New Efforts to Obscure Complicity in the Holocaust Masquerade as Tributes to Heroic Resistance

While honoring Polish Gentiles who risked—and in some cases, lost—their lives helping Jews in the midst of the Shoah seems a noble affair, Jan Grabowski argues that recent, enthusiastic efforts by the Polish government to do so have a more sinister agenda, aimed at distorting history. Their purpose is to suppress the history of Polish collaboration with the Nazis, and of Polish anti-Semitism, while painting Poles as uniformly victims or heroes. To make his point, Grabowski take the recent ceremony honoring Jan Maletka, a railway worker shot by the Nazis for offering water to Jews in cattle cars outside the Treblinka death camp: