10000 attendees? There should be plenty of citation besides you for anything that big, as in dozens of Google hits. Hundreds maybe. Let’s have them.
Unacceptable- see post #21.
Upon second thought, interview may be too strong a word. We had some people out on the floor recruiting people to some to us to share their stories. We sat at tables with recorders and invited them to talk. There were a few standard question, mostly so we were sure we had their names, and which camp or camps they had been in. Other than that it was pretty free form. Sometimes we prompted them if they paused or seemed stick, sometimes we turned off the recorders and held their hands for a while if they broke down and cried, which many of them did.
Nobody asked them, I’m pretty sure, “How did you feel about Polish collaborators?” I certainly didn’t. Which made it all the more surprising that these same feelings came pouring out of so many of them spontaneously.
Go find them yourself. Or don’t. Apparently you think I’m lying.
I genuinely don’t care whether this is accceptable to you.
Give me the name of the damn conference and I will go find it, if it’s there.
No person who has ever learned about the Holocaust at all can possibly be unaware that Polish collaboration is an enormous controversy. You don’t have to be a historian to know this, you just have to have visited a museum or read a book ever. Denying that these claims are even made is ridiculous Polish nationalist apologism.
I literally don’t know where to start out of the thousands of possible links to give you. Here’s a random one: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/101123/nazi-collaborators-or-victims
This is the woman who organized the oral history. I didn’t know she died until I saw this a few minutes ago, so thank you for that. I visited her at her home in CA the year after the conference.
This is the organization she founded. I suspect it has the originals or copies of the tapes. It mentions that copies of the tapes also go to the Holocaust museum in DC, but the museum didn’t exist at the time and I don’t know if the entire collection was sent there. I don’t even know if she had created the organization yet. As I recall, she was looking for a home for the tapes.
As to the name of the conference I don’t know. It was at the DC Convention Center in the early or mid-80s.
The author of this link is able to mention one and only one wartime pogrom carried out by Poles during the war (Jebwabne, 1940). It is sad that there was even one, but considering it was open season on Jews and that there were 3 million Jews, one pogrom must be considered evidence against significant Polish complicity rather than evidence for it.
I had never heard of the Szmalcownicy. They may have been responsible for significantly more Pole-on Jew harm than I previously considered likely. Still, expert opinion (per Wiki) places their numbers at only 2-3000 in Warsaw, the biggest city in the country, and the regular Polish resistance considered their activity to be a capital crime, so it is fair to wonder how extensive their depredations were.
Finally, this quote from the link is needed for balance:
“It should be noted without equivocation that Poland’s Holocaust record, while far from perfect, is better than most countries under Nazi occupation. Unlike most of Germany’s European colonies, Poland produced no native SS division. Those who served with the German army were primarily Volksdeutsch (Polish citizens of German extraction), and, unlike citizens of other countries under occupation, no Poles eagerly worked as death camp guards.”
Well, that’s definitive.
I’m telling you that as far as Jewish survivors were concerned, many Poles worked eagerly with the Germans.
Well, I hope someone eventually gets around to publishing at least some of the interviews. It sounds like a priceless collection and thanks to you for your part in its creation.
An interesting historical note from Wikipedia.
“72 Jews were killed and 443 injured by Polish troops, militia, and civilians in Poland in the 1918 Lwów pogrom.[19][20][21][22][23] The following year, pogroms were reported in several cities in Poland.[24]”
There is a baffling tension between your interviews and two thread cites. I do not think you or your subjects would make something up, but I am not going to just dismiss the cites either.
One thing mentioned in the latest cite upthread was a particularly awful Pole-on-Jew pogrom which took place shortly after the war. Imagine a Jew surviving all those years and then coming to such an end. The hatred of all things Polish arising from knowledge of such an event might have distorted many survivors’ memories. Not that there were no “eager” Poles, but that the weight attached to them was far greater than their numbers or their real share of the responsibility.
It is certainly possible that Polish Jews were angrier at Polish collaborators than Germans because they considered them traitors as well as tormentors. Wiki claims that a lower percentage of Jews collaborated than natives of other occupied countries, and that may be true, but that could still mean tens or hundreds of thousands of collaborators, and contact between tham and Jewish prisoners and/or ghetto residents may have been very common.
My cite was WWI.
I was speaking of the cite in post #27.
I beg your pardon. 
That’s not true. Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 and 14th SS-Volunteer Division “Galician” were both made up of Polish Ukranians, and, the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, made up of Volksdeusche Poles, was under SS command.
Yes, truly the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust was that Jews who survived it might be angry at the perpetrators.
You are skirting perilously close to denial here – Polish collaboration is a rock solid historical fact. The only controversy is how much and how under German duress it was.
I marvel at the kapos, prisoners who worked for the Nazi guards to live a few more days.