Krakow, Poland was the city I was least excited about going. However, after our first night, I fell in love with the architecture, food, and people. I spent a night in reflection on why it was that I was apprehensive about touring the Eastern European city, and the explanation was the knowledge of recent political shifts in the acknowledgment of the Holocaust. The Polish government’s recent decision to change the name of the concentration camps from Polish to German concentration camps, muting their complicity in the actions of the Germans. The rest of the time in Poland, I sought to understand why the current administration was eager to separate themselves.
In her report, my comrade Riley Sayers described the Polish people under occupation, she addressed the common collaboration with the occupied government during WWII. Riley addressed past collaboration with the perspective of the Poles who often only collaborated as a last resort for self-preservation under extreme war-time conditions. She cited Polish citizens who were starving to death and in a final act of desperation reported their Jewish neighbors in return for food. While this does not excuse those actions, it helps to understand the desperation of the Polish people better.
What surprised me most about being in Krakow was the lack of propaganda or public information about the recent changes regarding the Holocaust. Our last night in Krakow, I saw a post in the window of a side street. The poster was a graphic outline with Hitler saying “Death camps were Nazi German.” This was the only piece of propaganda that I came across on the issue. The more surprising nature was that it was written in English for the tourists of the city to see. The poster was a message from the Poles not to each other, but to the eyes of the world that it was not the Poles who committed such egregious acts against humanity.
The Schindler Museum presented the Polish view on the war and their treatment under occupation. The Museums went through the treatment of the Polish Jews and the Poles from the beginning of the occupation to the liberation of Poland from the Soviet Union at the end of the war. It told the horrific story of the treatment of their people and left me with even greater sympathy for the Polish people. The museum feeds into the narrative that the Poles were victims of the Germans, despite the acts of collaboration. After reading Neighbors by Jan Gross that recounted Polish citizens who participated in the murdering of their Jewish neighbors, the crimes Poles committed against each other are unforgettable. However, the museum added context and deeper understanding of the grave situation of the Poles.
I spent the past semester infuriated with how the current Polish nation can separate them self from their past crimes and collaboration with the Holocaust. The modern Poles, now a few generations apart, are able to separate themselves by the narrative of victimhood and separation in time. After touring Schindler’s factory, hearing from our tour guides at Auschwitz, and Riley’s site report, it is understandable that the Poles, exhausted from years of being associated with the horror of the Holocaust, would want to push the blame to solely the Germans. However, to deny the Polish complicity in the Holocaust is a dangerous step toward a complete re-writing of history.