters on the collaboration of various nationalities (including Jews) with both the Soviets and the Nazis. In particular, Piotrowski shows how some Polish Jews greeted the invading Germans (p. 66). He then details the many forms of Jewish Nazi collaboration. (pp. 66-75). He also refutes the argument that the prewar Zydokomuna had been marginal (p. 36) and goes into detail about Jewish-Soviet collaboration in 1939 (pp. 49-on) and again in 1944 (pp. 58-on).

Piotrowski also has a section on Polish collaboration. This adds refutation to the canard that Poles are “too nationalistic” to entertain notions of Poles as other than heroes. This is the bogeyman of “Poland’s heroic narrative”.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME

Various Polonophobic Holocaust accusations are addressed and answered by author and scholar Tadeusz Piotrowski. The informed reader may be struck by the fact that, decades later, much the same accusations keep coming up over and over again.

Other accusations acquire new incarnations with time. Consider the Holocaust lore about Poles killing fugitive Jews. In Piotrowski’s book, this meme was expressed in terms of Yaffa Eliach and the slaying of part of her family. Now it is expressed in larger form by the likes of Jan T. Gross, Jan Grabowski, and Barbara Engelking.

For shame.