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Group of Editors at Wikipedia Intentionally Skewing & Misrepresenting Facts About the Holocaust
Polish nationals behind Wikipedia campaign to exonerate them from evidence of their collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust
Edited by: Fern Sidman
In this age of rapidly escalating global anti-Semitism, it now appears that the well documented historical facts about the Holocaust and the heinous atrocities that were committed against Jews have been hijacked by a group of editors at Wikipedia. It appears that the agenda of the editors has been influenced by right-wing Polish nationals who wish to present a mendacious portrait of Poles bearing no responsibility whatsoever for their collaboration with the Nazi regime during the nightmarish Holocaust years of World War II. Moreover, the editors at Wikipedia are promulgating a dangerously false and highly spurious narrative that claims that the Poles were not culpable in helping to build Nazi concentration camps on Polish soil, nor did they wage deadly pogroms against Jews when the Nazis occupied Poland and prior to that. Rather, they present Jews as Communist activists and claim that the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves.
In early 2018, Poland’s Senate has approved a controversial bill making it illegal to accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in the Nazi Holocaust. The bill sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term as punishment. President Andrzej Duda said that his country has the right “to defend historical truth”.
The bill says that “whoever accuses, publicly and against the facts, the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years”. But it adds the caveat that a person “is not committing a crime if he or she commits such an act as part of artistic or scientific activities”.
The bill has outraged Israeli MPs, who are now seeking to strengthen their own Holocaust denial laws.
In March 2021, The New Yorker magazine reported thattTwo Polish historians of the Holocaust, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, were in the midst of fighting a court ruling that pronounced them guilty of defaming a long-deceased Polish village official. Grabowski and Engelking are the editors of “Dalej Jest Noc. Losy Żydów w Wybranych Powiatach Okupowanej Polski” (“Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland”).
The New Yorker reported that it was published in 2018, to significant academic acclaim and surprisingly brisk sales for a two-volume, seventeen-hundred-page scholarly title. One chapter, written by Engelking, mentioned Edward Malinowski, the prewar mayor of a small village called Malinowo. According to testimony uncovered by Engelking, Malinowski led the Nazis to Jews who were hiding in the forest outside the village; twenty-two people were killed. Last month, a Warsaw district court found that this passage of “Night Without End” defamed Malinowski, and ordered Grabowski and Engelking to apologize in print. Grabowski and Engelking have appealed the ruling.
The two historians’ legal troubles stem from the Polish government’s ongoing effort to exonerate Poland of any role in the deaths of three million Jews in Poland during the Nazi occupation, as was reported by The New Yorker. When facts get in the way of this revisionist effort, historians pay the price.
The New Yorkers also reported that in 2016, Polish authorities began investigating the Polish-American historian Jan Tomasz Gross, the author of the groundbreaking book “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.” The New Yorker report indicated that he was accused of insulting the Polish people for his observation that Poles killed more Jews than Germans during the Second World War. The case dragged on for three years, with Gross subjected to hours of police interrogations; the government also threatened to strip Gross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, a state honor he had received in 1996. (The state dropped the investigation after Gross retired from his job at Princeton.) Over 2019 and 2020, Dariusz Stola, the head of Warsaw’s acclaimed museum of Polish Jewry, found himself slowly squeezed out of his job, again by the Polish government.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE FACTUAL DISTORTION OF THE HOLOCAUST ON WIKIPEDIA, PLEASE CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINKS:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hksrnqlts
