Jan Grabowski, an expert on the Holocaust in Poland, discovered that some of these demands were to pay Poland for killing its own Jews.
On the 83rd anniversary of the outbreak of World War II last week, a three-volume report was published entitled “Report on Losses Suffered by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation during World War II 1939–1945.” The report was written by a parliamentary investigative committee established in 2017 to assess damages from Germany for Polish losses during the war....However, the report ascribes to Germans the murder of Jews carried out by their Polish neighbors without the involvement of Germans. Canadian-Jewish historian of Polish origin, Prof. Jan Grabowski, discovered this when reading the third volume of the report, which includes a list of 9,292 places where Germans committed atrocities against Poles in occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945. According to the report, the list is intended to “commemorate the Polish citizens who were killed by Nazi Germany in World War II.”Grabowski, who called the report “shameful," and a “rewriting of the history of the Holocaust,” discovered that one of the sites listed in the report is the town of Jedwabne, where it states that 1,650 Jews were murdered. The pogrom there, carried out in July of 1941, is well documented through historical research based on archival material and eyewitness accounts.According to the research, the pogrom was carried out by Poles exclusively, without German involvement. The precise number of Jews murdered in this event is not known but is believed to be a few hundred. Beaten and threatened, they were led by Poles to a local barn, where they were burned alive.Prof. Grabowski was surprised to find the victims of Jedwabne in a report meant to deal with German crimes against the Poles in World War II. Writing on Facebook, Grabowski said he was "dismayed" that the "Polish authorities would actually ask the Germans for compensation" for the Jews murdered by Poles in 1941. "To say that the whole situation is grotesque is to say nothing at all," he wrote.Along with requesting reparations for Poles' murder of the Jews of Jebwabne, the new report includes other sites where Jews were also killed by Poles exclusively. The list includes the murder of Jews in the towns of Radzilow, Bzura and Szczuczyn, all in the summer of 1941.Grabowski calls the inclusion of these towns in the report “grotesque,” but his claims against the writers of the report are more significant. He bases his arguments on the fact that in the calculation of Poles murdered and killed during World War II, the Poles also include 3 million Polish Jews, among whom he says about 200,000 were murdered with the help of or directly by Poles. What kind of restitution does Poland want from the Germans for 200,000 Jews murdered by the Poles or with Polish participation?" he asked in Polish on Twitter.The tweet drew angry responses, with comments calling him “Jewish bastard” and “Jewish swine,” among other things.
Poland has been engaged in historical revisionism about the Holocaust in recent years, denying Polish complicity with the Holocaust and allowing historians who documented it to be sued.
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