Scholars at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum have denounced material circulated by an extreme right-wing group in Poland that expresses support for Western figures who deny Adolf Hitler carried out mass murders of European Jewry.
Professor Yisrael Gutman, head of research at Yad Vashem, and Dr. Shmuel Krakowski, head of the museum archive, said that materials published in a newsletter entitled “Nasze Sprawy” (Matters of Our Concern) are “shocking.”
Copies of the newsletter were obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from the Polish Historical Society and relayed to Yad Vashem. The society had expressed concern about the news-letter after the Solidarity newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza editorialized against it.
“I have seen many anti-Semitic publications appearing recently in Poland,” said Gutman of Yad Vashem, “but this is the first time that I have seen material in Poland that denies that the Holocaust took place.
“This kind of material is terrible in other countries,” Gutman said. “But in the land where the death camps were established, it is absolutely barbaric. The Poles knew what was happening to the Jews. Even if they didn’t commit mass murder, they were witness to mass murder.”
The first two issues of “Nasze Sprawy” contain articles propagating the views of three Western figures who have asserted that central aspects of the Holocaust did not take place: David Irving, Ernst Zundel and Robert Faurisson.
“We welcome the emergence of democracy in Poland,” Krakowski said, noting that political groups can now circulate views that were previously suppressed. “But racist incitement of this nature should be banned,” he said.
“We assume that the appearance of Holocaust denial literature in Poland is a marginal phenomenon. But it is still very worrisome.”
‘THREAT’ OF WORLD ZIONISM
Both Krakowski and Gutman are Holocaust survivors from Poland. Gutman is a member of an international council advising Polish authorities on changes to be made at the Auschwitz museum.
The newsletter is printed in the city of Radom by a small movement apparently headed by a Professor Mieczyslaw Trzeciak. He is also a leader of the right-wing, anti-Semitic Grunwald movement.
One issue of the newsletter printed a reader’s letter quoting from an article by Trzeciak, in which he says that “a threat to Poland stems from world Zionism.
“A small group of Jews rules over 40 million Poles. The Polish servants of this group are their ‘shabbes goys,’ and they are worse than Jews,” it says, adding: “They are helping the Jews to establish Zionism in Poland and to rob our national spirit.”
A slogan on the first page of the newsletter says that “this paper is dedicated to youth and students in the belief that they will reject communism and capitalism, and will adopt the program of national democracy.”
Gutman said that the reference to “national democracy” seems to be an attempt to revive the spirit of the prewar National Democrats, a right-wing movement that was virulently anti-Semitic.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
