The Holocaust was recorded mainly in the occupied Poland. Some historians talk about the “polarization” of the Holocaust today. The issue remains sensitive 80 years later. In the middle of the forest, 120 kilometers north-east of Warsaw, signs point the way to a “place of national memory”. In January 2025, Michael Chev Gordon found himself in Chumovo, where his grandfather Zalman Korodetsky was killed along with 1,500 Polish Jews in August 1941. Michael learned all this a few years ago from his grandmother’s memoirs. “I grew up in a great silence, as great as the silence in this forest now,” says the London-based composer.

A mass grave can be seen on a hill. There, the foundation called “The Forgotten”, has placed a column with some of the names of the murdered. Since 2014 he has been searching, locating and documenting virtually unknown locations where Jews were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland. “Our work is based on information from local communities who contact us because they want to commemorate the Jewish victims. Because they feel there is a void in local history,” explains Anieska Niradko, director of the foundation.

Mass executions and pogroms against Jews began immediately after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. From June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and by extension the Soviet-occupied eastern territories of Poland, the German troops and local relief forces carried out mass killings of Jews.

Auschwitz – a global symbol

German extermination camps such as AuschwitzTreblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Kulmof and Majdanek. Of nearly 3.5 million Polish Jews before 1939, only a few hundred thousand survived the Holocaust. Most because they had been deported to Siberia by Stalin in 1940 and 1941.
After 1945, the communist regime in Poland proceeded to confiscate Jewish property and the Holocaust no longer played a role, although five of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust were executed there. Only after the fall of Communism in 1989 did the history of Polish Jews cease to be a taboo subject.

Piotr Czywinski, director of the Auschwitz Museum near the Polish town of Oświęcim, sees a growing interest in the history of the Holocaust. 2019 was a record year and 2.4 million people visited the museum, mostly young people, he told DW. One million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Germany’s largest extermination camp. “Each Polish victim has 20-30 descendants who honor his memory. Auschwitz is therefore a place of memory for many Poles. This is understandable and should be so.”

“Polization” of the Holocaust

Holocaust researcher Jan Grabowski, on the other hand, speaks of a distortion of history. “What is happening in Polish collective memory is what I call the ‘polarization’ of the Holocaust. Polish elements are embedded in the history of murdered Jews,” says the Polish-Jewish historian, who works at the University of Ontario in Canada.

According to polls conducted by the Polish Institute CBOS for the Jagiellonian University of Krakow in 2020, 50% of respondents in Poland associated Auschwitz mainly with Poles, while 43% saw it mainly as a site of the Holocaust. 82% of respondents were convinced that Poles helped Jews during the Holocaust. Half of the respondents said that Jews suffered as much as Poles.

Since 2015, June 14 has been established in Poland as the National Day of Remembrance for the victims of German Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Historian Jan Grabowski is outraged by the hundreds of crosses erected at Treblinka in memory of around 300 Polish victims. The site is two kilometers from the extermination camp where the Germans murdered 900,000 Jews in gas chambers. “Treblinka is gradually turning from the second largest Jewish cemetery in the world into a place of Polish martyrdom, which is difficult to understand,” says the historian.

Politics also plays its role. The conservative PiS party in government until 2023 has often caused upset with its nationalist history policy, such as in 2018 with the so-called “Holocaust law”. It provided for a three-year prison sentence for those who accused Poles of participation in Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust.

After protests from the US the law became more moderate. The intense debate in Poland about that time shows how sensitive the Holocaust still is 80 years later, according to Anieska Niradko, director of the Forgotten Foundation.

Edited by: Maria Rigoutsou