So is your position that Polish actions to facilitate the Holocaust were justified, or are you just posting facts and claims you have come across?
I’m providing these facts as a counterpoint to simpleminded and one-sided characterizations in this thread, such as yours, Haberdash. Were you aware of these facts or is it the first time you learned about them?
Here are some more facts to provide the full picture as opposed to caricatures in this thread:
Some estimates put the number of Poles involved in rescue at up to 3 million, and credit Poles with saving up to around 450,000 Jews from certain death
Nazi-occupied Poland was the only territory where the Germans decreed that any kind of help for Jews was punishable by death for the helper and his entire family. Of the estimated 3 million non-Jewish Poles killed in World War II, up to 50,000 were executed by Nazi Germany solely as a penalty for saving Jews.
To date, 6,394 Poles have been awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations by the State of Israel
How does the fact that there were Poles who helped save Jews counteract the fact that there Poles that helped persecute Jews?
I never gave it much thought. I’m used to it.
Some folks in every country hate Jews. Most Jewish religious holidays may be described as, “A bunch of people tried to kill us all. They didn’t. Let’s eat!”
Your link cites 2 estimates, 50% and 37%. I’m not sure how this matters though, unless you want to assign collective guilt for the actions of a few.
There are a number of other articles at Wikipedia. This one notes that Jews had a 10% survival rate in Poland, though that country also made up a majority of rescuers in the Righteous Among the Nations list. I’m a little leery of that statistic, as it doesn’t control for population nor does it investigates shares of righteous, as it were. More persuasively, “In his work on the Jews of Warsaw, Gunnar S. Paulsson has demonstrated that despite the much harsher conditions, Polish citizens of Warsaw managed to support and hide the same percentage of Jews as did the citizens of cities in reportedly safer countries of Western Europe.” That suggests at least to me a critical mass of mensches.
This article, covering the 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz takes a dimmer view. When 250,000 Polish Jews returned after the war, they hit a wave of hostility and repression, resulting in the deaths of 1500 Jews and a fair amount of official and unofficial looting of property.
And yet there were those mensches, thousands of them. Elie Wiesel wrote a review of Fear at the Washington Post: [INDENT]Does it follow that all of Poland was to blame? I do not believe in collective guilt. Only the guilty are guilty; their contemporaries are not. The children of killers are not killers but children. Today, a new generation will assume responsibility for its history. [/INDENT] Polish conservatives agitated to declare Fear a slander against the Polish state. To their credit, Polish prosecutors rejected those claims and declined to investigate. Great nations are not afraid of confronting their past.