A former Polish politician who is the father of the country’s prime minister said that during the Holocaust, Jews moved to ghettos of their own accord to get away from non-Jewish Poles.
Kornel Morawiecki, a former senator whose son, Mateusz, became prime minister last year, made the remark in an interview published Tuesday by the online magazine Cultura Liberalna.
“Do you know who chased the Jews away to the Warsaw Ghetto? The Germans, you think? No. The Jews themselves went because they were told that there would be an enclave, that they would not have to deal with those nasty Poles,” said Kornel Morawiecki.
In 1940, a year after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, Warsaw’s Jews were forced to move into the ghetto, a walled off area of the occupied capital.
Nearly half a million Polish Jews were confined in its squalid quarters, measuring just three square kilometers (1.2 square miles). The Nazis deported those who did not fall victim to rampant hunger or disease to death camps.
In the Tuesday interview, the prime minister’s father also touched on alleged Jewish complicity in the Nazi-led genocide against the Jews. He spoke of the Zagiew ring of Jewish informants that the Germans used to infiltrate resistance groups.
“Who sent Jews to the Umschlagplatz?” Kornel Morawiecki asked, using the German word for places, often city squares, where Jews were rounded up to be deported to death camps. “Did the Germans do it? No! The Jewish police were on the Umschlagplatz!”
Leading scholars of the Holocaust rejected the drawing of parallels between Jewish and Polish collaborators with the Germans, citing the fact that the former were prisoners destined for extermination and the latter were occupied civilians who by and large were allowed to lead their daily lives unless they violated Nazis laws.
