Published Date: 12 January 2011
The publishers of a book that claims Poles dug up the remains of Holocaust victims in search of gold teeth and jewels said an "organised" campaign is trying to stop them releasing it.
Directors of Znak said that opponents of Golden Harvest were sending hundreds of messages every day in order to jam the company's e-mail accounts.Written by Princeton professor Jan Gross, Golden Harvest examines Polish attitudes towards Jews in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Its title refers to Poles sifting through the remains of the hundreds of thousands murdered at the Treblinka death camp for gold teeth and anything precious missed by the Nazis.
The Warsaw-born historian also argues that Poles profited financially from hiding Jews from the Nazis. Andrzej and Anna Kolakowski, the husband and wife team who have organised the e-mail campaign, described the book as "disgusting and defamatory" and called on people to "defend the honour of Poland and the Poles" by sending as many spam e-mails as possible to the publisher.
Mr Gross has also been criticised by fellow historians. One academic, Piotr Gontarczyk, dismissed Mr Gross as "irresponsible and frivolous" and "guilty of obvious fraud".
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I haven't read the book written by Jan Gross but I did today finish Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps by Yitzhak Arad, former Deputy Chair of Yad Vashem. The book quotes primary sources detailing the plundering and searching of burial sites that took place at all three of those intensive extermination camps after they had been closed down and dismantled. The Germans were forced to settle a former Ukranian soldier in each camp as a farmer to drive off those digging up the remains.
It's uncomfortable reading if you want a black and white view of history: Nazis bad, everybody else good. But war isn't and wasn't like that: It doesn't take place in a moral monochrome. There were "Bad" Poles just as there were "Good" Nazis. It might be upsetting - in today's peaceful world - but we aren't the ones making these choices. I can tell myself today that I wouldn't dig up mass graves looking for gold and money but hunger and greed can drive people beyond reason. Our world is not that world, luckily for us.
If you want to consider it from another angle, it's possible to say that some British citizens contributed to mass murder too, after all it was British policemen in Jersey who registered and assisted in the deportation of that occupied island's three Jews. If Britain had been occupied there's no doubt some people would have assisted the Nazis or profited from their heinous crimes. And plenty would have fought on, just as thousands of Poles actively fought against the Nazis as partisans, Underground fighters and in armies abroad. The moral choices being talked about are the choices people make as humans, not as nationals.
So whilst I haven't read the book (this additional publicity will be helping its sales along I am sure) and so don't know in what way it goes beyond this assertion, this claim doesn't strike me as wildly exaggerated based on what I have read previously. There's plenty of evidence of Poles refusing to help or actively denouncing Jews in hiding, as there was throughout Europe, when hiding Jews meant the penalty of death for you and your family but denouncing them meant money, food and other rewards. There's plenty of evidence of Poles helping Jews, too.
These claims don't dishonour Poland, or the Poles, as this campaign's organisers would have it. They underline just what a wretched period this was for Humanity, something which serves to highlight the bravery of those who chose differently: to fight back against a great evil rather than be tainted by it. Not an easy choice to make.
The book deserve a fair hearing, if nothing else, no matter how upsetting it may be.
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