Readers of SHALOM are already acquainted with “Operation:
Last Chance,” which was launched by the Simon Wiesenthal
Center and the Targum Shlishi Foundation to maximize the
efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice by offering
financial rewards for information which would facilitate
prosecution and punishment. Since we had limited time and
resources, it was clear from the outset that the project
would focus only on countries in which the local population
had actively participated in the murder of Jews, i.e. in
Central and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western Europe,
where the locals indeed helped round up the Jews and transport
them to the death camps, but did not carry out the murders
themselves.
Thus in July 2002, “Operation: Last Chance” was officially launched in Lithuania,
Latvia, and Estonia based on the assumption that the likelihood
of success in those countries was probably the highest in
Europe. This assessment was based on three key factors:
1. Local collaborators in all three
countries were fully integrated by the Germans into the system
created to implement the Final Solution – both locally and
in other countries. Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian Security
Police units (and in some cases organized fascist militias)
actively participated in the mass murders at home and many
were subsequently sent to other countries to perform similar
operations.
2. The large number of local Holocaust
perpetrators in these countries.
3. The relatively large percentage
of Nazi collaborators who were prosecuted by the Soviets
during the initial decade after World War II, had already
served their sentences, and could now provide invaluable
testimony regarding the identity of those responsible for
the crimes, without fear of self–incrimination (due to “double
jeopardy”).
After the project was successfully
launched in the Baltics, we sought to expand it and the possibility
of bringing it to Poland was discussed. On the one hand,
Poland was an obvious candidate for inclusion, since the
overwhelming majority of the Jews murdered during the Holocaust
were killed there, all six Nazi death camps [Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, Chelmno and Sobibor] were located
there, and an extremely high percentage of Polish Jewry were
murdered, in many cases with the assistance of Poles. On
the other hand, in contrast to the Baltics, the Poles were
never given an opportunity to actively participate in the
systematic annihilation of European Jewry. The Nazis never
established a Polish Security Police which was integrated
into the apparatus of mass murder, nor did they draft Poles
into the Waffen-SS or create a local SS Legion as they did
in Latvia. In addition, Poles were not recruited to serve
as guards in the death and concentration camps on Polish
soil (or elsewhere).
Yet extensive historical evidence
– documents and testimonies – point to numerous cases in
which individual Poles murdered Jews, informed on Jews in
hiding, turned Jews over to the Gestapo, often in return
for rewards, prevented Jews from joining partisan units an/or
denied them opportunities to hide, all of which paint an
unequivocal picture of complicity by individual Poles in
the murder of their Jewish neighbors, which ultimately convinced
us to launch “Operation: Last Chance” in Poland.
In this regard we planned to follow
the modus operandi developed in the Baltics. The first step
would be a press conference in Warsaw to announce the project
and the reward, which would be followed by ads in the national
and local press. Thanks to the assistance of local Chief
Rabbi Michael Schudrich, we were able to obtain the cooperation
of the Jewish community, and we scheduled the press conference
launch at the Nozyk Synagogue conference room for the afternoon
of September 10, 2003. Yet contrary to our experience in
the Baltics (and our subsequent efforts in every country
in which O:LC was launched), our initial press conference
in Poland was an abysmal failure, with only a single local
journalist in attendance.
The reason for the poor turnout and
lack of media interest was that the Poles did not generally
identify themselves as among the guilty parties of the Holocaust.
If anything, the dominant perception in Polish society was
of their own victimhood by the Nazis during World War II.
This position was forcefully emphasized by prominent public
figures, but only nine months later, in June 2004, when we
announced that we had installed a toll-free “hotline” in
order to facilitate the receipt of information regarding
Poles suspected of murdering Jews. Ironically it was this
news, rather than the initial launch of “Operation: Last
Chance,” which sparked a vociferous public debate on the
validity of our project in Poland. Among the participants
were several prominent Jews or Poles of Jewish origin, whose
involvement was no coincidence. Thus, for example, among
those bitterly attacking “Ostatnia Szansa” was Prof. Bronislaw
Geremek, a former Foreign Minister and recently elected member
of the European Parliament, whose grandfather, a rabbi, was murdered in Auschwitz. In a radio interview, he expressed
a “deep distaste” for the project, which he said, filled
him “with disgust and anxiety.” Geremek preferred that “the
whole world be informed abut how many good things were done
by Poles” [to save Jews – EZ], and therefore was “very surprised”
by our initiative.
Geremek’s interview on “Radio Zet”
was followed by a front-page story on June 16, 2004 in Gazeta
Wyborcza, Poland’s largest and most important daily, which
was accompanied by an op-ed comment by its editor Adam Michnik,
a Pole of Jewish origin. Entitled “Wrong Idea,” the article
attacked O:LC for singling out the victims of the Holocaust
for special treatment as opposed to others who have been
victimized, or in his words, “I do not understand the logic
which advocates killing only Jews or the logic which advocates
chasing only their killers.
” In addition, Michnik expressed his concern that the rewards offered would open
the gate to “the hell of vengeance, false accusations and
demagogic generalizations,” and moreover, in his opinion,
chasing elderly suspects would cause more damage than good.
Thus although he had great respect for Simon Wiesenthal,
Michnik firmly believed that the Center was making a big
mistake.
Ironically, it was these sharp criticisms which struck a deep nerve (over 650
postings in response to the lead story in Gazeta Wyborcza)
and finally provided the project which the badly needed public
exposure that we had hereto lacked in Poland. It was the
number one story in the electronic media and numerous requests
for information regarding the hotline and the project were
received. Perhaps just as important, the controversy focused
intense attention on the issue of Polish complicity in crimes
against Jews and the role played by Poles in the fate of
Polish Jewry during the Holocaust. Thus I was able to publish
a lengthy op-ed in Gazeta Wyborcza in which I explained the
rationale and motivation for launching O:LC in Poland and
attempted to refute the criticisms leveled by Geremek, Michnik,
and Righteous Gentile, and former Polish Foreign Minister,
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski who opined that the project was “worthless”
and would badly damage the reputation of Simon Wiesenthal
who had contributed so much to tolerance and coexistence. My bottom line was that “while Poles can be extremely proud
of the activities of Zegota, a Polish organization especially
founded to save Jews, and the heroism of the other Polish
Righteous Among the Nations, the sad truth is that many Poles
participated in the murder of their Jewish neighbors and
others assisted the Nazis in doing so and that truth must
be confronted honestly. Of course Polish leaders would prefer
that their country be regarded exclusively as a victim of
the Nazis, but that is not the entire truth and it is extremely
important that the whole historical picture emerge clearly
and be visible to all. I sincerely believe that one of the
ways to help do so, is to bring the guilty to justice in
Poland, and in that regard we hope that O:LC will not only
succeed, but that even its current detractors will ultimately
recognize its importance and value for their country.”
The polemic sparked by the launching
of O:LC had the desired effect of initiated an intense public
debate on the issue of Polish-Jewish relations during the
Holocaust but also was instrumental in significantly increasing
the flow of information to our hotline. As expected, almost
all the suspects were individual Poles who had murdered Jews,
in some cases people whom they had initially undertaken to
hide but later killed, ostensibly for mercenary reasons.
Not long after the polemic regarding
the project received prominence in the media, we encountered
a potentially serious problem in the form of a government
investigation of O:LC. According to a letter from Elzbieta
Ostrowska of the Office of the Inspector General for Personal
Data Protection, a complaint had been submitted against the
project and an official investigation had been initiated.
The allegation was that by sending information about Polish
citizens overseas without their permission, we were violating
the local data protection laws, and the authorities demanded
the name and address of the person in charge. The letter
did not identify the individual who submitted the complaint,
but this clearly was the work of political opponents of the
project and we had no intention of complying with the request
or in any way jeopardizing our local worker.
In the meantime, we encountered another
obstacle when Fakt, a popular tabloid refused in principle
to publish our ads announcing O:LC. According to the newspaper,
they had the right to reject any ad which was against the
character of their publication or “against the law or social
standards.” In this respect, Fakt was no doubt responding
to the overwhelmingly negative response in Poland to “Operation:
Last Chance.”
Matters in both regards worsened in
the fall, as the Inspector General for Data Protection refused
to meet personally to discuss the problem and instead threatened
legal action, while our efforts to publish ads encountered
one technical problem after another. This latter problem
was a major impediment to our efforts, although by the spring
of 2005 we had already received over fifty phone calls on
our hotline, with the names of twenty bonafide suspects.
In June, however, the legal front heated up again, as the
person handling our hotline was summoned to the Office of
the Inspector-General for Data Protection for questioning.
It was then that we learned that the original complaint against
“Operation: Last Chance” had been submitted by Polish senator
Adam Biela of the League of Polish Families, an extreme right
wing, nationalist party. A week later Rabbi Schudrich, in
whose office the hotline was located, was also summoned for
questioning, an encounter which finally convinced the Polish
authorities to drop their inquiry.
At this point, in July 2006, we have
received the names of twenty-three suspects, almost all of
whom fit the profile we expected of people who murdered Jews
they had either agreed to hide or had previous contact with.
In the meantime, however, we have learned that several of
the most promising suspects are no longer alive and it has
proven extremely difficult to confirm the allegations against
the others. In fact, the only suspect whose name we have
hereto submitted to the Polish Institute for National Memory
with a request for prosecution, has been that of Erna Pfannstiel
Wallisch, a German woman currently living in Vienna, who
was a guard at Majdanek.
In terms of complicity in Holocaust
crimes, Poland is clearly not Lithuania or Latvia, but “Operation:
Last Chance” has exposed the deep denial still widespread
in Polish society regarding the role played by individual
Poles in the murder of Jews during the Shoa. Obviously, if
any Polish Holocaust perpetrators will ultimately be prosecuted
thanks to O:LC, that would be a significant victory, but
forcing Polish society to face the complicity of individual
Poles in the crimes which contributed to the annihilation
of one of Europe’s largest and most important Jewish communities
is also a worthwhile achievement.
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