A leading Polish educator engaged in an angry Facebook rant about alleged Jewish responsibility for Soviet atrocities against Polish citizens, amid deepening anger in Poland over international objections to new legislation that criminalises public discussion of collusion between Poles and the Nazi occupation forces during World War II.
“Young Jews should finally understand where the unhealed wounds of the Poles are!” wrote Ryszard Nowak – the director of the highly-regarded Lyceum XII public high school in the city of Krakow – in a Facebook post uncovered by the liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
Claiming that Jews dominated the court system in communist Poland after “your Holocaust,” Nowak named several communist officials as responsible for the 1953 execution of Polish General Emil August Fieldorf by the Soviet NKVD secret police, highlighting their Jewish origins. Those listed by Nowak as culpable for the murder of Fieldorf – a former commander of the Polish Home Army that fought on the Allied side during the war – included “military prosecutor Helena Wolińska-Brus, a Polish communist Jewish activist, Beniamin Wajsblech, a Jewish prosecutor, Paulina Kern, a judge of Jewish origin, Maria Gurowska, a judge of Jewish origin, Advocate Emil Merz of Jewish origin, Gustaw Auscaler, a Polish advocate of Jewish descent.”
Concern over Nowak’s comments is likely to be heightened by the fact that he is married to Barbara Nowak, the Polish government’s chief education inspector in Krakow – the nearest big city to the former site of the Nazi German Auschwitz slave labour and death camp.
