Gross’s answers were not only long winded, in many cases they were vague evasive and imprecise. To the last question of the first series he stated that he believed in individual responsibility and that there was no collective guilt for him. Possibly he realised that collective guilt was the nub of his lecture, so in his answer he implied that he is willing to assign collective guilt to a community in a war period. The answer is self-contradictory. You either accept the idea of collective guilt, or you don’t, you can’t have it both ways.

The key feature of the first part of question two of the first series was the issue of motive. Gross, in his lecture asserted that there was only one motive for the crimes described in his lecture –namely – a deep seated anti-Semitism virtually throughout the whole Polish community that lived in Poland during World War II and shortly thereafter.

The questioner referred to a fact, a little known fact in the West, but thoroughly documented in Poland, that thousands of Polish citizens of Jewish heritage who sympathised with the Soviet Union, denounced their Polish neighbours to the NKVD. In general they informed on whomever they judged as being bourgeois or whomever they judged as posing some threat to Soviet rule, because for instance they may have had leadership abilities. Those who had been denounced were either shot on the spot together with the rest of their family, men, women, children, and the elderly, or they were deported to Siberia or Kazakstan. Many of the deportees perished in the crowded cattle trains or did not survive the Gulag.

Incidentally, the ranks of the NKVD perpetrating this atrocity were made up disproportionately, very disproportionately, with people of Jewish heritage. However, the point of the question wasn’t the denunciations, killings or deportations in and of itself, it was the act of betrayal to an external enemy and the effect this had on the psyche of the individuals who witnessed the betrayals and those who had returned to Poland after having survived the Gulag . Seeing their friends or family betrayed by their Jewish neighbours, whom they presumed to be loyal Polish citizens, and to see their family and friends being put into the hands of the NKVD, a substantially disproportionate number of whom were people of Jewish heritage, would have boiled the emotions. To emphasise again, the point of the question was to challenge Gross’s single motive thesis.

In his answer, Professor Gross beats around the bush. Instead of directly addressing the issue of vengeance as a motive, he evaded the point of the question by focusing on the heritage of the people deported and stated that Jews comprised a disproportionate part of the total deported. This is irrelevant. The people betrayed were seeking vengeance not on those who had been deported, but rather they were seeking vengeance against the traitors who had denounced them and vengeance on behalf of the families who had been executed on the spot. These former neighbours turned informers were previously perceived as loyal Polish citizens. They numbered in the thousands and they were virtually all people of Jewish heritage. They were not Soviet citizens and not members of the NKVD. It was the traitors that were targeted for revenge, not the deportees.

Gross’s evasive answer is telling. His unwillingness to address this point of the question indicates the weakness of his thesis and why he did not cover this issue in the body of his lecture.

I do not endorse the concept of an ‘eye for an eye’ and I would hope that had I been living at the time and suffered such a betrayal, that led to the killing of men, women, children and the elderly of my family or friends, that I would have remained true to my Christian values, and forgiven the perpetrators, just as the Pope had forgiven the assassin that tried to kill him. I am just glad that I was never put to this test.

The last question of the second series called on Professor Gross to explain key tests historians or prosecutors could use for giving credibility to unsupported anecdotal evidence that is in contradiction with mainstream views. Gross failed abysmally to come up with even one such test. He begged the question and just assumed that anecdotal evidence can be used legitimately simply because he thinks it can.

With regard to the University of NSW and its Australian Human Rights Centre, I can only think about my mother’s human rights and millions of other innocent Poles who lived in Poland during and shortly after World War II. My mother is still alive, and she is a human being. Shortly after the war began, she was taken to Germany as a slave labourer, and at the end of the war, after spending more than four years in a Displaced Person’s camp in Germany, she migrated to Australia in November 1949.

When I was growing up, I would sometimes wonder why I had no uncles, aunties, grandparents but my Aussie mates had plenty. I asked mum for an answer. She told me how her brother was shot by a firing squad for the crime of throwing food over the Warsaw ghetto wall to help the Jews there avoid starvation. He had gotten away on previous occasions but was not so lucky on this last occasion. I was thinking of this painful memory while sitting through Gross’s lecture and I heard him condemn virtually the whole Polish culture, of which my mother was a part, solely on the basis of unsupported anecdotal evidence.

I value freedom of speech, and I respect that Professor Gross has the right to voice his point of view. However I find it disgusting that the UNSW and the Australian Human Rights Centre did not have the courtesy to reply to the letter written by Hubert Blaszczyk et al, appealing for the centre to give consideration to inviting a historian of equal standing, who has researched the very prime source material Gross looked at, plus other primary sources he conveniently ignored whenever it contradicted his thesis. I can understand that the UNSW and AHRC may not at this time have the resources to pay to bring out a person of such standing to Australia, but what I don’t understand is that they don’t have 55 cents spare, to pay for the stamp that would allow them to reply to Hubert Blaszczyk’s polite letter. Perhap’s he is not a human being and therefore has no right to the simple courtesy of a reply to his request.

Felix Molski

Link to Hubert Blaszczyk's article (Spotkanie z Grossem)

Molski about Gross' Lecture (promoting animosity)