Mythology and historical revisionism

"When your government and cultural authorities stop downplaying and denying the hard reality of the past, we can then come together for a better future." - Ron Riesenbach. August 19, 2023.

Photo by Despina Galani on Unsplash

Every now and again, I serendipitously run across someone fighting a different, yet equally important battle. Sometimes their topic relates to Holocaust Studies. Sometimes it does not.

No matter. When I find these scholars, these true gems among paste, my heart feels lighter. I recognize in their work the struggles we have known as a Center, and the struggles I have known as a researcher. They tell of similar circumstances, of slights or insults, of being marginalized.

Jan Zbigniew Grabowski is a very recent acquaintance. He writes about the Shoah in his homeland, Poland. Although he’s now based in Ontario, history professor at Université d'Ottawa, he frequently lectures in Poland – by no means an easy task, since he and his colleagues have taken on the mythologies created by Polish nationals to whitewash pre-Shoah antisemitism and genocide in that country. Together with his co-author Barbara Engelking, he has been sued in a case funded by the Polish League against Defamation for “defamation” of the family of a Polish woman who (according to Grabowski and Engelking’s research) had betrayed her Jewish neighbors.

One Polish mythos revolves around the family of Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma and their six children, in the town of Markowa, Poland. In the summer of 1942, Jewish citizens of Markowa were rounded up, executed, and buried in “a former animal burial ground” (Yad Vashem). Shortly thereafter, a Jewish family named Szall asked the Ulmas to hide them, as a renewed hunt for Jewish citizens of Poland was underway. The Ulmas agreed, also hiding two sisters, Golda and Layka Goldman.

As noted on the Yad Vashem site, the Szalls and Goldmans hid in plain sight, helping the Ulmas with farmwork. They slept in the garret of the Ulmas’ home. Stanislaw Niemczak, a neighbor of the Ulma family, was aware of their presence.

Early 1944, someone – identity as yet unknown – betrayed the Ulmas to German police who were once again ‘hunting for Jews.’ In the night of March 23-24, 1944, German police shot the Szalls and the Goldmans to death. Then they turned on the Ulmas. One report says that the German police-soldier who killed the Ulmas’ children was twenty-three years old.

A couple of miles away, Jan and Maria Wiglusz were hiding Yehuda Erlich. After the war, when Yehuda applied for the Wiglusz family to be recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, he spoke of the Ulmas’ ultimate sacrifice for the eight Jews they protected. “These were hard times for them [Jan and Maria Wiglusz] and for us. Searches were conducted both by the Germans and the Polish peasants themselves, who wanted to find the hiding Jews. In spring 1944 a Jewish family [Szall and Goldman] was discovered hiding with Polish peasants [Ulma]. The Polish family – eight souls, including the pregnant wife – was killed with the hiding Jews. As a result, there was enormous panic among the Polish peasants who were hiding Jews. The morning after 24 corpses of Jews were discovered in the fields. They had been murdered by the peasants themselves, who had hidden them for twenty months.” Others continued to shelter the Jews, including the Wiglusz family and other families in Markowa and the surroundings. (Yad Vashem)

Yad Vashem recognized Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma as Righteous Among the Nations on September 13, 1995. And in 2004, the Polish government erected a large monument in Markowa in honor of the Ulmas. Retired Israeli professor and former Ambassador to Poland Szewach Weiss visited the monument in 2017, calling it a “temple of memory.” Szewach spoke of the Ukrainian people who hid his family in Borysław, and how the monument evoked memories of “hay and the attic where he was hiding, and the images of the Gestapo who searched the barn...”

So far, no mythology, right? Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma deserve to be honored, to be remembered for their courageous act in a fearsome time. How could a story this gripping, this good, be ruined? Easy peasy. Enter the Polish government, the cultural authorities, and the Roman Catholic Church. Sounds like White Rose? Read on.

Because I am not going to describe the mythos in my words. I will let the descendant of a Jewish family from Markowa tell you exactly how this incredible story is being misused and distorted, just to whitewash history.

Ron Riesenbach of Toronto wrote the following letter to Malgorzata Szlosek, Marshal’s Office of the Podkarpackie Region, International Cooperation Section. Dated August 19, 2023.

Dear Ms. Malgorzata Szlosek:

I am writing in response to the letter sent to me by Wladysaw Oryl and Archbishop Adam Szal on June the 20^th inviting me to Markowa for the Ulma family beatification ceremony in September of 2023.

As you know, the Bar family hid my Jewish father, his parents and two sisters for more than two years during the war in the same village as the Ulma family’s heroic deeds. The Ulmas, the Bars and other Righteous Gentiles are indeed special and deserving of Poland’s attention and honours, both religious and secular. They shared the rare characteristics of bravery, compassion, and a deep sense of decency in the face of evil.

After much careful thought, I have decided to decline your invitation. I have arrived at this decision after researching the historical narrative promoted in the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews and after speaking with respected Holocaust scholars. I share your desire to bring attention to and honor to the martyrdom of the Ulma family. However, the reason that I will not attend this ceremony is because your museum, your national government and your religious authorities have failed to objectively communicate to the Polish people (and the world at large) that the remarkable sacrifice of the Ulma family and other Righteous Gentiles were a rare exception in the otherwise fraught history of Polish-Jewish relationships before and during World War II.

The sad fact is that only a tiny proportion of Polish gentiles put themselves at risk to help their Jewish neighbors during the thousands of ‘Jew hunts’, death camp deportations and liquidation actions that went on during those dark days. These despicable acts could not have been implemented so effectively by the German occupiers without at least the tacit support (if not the active involvement) of Polish citizenry. The historical record is replete with evidence that many local Polish citizens watched passively, or worse, voluntarily supported these horrible acts. There is also clear evidence of collusion and participation in searches and betrayal of Jews by residents in the village of Markowa and surrounding region.

Besides the vast historical records, I have video and audio recordings of my father and my grandfather describing their anxiety that their Markowa hiding place would be discovered not by the German authorities occupying the region at that time, but rather by the local Polish villagers who were actively looking for Jews to turn in for material rewards.

It is painful to me and my cousins (all decedents of Holocaust survivors) that national initiatives such as those being promoted in your museum presents such an unbalanced narrative of the realities of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II. Yes, Poles were victims of Nazi oppression. But sadly, many were also perpetrators. Building on centuries of institutionalized antisemitism, too many ordinary Poles used the war and occupation as pretext for either cold-hearted passivity in the face of evil or active collaboration with the occupiers.

I share your vision of a reconciliation between Polish gentiles and Jews. However, the martyrdom of the Ulma family and the heroism of the Bar family can only be meaningful in the cleansing light of an honest, open, and contrite communication of the sad historical reality of Polish-Jewish relationships during World War II.

When your government and cultural authorities stop downplaying and denying the hard reality of the past, we can then come together for a better future.

Respectfully,

Ron Riesenbach

Toronto, Canada.

(To know more about the Riesenbach family, see their public blog. If you want to know more about the Riesenbachs’ experiences in Markowa, Poland, see this part of the blog. It contains the video testimonies given by Yakel and Joe Riesenbach. The above letter is used by permission.)

The grounds for the Riesenbach protest are supported not only by Jan Zbigniew Grabowski, but also by my pingelig (picky) reader and fellow scholar, Dr. Armin Ziegler. He lived most of his youth in Posen, now Poznań. He not only explained “Poland” to me while I was working on White Rose Histories Volume I and Volume II; he also told me about his visit to Poznań in the early 2000s, at the invitation of Polish authorities. They were opening a new Holocaust museum, and he was an honored guest.

His reaction to the Holocaust museum in Poznań was almost identical to Ron Riesenbach’s. With a twist. In Poznań, the curators only recognized Polish victims of German aggression. Not one single Jewish friend or neighbor showed up in the exhibits.

Dr. Ziegler was livid. He told the very-young director what it was like growing up in Poznań, the antisemitism at every hand, Polish attitudes towards Jewish neighbors. He gave her a condensed history lesson, including any names he could recall. He emailed me that he was pleased when she sent him a revised brochure that included Jewish citizens who had been murdered. Whether the museum in Poznań has maintained the ‘Ziegler sensibility’? I do not know. Dr. Ziegler’s death was a blow to good White Rose scholarship, and I feel the loss.

But Ziegler, Riesenbach, and Grabowski are not the only voices calling for the same reforms in Poland that I yell about regarding White Rose research in Germany. (Ron Riesenbach’s letter could be tweaked a tiny bit, and it expresses the problems with White Rose mythology!)

In 2001, George Will used the platform afforded him by Newsweek to write about the horror of Jedwabne. His essay – worth clicking on the link to the July 8, 2001 article – is a review of Prof. Jan Gross’s book Neighbors, published by Princeton University Press. Stanley Naj, of the Polish American Congress, immediately went on the attack. That group and its affiliates continue to attack George Will (!) to this day. I found a 2018 polemic against Will, still ranting about his 2001 essay.

Note: If you Google to verify this statement, be careful. Norton blocked a malicious attack on my computer from one of those sites. These are sites I try to avoid, as they are replete with historical revisionism and Holocaust denial that makes mythos look harmless. Relatively harmless. For example, Naj and his associates argue that the Holocaust was a Jewish plot concocted together with Germans to murder Poles. That is the sort of insanity that is enabled if not encouraged by the museums, Polish government, and religious authorities. If it’s impossible to talk about factual matters rationally, you leave the door open for conspiracy theorists and antisemites.

The very first contact I had with overwhelming issues in Poland and other Eastern European countries came not from a scholar, but from a photographer. Edward Serotta, a nice Jewish boy (he’s 74…) from Savannah, Georgia, took his camera to Eastern Europe in 1985, before the Wall fell. His first book, Out of the Shadows, published in 1991, is the one I read in the late 1990s. I need to catch up on his updates from 1991-2017!

In Out of the Shadows, Serotta told of the blatant antisemitism he witnessed, especially in Poland. Nuns teaching blood libel to elementary school children. Antisemitic paintings hanging in churches. Forty years after the war ended.

The grimmest experience I had came in November, 1989, when Piotr Kadlcik took me to the village of Sobienie, [Poland], where we found a priest’s front yard completely covered in Jewish gravestones. “We didn’t do this,” the priest said, “the Nazis did.” As three thugs started jogging up the street toward Kadlcik and me, we decided to make a hurried exit, although I had wanted to ask the priest if he hadn’t perhaps had a few free weekends free (sic) since 1945 to dig the gravestones up.

Serotta’s updates are a mixed bag. He reported that after the publication of Jan Gross’s book Neighbors – yes, that book! – Polish youth started asking questions. Serotta said there was clear interest in Jewish cuisine, music, literature, culture, and history. He believed the interest was real. But in 2017, the last time he updated his blog, he expressed genuine concern for the hard right swing in Poland and other Eastern European countries. The jury is out. Whether hard conversations can yet be had? One can hope.

In Poland, the mythology and historical revisionism focuses on two things: Poles were the true victims, and Poles regularly rescued their Jewish friends and neighbors. In France, the mythology centers on ignoring the complicity of the Vichy government. In the southern states of the USA, there’s this whole crazy notion that secessionists are heroes even today and that all those statues honor Americans (no, the men those statues represent had renounced their citizenship). In Russia, they’ve fooled themselves into believing that they singlehandedly won World War II. In Italy, it’s “what war?” In Germany, all those factions claiming the “heroes” belonged to them, and only them. If you need a refresher…

There are several things that all these mythologies have in common.

• People who supported Nazi racial ideology and antisemitism (or slavery, or racism) have been permitted to reinvent themselves. This is true regardless of location, not just in Germany. Or the South.

• Archives are not wide open. There are no sunshine laws. People who’ve reinvented themselves may block access to archival material. This is especially true in Germany. If you know status in France, Poland, the Southern USA, and the rest, please comment.

• The mythologies are funded and supported by museums, national (and state) governments, and religious authorities. If any single entity controlled “history,” it would be bad enough. When all three do so, it’s deadly.

If you’re a casual reader of literature related to the Shoah, or to German resistance, or to the Third Reich, you may wonder at the forcefulness of my words, as well as those of Ron Riesenbach, Jan Zbigniew Grabowski, Armin Ziegler, George Will, Edward Serotta. You may think, Maybe we should let the past be the past. Maybe it’s not all that important to get it right.

If you’re a beginning researcher, maybe a high school student working on a National History Day project, or an undergraduate choosing a topic for a Senior Essay, or a graduate student halfway through your thesis or dissertation. Or a professor, struggling to teach this most difficult topic to students who don’t even remember the Vietnam war – most don’t even remember the first, second, and third Bush wars! – much less the Shoah. If this describes you, perhaps you think, Oh, but my bibliography will be a whole lot longer if I take the easy route and tell the mythology. Besides, there’s more money in that! I may not survive the hazards and attacks the non-mythology people have to deal with!

If you’ve been in these trenches for a very long time, and you feel like I feel a whole bunch of the time, like Jan Zbigniew Grabowski must feel quite often, especially when his 20-month-old grandson is detained at the Warsaw airport by border security; or when he is assaulted by a member of the Polish parliament, as he (Grabowski) is giving a lecture at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw; or when he was summoned to the Warsaw police for interrogation about the assault on his person – yeah, not fun.

If you are one of the trench-dwellers who believes that it’s more important to get the historical record correct than it is to cave to the museums, national (and state) governments, and religious authorities, you are most welcome in our small circle. Always a pot of tea or coffee on, and time to talk and compare notes and learn from one another.

I look at it this way. I won’t get rich off my White Rose research. In fact, there have been times when I couldn’t afford basic groceries and I worried about paying rent. The big money goes from those national (and state) governments and religious authorities to museums, schools, foundations. Who all have a vested interest in the mythology.

But.

That dratted wheel of history (thank you, Hans Scholl!, Leaflet 1) will not deal kindly with people who write “definitive” histories based on censored archives. One hundred years from now, historians won’t care about national and religious sensibilities. They will look at authors who consciously published Scholl-centric (Germany), “Poles were the victims” (Poland), and other mythologies as frauds.

Not one word of the above in any way denigrates the heroism and courage of Hans and Sophie Scholl or anyone in the White Rose, just as Ron Riesenbach in no way denigrated the heroism and courage of the Ulma and Bar families.

However, the martyrdom of the Ulma [Scholl, Graf, Schmorell] family and the heroism of the Bar [Chiune Sugihara, Wolfgang von Gronau, Stauffenberg] family can only be meaningful in the cleansing light of an honest, open, and contrite communication of the sad historical reality of Polish-[German-French-Japanese]-Jewish relationships during World War II.

When your government and cultural authorities stop downplaying and denying the hard reality of the past, we can then come together for a better future.

And oh! How I want that better future!

Yes. This. Matters.

© 2023 Denise Heap.

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