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| New evidence points to pre-war Polish “Holocaust”
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WARSAW (EJP)--- Jewish organisations in Poland have moved to counter claims that Poles ran their own pre-war "Holocaust" after publication of controversial extracts from a 1930’s Jewish daily.
The Polish daily "Zycie Warszawy" published during the week of September 24 the first extracts in Polish of a book compiling press articles from pre-war daily "Haynt," which reports how Poles tormented Jews, burying them alive, burning them and throwing them out of moving trains in a "mini-Holocaust" that began long before the Nazi Holocaust.
The governments of independent Poland (1918-1939) were "far and away worse" in their persecution of the Jews than either Poland’s Tsarist or German occupiers, author Chaim Finkelstein, the last editor of the pre-war "Haynt," wrote in the forward to the compilation.
Communal criticism
Jewish groups in Poland have criticised the claims, though.
They have been horrified to hear the word "Holocaust" used in reference to Polish anti-Semitism. "Calling what happened before the war a ‘mini-Holocaust’ is a historical lie. Our pre-war history shows that Poles and Jews lived happily side by side," said Bartosz Malowicki of Fundacja Judaica, a Cracow-based Jewish cultural centre.
Feliks Tych, director of the Warsaw Jewish Historical Institute, was just as quick to reject the term. "Pre-war Poland wasn’t heading towards a Holocaust; it just wanted to get rid of its Jewish population," he said.
But Bob Becker, who headed the translation team that brought the book out in English, told the daily “Zycie Warszawy”: "If it wasn’t for Haynt, I would never have found out that Poland was moving towards its own mini-Holocaust. Like most people, I only knew about Germany."
Coming to terms
Poland, used to viewing itself as an innocent victim of Russian and German aggression, has only just begun to come to terms with its own legacy of hate and violence.
The modern day inhabitants of the northeastern town of Jedwabne, for example, now notorious for the burning of a barn full of 1,600 Jews in 1941 during WWII, have steadily refused to take part in commemorations of the tragedy.
Unlike Germany, where anti-Semitism was politically and socially marginalized after 1945, vocal anti-Semitism has continued to play a vital social and political role in Poland since World War II. A 1946 pogrom in the southeastern town of Kielce was followed by a Soviet state-sponsored witch hunt in 1967 that reduced Poland’s 40,000 Jews to fewer than 5,000.
"During the 45 years of Communist rule, the Holocaust was a taboo subject, and the question of anti-Semitism was never addressed," said Feliks Tych, one of the movers behind the Polish translation.
Volunteers are still working on the - as yet unfinished - Polish translation, as funding has been hard to come by, according to Tych. "I don’t know when we’ll be able to bring it out," he said.
Poland’s present Jewish population is estimated at somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000.
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