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

Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, edited by Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs. 2019. Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford

Bystander Holocaustspeak: The Continued Drift of Holocaust-Related Thinking in an Anti-Polish Direction

This work includes many topics. I focus on a few of them.

BYSTANDER HOLOCAUSTSPEAK: A PREJUDICIAL JEWISH-SERVING TERM

The conventional “bystander” concept is highly Judeocentric. One hardly ever hears about the bystanders to genocides other than the Jews’ Holocaust. When it comes to the multifaceted tragedy of WWII itself, the Jews are effectively made out to be the only victims, with everyone observing their suffering having an unspoken moral duty to them.

In the context of WWII, the victimhood of bystanders, who experienced their own sufferings under the Nazis, is canceled. In other words, the sufferings of Poles do not count: The only thing that counts is that Poles were bystanders (or worse) to Jewish suffering. The issue is even more fundamental. More and more, Poles and Poland are being defined in Jewish terms.

BYSTANDER HOLOCAUSTSPEAK: DEFLECTING-AWAY THE GUILT OF THE GERMANS

In addition, the term bystander, as customarily used in Holocaust-related discourse, has German-guilt-diluting properties. It effectively changes the subject away from the Third Reich to the presumed moral duties of those who saw Jews being killed. Just because the German killers are not formally excluded does not change this fact. Ido de Haan recognizes as much. He writes, “Even if the latter’s responsibility is not denied, the almost exclusive focus on the failure of the bystander in much of the national debates about the Holocaust–be it on Vichy France, Dutch accommodation, Polish antisemitism, or by contrast, Danish heroism–tends to disregard the decisive impact of Nazi policies and actions on the initiation, course, and outcome of the Holocaust.” (p. 346. Emphasis added).

Exactly right. How could it be otherwise?

BYSTANDER HOLOCAUSTSPEAK. JEWS CAN ALSO BE BYSTANDERS!

The conventional bystander narrative is entirely Jewish-centered: No one ever speaks of Jews having a moral obligation to the goyim, let alone to Poles, whenever they see them suffering. One slight and rare exception to this obvious Judeocentrism is provided by Mary Fulbrook, who also points to the completely vacuous nature of the term bystander. She discusses such terms as “bystander”, and the alternative terms “spectator” or “eyewitness”, and then writes, “These categories too embody their own problems, as when Jews were forced to spectate at public hangings, alongside Germans who came to enjoy the spectacle. The categories do not really map onto that of bystander in these cases, nor would one really want to lump the groups together.” (p. 24).

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““THE ENTIRE DANISH NATION RESCUED JEWS”–TOTAL BUNK

Yad Vashem summarily awarded the Danish nation as a whole for rescuing Jews, and Holocaust museums uncritically repeat the fairy tale of the wonderful Danes. At the same time, many Jews complain about Poles claiming “too much credit” for rescuing Jews. For more on this farce, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/02/17/shrewd-ihra-holocaust-exclusivism-dane-glorification-frenzy/

Bart van der Boom makes midnight of the Danish fairy tale. He writes, “The effect of this highly unusual state of affairs was that it was not particularly difficult or dangerous for Jews to flee or for Danes to save them. Without effective German hindrance, the seven thousand or so Danish Jews could have been ferried to Sweden in a matter of days. In practice, it took several weeks, because it proved difficult to find fisherman willing to make the short trip. Many hesitated, some refused, and those who agreed demanded considerable sums of money. On average, 1,000 kroner was paid per person, the equivalent of three months’ earnings of a skilled laborer.” (p. 217. Emphasis added). And yet we have the likes of Jan Grabowski whining about “Polish greed and antisemitism” whenever Polish rescuers required payment for hiding Jews–and that under far more difficult conditions than faced the Danish rescuers.

Furthermore, the Danish rescuers were as at least as motivated by making money as they were by saving Danish Jews. Van der Boom makes these iconoclastic statements, “The price of the crossing has been shown to fluctuate with supply and demand, suggesting that to the fisherman the rescue was a commercial undertaking.” (p. 217).

BYSTANDER HOLOCAUSTSPEAK? DANISH RESCUERS HAD FAR LESS TO FEAR THAN POLISH RESCUERS

Author Van der Boom touches on the night-and-day difference between the occupations of Denmark and Poland. He comments, “The crucial question is to what extent the [Danish] rescuers knew they ran little risk. Hans Kirchhoff argues they must have been intimidated by the few occasions when authorities did try to hinder the rescue and shots were fired. The more recent literature counters, more convincingly, that the paucity of such violent reactions must actually have reassured them. Moreover, the Danes had witnessed none of the draconian punishments the German occupier meted out in other occupied territories. Many helpers probably realized they did not run particularly large risks. The same applies to the victims.” (pp. 217-218. First and second emphasis in original. Third emphasis added).

CLAUDE LANZMANN’S POLONOPHOBIA. EXEMPTING WESTERN EUROPEANS FROM CRITICISM

German historian Wulf Kansteiner calls out the anti-Polish innuendo and the subtle blame-shifting in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. He writes, “…the narrator figure of Lanzmann pulls the strings alternatively duplicitously cuddling up to real Nazis in an undercover sting operation, relentlessly seducing survivors into restaging their humiliating past or obsessing about Polish callousness and merriment in the face of Judeocide. The Polish figures, rendered unforgettable on the covers of Shoah products, effectively export the figure of the Holocaust bystander out of Western Europe.” (p. 280. Emphasis added). Claude Lanzmann was a French Jew. Is his conduct a coincidence?

BYSTANDER HOLOCAUSTSPEAK: YOU CAN BLAME THE DUTCH MORE THAN YOU CAN BLAME THE POLES

Authors Morina and Thijs make these seldom-mentioned comments, “…the latest in a series of controversies in the Netherlands on the role of ‘ordinary people’ in the persecution of their Jewish compatriots. They concern the ‘Dutch paradox,’ a key question in Dutch contemporary history, namely how it was possible that in a country of relatively limited antisemitism about 75 percent of Jews were killed in the Holocaust, by far the highest rate in Western Europe.” (p. 3).

Of course, we hardly ever hear about the Dutch. Poland is normally the designated whipping boy for Holocaust-related blame.