europe

Pole says Jews chose ghetto life

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A former Polish politician who is the father of the country’s prime minister said that Jews during the Holocaust moved to ghettos of their own accord to get away from non-Jewish Poles.

Kornel Morawiecki, a former senator whose son, Mateusz, became prime minister last year, made the remark in an interview published Tuesday by the online magazine Kultur Liberaln.

“Do you know who chased the Jews away to the Warsaw Ghetto? The Germans, you think? No. The Jews themselves went because they were told that there would be an enclave, that they would not have to deal with those nasty Poles,” said Kornel Morawiecki.

The Polish prime minister’s father also touched on alleged Jewish complicity in the Nazi-led genocide against the Jews. He spoke of the Zagiew ring of Jewish informants that the Germans used to infiltrate resistance groups.

“Who sent Jews to the Umschlagplatz?” Kornel Morawiecki asked, using the German word for places, often city squares, where Jews were rounded up to be deported to death camps. “Did the Germans do it? No! The Jewish police were on the Umschlagplatz!”

Leading scholars of the Holocaust rejected drawing parallels between Jewish and Polish collaborators with Germans, citing the fact that the former were prisoners destined for extermination and the latter were occupied civilians who by and large were allowed to lead their daily lives unless they violated Nazis laws.