The issue of Polish History and contemporary Politics: A response to Kate Maltby- by James Oliver

DISCLAIMER: This blog post has been written by James Oliver

“My name is James Oliver. I am a student and freelance writer based in Southampton, UK, who specialises in the history of Central and Eastern Europe. Some of my work has been featured on Euromaidanpress. But for those who want to follow me on a more day-to-day basis can do so via my twitter handle @historyboy77”

Over the past two weeks two distinct but unrelated events have hit the headlines relating to Poland. The 1st is the Royal visit to Poland by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge which most mainstream media outlets depicted as a “charm offensive”. The 2nd involved the large-scale protests against the ruling “Law and Justice” (PiS) party’s proposed changes to the role of the Judiciary in Poland (two bills of which have since been vetoed by President Andrzej Duda with another passing). Naturally it didn’t take too long for western commentators to see the two as somehow inter-related and in particular Kate Maltby released a venomous column to the Guardian Newspaper complaining that the royal visit amounted to an endorsement of what she termed “Ugly Nationalism.” She has since complained on twitter that the critics of her article amount to nothing other than a collection of Polish Nationalists and bots. In light of this i have to report i am not Polish, nor a Polish-nationalist, nor am i a bot (I highly doubt bots have the AI yet to write blogposts). I am not necessarily a fan of the current Polish government myself but this shouldn’t stop me from calling out nonsense when i see it.

Let’s begin by explaining the protests: It is a standard feature of modern western democracy that the Judiciary ought to remain separate from and independent of the government of the day so that it can act as a check on keeping the prevailing government under the rule of Law.  The Communist tyranny which Poland had to endure until 1990 had no such Rule of Law nor did it have an independent Judiciary as the Communist elites serving the Polish dictator Wojciech Jaruzelski (and by extension the Kremlin in Russia) saw themselves as being above such western value systems.

Jaruzelski’s regime was a one-party-state until 1989 meaning that the “official” route for those who wanted to get into Politics at all was to join the Communist Party regardless of what their true ambitions might have been.  After the fall of Communism in 1990 many of these “ex-communists” entered the new mainstream political culture of a pluralistic and democratic Poland, and in particular many gravitated towards political parties of the self-styled “social-democrat” left.  Given that Poles are fully aware of the realities of Communist rule it has thus been difficult for the centre-left as well as individuals in other parties to shake off this “ex-communist” baggage and gain traction which goes partly to explain why in recent years Polish politics has been dominated by parties of the political Right.

Flinging the charge of being an “ex-communist” has proven to be an notable way for Polish politicians and political hacks of most stripes to abuse their political opponents and to “justify” policies and ideas against these unwelcome blasts from the past. PiS have attempted to justify its reforms of the Judiciary by suggesting there are too many Communist relics within it (note that as i type the average age of district judges in Poland is 38) and critics of the proposed changes have noted that Stanisław Piotrowicz, the figurehead heavily associated with the reforms is also (and perhaps somewhat ironically) one of these “ex-communists.”

Of course it is easy for the Liberal Polish opposition (as distinct from the left opposition here) to use the “ex-communist” term as an insult in the same way that PiS and its supporters have done to others, but in one sense the debate on much Piotrowicz or others admire the old Communist power-structure or ideological whims is something of a sideshow because the concept of expanding the power of the executive over other branches remains a bad idea regardless of who is implementing it, where it is being implemented, or why it is being implemented, because the results in all cases end up as the same. Cronyism, corruption and the lack of executive accountancy become the inevitable, inexorable results of such actions. It is on that principle that has seen Poles demonstrate their democratic right to protest against the proposed changes.

Again, you don’t need to be a fan of PiS to call out anti-Polish nonsense when you see it and in Maltby’s example she goes too far in her criticisms.

Much of her article focuses on where “the royals were taken” (her words) as if to imply it was the Polish government who suggested that the Royals go to Stutthof et al and not the other way around, because in reality the Polish govt were consulted but had no final say in where the Royals went. “You might not have heard of Stutthof” Maltby suggests, but “you are more likely to have heard of Auschwitz.” The failure of most British people  (or most non-Poles for that matter) to name any of the German concentration camps other than Auschwitz erected in Occupied Poland in WW2 is down to British general ignorance and not because of any current education policy proposed by PiS. The official twitter account of the Kensington Royals actually fell into one of the most nefarious linguistic errors by referring to Stutthof as a Polish concentration camp before deleting and creating a new tweet to say “former Nazi German Concentration Camp Stutthof.” This correction isn’t in-and-of-itself promoting some concept of “Polish martyrdom” as inferred by Maltby, it’s promoting simple history by reminding the rest of the world who exactly it was that built these concentration camps!

And it should go without saying that all the peoples of all nationalities that died because of Hitler’s genocidal barbarism deserve to be remembered. Maltby on the other hand seems to suggest that the victims of Stutthof (which also included Jewish victims of the Nazi-German “final solution” especially after it was ramped up in 1941) don’t deserve to be remembered in the same way that others who died elsewhere are remembered. That is tremendously insulting!

Whilst on tour in Poland the Royal couple visited the Museum to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 which Maltby calls the “pride and joy” of the current government. This museum opened its doors in 2004, long before PiS came to power. In a 2009 CBOS poll, 68% of respondents agreed that the Warsaw Uprising was a necessary act in order to secure a free Poland. Maltby’s article depicts the uprising as “doomed from the beginning” but this is a viewpoint that can only be gained from a retrospective analysis and not from the fog of war which prevailed at the time.

The timing of the Warsaw Uprising was motivated by two major factors. The 1st was that just a few days prior to August 1st 1944 and approximately 50 miles south of Warsaw the Red Army had crossed the Vistula. The day before the uprising the Armia Krajowa (The Polish Home Army) had been notified by General Antoni Chruściel that Soviet tanks had apparently entered the district of Praga in East Warsaw. So the capture of the Polish capital by the Red Army looked imminent. The 2nd factor was that the AK knew that Poland under Stalin’s rule would not be a free Poland. By this time in 1944 Stalin had already organised a puppet government whom had already openly clashed with the legitimate Polish govt in exile based in London. Whilst the Red Army swept across Eastern Occupied Poland they utilised local AK units until their usefulness in any particular area had expired. After which they would either be imprisoned, shot or deported. The brief time window between the retreating Wehrmacht and advancing Red Army presented the only opportunity to secure a prospective free Poland. What the AK did not count on was that whist the 63 day uprising was underway the Red Army halted their advance and prevented the western allies from resupplying the uprising with munitions.  Between August 18th-19th Soviet planes actually dropped leaflets into Warsaw telling the Poles to end their resistance. Why the Red Army halted their advance is still something debated over, but the most common idea floated is that Stalin preferred it that his two enemies ought to weaken and bleed each other to death thus making the advance of his army that much more easier. The valiant ideas of what the AK fought for during the Warsaw Uprising and their heroic actions should not be disrespected or ignored, but that is precisely what Maltby does in her article.

What is left in Maltby’s arsenal is the (actually rather unoriginal) claim that Poles actively promote a distorted picture of Polish Antisemitism in WW2. In reply to this unoriginal barb the record of the Polish underground resistance in relation to the Jews ought to be repeated and made better known.

The AK was the only major resistance organisation to create a branch specifically designed to aid Jewish resistance, the Żegota. It attempted with limited success to alert the west about the realities of the Holocaust (with the efforts of Jan Karski and Witold Pilecki here being perhaps the most well known). It assisted in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 on August 5th it liberated the Gesiowka Concentration Camp which by this stage only had 348 Jewish survivors left whom then promptly joined the Warsaw Uprising seeing the Poles not as enemies but as comrades against the common German oppressor. In the words of Michał Zylerberg, “A Jewish perspective ruled out passivity. Poles had taken arms up against the mortal enemy. Our obligation as victims & fellow citizens was to help them.” There are more Poles listed as “Righteous Among the Nations” than any other nationality for saving Jews from the Holocaust

It is in spite of these facts that Maltby has to pick something that is unrepresentative of Polish Society at large in order to force her point.  Between September 1939 and July 1941 Białystok and its surrounding area was swarmed with Stalin’s Secret Police who conducted with great relish a swathe of mass deportations of the Polish population and mass shootings. But Stalin’s NKVD also laid the seeds of mutual ethnic hatred that the Germans would later go on to exploit!

Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski in his memoirs noted that the NKVD was “a hundred times more dangerous and efficient than the Gestapo” for the Polish resistance because of the NKVD’s use of “quislings” to gather intelligence and sow suspicion of others as part of a deliberate divide and conquer tactic to rule over the peoples of Eastern Poland.

“The mainspring of Soviet police tactics” he wrote “was their efforts to spread mutual distrust amongst the population. The result was that while the German methods unified and strengthened the [Polish] nation [against Germany], those of the Soviet weakened and split it. In the Russian Zone, even old friends never revealed their political feelings to each other and everyone was the prey of suspicions.”

And it was this toxic climate that the Germans entered into when they occupied the small village of Jedwabne  just outside Białystok on July 10th 1941. As they would later do further East and in Russia (where they would have greater success with this tactic) the Germans attempted to deflect any local anti-Soviet feeling directly onto the Jewish population and thus entice locals to become complicit in Hitler’s genocidal campaign. At Jedwabne the Germans managed to instigate a pogrom where 340+ Jews were driven into a Barn which was then promptly burnt, killing all inside. They were assisted in this endeavour by 23 Poles. There is no clear scholarly light that suggests that what these 23 Poles did here was repeated by any other Poles in any other Polish village, town or city that was occupied by the Germans but Jedwabne remains a heated topic of debate, especially that one of the authors who brought this atrocity to wider attention, Jan T Gross, has had his methodology severely criticised by other scholars not out of nationalism but over his use and treatment of sources that are not necessarily corroborative! The reason why Gross has come under so much fire is down to an interview 2015 to a German newspaper where he made the untrue claim that “Poles killed more Jews than Germans” in WW2, and not simply because of his work about Jedwabne, slipshod though it might be. Polish law as is set to be amended prohibits attributing German crimes onto a Polish country that didn’t exist in WW2. It does not prohibit discussion about what individual Poles did or did not do!

After the horrors at Jedwabne were brought to light in the 1990s moves were quickly made to commemorate the victims and on the 60th anniversary of the Pogrom the then Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski helped lead a fitting tribute which included local faith leaders.  History education and awareness in Poland, warts and all, remains much better than say in Russia where Vladimir Putin is currently brainwashing the Russians into worshiping Stalin or the shoddy state of History education in the UK exemplified by the current British Trade minister Liam Fox who thinks that the British did nothing wrong in the 20th century.

In short, there is no state-sponsored Holocaust denial in a country where denial of the Holocaust is outlawed. To suggest otherwise is defamation and something tantamount to slander warranting legal action which i am sure that Polish authorities are already considering.