Polish Righteous Among The Nations - Misconception

Misconception

Prior to the 1941 German invasion of the USSR (see: Operation Barbarossa), the local population in Soviet occupied Poland had witnessed the repressions and mass deportation of up to 1.5 million ethnic Poles to Siberia, conducted by the NKVD, with some of the local Jews collaborating with them and forming armed militias. There were also incidents of Jewish Communists betraying Polish victims to the NKVD. The Anti-Semitic attitudes in those areas had been exploited by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen who induced anti-Jewish pogroms on the order of Reinhard Heydrich, such as the Jedwabne pogrom, an atrocity committed by a group of ethnic Poles in the presence of German gendarmerie. There were also a number of criminal or opportunistic Poles of various ethnicities (known as szmalcownicy) who blackmailed the Jews in hiding and their Polish rescuers or turned them over to the Germans for financial gains. Official collaboration did not exist in Poland as it did in other countries such as France (see World War II collaboration and Poland for details). As Paulsson notes, "a single hooligan or blackmailer could wreak severe damage on Jews in hiding, but it took the silent passivity of a whole crowd to maintain their cover."

The fact that the Polish Jewish community was decimated during World War II, coupled with well-known collaboration stories, has contributed to a stereotype of the Polish population having been passive in regard to, or even supportive of, Jewish suffering.