The article Hijacking History of the Holocaust by Jan Grabowski (Weekend Australian, Aug. 17-18, 2024) does what it blames Poland of doing: it distorts history. It accuses Poles of active involvement in the German extermination of Jews, thus, shifting the responsibility from Germany to Poland.

I will address only three issues that the article either presents incorrectly or does not address at all. The first incorrect information is that all the death camps were established by Germans in Poland.

Not all, the first ones were erected in Germany, then in Czechoslovakia, Austria, etc. Most of them were indeed in Poland for a very simple reason: Poland was home to three million Polish Jews, the highest number of Jews in any European country. Would it be easier to transport Polish Jews to Germany with its over half a million Jews or to France or Austria, each with over 200,000 Jews?

Pure economics; Germans were a very practical people. The second is a convenient “omission”: claiming that Poles could save more Jews, the author forgets to inform that Poland was the only country in Europe where for hiding a Jew or helping in any other form the whole family would be shot on the spot. Dr. Gideon Haussner, the Israeli prosecutor at the Eichmann trial, who although not favourably inclined towards Poles, stated in his book about the trial that in no country was it as difficult to save a Jew as it was in Poland.

Another “omission”: the role of Jewish Judenrate (Jewish Councils) and the Jewish police force, consisting of the Jewish elite, and established in ghettos in Poland by Germans. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German philosopher, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem claimed that the complicity of the Jewish elite in organizing the logistics of mass deportations from the ghettos to death camps increased the Holocaust’s death toll. So much for accuracy.

Bozena Szymanska, Baulkham Hills, NSW