Robert Fisk: In the cases of two separate holocausts, Israel and Poland find it difficult to acknowledge the facts of history // ANDRÉ LIEBICH - Righteous indignation: On the Polish Holocaust law debate
How many times must
the dead die all over again for nations to accept the facts of history?
While Poland has decided to outlaw any
claims that their countrymen participated in the extermination of the Jews,
Israel continues to ignore the Armenian genocide. Poland punishes anyone who speaks of Polish participation in the Jewish Holocaust, but accepts the Armenian Holocaust. Israel insists that all must acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust – and Poland’s peripheral guilt – but will not acknowledge the Armenian Holocaust.
The Israelis have been
mighty pissed off with the Polish government these past few days. I don’t blame
them. In fact – and I’m not referring to the racist, extremist military
occupation government of Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli people and Jews
around the world are quite right to be enraged at Poland’s latest Holocaust
denialism. The Polish decision to
criminalise any accusation of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, passing a law
which effectively prevents any Pole from acknowledging that Poles themselves
assisted in the genocide of six million European Jews, is iniquitous. Its
purpose is not to elicit the truth, but to bury it. It certainly constitutes
part of the denialism of the Jewish Holocaust.
But – to give a taster
to what this column is also about – I will say one word: Armenia. And reveal
henceforth one of the most remarkable coincidences in recent publishing
history. It involves century-old telegrams – hitherto regarded as forgeries,
but in fact real – ordering the mass extermination of more than
one million Christians, a truly courageous Turkish historian, and a total
denial of the Armenian Holocaust by the one nation which should acknowledge its
existence. But first, Poland.
So let’s get the facts
– “just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts,” as Sgt Joe Friday never actually
said in Dragnet – out of the way. Jews accounted for 10
per cent of the Polish population in 1939.
Pre-war Polish governments took
anti-Semitic measures to exclude Jews from important state posts. When the
Germans invaded, they regarded the Poles as Slavic “untermenschen”, but
understood all too well how latent anti-Semitism stained the Christian
nationalist state of Poland. Poland lost
two million non-Jewish citizens at the hands of the Nazis. Polish Jews
were virtually annihilated. Many Poles hid Jews from the Nazis and fought
alongside them against the Wehrmacht and the SS.
But the Germans used
Polish police forces to guard Jewish ghettoes, the last transit point before
the Jews were sent in their tens of thousands to the extermination camps on
Polish soil. No, they were not “Polish death camps” – both the Poles and the
Israelis agree on that – but Polish collaborators (the “Blue Police”) did
enforce curfews against Jews and assisted in the liquidation of the ghettoes.
There is clear and
unimpeachable evidence that some (perhaps more than “some”) Poles blackmailed
Jews in return for keeping their hiding places secret. In eastern Polish towns,
Poles in a few cases participated in the murder of their Jewish neighbours. The
massacre at Jedwabne comes to mind. But Poles were the first to reveal the
facts of the Jewish Holocaust to the Allies, and at least one Polish resistance
group saved thousands of Jewish lives by producing forged papers and finding
escape routes for Jews.
As in most
German-occupied European nations, morality – or immorality – was coloured grey.
Think Vichy, and the French “maquis”. Think Italian fascism, and the Italian
communist resistance. In 2015, Ukraine
passed laws that forced its citizens to honour nationalists who briefly
collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the mass killing of Jews. No
uproar from the West, of course, since we currently support brave little
Ukraine against the Russian beast that has gobbled up Crimean Sevastopol.
But now to the
incredible timing of the Polish legislation. For even as this disreputable law
was actually passing through the parliament in Warsaw a few days ago, that most
brave of Turkish historians, Taner Akcam, was publishing a short but revelatory
book (Killing Orders, published by Palgrave Macmillan) which proves,
finally and conclusively, that the extermination orders of Talat Pasha, a
leader of the Young Turks and one of the Three Pashas who ruled the Ottoman
Empire in the First World War, to destroy the entire Armenian Christian
population in 1915 were real. Not forgeries as
Turkey’s apologists and denial historians would have the world believe. Not
concocted by Armenian counterfeiters, or fiction created by a non-existent
Ottoman official, as these wretched people would have us think. But as
copper-bottomed and terrible as the Nazi documents which prove Germany’s
responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust – and the evidence that
proves Poles sometimes joined in the slaughter.
The facts of the
Armenian Holocaust – for “Shoah” (holocaust) is the very word that many
honourable Israelis use for the Armenian genocide – are well known but need,
however briefly, to be repeated. In 1915 and in the immediate years that
followed, the Ottoman Turks deliberately set out to liquidate a million and a
half of their Armenian Christian citizens, sending them into the desert on
death marches, butchering the men, raping the women, spitting the children on
bayonets or starving them to death with their mothers and other family members
in what is now northern Syria.
The Kurds, sorry to say,
assisted in this barbarity. Taner Akcam has written extensively and with
immense authority on this appalling period of Turkish history – which the
Turkish government, to this day, shamefully denies – and has as a result been
abused by hundreds of right-wing Turkish extremists who have even tried to
place him on an American “terrorist” list (he teaches in the US
Akcam’s new book
contains a dark and haunting – almost frightening – geography, for most of
the 1915 massacres he writes about took place in or near towns which carry
their own fearful message of slaughter and horror to us today: Mosul, Raqqa,
Deir ez-Zour and, yes, Aleppo.
It was in the Baron
Hotel in Aleppo – still standing today, the descendants of the then owner
Mazlouiyan still (just) occupying its lobby – that a set of original telegrams
from Talat Pasha, along with other liquidation messages memorised by an Ottoman
official, Naim Bey, were handed over to an Armenian Holocaust survivor called
Aram Andonian. He paid cash for the documents. We don’t know how much. Until now, Turkish
historians and their supporters in the West have regarded these vital papers as
false. They claimed that Naim Bey did not exist, that Andonian was a forger, that
the cypher in which Talat’s telegrams were written did not match the Ottoman
cypher system of the time. They ignored the mass of evidence presented to the
existing but quickly suppressed post-war trials in Istanbul, archives which
subsequently went missing. And they held up telegrams – real enough but
deliberately misleading – that “proved” Talat had the best interests of the
Armenians at heart when he deported them.
Akcam’s unravelling of
the truth is both a detective story and a volume of sudden, inconceivable
horror. He proves the cypher numbers were real, that Naim Bey did indeed exist;
an Ottoman document on a corruption investigation – in which Turkish officials
accepted bribes from Armenians in return for their lives – identifies him as
“Naim Effendi, the son of Huseyin Nuri, 26 years of age, from Silifke, former
dispatch official for Meskene, currently the official in charge of Municipal
Grain Storage Depots”. And more powerfully than any previous historian, Akcam
proves – along with papers from the archive of a dead Armenian priest – that
the Ottoman authorities were sending two sets of telegrams about the Armenians.
One set expressed the government’s insistence that food and tents should be
provided for Armenian deportees and that their confiscated property should be
recompensed. The other set insisted upon their secret liquidation, preferably
away from the cameras of prying US diplomats (America was neutral until 1917)
and German officers allied to the Turkish army.
The Nazis told their
Jewish victims that they were going to be “resettled” in the east rather
than gassed. They also tried to cover the traces of the gas chambers of
Treblinka before the Red Army arrived. But the “double” instructions sent by
Talat Pasha and his 1915 genociders demonstrate that the pretence of
humanitarian resettlement was conceived even before the organised
genocide began. Some of the young German officers who witnessed the
killings of 1915 turned up 26 years later in the Soviet Union, overseeing the
slaughter of Jews.
And here is one very
short account (courtesy of the Turkish historian Akcam) of an Armenian witness
to his people’s destruction, which could – if the identities and locations were
changed to the Ukraine or Belarus – have been written during the Second World
War: “In order to eliminate the last remaining Armenian deportees...between
Aleppo and Deyr-i Zor [sic] who had managed to survive...Hakki Bey...evicted
all the deportees along the Euphrates, starting from Aleppo... Close to 300
young men and boys...surviving in the camp Hamam were sent to the South in a
special convoy... Solid reports about them arrived that they had been killed in
Rakka [sic]... Elsewhere, we learned in no uncertain terms that in the area
around Samiye, 300 children were thrown into a cave opening, gas was poured in
and they were burned alive.”
So here’s the real
hypocrisy of this story. The Israeli government, so outraged by Poland’s Jewish
Holocaust denialism, refuses to recognise the Armenian Holocaust. Shimon Peres
himself said that “we reject attempts to create a similarity between the
[Jewish] Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the
Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not
genocide.” The Americans, I
should add – Trump included, of course – have been equally pathetic in their
failure to acknowledge the Armenian truth. But oddly, not Poland.
For 13 years ago, the
Polish parliament passed a bill which specifically referred to the “Armenian
genocide”. The speaker of the Polish parliament, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, said
at the time that the Armenian genocide did indeed take place, that
responsibility fell on the Turks, and that Turkish documents – though not yet
those which Akcam has just revealed – “confirm” this.
So there you have it.
Poland punishes anyone who speaks of Polish participation in the Jewish
Holocaust, but accepts the Armenian Holocaust. Israel insists that all must
acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust – and Poland’s peripheral guilt – but will not
acknowledge the Armenian Holocaust.
Mercifully, Israeli
scholars like Israel Charny do so. And mercifully, Turks like Taner Akcam
agree. But how many times must the dead die all over again for nations to
accept the facts of history?
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/holocaust-israel-poland-history-difficult-acknowledge-netanyahu-jewish-polish-government-a8212071.htmlANDRÉ LIEBICH - Righteous indignation: On the Polish Holocaust law debate
The Polish government
thought it could be done quietly, without attracting international attention.
After all, other countries in Central and Eastern Europe had successfully
whitewashed their involvement in the Holocaust and their complicity with the
Nazi regime. The former Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, was invited to the
opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington in spite of his country’s
appalling record under the Ustaše regime during World War II, a record he had
personally downplayed. Latvia holds an annual parade in which veterans of that
country’s SS unit march proudly, and elsewhere in the Baltics communist
outrages rather than Nazi atrocities are emphasized. All these countries are
now members of the European Union. Recently, Ukraine elevated to heroic stature
its own freedom fighters who had worked with the Nazis against the Soviets, and
who had perpetrated crimes against Jews in general and Poles living in areas
that had been Polish before the war and that were coveted by Ukrainian
nationalists. Ironically, in the light of the current debate, the most emphatic
official objections came from the Polish parliament.
What has become
notorious as the ‘Polish Holocaust Law’ consists, in fact, of a number of
amendments to a 1998 Law on the Institute of National Memory. A new wording has
been introduced into article 55 of that law that declares: ‘Whoever claims,
publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of
Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third
Reich … or for other felonies that constitute crimes against peace, crimes
against humanity or war crimes, or whoever otherwise grossly diminishes the
responsibility of the true perpetrators of said crimes … shall be liable to a
fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years.’ Immediately afterwards, in what can be
considered a mollifying gesture, the law diminishes the sanction on those who
commit such acts unintentionally and states that no offence is committed if the
claims are made in ‘the course of one’s artistic or academic activity’…read more:
see also
Madhavan Palat on Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn:
Articles on ideology in East Europe
