January 27 was declared by the United Nations in 2005 “international day dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust”, to commemorate the liberation of the Nazi camp of Auschwitz Birkenau, January 27, 1945. While France voted two days ago to return works stolen from Jewish families by the Nazis, phenomena of distortion of history in political discourse or even trivialization of the Holocaust are worrying. Overview of Israelel and Poland.
Israel wants to fight against new ways of questioning the Holocaust
This happens in particular at Yad Vashem, a place of memory and research dedicated to the Shoah, in Jerusalem. For its director Dani Dayan, there are hardly any denials of the Holocaust anymore, but he denounces two new phenomena: first, its distortion: “The problem with Holocaust distortion is that it is supported and propagated by extremely powerful governments or social or political groups, he explains. These are countries that say: “Of course 6 million Jews were massacred but in my country, the whole population helped them, we were victims in reality.”
“You see these days a presidential candidate in a very big country in Western Europe – a Jew at that – saying, ‘The Nazi-influenced government of my country helped the Jews!’
Dani Dayan, director of Yad Vashemat franceinfo
But what worries Dani Dayan more is trivialization: “The trivialization of the Holocaust has become even more atrocious after the emergence of Covid. The comparison between the health pass and the yellow star, between Doctor Fauci and Mengele, between vaccination obligations and the Nuremberg laws, the hateful comparisons with Anne Frank. All of this is unacceptable !” To meet these new challenges, the director of Yad Vashem insists on the importance of ceremonies of remembrance, the involvement of politicians, but also an immediate and combative denunciation of anti-Semitism, research with the opening of archives and the participation of the last witnesses.
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Lucien Lazare, a 97-year-old historian, is one of them. He was resistant before enlisting in the army alongside General Delattre de Tassigny and has lived in Jerusalem since the sixties. In his book “Neither heroes nor bastards” released Wednesday January 26 in Israel, translated into Hebrew, it recalls that, if a quarter of the Jews who lived in France were exterminated by the Nazis and their auxiliaries of the Vichy regime, three quarters were protected, hidden, helped, by the French population. For him, the passage of time is an opportunity. “The further we go from the date of the Shoah, the better we know it: because it is as if we were at the foot of a mountain from which we are moving away, he illustrates. When we are at the foot from a mountain, you cannot see what is happening above you: to see the whole picture as it happens in reality, you have to move away from it.”
And on the words of Éric Zemmour he is pithy: “It will be forgotten after the elections”. The book Neither heroes nor bastards by Lucien Lazare and Alexandre Doulut is published by Editions du Bord de l’Eau.
In Poland, the government wants to rehabilitate the memory of the country
In Poland, the historic policy of the conservative national government on the Holocaust has not failed to create several diplomatic incidents with Israel in recent years. As during the adoption, last summer, of a law by the Polish Parliament which makes more complicated the restitution of the Jewish goods confiscated by the Nazis, then recovered by the communist regime after the war. This had aroused the anger of Israel, which had denounced the sign “of a contempt for the history of the Holocaust”.
New controversy between Poland and Israel: Warsaw wants to pass a law that could, according to the United States and Israel, prevent the return of Jewish property to Holocaust victims https://t.co/H4D1VHA74Z
— The World (@lemondefr) July 2, 2021
In Poland, the subject of the memory of the Holocaust is sensitive, in a country where 6 million people died during the war, including 3 million Jews. The nationalist ruling Law and Justice party is accused of waving patriotic rhetoric, presenting a glorified account of the attitude of Poles during this period. A dissonance with reality that poses a problem for Jonathan Ornstein, director of the Jewish Community Center in Krakow: “When the Prime Minister says that the entire Polish nation deserves to be honored at the Yad Vashem Righteous Memorial, it is as if all Poles at the time tried everything to save Jews. There are Poles who saved them, but there are also Poles who hurt them. And of course, we will never know the exact ratio.”
“To suggest that the whole country was obsessed with saving Jews does not seem to me to be the reality nor to agree with the memory of the survivors who in many cases were afraid of the Poles. “
Jonathan Ornstein, Director of the Jewish Community Center in Krakowat franceinfo
For its part, the Polish authorities explain that they fight for the truth about the Second World War, which, according to them, is often the subject of lies. He says that the history of the country during this time is too little known. “The government of the day never collaborated with the Nazis, he recalls. The country was under German occupation. The Law and Justice party thus protests against the expression “Polish death camps”. For Mateusz Szpytma, vice-president of the Institute of National Remembrance, it is necessary to rehabilitate Polish memory: “If the world knew what it was like in Poland during the Second World War, how the camps worked, who decided what, there would be no problem. But we have to explain it to the world, which is very difficult.”
“One day, we did a survey of students in Canada asking “who are the Nazis”, and the Poles came in 2nd! If we had been a country with a government that had collaborated in the deportation of Jews, I would understand but it was not the case!
Mateusz Szpytma, Vice President of the Institute of National Remembranceat franceinfo
In 2018, a law was passed allowing civil prosecution of those accusing the Polish nation of being responsible for crimes committed by the Nazis.