The Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, which represents thousands of survivors, denounced a recent claim from Tom Rose, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, that the country wasn’t complicit in the Nazis’ war crimes.
“The persistent belief that Poland shares guilt for barbaric crimes committed against it is a grotesque falsehood and the equivalent of a blood libel against the Polish people and Polish nation,” Rose said at the International Conference on Antisemitism and the Jewish People in the Legal Aftermath of Oct. 7, hosted by the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, in Warsaw from Nov. 19 to 20.
The “false” premise that Poland was complicit “holds the victim liable” and “has poisoned relations between Jews and Poles, between Israel and Poland, and between the United States and Poland for decades,” he said.
The Holocaust survivors group called those remarks “deeply offensive on several levels” and “an insult to the memory of hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by Poles during the Holocaust.”
“The complicity of massive numbers of ordinary Poles in the capture and murder of Jews is not a debatable subject. After the Nazi invasion, Poles were handing over Jews for a bag of sugar,” it said. “Even after Auschwitz, after returning home, Jewish survivors hid in basements because the Holocaust itself did not diminish many Poles’ hatred and violence toward Jews.”
“Were there good Poles? Yes, a small percentage,” it said. “But the United States’ ambassador should not validate the denial of Holocaust realities.”
