In March, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau signed an agreement on “cooperation in the field of study visits of organized youth groups, after the Lapid government last August canceled the visits of Israeli schoolchildren to Poland that were scheduled for last September through November. Israel announced that the two sides had reached a dead-end regarding content and security. Lapid, who served as both PM and FM, said the visits had been canceled due to the Polish government’s demand to intervene in the content that would be presented to the participating youths.
Now an agreement has been reached and is only waiting to be ratified by the Knesset and the Polish Sejm (pronounced “same”).
In its opening, the agreement explains that among its concerns is:
“recognizing that negative ethical and moral attitudes such as racism and xenophobia, among others, largely stem from a lack of knowledge and insufficient education among young generations and that at the same time, both countries have a shared historical legacy which provides a foundation for facilitating bilateral relations.”
Because Poland and Israel on paper are ideally suited to be close and fast allies, and so many Israelis come from a Polish background or countries that border Poland – we should be friends. Commercially, the two countries benefit from a robust trade: In 2021, Israel exported to Poland gas turbines, pesticides, and medicine worth $364 million. Poland exported to Israel in 2021 raw sugar and beef worth $989 million. Practically sister nations.
There’s only this pesky thing about the events of 1939-1945 in Poland which Yair Lapid, whose father was a Holocaust survivor, refused to forgive.
His successor either didn’t read the small print or didn’t assign to it a similar value. The deal he signed with Poland will, in fact, expose Israeli schoolchildren to Poland’s version of what happened under six years of German occupation, and don’t be mistaken, it will be all about Polish heroism in the face of the Nazi stormtroopers.
The devil hides in Article 2 section 1 of the agreements, which states that the “program of educational study visits will include in particular … study visits to sites commemorating the Holocaust and other crimes of the World War II, and additional sites, of special importance, to each nation’s history.”
Article 2 section 2 specifies: “In order to implement the provisions of [section 1], the parties will recommend sites and places for study visits specified in Annex 1 to this Agreement, which will be regularly updated…”
Scroll down to Annex 1, and, behold, it looks as if those Israeli teens will be treated to the entire Polish revisionism industry that whitewashes any trace of responsibility on the part of so many thousands of Poles in turning in Jews to the Germans, of stealing Jewish property, and, after the war, of lynching the few concentration camp prisoners who returned to their homes. Here’s the list, it is staggering. I’m sure that some of these museums are engaged in commemorating accurately and reliably the German (and Soviet) atrocities against Polish citizens. Many of them are reportedly engaged in whitewashing the country’s bloody past of antisemitism and collaboration.
One such center of shameless revisionism is the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II. It was inaugurated in 2016 in Markowa, to commemorate Josef and Wiktoria Ulma and their six small children who were murdered by the Nazis for harboring Jews. The Ulma family is among Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations, which includes 6,700 Poles. Mind you, in 1939 the Polish population, not counting Jews, was about 32 million. But museums like the Ulma Family in Markowa create the impression that the vast majority of Poles spent the war years in a tireless search for Jews they could rescue. This museum desecrates the memory of the Holocaust, any sense of historical accuracy, any notion of decency and responsibility, and above all, it desecrates the memory of the saintly Ulma family.