The same will apply to those who describe how, in a very large number of localities, peasants looted property abandoned by Jews who had been deported to their deaths. Of the few survivors who returned, a high proportion were met with murderous hostility after the war when they tried to reclaim even personal items.
Liberal academics now face the reduction or elimination of essential subsidies for research and publication, and may well be threatened with a loss of their positions.
Penury is an effective weapon in the hands of authoritarian regimes — of which Poland is becoming one. As with all anti-democratic governments, facts will be determined not through independent research but by the authorities, in this case by the Institute of National Memory.
The Israeli government agreed with all that. But why accept the mendacious Polish narrative, abandon the many decent and courageous Poles who speak the truth, and distort Holocaust history?
For pragmatic political reasons, obviously. Economic and security ties and Polish support for Israeli positions are more important than something as minor as Holocaust memory. We are great with the words, but we are acting in conformity with historical untruths. This is collusion.
Yehuda Bauer is a Holocaust scholar
