3 ms·
Seems like this is a topic where there are high stakes riding on both sides of the story. The Polish nationalists want to rid themselves of this atrocity and s
by metacritic12 3y ago
Seems like this is a topic where there are high stakes riding on both sides of the story. The Polish nationalists want to rid themselves of this atrocity and so want to downplay it (at certain points if you deny certain facts, it becomes denial and so terrible).
But the Holocaust is also an important narrative for Israel to emphasize to get international support, and so out of all historical atrocities also gets more than it's proportional airtime. To be clear, the event is terrible, but there's also vested interests on the other side in continuing to make it very salient over other events in its category.
- benterix 3y agoI can see you're being downvoted by both sides already. I think the crux of the issue is scale. When people make sweeping statements like "Poles were helping Jews" and "Poles were giving Jews away to the Nazi", technically they are both true, but it really makes the difference how many people were in each group. The thing is, memories are passed down in a different way. Every Polish family knows someone who helped the Jews during the war. Poles are also the most represented group among the Righteous Among the Nations which is statistically obvious since Jews had the largest population there (for good reasons). But when you pass on your memories, you don't mention anything wrong you might have done during the war. Polish is the only language that has the word "szmalcownik"[0]. This means that these people existed. It is impossible to estimated them, but we know they were there, and that people hated them. So practically speaking you can make an infinite number of arguments on both sides, finding more and more actual cases, and never finish. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szmalcownik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szmalcownik