A rabbi’s failed attempt to clean up Holocaust distortion

On November 20, Thomas Rose, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, delivered a speech in Warsaw in which he categorised as a “historic injustice” and “grotesque falsehood” any suggestion that “Poland shares guilt for the barbaric crimes committed against it” during World War II, presumably including the murder of millions of Polish Jews in German-occupied Poland.

After I learned of Rose’s speech, I wrote an article calling him to task for engaging in blatant Holocaust distortion by blanketly absolving Poland, the Polish nation, and Poles generally of any responsibility for or complicity in the murder of Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. Specifically, I emphasised that, “While Poles and Poland did not perpetrate the Holocaust, those Poles who assisted the Germans in doing so must not be whitewashed out of history.” I reiterated and expanded on these criticisms in a second article some days later

In my articles, I described how, contrary to Rose’s depiction of Poland and Poles as nothing more than victims of Nazi Germany, large numbers of Poles handed Jews over to the Germans, blackmailed Jews, stole Jewish property, and murdered Jews. I also specified that “the machinery for the implementation of the Nazi “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was established by Germans – not Poles . . . at places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Majdanek,” and that “more than 7,000 non-Jewish Poles — more than from any other Nazi-occupied country — have been recognized by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations, that is, men and women who risked or gave their lives to rescue or help Jews.”

Since then, Rose has not qualified or recanted his speech. Instead, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who presented Rose with his organisation’s Champion of Jewish Values award in 2022, has written a spirited and eyebrow-raising defence of the ambassador.

Boteach’s article came as a surprise to me because in it he accepts as valid every single example I listed in my articles of what he refers to as the “painful aspect” of Polish involvement in the perpetration of the Holocaust, none of which was mentioned by Rose in his address to the conference of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. And yet, Boteach contends that Rose’s speech was “right in its overall message.”

I wrote of the “thousands upon thousands” of Poles who “betrayed Jews hiding from the Nazis by handing them over to the Gestapo, profiteered from their deportation to ghettos and death camps and killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of Jews outright.” Boteach acknowledges the “truth” that “Some Poles, thousands of them, did participate in the destruction of their Jewish neighbors.” In Boteach’s words, “The Holocaust was a German Nazi project, but some Poles added to the suffering.”

I wrote that historians Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski established in their Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, that “two-thirds of the Jews who hid in the nine regions in Poland covered by this particular study did not survive World War II, either because they were killed by Poles, or because Poles handed them over to the Germans who proceeded to kill them.” Boteach cites the same work by Engelking and Grabowski for the proposition “that in the regions they studied, two-thirds of Jews hiding outside ghettos were killed—often because Poles denounced them or handed them to the Germans.”

I wrote that members of the Polish “’Blue Police’ . . . assisted the Germans in rounding up Jews, often rousted Jews out of their hiding places, and stole Jewish property as perks of their job.” Boteach writes that “Thousands of members of the Polish Blue Police—local police under German command—participated in hunting Jews, assisting roundups and stealing Jewish property.”

I referred to “the szmalcowniks, the extortionists and blackmailers who preyed on Jews hiding outside ghetto walls.” Boteach writes that “The szmalcowniks—extortionists who hunted Jews in hiding—cast a terrible shadow over wartime Poland. They threatened, blackmailed, turned in Jews or bled them dry financially.”

I wrote of “the horrific 1941 slaughter of hundreds of Jews by Poles in the eastern Polish town of Jedwabne” and “the post-war 1946 pogrom in the city of Kielce in which a Polish mob killed 46 Jews.” Boteach writes that “there were Polish pogroms during and after the war—namely, in Jedwabne (1941), where hundreds of Jews murdered [sic] by their Polish neighbors; and in Kielce (1946), where 46 Holocaust survivors murdered by a mob,” and adds that “These atrocities must be remembered.”

It would appear that Rabbi Boteach and I are in furious agreement concerning the negative, often sinister, role played by certain Poles during and immediately after the Holocaust.

Our position on this issue is very much mainstream, as is evident by this observation by Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs in 2020:

“Liberal Polish historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and others have demonstrated that a large number of Jews (there is a disagreement among these academics as to the numbers, between 130,000 and 200,000 or more) were caught by the Polish ‘Blue Police,’ some 18,000 strong, which was part of the German administration. The police handed those hapless individuals over to the Germans to be murdered—or murdered them themselves. Other Jews were hunted by peasants and town dwellers and were either killed by them or turned over to the Blue Police.”

Boteach and I are also on the same page with regard to the heroism of other Poles during World War II. Indeed, I fully share Boteach’s and Rose’s admiration for those Poles who risked and often gave their lives to rescue, hide, or help Jews during World War II.

I respect Rabbi Boteach but I’m afraid that his attempt to somehow take the edge off Rose’s speech falls short. Rose’s speech was unsalvageable because, as Boteach concedes in his article, Rose failed to mention or even allude to any of the multiple ways in which Poles assisted in or enriched themselves from the persecution, deportation, and murder of Jews while Poland was under Nazi rule.

In defending Rose, Boteach sets up a straw man by arguing that “the state of Poland and the Polish Nation did not choose, design or execute the Final Solution” and refuting as “historical slander” any “claim that “Poland was responsible for the Holocaust.’” Except, of course, that no responsible historian and no credible personality in the community of Holocaust survivors and their descendants has promoted or is promoting either of these propositions.

What Ambassador Rose did say was altogether different — he denounced as “the equivalent of a blood libel” any suggestion that Poland or the Polish “nation” played any role whatsoever in the annihilation of the vast majority of Polish Jewry. As Rabbi Boteach recognizes, however, large numbers of Poles, thousands of Poles, played precisely such nefarious roles.

In his article, Rabbi Boteach presents a balanced historical account with which I do not disagree. But with all due respect to Boteach’s considerable erudition, it is Rose we need to hear from.

If he wants to play a constructive or credible role of any kind in the preservation of Holocaust memory in Poland, it is Rose himself who needs to make clear that, in contrast to what he maintained in his speech, Poles actually played a not insignificant role in, and therefore bear their share of responsibility for, what was done to Jews on Polish soil between 1939 and 1945.

As my friend, the novelist, law professor, and social commentator Thane Rosenbaum has noted poignantly, “erasure and denial,” of the kind Rose perpetrated in his speech, “are moral crimes that should transcend diplomatic niceties and protocols. Three million Jewish ghosts went up in smoke or died as skeletons at places such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. Many were betrayed by Polish Catholics who profited from their neighbors’ deaths. All ghost stories demand that the wrongly dead be remembered for how their lives came to an end.”

This is the fundamental “truth” – to use Rabbi Boteach’s term – that Rose left out of his historically revisionist narrative and that he now has an obligation to affirmatively and publicly acknowledge, again, in Boteach’s words, “without distortion” and “without whitewashing.”

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, the son of two Holocaust survivors from Poland, is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author, most recently, of Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).