I watched the video of the president handing out Medals of Freedom. I was most interested to see the interaction between the president and Bob Dylan, and there are some pretty hilarious still-shots of that. Jan Karski is dead, so former Polish Foreign Minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld accepted the medal in Karski’s honor. The president made a few kind remarks about Karski, presented the award to Mr. Rotfeld, and moved on. Unfortunately, the president referred to “Polish” death camps during the war, and now the Polish government is all upset.
Here’s my response to them.
POLISH DEATH CAMPS! POLISH DEATH CAMPS! POLISH DEATH CAMPS!
If Poland wants to invite people to look carefully at their treatment of the Jewish people before and during the war, they should know that they will not come out looking appreciably better than the Nazis. Yes, these were Nazi death camps on Polish soil. That is understood. The president was in the middle of giving Poland’s greatest anti-Nazi hero a medal. He did not intend to insult you or dishonor you. So, chill the fuck out.
Oh, did you say? POLISH DEATH CAMPS! POLISH DEATH CAMPS! POLISH DEATH CAMPS! ??
Or did you say George Tierney, Jr. of Greenville, South Carolina?
They sound so much alike.
FTW !
In other news, the North African campaign was not fought by North Africans, nor the Crimean War by Crimeans.
Damn straight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/books/review/23margolick.html?pagewanted=all
“But as Gross reminds us, in at least one respect many Poles applauded Hitler: just as he offered a final solution to Germany’s Jewish problem, he was taking care of Poland’s, too. Nazi policies toward the Jews, the legendary underground Polish diplomat Jan Karski reported to his government-in-exile in London in 1940, formed “a sort of narrow bridge where the Germans and a large part of Polish society meet in harmony.”
It wasn’t only Karski saying so. Eyewitnesses in the Warsaw ghetto saw Poles watching approvingly or even helping out, acting as spotters as German soldiers shot Jews. Polish girls were overheard joking, “Come, look, how cutlets from Jews are frying,” as the ghetto burned. Nazi accounts of Judenjagd, or “Jew hunts,” detailed how Poles pitched in to find any stray Jews the Germans somehow managed to miss.”
and it is all true.
How many polish people does it take to deny their role in the Holocaust?
Isn’t Rotfeld tied to Murdoch (sp) in the past? That would give him motive to go after Obama.
Well, you have to understand that President Obama only said that because it was probably how the history was taught in his days at the radical Islamic madrassa.
Maybe he’s forgotten this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Police
Maybe Poland ought to take care of their racism problem first, before they complain.
Good to know the Culture of Offendedness has gone global.
The Wingnuts on Twitter are now substituting “Obama” for ugly, politically incorrect terms like “dumb blonde.”
They just can’t help themselves.
I don’t disagree with a single thing you say here, Boo, and they certainly should not have made an issue of it, but it still needs to be said that in Poland, unlike many other eastern European countries, there never was a Polish puppet Nazi government. The Polish government in exile worked with the allies and against the Nazis, and of course Jan Karski was part of that. Poland was flat-out occupied by the Germans. Antisemitism runs very deep in Poland, but the relationship between Poles and Jews is an old and complex one, and as in every other country in Europe there is an ongoing struggle between more liberal and more fascistic elements.
Sorry to be OT, but I couldn’t find an open thread and Dan Rather is reporting that Hugo Chavez is about 2 months at best away from death due to cancer. Seems fairly momentous if true.
There’s a damn good reason Art Spiegelman portrayed the Poles as pigs in “Maus”. I say this as someone with some Polish ancestry. They did not treat the Jews well AT ALL.
Let’s see what Mr. Kosinski wrote on the subject of wartime Poland and Jews, shall we?
@Amazon
A very long and extremely careful documentary about the Shoah, or holocaust.
A LOT of it involves interviews with Poles who lived next door to Auschwitz. They heard the screams and did nothing. They smelled the burning, and nothing. They just plowed their fields, and did nothing.
Fuck those bastards. Most of Eastern Europe hates jews, gypsies, and gays, and were happy to see the German solution.
So fuck those ungrateful pieces of shit. The polish prime minister is a tea bag wack.
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Teaches us all about the facts of history in World War II. The US lost about 0.3% of its population in the war, Japan 4% and Poland a whopping 16%. In terms of the U.S. population that would have been more than 22,000,000 deaths. Poland as a nation was invaded by the Soviets first and were slaughtered, in 1939 the Germans and their Pantzer divisions invaded and occupied all of Poland. The German SS had control over the Nazi death camps where 3 million European Jews were exterminated and a similar number of non-Jewish Polish citizens. After the war, Poland would remain under communist Soviet control, thanks to the Yalta agreement between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Read about the heroic attempt to liberate Warsaw in 1944 or about the large contingent of Polish soldiers in the Allied forces across all of Europe.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Yes, no lectures please. I know a lot of that.
In many of these places, the population was complicit.
In my own case, my mother’s family comes from the area of Southern Hungary. They were of German origin, and are a collective group called the Donau Scwaben. They were originally from Schwabia, south east Germany and Austria near Salzburg.
During WWII, the German army occupied the area, and of course there was a lot of collaboration from local Germans. The sons fought in Hitler’s army (my 3rd and 4th cousins, although I know of none specifically). After the war, the Germans there were either sent back to germany or put into starvation camps. I had 3rd cousins in DP camps in 1960 that we visited. Of the 400,000 Donau Schwabian peoples in S Hungary, N Serbia, Bosnia, and Roumania, 200,000 were killed and there are many 40,000 there now. So the German peoples (my family of my mother) also had their time of suffering.
Not making excuses here, just noting that the wheel turns, and all are on top for a time, and then the wheel turns and you are crushed.
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I’m old enough to have heard many first-hand accounts of the German occupation of the Netherlands 1940-1945. I lived along the Dutch coastline which was part of the German Atlantik Wall with live mine fields and bunkers. I presently live in a neighborhood of The Hague that was Sperrgebiet during the war, V1 and V2 rockets were launched from a city park a block away and the former Nazi HQ of Seyss Inquart houses the Clingendael Institute for Peace.
My objection is to the interpretation and general accusation of the Polish nation for the crimes of a few citizens. Collaboration out of free will and without duress from the occupier is one of the worse crimes against one’s neighbor. From the Wikipedia account of the documentary Shoah, it specifically explains the Nazi death camps were run by Germans and more often under responsibility of Himmler’s SS.
Poland suffered greatly in the 20th century as I explained in my diary.
The history of your ancestors is very interesting and goes back many centuries in one of Europe’s hot spots of wars and multi-cultural societies. Indeed an unfortunate and shameful collaboration with the German invaders and oppression of the Yugoslav population. The Schwabians paid dearly in the starvation camps under a communist regime. The revenge of the Second World War played out again under the likes of Milosevic and Mladić, Serbs against the Croats and Bosnians.
Danube Schwabians living in the valley of the Vojvodina region. (Map)
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Yes, it is interesting, as it always is to learn something of your background. last summer, I went to Budapest, and went to the church that my grandmother’s family attended.
I agree that most in the subject areas were not complicit. However, the Polish prime minister, who is a neo con who is in bed with American neocons, is not playing as a simple Polish partisan. He is an active collaborator with American fascism.
You are obviously ignorant about “Shoah”. You should educate yourself. It was not a hollywood movie. It was 18 hours of documentary footage, in which people were interviewed. Not a Hollywood movie at all. It was in fact made by a french guy, I believe.
My first wife’s mother escaped Poland not too long after the Nazi’s gained control and established the Warsaw Ghetto. She said it was clear disaster was in the making and on more than one occasion spoke of how she and so many others were in many ways more terified of the very large percentage of the Polish citizenry and the special Polish Police who sympathized with the Nazis and helped identify Jews the Nazis overlooked so they too could be rounded up. She said at least the Nazis were in uniform so one could idnetify them at a distance and perhaps have a slim chance to avoid them for a bit longer, but with the collaborating Poles there was no way to tell friend or foe until it was too late. Truly terrifying.
So yes, by all means Polish government officials, STFU!
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Hi Oui, I remember you and your excellent insights from several years ago when I was significantly more actice here in the frog pond. Glad to see you’re still here and still sharing meaningful info.
Yes, the Blue Police. an extensive cadre of monsters to be sure, like the Lithuanian and Ukranian death squads slaughtering Jews and various others with impunity even before the Nazi’s established complete occupation of Poland and the region around it.
I should have added to my previous comment that there were indeed many heroic Poles serving in the Blue Police who opposed and undermined the Nazi plans and orders whenever they could, and many were killed by the Nazis as a result. But there is no question that there was significant participation by Blue Police in the Nazi atrocities.
I’m not going to make any excuses for individuals or governments that persecuted and murdered, or allowed to be persecuted and murdered, or aided and abetted the persecution and murder, of the Jews (and that includes the governments of the United States and Great Britain, both of which knew what was being perpetrated not only by the Nazis, but by our eventual ally, “Uncle Joe.”)
I would suggest that those who are a little short on knowledge of exactly what was happening in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States between 1933 and 1945 read one or all of the following: Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder; Rising ’44 by Norman Davies; Katyn by Allen Paul; The War Against the Jews – Lucy S. Dawidowitz; Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders by Raul Hilberg; The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert; Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes. There are, of course, many more excellent and informative choices.
All of the Nazi death camps and the harshest of the slave labor camps were located in Poland, because Hitler had no intention of letting any Poles – Jewish or not – survive his quest for lebensraum. But despite the fact that the death camps and the murderous slave labor camps were in their midst and the penalty for harboring or helping a Jew (or any other “undesirable”) or for refusing to do what the Nazis wished was instant death, Poland has more people among the Righteous of the Nations at Yad Vashem than any other country. So, while the Nazis and Stalin had Poland in vice grips, and the United States and Great Britain looked the other way, and the Catholic Church signed a concordat with Hitler, 6,339 Poles (that we know of; there were probably many more) risked (and often lost) their lives and the lives of their families to save Jews.
Anti-semitism was not a province exclusively of the Poles. There are few, if any, countries in Europe that do not have a centuries-long history of Anti-semitism, and it is worth noting that prior to Hitler and the Nazis, Poland had a population of Jews that far exceeded, as both a percentage of total population and an actual number, that of any other European country.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/statistics.asp
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of reading about the vise grip on Poland by Hitler and Stalin. Thanks.
See my reaction to BooMan’s short-sighted story – Sheer Ignorance of Polish Contribution In WWII.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."