Will the REAL Holocaust Please Stand UP!

After decades of combating revisionists who want to minimize, or even deny the Holocaust of the Jews during World War Two and the Nazi occupation of Europe, the government of Israel has finally bowed to pressure from within and offered their own, "politically correct" (but false to the facts) version. Here's what happened.

The government and the people of Poland, having grown tired of taking all the blame for collaborating with the Nazis, decided to fight back with a law making it illegal to FALSELY state that the Poles were responsible for Holocaust atrocities. The law was quite exact. It did not criminalize TRUE statements, only false ones. Nevertheless, the State of Israel over-reacted, accusing the State of Poland of Holocaust denial.

After several days, nay, weeks of highest-level negotiations, it looked like things were finally calming down, with Israeli Jews being reassured that only lies were being criminalized, not true historical references. A well-known Jewish scholar, whose family were betrayed to the Nazis by Polish neighbors, asked in an Israeli periodical if saying so would get him arrested in Poland. The Polish Prime Minister himself chose to answer him. Part of his reassurance went awry.

As part of his statement, he mentioned that TRUE statements about those who cooperated with the Nazis would always be legal in Poland. And he listed them by nationality: Polish perpetrators, Jewish perpetrators, Lithuanian perpetrators, Russian perpetrators, etc. At the mention of the phrase, "Jewish perpetrators," the Israeli press, public, government, and worldwide supporters went wild! It seemed to them that the Polish Prime Minister was blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, a favorite tactic of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites around the world.

In fact, he was doing no such thing. He was merely pointing out that ALL nations had weak individuals who succumbed to the Nazi tactics of torture, kidnapping, and deliberate starvation, and ended up collaborating in the Holocaust, including some Jews.  As a descendant of Polish Jews, I am neither proud nor ashamed of this fact. It happened.

To be sure, there were many more heroes than villains in every group. The Russians lost HALF THE MEN in their country, fighting the Nazis. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were the first people in Europe to rebel. With homemade weapons, no food, and no outside help, they threw the Wehrmacht out of the Ghetto and kept them out for a MONTH. It took dive-bombers, tanks, and firestorm bombing for the Germans to reconquer the Ghetto, and they only did it by razing the Jewish part of Warsaw to the ground.

The Poles were not far behind. The citizens of Warsaw, seeing what the Jews had done, heroically rose against the Germans themselves, becoming the only conquered national capital in all of Europe to rise in open rebellion and throw the Germans out. I am proud that one of those Polish fighters was my family member. She was a teenage girl at the time, and one of the very few Jews to escape from the Ghetto alive. These things all happened, the good and the bad.

The government of Poland is correct to say that it's time to stop throwing mud at each other and tell the truth. There were Jewish heroes. There were Polish heroes. There were Russian, French, and German heroes, too. Alas, there were also collaborators and even villains in every group as well. Saying otherwise is not historically accurate, even if it is politically correct. The Holocaust was terrible enough without muddying it up with propaganda, however well-intended.

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