Israel-Poland deal on Holocaust school trips condemned as whitewashing

An agreement to renew visits by Israeli schoolchildren to Poland to learn about the Holocaust has been criticised as whitewashing the role played by some Poles in the murder of Jews.

Most Israeli schools organise trips to Poland for high school students, focusing on the sites of former Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz and former Jewish ghettos in order to learn about the Holocaust. However, the trips were suspended a few years ago after the Polish authorities criticised the programmes for focusing exclusively on the Holocaust and ignoring Polish victims of the Nazi occupation.

Last month the Polish and Israeli governments agreed to renew the school trips but the details were only published this week, sparking major criticism in Israel and from international Holocaust scholars.

Close to six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust but the Nazis preferred to construct the death camps outside the territory of the Reich – most of them in occupied Poland. In all occupied territories local collaborators were recruited by the Nazis to help in the slaughter and Poland was no exception.

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Under the terms of the agreement, which still needs to be ratified by the Israeli and Polish parliaments, each Israeli delegation must now visit one site from a list of 32 recommended sites that stress the Polish narrative of the war.

The sites include museums and memorial sites that document crimes committed by the Germans against non-Jewish Poles and even sites that commemorate Poles who participated in the murder of Jews. Some of the sites are dedicated to Polish nationalist heroes who fought the communist rulers after the war but some of these figures also participated in the murder of Jews.

One of the museums is dedicated to a Polish family who were executed by German troops after sheltering Jews but the museum fails to mention the much more common phenomena of Poles handing over Jews to the Germans or even participating in the murder of Jews.

Polish foreign minister Zbigniew Rau, speaking at a joint press conference last month with his Israeli counterpart Eli Cohen, welcomed the deal. “We note with satisfaction that the Israeli side referred to our point of view with understanding and has adopted the Polish position.”

Prof Jan Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian historian whose research focuses on the murder of the more than three million Polish Jews, condemned the deal. “What you have there is the ‘Polish wish-list’ of where Israeli youth should go. It reads like a Holocaust denier’s dream,” he said.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said Israel’s “surrender” to Poland in the agreement “is a national disgrace”.

“The Poles have for years attempted through every means to hide and deny the part of many Poles in the extermination (of Jews in the Holocaust) – alongside those Righteous among the Nations who acted to save Jews…It is unacceptable that youth trips coming to learn about the Holocaust will learn the Polish narrative.”