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

Research in Teaching and Learning About the Holocaust: A Dialogue Beyond Borders, by Monique Eckmann, Doyle Stevick, and Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs (eds.). 2017. IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), Metropol, Berlin

Perceptive Polish Students Not Fooled By the Judeocentric Messaging of Holocaust Education

This book is more detailed than most others on this subject. I focus on some relevant issues.

SHIFTING THE BLAME FOR THE HOLOCAUST AWAY FROM THE GUILTY PARTY–THE GERMANS–AND UNTO THE POLES

In the West, we have the Polish death camp lie, the de-Germanized Nazis, and the Goodbye Jews! Lie of the well-watched movie Schindler’s List. In the latter, a Polish girl cheers the impending death of the Jews, while other Poles are throwing globs of mud at the poor doomed Jews.

Holocaust education is basically propaganda, and, in Poland, the same kind of blame-shifting is done. Fortunately, Polish students are not deceived. Magdalena H. Gross writes, “In another qualitative interview and participant observation study, Bilewicz asked approximately 1,000 Polish and Jewish high-school students to propose some questions they would like to ask one another. Polish students, according to this study, most often wanted to know why (they thought) Jewish students still accused Poles of participation in the Holocaust with questions such as ‘Why do Jews think that we allowed and helped the Germans to build Auschwitz?’ or, more explicitly, ‘Why do you still blame Poles for the Holocaust?'” (p. 62). Right on!

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION: STILL NOT ENOUGH GERMAN GUILT DIFFUSION

Monique Eckmann and Doyle Stevick raise the following complaints, “In terms of content, these studies do suggest that students tend to know more about the Nazis and their individual leaders than about the Jewish communities of Europe or individual Jews who perished in or survived the Holocaust…Many students develop simplistic narratives of the Holocaust that hold Hitler completely and solely responsible…Indeed, the extent to which teachers in different places demonize the Nazi leadership or the Germans of that era more generally is not clear, but merits attention.” (pp. 291-292). Amazing!

THE USUAL COMPLAINTS ABOUT HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY NOT BEING AFFIRMED

Consider Poland. Magdalena Gross comments, “And, second, in textbooks published between 1989 and the early 2000s (reviewed at the beginning of this chapter), the Holocaust was barely mentioned and Jewish victims were absorbed into a narrative of Nazi aggression against the Polish people.” (p. 65).

Not enough Holocaust self-importance, eh? And, once again, the Polish victims of the Nazi Germans are not good enough to be juxtaposed with the Jewish victims of the same. In addition, Poland’s Jews want to have their cake and eat it to: To simultaneously insist that they are Poles and that they are not Poles. So, which is it?

ATTEMPTED UKRAINIAN POLITICAL PUSHBACK AGAINST HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM

Mikhail Tyaglyy writes, “While some observers have established that Ukrainian President Yushchenko actively introduced both the terms ‘Holodomor’ and ‘Holocaust’ into official discourse, others have argued that his (failed) attempts to pass a law criminalizing both Holocaust and Holodomor denial were intended to make domestic and international audiences recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide equivalent to the Holocaust.” (p. 146). Exactly right.

So here we have tacit admission that laws criminalizing Holocaust denial actually exist in order to enshrine Holocaust self-importance over all non-Jewish genocides. Holocaust supremacy reigns, and only the memory of the Jews’ Holocaust has the “right” to be protected by law.

HOLODOMOR AND HOLOCAUST EDUCATION: UKRAINIAN STUDENTS PUSH BACK

With reference to the Holodomor, Ukrainian students discern the fact that teaching of the Holocaust is a foreign imposition, and that attention to the Holocaust will inevitably reduce the classroom time for studying one’s own genocide. Mikhail Tyaglyy comments, “Attempts to introduce the Holocaust in secondary and upper-secondary schools were often met with aversion and questions such as ‘Why should we study their tragedy when our own is still insufficiently studied?'” (p. 146). Wisdom from the mouths of babes.

THE CONTRIVED DUALISM BETWEEN GERMAN DEATH CAMPS AND GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Eckmann and Stevick make an issue of the fact that, “…students and teachers alike are often unclear about the distinction between concentration camps and death camps.” (p. 291). In pressing for this distinction, the authors are promoting the Judeocentric narrative which implies that the usually-slow deaths in concentration camps (where mostly non-Jews were sent) are less significant than the usually-quick deaths in death camps (where mostly Jews were sent). The speed of death does not determine its historical or moral significance! For more on this contrived Jewish-serving dualism, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/auschwitz-no-valid-jewish-monopolization-hoess/

VICTIMHOOD HIERARCHIES. DOUBLE GENOCIDE FEARED. COMMUNIST CRIMES BELITTLED

Marta Simo, Doyle Stevick, and Magdalena H. Gross are beside themselves in trying to deal with the fact that students may compare Nazi crimes (against Jews, that is) with Soviet Communist crimes, and (horror of horrors) decide to equate them. These authors lament, “Part of the problem stems from the multiple connotations of the word ‘compare’. One connotation is to consider both similarities and differences based on an extensive consideration of the evidence in both cases. But the word ‘compare’ in many languages also carries the connotation that things are equal, or the same, and there is a concern [BY WHOM?] that the very act of permitting a comparison between, say, Soviet and Nazi crimes, legitimizes the idea that they are moral equivalents and erases meaningful distinctions between them.” (p. 242). I just love it!

The whole argument, about “extensive consideration of the evidence”, presupposes that there is ANY valid distinction that would rationally enable one genocide to be more significant than another (just as “scientific” racism presupposes that there is ANY valid distinction that would rationally enable one race of people to be more significant than another.)

This obsessive fear of comparing genocides, exhibited by the three cited authors, graphically exposes the reality of victimhood hierarchies and tacitly recognizes the threat posed to Holocaust supremacy. Now more than ever, it must go.