In the center of a forest 120 kilometers (about 75 miles) northeast of Warsaw, signposts point the way to a “place of national remembrance.”
It’s mid-January, and Michael Zev Gordon has returned to the municipality of Szumowo. He has come to the place where his grandfather Zalman Gorodecki was killed in August 1941, one of 1,500 Polish Jews murdered here.
Gordon was born in Britain and only learned about his grandfather’s fate a few years ago when he read his deceased grandmother’s memoirs. No one in his family ever spoke about it.
“I grew up with so much silence. But I wanted to find out, and the trip here was the culmination of that finding out, of working through this thing,” said the London-based composer.
Pillars on a nearby mound mark the location of the mass grave where Gordon’s grandfather lies. The Warsaw-based foundation Zapomniane (Forgotten) has erected a wooden gravestone and a granite pillar with the names of some of the people who were murdered here.
Since 2014, the foundation has been seeking out and marking lesser-known sites where Jewish massacres took place in occupied Poland during the Nazi era. Although a memorial dating from the 1970s used to stand in the forest of Szumowo, it made no reference to the fact that Jews were killed here by German troops.
“Our work is based on information provided by local communities who get in touch with us because they want to commemorate the Jewish victims. Because they feel that there is a gap in local history,” said Agnieszka Nieradko, president of Zapomniane.
German troops killed millions of Jews in occupied Poland
Germany began carrying out pogroms and mass shootings of Jews immediately after it invaded Poland in September 1939. Starting in June 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union and the Soviet-occupied eastern territories of Poland, German troops and local helpers unleashed a massive wave of massacres that targeted Jews.
German extermination camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Kulmhof and Majdanek were set up in occupied Poland.
There were almost 3.5 million Jews living in Poland before war broke out in 1939, but only several hundred thousand survived the Holocaust. Many only did so because they were taken prisoner by Stalin’s troops and sent to Siberia in 1940 and 1941.
Poland’s communist history overshadows Holocaust remembrance
After 1945, the communist state took over Jewish property and focused its account of events — its politics of history — on the Polish victims of the war.
The Holocaust played a subordinate role in this account, even though 5 million of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust were murdered on Polish territory. Three million were Polish citizens.
It’s estimated that about 2 million non-Jewish Poles were also killed by the Nazis. For decades, all victims were described in Poland simply as “Polish citizens.”
Only since the collapse of communism in 1989 has the history of Poland’s Jews stopped being taboo.
Auschwitz ‘a place of remembrance for many Poles’
Piotr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz Museum near the Polish town of Oswiecim, has noticed a growing interest in the history of the Holocaust. In 2019, a record 2.4 million people visited the museum.
“Many of our visitors are young people. And most of the teachers who accompany these groups were here themselves when they were younger. That’s why they understand the significance of such a visit and know what it can do to a person,” Cywinski told DW.
One million Jews were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest German death factory. Of the remaining 100,000 victims, three-quarters were non-Jewish Poles.
Cywinski said the camp is also an important place for Poles. “Every Polish victim has between 20 and 30 descendants who keep their memory alive. So Auschwitz is also a place of remembrance for many Poles. That’s understandable; and it’s OK that it’s that way.”
Historian fears ‘Polonization’ of the Holocaust
Holocaust researcher Jan Grabowski, on the other hand, speaks of a “distortion of history.”
“I call what is happening in the Polish culture of remembrance a ‘Polonization of the Holocaust.’ Polish content is being incorporated into the history of the murdered Jews,” said the Polish-Canadian Jewish historian, who works at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
According to surveys conducted in 2020 by the Polish polling institute CBOS for the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, 50% of those surveyed in Poland said they associated Auschwitz primarily with Polish victims, while 43% saw it first and foremost as a site of the Holocaust.
The surveys also showed that 82% of respondents were convinced Poles had helped the Jews during the Holocaust. Half said Poles suffered just as much as the Jews.
Since 2015, June 14 has been National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps in Poland. This date was chosen because June 14, 1940 was the day on which the first prisoners — about 700 non-Jewish Poles — were brought to Auschwitz.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp for Jews, was built the following year.
Treblinka ‘being transformed into a site of Polish martyrdom’
Grabowski is filled with indignation by the hundreds of crosses in Treblinka that commemorate the roughly 300 Polish victims of the labor camp situated there. The labor camp is 2 kilometers (about 1.2 miles) from the extermination camp where the Germans killed 900,000 Jews in gas chambers.
Every year, the site holds official commemoration services with Catholic prayer services. “Treblinka, the second-largest Jewish cemetery in the world, is gradually being transformed into a site of Polish martyrdom, which is hard to comprehend,” said Grabowski.
Grabowski accuses the liberal-conservative government of Donald Tusk of a passive stance on the issue. He said while the politics of history is no longer a priority for the current government, Tusk is also not interested in reversing the manipulative policy of the previous government, which was led by the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party.
PiS regularly caused outrage with its nationalistic history policy while in power. One example of this was the so-called “Holocaust Law” of 2018. This law provided for a three-year prison sentence for anyone accusing the Poles of being involved in Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust.
After protests from the United States — Poland’s largest ally — the law was toned down.
The heated debate in Poland at the time showed the delicacy of the subjects of the Holocaust and Polish–Jewish relations. However, an honest reappraisal of these issues does not seem to be on the cards at the moment.
‘Awareness of Holocaust history is growing’
According to Nieradko of the Zapomniane group, it takes time for a society to be ready to discuss such difficult topics. The fact that 80 years after the end of the war, new sites of Jewish massacres are still being found is evidence of that, she said.
“The awareness of history is growing, perhaps because those who are currently focusing on this subject neither have feelings of guilt, nor feel threatened when they deal with Jewish history,” she said.
Michael Zev Gordon’s latest work, “A Kind of Haunting,” which will soon be performed in London and later in Poland, is based on his family history and is a mixture of music, memoirs and poetry.
Thinking of his grandfather, Gordon said it’s vital to be able to pass on all this to the next generation.
“I’m his grandchild, but I can pass it on to my children,” he said. “And so, somehow, his story moves forward. He’s not forgotten.”
This article was originally written in German.
