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Silence
Isn’t Always Golden
On February 1st the Polish Senate passed a
bill that leaves me somewhat perplexed.
As soon as President Andrzej Duda signs the
legislation into law, it will be illegal—and punishable by up to three
years in prison—to claim that Poland was complicit in any Nazi
atrocities committed on Polish soil during World War II.
“We the Poles, were victims, as were the Jews, “
Deputy Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said Wednesday right before the vote.
“It is a duty of every Pole to defend the good name of Poland.”
During WWII, Germans killed at least 3 million Jewish
citizens of Poland in addition to 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish
civilians, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Nazis
established some of the most notorious extermination camps of the
Holocaust on Polish soil, including Auschwitz-Birkenau where nearly 1
million Jews and 75,000 non-Jewish Poles died.
There is little doubt that the people of Poland were
victimized by the Nazis. Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to
Holocaust victims recognizes thousands of Polish people as “Righteous
Among the Nations.” Many Polish non-Jews took great risks to save Jews
during the Holocaust. These brave men and women are heroes.
However, there were others who were not righteous.
Jewish historian Jonathon Tobin recently wrote, “Anti-Semitism was
endemic in pre-Holocaust Poland. Many, if not most Poles were largely
indifferent to the fate of their Jewish compatriots.” Jews were being
massacred by their Polish neighbors in 1941. In a well-documented
incident in 1946, forty-two Jews were killed by police and townspeople
in Kielce, Poland.
Don’t these atrocities contradict the government’s
claim that no Polish people committed crimes against Jews during WWII?
Is the Polish government now attempting to forbid free speech to erase a
painful and complicated time in world history?
What about the Allied forces?
The extermination plan was smuggled out of Poland by
a Jewish political organization (The Bund) and reached England in 1942.
Details were also smuggled from Poland and Switzerland to the Vatican
and forwarded to the Allies.
An emissary of the Polish underground met personally
with President Franklin Roosevelt and British Foreign Minister Anthony
Eden in November 1942. It is absurd to say that our governments didn’t
know what was happening to Polish Jews.
A quote by Albert Einstein is displayed in the Dallas
Holocaust Museum. It says: “The world is too dangerous to live in—not
because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and
let it happen.”
I’m not questioning that hindsight continues to
reveal disturbing facts about the Holocaust. What concerns me is the
misleading intent of the Polish bill, and a similar mindset in our own
country.
Our children’s text books are being rewritten to make
us look better. We are changing what is taught about abuse of the Native
Americans who were here before colonization. We don’t want to admit that
our ancestors got rich buying and selling people from Africa into
slavery. Statues and memorials from the Civil War are being taken down
and destroyed because it is offensive to see the stark ugliness of our
history.
People have committed and will continue to commit
atrocities… not because people are inherently bad, but because sin is
unchallenged. Can we really afford to deny historical hindsight and
painful repentance to the generations that follow us?
I hope that Polish people will eventually admit that
not all of them were perfect. I hope we can too.
Scripture is clear on this matter. “Whoever knows the
right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” (James 4:17)
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