Semitic Semantics: When Polish Death Camps Aren't Polish

FRIENDLY FIRE - While I've supported Obama from the beginning, and still support him, I'm troubled by his apology to Poland for calling the death camps in Poland, "Polish death camps." The Poles were quick to point out that these were Nazi death camps and not Polish. The very credible and rightly respected scholar of the Holocaust, Michael Berenbaum, agrees that they weren't Polish death camps--and not even Nazi; they were German.

All of this is technically true. However, I feel an unease bordering on nausea, because these seem to me to be technical and linguistic distinctions that feel Talmudic, or what Roman Catholics call Jesuitical. They're true but don't contain the whole truth, the plain truth and nothing but the truth. To me, these distinctions are 100 percent half-true.

The great moral question is how much actual complicity in horrors and crimes does it take to establish some ownership? If you knew about the death camps but didn't speak, would the camps be partly yours? How about if you not only didn't speak but actively turned your neighbors over to the Germans? Wouldn't that give you some equity, or considering the location and name of Auschwitz, some sweat equity?

Looking at the logic of this politically correct clean bill of historic moral health for Poland, let's take a far less violent example closer to home. Can we call Manzanar a California concentration camp? It was built and operated here. It held mostly Californians of Japanese origin, but legally it was a Federal program. Are we truly comfortable with these technical facts? Did Californians, then and now, have no ownership, no responsibility--or at least not enough to earn Manzanar the appellation: Californian?

Could we have the chutzpah to put all the responsibility on the Federal government? If this is the case then all the crimes of history (which is to say all history) are orphans. 


Given the logic of this issue, the Holocaust was perpetrated, well, by no one. It wasn't the Poles--they were occupied by Germany. It wasn't the Nazis--they were just a political party. It wasn't the Germans--we can't have group guilt and not all Germans were bad. So who?

While our linguistics are finely tuned and technically true, this seems both intellectually and morally dishonest. Where was Auschwitz and where did most of the murdered Jews come from? Poland. QED.

(Jonathan Dobrer is an op-ed contributor to the Daily News and Friendly Fire and is a syndicated columnist. This column was posted first at Friendly Fire.  More on Jonathan and his books at www.Dobrer.com) -cw

Tags: Jonathan Dobrer, Polish Death Camps, Nazis, concentration camps, Holocaust, Manzanar, California Japanese







CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 48
Pub: June 15, 2012