Rewriting History? Poland Becoming Careful About Who They Allow in WWII Camps

Poland provoked a new international scandal: the authorities refused to let the Israeli scientists to the memorial at the Sobibor extermination camp site.

Poland provoked a new international scandal: the authorities refused to let the Israeli scientists to the memorial at the Sobibor extermination camp site. Earlier, Poland, at first, refused to cooperate with Russian specialists and then with Dutch specialists, who wanted to help to memorize the prisoners. Why did Warsaw decide to go for another conflict and what was the Israeli reaction?

Sergey Pashkov, the chief of our Middle East bureau, will answer those questions.

 

The Nazi German extermination camp Sobibor near the Polish town of Chelm. The people-killing factory. Yoram Haimi, an archeologist, shows us a medallion and pre-war photos of little Carolina, killed in a gas chamber and cremated in a ditch in the death camp in September 1943.

Yoram Haimi, archeologist: "My mom's brothers died here. A freight train delivered them to Sobibor in 1943. I discovered their fate 11 years ago and then we started excavations in Sobibor".

Today the excavations are stopped. The Polish authorities, who invited Russia, Israel, Netherlands, and Slovakia to create the Sobibor extermination camp memorial, refused to cooperate with our country in summer 2017 without giving any reason. Then, it was the turn of Israeli and Dutch archeologists. The authorities forbid them to work at the former extermination camp. A little later, they brought up heavy construction equipment to the Sobibor camp. The dozers and excavators dig up pits, lay service lines and asphalt.

Yoram Haimi: "Right now there's a construction site with large pits. They have a construction plan for the place where we found the gas chambers. They're laying the waterline right where dead bodies were carried on a cart to the ditch. They're building a parking lot at the camp site. The Nazis destroyed the camp in 1943, the memorial builders destroy the remains. Nobody has consulted with us".

Franz Stangl, the commandant of the camp, wrote in his testimony that it would take them three hours to eliminate 3,000 prisoners delivered to the camp by a 30-car train. Sometimes the trains would come one after another and the gas chambers would work for 12 hours straight. There were more than 250,000 people gassed and cremated over 16 months. But on October 14th, 1943, Alexander Pechersky, imprisoned Red Army soldier, headed the only successful uprising in the Nazi extermination camp during World War II.

Naama Galil, the leading researcher at the Yad Vashem memorial complex: "Red Army soldier Alexander Pechersky was surely the main figure of the uprising. It was he who designed the bold and daring plan, gathered everyone he could count on, and led the prisoners to freedom".

The memory of the prisoners of Sobibor, who rebelled and won, is commemorated in Israel. The children of those who killed the guards, broke through the barbed wire, forced through the minefield to the forest, gather for a mourning ceremony at World Holocaust Remembrance center Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Yoram Margulis, son of Avraam Margulis, one of the Sobibor rebels: "I walked down the Tverskaya street among the others to commemorate my father who should've died, I carried his photo and cried.”

Israel thinks that the arguments of historians don't fit the nationalist doctrine of the current Polish government: the new amendments to the laws on desovietization of the historical memory, demolition of dozens of the memorials and statues of the Red Army soldiers, who liberated Poland, indicates that the tragedy of Holocaust has become a political bargaining chip in this country.

Ksenia Svetlova, member of the Israeli Knesset: "Regrettably, those sad, tragic news about what happens in Sobibor are not so surprising to me because for the last 2.5 years I have been following the policy pursued by the Polish authorities regarding the tragedy of the Jewish people. We remember the absolutely crazy law, which hasn't been passed yet, but we don't know what will happen next, the purpose of the law is to ban the talks about the role of the Polish in the catastrophe".

Yoram Haimi walks us through the museum, located in the small kibbutz Yad Mordechai in southern Israel, dedicated to the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. He dreams to create an exhibit dedicated to Alexander Pechersky, the tragedy and the act of bravery in Sobibor, by the next summer, at the place where they're sacredly commemorated.

Sergey Pashkov, Varvara Galembo, Alexander Ivanyuk, Vesti, Israel.