For years after the war, under communism, talk of complicity was effectively
silenced in Poland, from the left and the right. The Communist Party had no interest
in being seen as the defenders of Jews; right-wing nationalists had no desire to wash
Poland’s dirty laundry in public.
But the stories were there, carried by witnesses, rescuers, and survivors — a complex
history of heroic actions, terrible betrayals and even massacres.
When the Nazis seized the Polish border town of Piotrkow in 1939, nine-year-old
Ben Helfgott was forced into a ghetto alongside his family. When the SS first
attempted to transport him to a camp in 1942, he was saved by a Polish manager at
the glass factory where he worked, who told the SS that he was not a Jew.
“It was not easy for Poles to help at that time, they risked their own lives,” said Mr
Helfgott, now 88, from his home in England.
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He was eventually transported to Buchenwald in 1944, aged 14, and ended up in the
Theresienstadt camp where he was liberated in 1945. The horror wasn’t over though
— when he returned to Piotrkow he was racially abused and nearly murdered by
Polish army officers.
“I was saved by a Pole and I was nearly killed by a Pole. That is my history, it cannot
be changed,” he said. “They can pass a law but it cannot work. Many people, Jews
and Poles, have written about this history. It is there in books. You cannot change it.”
It was a book that finally forced Poland, in 2000, to reckon with the darker chapters
of its past. Neighbours, by historian Jan Gross, told the story of a 1941 pogrom in the
village of Jedwabne, where at least 340 Jews were locked in a barn and burned alive
by their Polish neighbours. The account was based on interviews with witnesses,
murderers, and survivors, and it shocked the country out of a long period of denial.
“Jan Gross threw a hand grenade into the debate,” said Ms Prazmowska.
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Historian Jan GrossImage copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
Historian Jan Gross pieced together eyewitness accounts to detail the murder of Jews
in Jedwabne
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Other historians followed. In 2013, Professor Jan Grabowski concluded that at least
200,000 Jews who escaped the liquidation of the Polish ghettoes were killed, directly
or indirectly, by Polish citizens. His book, Hunt for the Jews, detailed a complex
history of inducements and threats by Nazis and moral compromises by Poles.
“For years these topics had been off the table. There was a consensus of silence that
was broken by Jan Gross,” said Mr Grabowski.