In this interview (originally published in Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and republished with their kind permission) Magdalena Rigamonti speaks with Dr Jakub Kumoch – Poland’s ambassador to Turkey since 2020 and to Switzerland in the years 2016-20, author of The Ładoś List, and a former analyst at the PISM, Sobieski Institute and OSW think tanks – about the actions of Poles towards Jews during World War Two and the recent court case in Poland against two prominent Holocaust scholars.
Magdalena Rigamonti: You go to Turkey and suddenly we hear about Consul Wojciech Rychlewicz, who was rescuing Jews. Before that, [when you were ambassador] in Switzerland, there was the case of Aleksander Ładoś [who created fake passports to help Jews escape the Holocaust].
Jakub Kumoch: Sounds like Polish propaganda, right? Actually, it’s the World Jewish Congress which supported our research on Ładoś and it’s Israel Hayom which discovered Rychlewicz. I could joke both are a part of a secret Polish conspiracy!
But joking aside, after the Switzerland experience my scholarly intuition told me that numerous Polish diplomatic posts had a similar wartime history. The case of the Ładoś group was a breakthrough of sorts, as it channelled research towards answering the question as to what actions the Polish diplomats undertook during the Holocaust of the Jews.
The Polish Institute of International Affairs will soon publish documents pertaining to the activities of other Polish diplomatic posts, and more survivors are reaching out to us to ask for assistance in finding out who helped them survive. These documents were not destroyed, and some are truly fascinating.
Is carrying out these activities an order from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? From your boss?
The minister of foreign affairs is concerned with implementing foreign policy and advancing Polish interests, not with rummaging in archives. This is my personal passion. You’re talking to a Holocaust researcher, not an ambassador.
Both a researcher and an ambassador.
As a researcher, I can tell you that the cases of Ładoś and Rychlewicz are not much alike, because these were two different phases of World War Two.
Wojciech Rychlewicz was one of the diplomats in charge of the great evacuation of 1939–1941, when masses of Polish refugees were trying either to reach the army in the west or to escape as far as possible. After the fall of France in May 1940, the end of this route in Europe was in Turkey or Portugal, and in Asia, Japan. When you read foreign ministry files from the first two years of the war, one thing becomes apparent: the fight for visas.
This is where the Jewish problem comes into play. Jews constituted a large part of Poles in Turkey, and no other country was willing to let them in. Our diplomats heard from representatives of other countries, “Poles – Christians? All right, let them come”. Thousands of immigration visas to Brazil and the US were available on one condition: no Jews. This approach was common for the British, the Americans, Canadians and South American states.
From the point of view of Polish diplomats, then, there was a risk that Portugal or Turkey, thus far sympathetic to Poland, would soon say that there was a jam and wouldn’t issue any more visas. Those people had to be sent somewhere else immediately – women, children and the elderly away from Europe, young men to the army in England or Palestine – to make room for others.
This is why at least several heads of the Polish diplomatic missions agreed to forgery: the Jews were issued papers stating that they weren’t Jews and were sometimes given false dates of birth. Rychlewicz was one of the first – he did it on a mass scale. And while Envoy Karol Dubicz-Penther made sure that his “Roman Catholics” at least had Polish surnames, Rychlewicz issued certificates of Catholic origin to the likes of Morduch Epstein and Salome Rokeach.
In this way the US, Brazil and British Palestine received several hundred false Catholics from Turkey, and in this way those people received help.
You became interested in Ładoś when you were an ambassador to Switzerland.
Ładoś acted in different conditions: from 1942, Switzerland was a neutral island surrounded by Germans and their collaborators. Nobody could escape without risking their life. Ładoś allowed his diplomats to expand, in cooperation with Jewish organisations, the system of forging Paraguayan passports, which was in place since 1940.
At first, it was about enabling the elites stuck under the Soviet occupation to pretend to be foreigners and leave through Japan for the free world. But, from 1941, the same documents were sent to the Jews living in occupied territories, with the hope that the Germans would treat them as citizens of Paraguay or Honduras and thus earmark them for internment, not death.
Rychlewicz at least saw the people whom he was helping, while those working with Ładoś didn’t even check whether these people held Polish citizenship. They rescued all and sundry: Jews from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia, Hungary and – first of all – Germany. In fact, Germans and the Dutch of Jewish origin are the most represented in “The Ładoś List”.
Little is said on this topic in either Germany or the Netherlands.
Ładoś was extensively written about in the US, Great Britain, Switzerland and, first and foremost, in Israel. There were some articles about Ładoś himself in Germany, but it was too much to admit that a Pole was rescuing German Jews. In the Netherlands there is almost absolute silence.
You represent a government that in the global discourse is often called “nationalistic” or even “antisemitic”.
I represent the Polish state, and as a researcher I represent myself. If someone says that my government – this one or the previous one, or any other Polish government – is antisemitic, they’re not in their right mind. It’s no use talking with the ignorant. And the Polish government in World War Two stood up for the victims of the Shoah and did more in this regard than any other government.
The position of the ambassador was offered to you by a minister connected with the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.
And the new American ambassador to Poland is appointed by the Biden administration. As a rule, the ambassador is appointed by the government, and in Poland by the president, proposed by the government. First the candidate appears before the parliamentary committee, and I am proud to have received almost unanimous approval.
The Polish government has already spent more than 60 million zloty on the “Memory and Identity” Museum being built by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk. Its aim will be to promote research findings concerning the attitudes of Poles towards Jews during World War II.
Is it too much or too little?
I have doubts whether Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, who is known for his antisemitic statements, is the right person here.
I don’t follow Father Rydzyk’s activities and I don’t comment on domestic matters. As far as I know, the Israelis had much fewer reservations and aren’t boycotting him. I’m interested solely in international repercussions.
So you won’t comment on the fact that the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) appointed a former member of the National Radical Camp (ONR), who publicly performed the Roman salute, head of its Wrocław branch [Tomasz Greniuch, who after this interview resigned following a backlash against his appointment]?
Of course I will. In Poland, the promotion of Nazism or fascism is a crime. And the so-called Roman salute is an abominable gesture that offends the memory of the victims of the Third Reich, as in Poland – and I believe everywhere else – it has come to be associated solely with Hitler and not with Rome. This is a breach of law and all civilised customs.
Yet the IPN is not a government entity, and I even read somewhere that the prime minister had tried to prevent Greniuch’s appointment.
Such decisions make all your work go to waste.
So Konstanty Rokicki [another Polish diplomat who was part of the Ładoś group] didn’t falsify Paraguayan passports because of Tomasz Greniuch? Such a line of thinking is foreign to me. I don’t understand all those “be quiet with this Ładoś” or “Rokicki is used for whitewashing”. All countries commemorate their heroes, not their bandits or traitors. Have you ever been to a museum of treason?
You know it’s not about making a museum devoted to the informers, but about discussing those who denounced and murdered.
Because in Poland we don’t talk about betrayal during World War Two? This is another myth. In Polish bookstores the shelves are stocked full of the darkest stories, while the Jedwabne and Kielce pogroms are mentioned all the time.
It is Great Britain that doesn’t know what MV Struma was and why in 1942 it sank with Jewish refugees abroad who were refused admission to Palestine. Poland knows what the pogroms were and is repelled by them, at least the Poland that I represent. Saying that it shouldn’t talk about its heroes is perverted. Am I to understand that if Japan honors Chiune Sugihara, it is only to whitewash the Nanjing Massacre? This is absurd.
Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski claimed that Poles murdered 200,000 Jews [during the war]. It was you who proved that he was wrong.
Let’s not exaggerate. I proved that he based his claims on the manipulation of sources: he took the number of ghetto escapees from one historian, the number of those saved from another, and left unsaid the things that did not fit his narrative. Unfortunately, it seems that he misled some journalists.
It all began with the Polish historian Szymon Datner…
Yes. In 2018, a journalist for The Times of Israel claimed that “already in 1970, Szymon Datner” wrote that Poles killed 200,000 Jews. I asked her where and in what language she had read the article – in fact, it was translated only after that conversation. She admitted that she hadn’t read it, as she didn’t speak Polish, but that she had learned about this text from Polish Holocaust researchers.
It followed from her answer that one of them was Grabowski. He supposedly added that new research showed that Datner wasn’t much mistaken. He was speaking about Night without End (Dalej jest noc), edited by Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, which was soon to be published. It was then, in February 2018, that I had an argument with Grabowski – an argument well known and available on my Facebook profile.
Did the book confirm what the journalist had written?
It didn’t. Neither did Datner write about 200,000 Jews murdered by Poles (his article is now available in English) nor does Night without End contain such a statement. When read carefully, the book actually refutes such a thesis in numerous paragraphs. Unfortunately, there is no conclusion or summary results, so a less advanced reader will never learn that.
The book contains, however, strong suggestions that the number of those saved was higher than Grabowski had indicated, while the escapees from ghettos were fewer in number. Of course the fact remains that thousands of Jews were killed as a result of denunciation by the dregs of Polish society and often simply murdered by them. This cannot be left unsaid.
How did Grabowski arrive at his number?
He read in Datner’s article that 100,000 Jews survived the occupation in Poland, while 100,000 perished. Grabowski added these numbers, but rejected the number of Jews rescued. Then, on the basis of Datner’s interview, he increased this number to 250,000. Sometimes he puts it as high as 300,000, because such was the estimate of yet another scholar.
Grabowski decided that this is about 10% of ghetto prisoners and that this is the number of those who fled. And he clings to it. The rest of Datner’s publication, his positive – in my opinion, too positive – assessment of Poles and his claim that 100,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in hiding in Poland, is left out. The aim is to show that not tens, but hundreds of thousands of Jews wandered around Poland after the ghettos had been liquidated. And that almost none of them survived.
But how did he calculate how many people survived?
He didn’t. In a footnote in the book about [the town of] Dąbrowa Tarnowska, he cited the Israeli historian Saul Friedlander, who in turn quoted the British-based historian Antony Polonsky. Polonsky found the results of the registration of Jews from June 1945 and made an honest calculation: only about 20,000 testified that they had survived in hiding.
Polonsky has a brilliant mind, so he reflected on the number. He wrote that it was too small and couldn’t have included all cases, but that even if it were doubled we would still get only 40,000 people. Grabowski made this reflection the revealed truth: 40,000–50,000, though I believe he now talks about 30,000–35,000. But there is a problem. Night without End offers a very important finding in this regard. Engelking calculated that only one in ten survivors was registered in the district she described. Another author also points out that people were not so willing to register as has been thought.
That would mean that even 200,000 Jews could have survived in hiding.
I would be careful here. First of all, we don’t know anything about the representativeness of the district of Bielsk Podlaski. Secondly, Polonsky made a slight arithmetical mistake – the exact number was 15,500. Finally, among those registered in Bielsk are several dozen people who didn’t indicate how they had survived the war.
Nevertheless, such a signal must give rise to reflection whether “Polonsky’s doubling” shouldn’t actually be “multiplying”. Is it really so difficult to understand that after the Shoah, many Jews were afraid to say they were Jewish? But since we find 322 survivors in Bielsk and only several dozen of them are registered, this should raise a red flag. But it doesn’t; the editors gloss over it.
The trouble is that Grabowski’s range begins to dwindle rapidly. It turns out that the alleged 200,000–300,000 escapees were made up, that the 30,000–40,000 survivors are the result of an erroneous analysis of the text. And there is the issue of amnesia. I’m putting aside the downplaying of the role of the occupier, as this charge is frequently made. But did the population of occupied Poland consist only of Poles and Jews?
Let me reference Night without End once again: in the district of Złoczów, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was more dangerous than the Poles; in Bielsk Podlaski,the eastern part of the district, which was of the Orthodox faith and partially Belarusian, was more prone to denouncements [of Jews]; in Dębica, a mention of the Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans]. There is more research on that.
Magdalena Gawin examined the district of Ostrów Mazowiecka and found a Gestapo officer who was responsible for numerous crimes. Grabowski would perhaps count him as a Pole, but in fact he was a German from Poland, from Tarnowskie Góry, and died in West Germany. Unfortunately in his work of betrayal and destruction, he received support from collaborating residents of the language islands – in the environs of Warsaw, the German settlers accounted for up to 2–3% of inhabitants. Some remained loyal, others became a scourge. They knew the local populace and spoke Polish.
Now, what part of Grabowski’s Poles are Poles in today’s understanding? I assume that still a majority, but not 100%. And, finally, did every Jew who perished die with the involvement of a local resident? Barbara Engelking answers in the negative. Stanley Bill, who analysed Night without End from the position of someone favourably disposed, estimated that in about half of the cases the participation of Poles – and I infer from the text that he means all non-Jewish inhabitants of Poland – was not proved.
Here you should answer the question, why is Grabowski doing this? Why is he giving the number of 200,000?
To judge intentions would be contrary to the rules of science. I will only say that I have some respect for Grabowski’s local research, but he never conducted any quantitative analysis concerning the entire country.
His theories are often nothing but a manifesto. The “mass participation of Poles in the Holocaust” is just an empty slogan. Critical reading of Night without End doesn’t lead to any such conclusion. It rather indicates that several dozen thousand ethnic Poles could have – under duress, out of fear, hate or on their own volition – had something to do with the death of Jews. Is this a lot? I’m interested in numbers. 20,000–25,000 people constitutes only one in a thousand of Poles of the time.
The very fact of putting together many horrifying stories is not conducive to appropriate reasoning. In science it’s called anecdotal evidence. Or the statement about the “entire segments” of Polish society taking part in the Holocaust. The journalist sticks out the microphone and then publishes those “entire segments” without pausing to reflect what it actually means.
And finally, the thesis that with regard to the Holocaust there were no “bystanders”, that everyone who saw it and did nothing was complicit. Catchy, but scientifically specious. But a poor journalist needs two or three powerful statements and gets them, because Grabowski is an excellent speaker. On top of that, his English is perfect. The late British politician Paddy Ashdown told me once that the Anglosphere has a weakness: it falls for good English.
Professor Grabowski does interviews, takes part in debates, is acclaimed by scientific milieus all over the world, and you say that it is because of his good English?
This is exactly what I’m talking about: I draw a line between his research and his journalistic activities. He is a wonderful publicist. Among scholars who don’t speak Polish, his renown is indeed great. This is because he is an excellent speaker, while the sources are unavailable to them. As regards Night without End, we must again draw a line between Prof. Grabowski’s interviews and the book itself. For a large part of what Grabowski talks about in his interviews is not to be found in the book. It doesn’t show the complicity of “segments [of society]”, but the chaos of war and occupation and a diametrically different situation in various districts.
Finally, I would like to point out another misstatement: the claim that the book proved anything. There is no defined scope of research. Nine districts were selected, but on what basis? Where is the list of over 7,500 individual cases under study? I waited for it throughout the book, but in vain. The fact that chapter 10, which was eventually abandoned, was to concern the area around Auschwitz – hence a location outside the General Government – made it even clearer to me that the selection had as its aim the analysis of the environs of extermination camps. This would obviously mean a higher number of escapees and thus would distort the findings. If this was really the case, then the editor’s entire approach is in question.
And so we come to the lawsuit against Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking…
And we won’t go further than that. This is a legal dispute between three adult people.
Supported by…
“The pro-government Polish League Against Defamation, which has received funding from the government, as this is an element of the nationalist government’s campaign against widely acclaimed scholars”. Yes, I know this kind of discourse. I understand that, analogically, each liberal and leftist NGO in the US is an agency of Biden’s administration, and each Jewish organisation forms part of the “Jewish lobby”.
Let us drop this kind of discourse. If we are to talk at all, we need to talk about facts. The Polish government doesn’t prosecute anyone for writing about history – neither Gross nor Grabowski. On the contrary, Night without End received funding from the Ministry of Higher Education.
From the point of view of research, the court proved that out of numerous sources at their disposal, the authors chose only one – the least advantageous to the Pole. It didn’t matter to them that it was created 53 years after the events by a person who was not a direct witness. And this is probably the crux of the matter. If someone is caught doing this several times, it can put the methodology of the entire book into question.
This is why sources have to undergo critical analysis, and the lack thereof, when discovered, undermines trust in a given scholar.
Before the pandemic, you met Prof. Havi Dreifuss in Israel, who has been researching the Shoah for over 20 years and who heads the Center for Research on the Holocaust. She claims that freedom of scholarship in Poland is threatened.
Let’s draw a veil over her words. Seriously.
In Israel, she is an acclaimed scholar in the field of Polish-Jewish relations.
With scarce knowledge of Polish. I witnessed it myself. The statements made by representatives of the institutions of another state are difficult to comment on, especially if they are embarrassing. I don’t want to argue which country offers more freedom.
To return to the subject, I can assure you that I will be writing about diplomatic rescue efforts and will strive to restrict my conclusions to the researched material. What will others do? Probably what they’ve been doing so far. Here I will disappoint all those willing to resort to the prosecutors: these scholars have the right to do so. We need revisionist history, or else we might get caught in the trap of monumentalism.
This is also a matter of mental hygiene. Israel has its Shlomo Sand, who generally believes that there is no right of return to the Land of Israel and that the Jews are merely a group of converts to Judaism, while Poland has its Jan Grabowski, who believes that Poles rejoiced in the Holocaust and assisted in it on a mass scale, readily and with a smile on their faces.
Translated by Aleksandra Arumińska
Main image credit: Muzeum Polaków Ratujących Żydów/Facebook
Note: this text was corrected after publication to translate the world “uważa” as “believes” rather than “claims” in the final sentence.
