Estimating the Losses of Polish Jews in Hiding, 1942-1945: Revisiting Yehuda Bauer’s Observations, by Jan Grabowski. 2022. JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH
Why is Yehuda Bauer dragged into this missive? Jan Grabowski, evidently unsure of himself, is trying this time to “ride the coattails” of the prestige of Yehuda Bauer. Now Bauer is an outstanding Holocaust scholar all right, but he is also a very doctrinaire Holocaust supremacist. See:
Just because Bauer says something, it does not make it correct, though Grabowski seemingly imagines that it does. Grabowski’s “Holocaust scholarship” is a joke. As quickly becomes obvious, the article is little about “Jewish losses”, and is more a repetition of all the canned Jewish attacks on Poland. This article repeats many accusations that have been voiced a hundred times before, and, rather than again answering every single one of them, I focus on major themes.
MYSTIFICATION OF THE HOLOCAUST: GRABOWSKI SLAYS THE KL WARSCHAU BOGEYMAN
Grabowski (pp. 100-101) parrots the Judeocentric interpretation of the KL Warschau controversy, and revives the closely-related Judeocentric complaint about the presumed “blurring” of Nazi death camps and “ordinary” concentration camps. (p. 101). There is more to this than meets the eye. Let us take a closer look at all this.
The intensity of the recent KL Warschau controversy itself speaks volumes about the power of the Judeocentrists to shape public opinion, and especially the hysterical jealousy with which they deal with potential threats to the Holocaust supremacist narrative. They have expanded the mystification of the Holocaust itself: The mystification of the association of Jews with gas chambers and death camps, in public consciousness, must be maintained at all costs. That’s what the fuss about KL Warschau, and death camps, is all about.
In “discounting” KL Warschau, the Holocaust supremacists have, at best, won a pyrrhic victory. So what if the mass gassing of Poles at KL Warschau did not happen? Jews still would not validly “own” the gas chambers! Few people know this (and I don’t wonder why), but the mass gassing of Poles at various camps, including Auschwitz, was an undeniable fact. See:
https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/gassing-poles-at-auschwitz-pilecki/
Death by murder is death by murder. Except to the Holocaust supremacists, it makes not the slightest difference if the death was of a Pole or a Jew, or if the death occurred in an “ordinary” concentration camp or in an extermination camp. Nor does it matter if the murder was upon arrival or with some delay, or whether it was by means of poison gas, bullet, or overwork and starvation. This is according to Rudolf Hoess. He should know: He was the Kommandant of Auschwitz. See:
https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/auschwitz-no-valid-jewish-monopolization-hoess/
CLAIMING “TOO MUCH CREDIT” FOR RESCUING JEWS. YIKES!
Grabowski is irked by the “fact” that Poles in general, and the PiS government in particular, talks “too much” about the Polish rescue of fugitive Jews. (e g. p. 99). He is demolishing a straw man. No Poles have ever suggested that Jew-rescue was typical Polish behavior. To the contrary: Poles have always stressed that heroic behavior, by its very nature, must be exceptional. Grabowski is deeply confused: Celebrating heroic behavior is not synonymous with implying that it was typical!
In addition, Grabowski’s indignation is blatantly selective. If claiming “too much credit” for rescuing Jews is such a big deal, why not focus on the Danes? The entire Danish nation was summarily honored by Yad Vashem for its (relatively-easy) rescue of Jews. Was every single Dane personally involved in the rescue of Jews? Hardly. Do the Danish SS, generic Danish collaborators, and outright card-carrying Danish Nazis, all fit under the Yad Vashem umbrella of the “entire Danish nation rescuing Jews”? Most certainly not.
THE POLISH GOVERNMENT IS BAD. IT REJECTS THE JEWISH ATTACKS ON POLAND
Grabowski waxes eloquent in his complaints about the PiS government and its support of the remembrance of Polish suffering. (pp. 96-97). Not done yet, he whines about the questioning of the factuality of Jewish attacks upon Poland. Evidently, those rascally Poles are finally beginning to stand up for themselves. What’s this world coming to?
The author does not even bother to be internally consistent. Elsewhere, Grabowski complains that Poles all over the entire political spectrum generally reject the standard Holocaust messaging (p. 107), and not just PiS. So, as admitted by Grabowski himself, the “problem” is not the PiS government or those big, bad Polish nationalists. The “problem” is Poles, as a whole, refusing to submit to the dictates of the standard Judeocentric narrative on the Holocaust that is being forced on them. How dare they!
Grabowski has a conniption about the fact that Poles focus on their own sufferings. How awful! Then again, minimizing non-Jewish sufferings is what Holocaust supremacism is all about, and Grabowski is a virtuoso at that.
Failing everything else, Grabowski (p. 100) accuses the Poles of having “Holocaust envy”. Same old Holocaustspeak. Could it not more validly be said that far too many Jews have “goyim-genocide envy”, in that they are reluctant to acknowledge the sufferings of non-Jews, especially–perish the thought–on an equal footing with their own? See:
INVOKING (WHO ELSE?) HITLER
Grabowski never stops fibbing. He tells us that Dmowski was “a great admirer of Adolf Hitler”. (p. 99). On what planet is Grabowski walking? Then again, it’s the same old reductio ad Hitlerum song and dance, and Grabowski evidently does not want to feel left out, so why not?
NOW GRABOWSKI IS THE HERO-MARTYR
Jan Grabowski tries to play on the reader’s sympathies. All in all, Grabowski imagines himself to be a heroic iconoclast, and that he is persecuted for doing so. Then again, this gambit often works in today’s world. He whines about the “fact” that he, and others that parrot him, are subject to “a vicious hate campaign”. (p. 99). What if? Why should it be remarkable that Pole-haters like Grabowski are sometimes themselves hated in return? It is hatred of the haters.
THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION OF JUDEOCENTRIC THINKING: A NEW EXAMPLE
I have studied Holocaust-related issues for a long time, and, whenever I think that I have seen everything, I am amazed anew by the creative rhetorical novelties put out by the Holocaust establishment. This time around, Grabowski would have us believe that the “3 million dead Poles” figure was an invention of Jakub Berman and the Communist government, all done because Poles could not bear the thought that fewer Poles had died than the 3 million German-murdered Jews. (p. 103). This feat of imagination is not supported by a shred of supporting evidence, but what does it matter? When it comes to the Holocaust in all its over-attention and moral prestige, an accusation is as good as a solid fact.
If anything, the Soviet-imposed Communist government, disproportionately Jewish in the first place, had been currying favor with Poland’s Jews and not the ethnic Poles, as evidenced by its promptly building a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. Besides, the Communists surely knew that their legitimacy was based solely on force, and not on Polish public opinion. Why, then, would they suddenly feel some kind of strange need to go out of the way to falsify facts–just to cater to the enslaved Poles?
Never mind the fact that some scholars today, long after Jakub Berman and all the Soviet-Communist puppet government are thankfully gone, continue to support the 3 million (or even 4.4 million) figure for Polish dead. See:
https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/polokaust-definitive-work-materski/
Are they also fabricating things just to flatter the Poles today? Or do we overall see more a catering to Jewish sensibilities through the endless selective memorialization of the Holocaust throughout the Western world?
Grabowski’s insinuation is not even superficially plausible. The Holocaust supremacist narrative is not dependent upon the absolute numbers of Polish and Jewish deaths in the first place! Far from it. We keep hearing, for example, that 90% of Poland’s Jews died against “only” 10% of Poles. Yes, “only” 10%. What a relief! Even that does not ultimately matter. What matters most, as has been pushed by the Holocaust establishment for decades now, is the fact that Jews (supposedly) were slated for total annihilation, while the Poles (supposedly) were not. This is what perennially is supposed to justify the elevation of the Holocaust over all other genocides.
WHO IS PLAYING WITH NUMBERS?
Grabowski contrives an issue of the “fact” that something is made about the range of Jews supposedly denounced or killed by Poles (130,000 to 200,000), but nothing is made of the range of Poles killed by the Germans (1.8 million to 3.0 million or more). (p. 107). What does one have to do with the other? And never mind the fact that the Holocaust establishment today (such as the USHMM) quotes only the lower figures for Polish deaths–1.8 million of them, and never any higher figures. Who is it, then, that has a problem with numbers–the Poles or the Holocaust establishment?
TRIVIALIZING COMMUNIST CRIMES. IS GRABOWSKI A COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZER?
Grabowski lays another whopper, “…the communists who already were perceived by large segments of the Polish society not only as foreign agents, ‘Russian and Soviet proxies’…” (p. 103). [Note, first of all, the small “c” for Communists: An Orwellian minimalization]. Perceived, huh? So the Poles only perceived that they were being subjugated. I guess that the Soviets came to Poland as wonderful friends. Imagine someone saying that Jews perceived the Holocaust an unspeakable tragedy. How would that play?
THE STANDARD JUDEOCENTRIC CONTEXTUAL VACUUM, AND BLAMING POLES FOR GERMAN CRIMES
Now Grabowski plays the magician. He once again makes the Germans almost completely disappear, at the snap of a finger, as he writes, “The Polish Blue police took part in all of these liquidations, either cordoning off the ghettos from the outside, preventing the fleeing Jews from reaching the Aryan side, or becoming directly involved in the Aktion inside the ghetto.” (p. 106).
Back to reality. For the facts on the conduct of the Polish Blue Police, notably its tight control by the German conquerors and occupants of Poland, see:
THE ANTI-POLISH FAIRY TALE ABOUT WEGROW COUNTY–AGAIN
Jan Grabowski, oblivious to recent scholarship, repeats the canard about Poles, acting largely on their own, rounding up the Jews of Wegrow County. (p. 99, pp. 106-107). Unfortunately for Grabowski’s cock-and-bull story, it has thoroughly been debunked. See:
GRABOWSKI’S VOODOO NUMBERS ARE STILL HAUNTING MODERN HOLOCAUST SCHOLARSHIP
Grabowski repeats his decade-old claim, “Historians agree today that close to ten percent of the 2.5 million Polish Jews who survived up until the summer of 1942 tried to escape extermination.” (p. 104). Oh, really? What is the evidentiary basis for this “ten percent” figure? Exactly which historians is he referring to? And where can this agreement be located? On Mars? Grabowski does not even bother to supply a reference to back up his claim. Oh well, Grabowski has always been a rather good Judeocentric storyteller, and nothing has changed.
Back to reality. Fact is, inferred Jewish-escape rates, from the Warsaw Ghetto alone, cover a huge range–1% to 10%. If this is true for the most-studied large Jewish community in Poland, it is even truer for all Jews collectively in German-occupied Poland. This makes it all the more ridiculous to suppose that an overall Jewish-escape rate can even be approximated for Poland in its entirety. See:
See also:
GREUELPROPAGANDA (HORROR PROPAGANDA) ONCE MORE
In over a decade, Jan Grabowski has evidently not learned anything. He says, “The hypothesis I put forward in 2011, concerning the ‘dark number’ of 200,000 Jews who had a working chance to survive and who died with the complicity of the local populations, is one that I am willing to continue to defend today, ten years later.” (p. 106). Grabowski is confusing his opinion with fact, and he conveniently forgets that sticking to an opinion does not make it true. Just as predictably, Grabowski provides not a shred of evidence to support his claims. But as long as it makes for a bigger anti-Polish splash (reminiscent of the Jewish-German 1918 massive-Polish-pogroms newspaper horror propaganda), why not declare it anew?
GRABOWSKI CLUMSILY RATIONALIZES HIS VOODOO NUMBERS
The author comments, “The estimates of losses during World War II, and especially those among populations in central and Eastern Europe are, and always have been, burdened with high degree of inaccuracy. In the case of the Soviet Union, for instance, the estimates are widely imprecise, ranging from twenty to 27 million people. The same is true for Poland.” (p. 107). This is disingenuous to the hilt. Grabowski conveniently forgets that good-faith scholarly differences in estimates are one thing: His made-up fantastic numbers, done for the purpose of Jewish-victimization Pole-demonizing propaganda, are quite another.
But wait. It gets even better. Grabowski thus imagines the situation of the Blue Police searching for fugitive Jews left behind in the ghettos by the Germans, “Can we offer detailed counts of these victims who were murdered through the efforts of their Polish neighbors? Probably not. Should we discount their tragedy? I do not think so. In light of the above, the hypothesis that Poles were involved in the deaths of 200,000 Jews seems like a very conservative proposition.” (p. 107)
This is priceless! Grabowski’s moralizing and wild speculation now pass for Holocaust scholarship, moreover published in a prestigious Holocaust-research journal. Who needs those dang Holocaust deniers in order to bring discredit to Holocaust studies?
Enough of Grabowski’s fantasies. For a thorough, objective study on Poles and Jews in the German-occupied Polish countryside, see:
