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Silencing history and memory in the Christ of Europe - Aliens 64
470 Plays4 months ago
This time, we are going to do something a little bit different. We will do a case study of a country where the government has started to promote its preferred historical narrative. While some might not call that alternative history or pseudo-history, I would argue that this is overlapping. So we will look at Poland and its memory laws, how the government is policing museums, and trying to silence research on Polish complicity in the Holocaust. We will also look at Polish history to see how it came to be and what national memory they draw from.
We will look at how they create emotionally triggering museums while leaving out the parts of history that put Poland in a bad light. We will see how PiS, the ruling party, is trying to silence museum directors and professors who don't follow the party line. In the past, we have discussed how governments in Bosnia and Indonesia have used state funds to promote psuedoscience. This isn't too far off, just fewer aliens and lost civilizations. But it is still essential to keep our eyes on this pseudo-history in times like this.
Videos you hear in the episode:
- The Unconquered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q88AkN1hNYM
- Dziewczyna z granatem: https://youtu.be/6pTPMq4ZrGw?si=uYA_my0qMturS-vU
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Music
The intro music is Lily of the woods by Sandra Marteleur, and the outro is named “Folie hatt” by Trallskruv.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:19
Speaker
Welcome to Digging Up Ancient Aliens. This is the podcast where we examine strange claims about alternative history and ancient aliens in popular media. Do their claims hold of water to an archaeologist? Are there better explanations out there? We are now on episode 64. I am Fredrik, your guide into the world of pseudo-archaeology. This time we're going to do something a little bit different. we're going to do a case study of a country where the government has started to promote its preferred historical narrative. While some might not call that alternative history or pseudo-history, I would argue that it's, well, at least, overlapping.
00:01:05
Speaker
So, we will look at Poland and their memory laws, how the government is policing museums and trying to silence research on the Polish complicity in the Holocaust. We will also look at Polish history to see how it came to be, how it is today, and what national memory this ah politician is drawing from when they create these narratives. We will look at how they create emotionally triggering museums while leaving out the parts of the history that put Poland in a bad light. We will see how PIS, the ruling party or peace, as I probably will refer to it further in the episode, is trying to silence the museum directors and professors that don't follow the party line.
00:02:01
Speaker
In the past, we have discussed how governments in, for example, Bosnia and Indonesia have used state funds, state ah influence, to promote pseudoscientific project. This isn't that far off. Sure, it's fewer aliens, fewer Atlantis, fewer lost civilization, but is still essentially important for us to keep our eyes on this type of, let's call it alternative history in times like this. And this might be also the first episode that might get me into some legal trouble, but we will see how that develops. And on that note, I want to thank all of those who financially support the show through Patreon or the membership portal.
00:02:50
Speaker
This donation is very helpful and I'm very thankful for your support. And if you want to support the show, well, way to the end of the episode, I will tell you exactly where you can go to do this. And remember that you find sources, resources and reading suggestions on the website, taking up ancientadans.com. And just a quick content warning, we will bring up but World War Two and the genocide taking place during this time. There's nothing graphic in this episode really, but this is just a heads up that we will talk a bit about these ah war crimes that took place ah during this war. So now that we have finished up our preparation, let's dig into the episode.
00:03:42
Speaker
On the third floor of a small museum in the little town of El Blon, we step into a war-torn landscape. In the background, we hear ominous music, a haze of bullets approaching us like warring messages of death. There's crying somewhere in the background, the sounds of screeching metal echoing in the hall. On the first text that we meet as we step into the world of despair goes as follows.
00:04:16
Speaker
Whoever crosses my walls, becomes my walls. Whoever speaks about or touches the remains might see my former inhabitants and will not forget them, will not forget me. I am an inhabited land, a populated place. I have no borders. I am ever expanding and no longer just a city. I am an endless story. Now it's your turn, and I invite you to consider who you are. Are you a passerby? A random traveler? My inhabitant? My body? You stand at the moment on my downfall.
00:05:07
Speaker
We then move through history, where Poland is repeatedly the victim of aggression from its neighbors. The Vikings came and settled in Poland, as they did the Teutonic Knights and the Mongols. And then came the Swedish deluge that washed over the nation, the partition of Poland between Austria, Russia and Prussia, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and, of course, World War II. While we are met with a war-torn nation conquered by others, the Polish inhabitants are painted as victims. But while we have this notion of victimhood, the Polish people are also portrayed as being prepared to die on their feet. But why are we really talking about this? Well, while it's fun to poke holes in the ancient alien theory and the Atlantic's claims, we must keep an eye as I mentioned in the beginning
00:06:06
Speaker
on the alternative history, it's kind of going under the radar. Alternative history has unfortunately stuck its way into politics. Something we see in both Bosnia and Indonesia that we have talked about before, their state-sponsored pyramid hunts. There are, however, more nefarious alternative histories that are being state-sponsored. Poland is an excellent example of this. They both have memory laws and a historical narrative that's said set by the state. To fully understand all of this, we need to look at several things. Polish history, the history being promoted today in Poland, and well, the memory laws themselves. So in front of us, we have a case study on how alternative history can be more than aliens and
00:06:58
Speaker
in a sense even worse. But let's get back into the history that we found at the Museum of Elblom. A floor down in this museum, we encounter another immersive exhibition. This time, we start a journey in World War II and get to experience the life in Elblong and the Polish resistance that were fighting the Nazis, but some were captured putting camps and, of course, executed and massacred. We see apartments ravaged by German soldiers, and we later get to experience the life on the thumb of the Soviet Poland behind the iron curtains.
00:07:44
Speaker
And the museum makes an excellent job of immersing the visitor in a historical narrative. But if you lack a connection to Poland, you might get a wave of wrath around here somewhere. You notice it even more clearly if you first start your tour at the museum at the exhibition on the Viking settlement Trusso, or as it's known today, Janow Pomorski. This exhibition offers both text and explanation in Polish and English, but the two exhibitions I've been talking about so far are solely in Polish. The target audience is Polish adults and schoolchildren visiting the museum, not people visiting from elsewhere.
00:08:34
Speaker
And this type of highly emotional history narrative is not some sort of isolated occurrence here in Elblong. As Ruta Kasalovskait puts it in a paper, this trend has been going on for almost 20 years now. While some museums have gone for the full immersive experience, there are also examples of museums who try to go sort of the middle route. One example of this is the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk. While having a more maybe not sterile but traditional exhibition with artifacts and obviously on display,
00:09:13
Speaker
There are also this immersive element that you can, for example, walk down a street from 1941 where Jews are not allowed to go into stores. In another section of the museum, you walk through a bit of a get-downs that's bombed to pieces with tanks going straight through these smoldering ruins. You can walk around the cattle cars that took the use to the different concentration camps. And what impressed me with this museum well recently was the fact that they told the story of Nanking and Ainfo, or the sexual slaves used by the Japanese army during World War II. I will return to what we don't find in this museum a bit later.
00:10:05
Speaker
Now, while the World War Museum in Gdansk is a little bit more neutral, or what we should call it, we still see this narrative ah victimhood of and isolation, a feeling that was enforced when you exit the museum. So if you made your way out of the museum in the past a couple of years ago, you were presented with a video and this video show the experience of a fugitive in a modern war zone. And it was a time to reflect on what you had witnessed at the museum and how these experiences can be found still today in these different war zones like in Syria or Ukraine.
00:10:48
Speaker
Today, you're not able to see this particular video. Instead, there's a new film in place that was produced in to be more in line with the ruling party's policies, law and justice, PIS, historical policy. named Nieswiecie of Czerny, or in English, the Unconquered. This video has as a cashaller's guide, so I'll describe it, quote, emotionalized language that offers insight to the official memory narrative and its ah associate emotional dynamics that the PIS government seeks to elicit among viewers.
00:11:33
Speaker
and The video was produced by a company called IPN TV and did not work with her sparse budget, it seems. The animation itself is stunning and the English version is narrated none other than Boromir or Sean Bean, if you prefer. He did not die in the end, if you wonder. I'd like you to listen a bit on this narration and pay attention to what ideas they seem to promote, because we will see these again later in our story.
00:12:05
Speaker
first germany attacks then Soviet Russia. We don't give up, despite being left on our own. We create an underground state, complete with a government, an army, schools and courts. We suffer two occupations. The Germans murder millions of Polish civilians. The Soviets deport Poles in cattle cars to gulags in the east. They shoot over 20,000 officers during the Kacin massacre.
00:12:37
Speaker
and hundreds of thousands of Poles are forced into slave labour in the inhuman lands of the Soviet Union. Paratroopers make their way to occupied Poland to support the underground state while our counterintelligence acquires secret plans of the enemy. There are Poles who save Jews despite the threat of the death penalty. We create resistance movements even within the German concentration camps. We are the first to alert the world about the Holocaust, though politics appear to be more important than human lives, and nobody listens to us. Polish Jews fight the Germans in the Warsaw ghetto.
00:13:21
Speaker
without even a chance for success. Our nation comes up from the underground and fights in the Warsaw Uprising. We break the German enigma code, saving millions of lives. But in exchange for all that we do, we are betrayed. The free world distances itself from us, leaving us behind the Iron Curtain. Despite our scars from the war, we still resist. The Pope gives us strength. Workers' strikes spread throughout Poland. The Communists lose. i The Iron Curtain falls. The war is over. We prevail. Because we do not beg for freedom. We fight for it.
00:14:08
Speaker
The video is created to create a feeling with the highly emotional language. It enforces this idea of Polish victimhood and abandonment, themes that are deeply woven into Polish history, as we will see. But note here that the video portrays everything black or white, the poems are portrayed as heroic and rightful, while the others, the outsiders, are the only ones committing this evil act, either as aggressors or in the role as spectators. But where did this type of immersive museum concept start?
00:14:50
Speaker
To find an answer to this, we need to go to Warsaw and back to the year 2004 and a grand opening of the Uprising Museum.
00:15:03
Speaker
The museum was a first of its kind and was created on the initiative of Lesz Kaczynski from PIS. Visitors would be able to be submerged in the history and the suffering of the Warsaw citizen. during the uprising that took place between the 1st of August and the 2nd of October in 1944. And if you have the opportunity, you should definitely go and visit because it really is an experience, so to say. Since then, when PIS rose to more, well, ah national power, the party has started to appoint a museum director that
00:15:49
Speaker
again follow the party lines and we start to see these type of exhibitions all across Poland and then has become a quite large part of the Polish museum scene. All follow the party line regarding what his history or what version of history the public should be able to encounter in these spaces. And this historical version, PIS, promotes this not only limited to museums, but also popular media. This enforces the idea of these heroic Poles which are left to fend for themselves against the world.
00:16:31
Speaker
which either doesn't care or is out to harm them. On television there are shows like Škas honor povostanie or Time for Honor Uprising, a TV show that follow where a couple of Polish youth that are fighting in the resistance during the Warsaw Uprising. And this show is accompanied by songs like a Jeff Schindler's Seggra Natem or in English Girls with Grenades.
00:17:23
Speaker
fitting all with his preferred an historical narration. So to better understand where this idea originates from and to better understand Poland, today we need to have a quick look at the historical past. While we could easily spend a semester trying to cover the history of Poland to better understand the nation today is a little bit out of the scope of this podcast. We as we initially know that Poland has had several occupations through history.
00:17:57
Speaker
Now, I want to focus on a specific period during the 18th century when Poland were split into bits and pieces and handed to Russia, Germany and Austria. Poland's participation seems to be where much of the Polish self-image we see today originates. So, we're back in time. The year is 1569, and a union between Poland and Lithuania was created in the town of Lublin. This would create the largest state in Europe.
00:18:37
Speaker
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would last until 1795. How was such a large and robust country divvied up like a cake among siblings? We can spend again hours on the subject, and as usual, You can find more reading suggestions on the episode page if you want to learn more. Now, here comes the Sparknotes version. And leading up to 1772 and the first partition of the Polish-Lisewanian Commonwealth, the country had been drained by endless wars with Sweden and Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
00:19:19
Speaker
There are also this large plague outbreak that wiped out at least a quarter of the population, weakening the Polish state even more. and Add to this the political structure of Poland, Lithuania. Some historian claimed that the state was a bit too democratic for its own good. And that's it's something that could be discussed for over the while. Poland, Lithuania had a king as a ruler, the same, and that's the, what should we call it, the Polish parliament of the time, limited the power of the ruler quite a lot. They had a two chamber parliament and they had the final say on all the laws issued by the king and had a power to create rules and policies on their own on top of this.
00:20:09
Speaker
While this to our modern air sounds very familiar and not really over-the-top democratic, each member of the same had Liberum Vito, the power of standing up and say Nie Pozwalaam or I don't allow this. In Sweden we have a saying that when a meeting is very unfruitful and not a single decision can't be made, it's Polsk Riksdag or Polish government. And this expression's origin is this liberum veto, the veto right, because if a member of the schlada, the nobility, stood up and cried nia pozvallam, the session ended and nullified the past legislation that had been made up to that point this day.
00:20:58
Speaker
something that of course was taken advantage of by all other countries around Poland who did not want Poland, Lithuania to make certain decision or try to destabilize the country from within. So this is the position that Polish-Lithuanian found itself in. War of the war with the surrounding powers all of them interfering by providing influence on the inside by bribing the shlada and there's even uprisings around in the commonwealth for example in an attempt to stabilize the situation a few partitions ah form the confederation of bar and this is a group of nobles who group together trying to
00:21:47
Speaker
defend against outside and inside threats, such as say the Kolywyshina rebellion in modern Ukraine, where Cossacks revolted against the unfair Polish-Lithuanian treatment of them. This culminated in a massacre of Polish nobility and Jews by peasants egged on by the Cossacks. The largest of these slaughters was the massacre of Uman, where thousands lost their life.
00:22:19
Speaker
how many that died isn't exactly known. I've seen numbers ranging from 2,000 to maybe with up to 100,000 during the whole stretch of the Colovishina Rebellion.
00:22:51
Speaker
So the end of the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth is drawing close. There are three countries that will essentially use Poland-Lithuanian as a buffet. To the east, we find Catherine the Great, who used power, money, and influence to get a man that she thought loyal to her, Stanislav Argos-Ponyantovsky, in the position of king of the Commonwealth. Catherine hope that this will develop up into that this area becoming a sort of Russian satellite state. To the west we have Frederick the Great of Prussia, hungry for access to the Baltic Sea.
00:23:37
Speaker
And Frederick saw the weak, Paulian, Lithuanian state, and while licking his lips, he said to have compared it to an artichoke. He was going to devour leaf by leaf. Close by at the table sits Maria Theresa, Empress of the Austrian Empire of the Habsburgs. She is a bit reluctant to agree with this idea of splitting Poland Lithuania still.
00:24:08
Speaker
As the other rulers just put on the napkins in their laps and pick up their cutlery, Maria Theresa joins in in the end. Frederick the Great supposedly said about Maria Theresa that the more she cries, the more she takes regarding her changing morality. Stanislav August Poniatowski, the king of Poland, Lithuania, and Catherine the Great's post-puppet, saw the writing on the wall. and In an attempt to modernize Poland, Lithuania, Poniatowski started to try to get reforms in place. and This alarmed the big three, who then decided to well take what was theirs in their own minds.
00:24:56
Speaker
Even if the Confederation of Bár had won some support among the Polish people for putting down the Kolywyshyn rebellion, the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth was too weak. Almost overnight a third of the country's area was lost. A bit more third of the population was no longer part of this union, and this shocked the surrounding nations, who rightfully questioned this brazen coup, to make it seems all legitimate. Austria, Prussia, and Russia forced the same, the Polish parliament, to agree with this partition.
00:25:37
Speaker
However, a young nobleman from today's Belarus named Tadeusz Reitan tried to stop it, dressed in the traditional noble robes of his claws with a sash for a sword and cavalry boots. He ah had a traditionally styled mustache and a shaved head, except for a little bit of hair left on top as nobles up to then previously had looked like. He must have differed from the others at the same time, who supposedly, according to different witness accounts, had a more Western dress. Of course, it can be taken with a grain of salt, but they are described to look like the Westerners do with wigs, their clothes, and all of that.
00:26:28
Speaker
Rayton protested during the same, but his voice fell on deaf ears. The others were either bought by outside influence or kind of just had given up. In the end, as the same was on their way out, Rayton threw himself on the doorstep, tearing his robe open and shouting, kill me, stamp on me, but don't kill the fatherland. Does it sound familiar? While much of peace national history policy concerns, 20th century history day seemed to draw inspiration from these events. Here we can find the base for the views on Polish identity and how, well, an ideal Pole should behave in a crisis like this. And who can blame that this was more or less a blatant robbery in the middle of the day.
00:27:27
Speaker
So after this first partition, many Poles went to exile, zone fighting in America against the British. Others stayed and started to work, trying to reform and stabilize what was left of Poland. education policies and a new constitution were put in place, and these reforms were not looked upon fondly by the surrounding countries. Soon, Prussia and Russia were hungry for more, and in 1792 these two countries moved in and seized more land.
00:28:02
Speaker
An uprising was staged and led by Tadeusz Koczyszko, who had fought in the American Revolution, and this attempt to recapture the lands taken was unsuccessful. In 1795 there was the last partition between Austria, Prussia, and Russia. And this would be the end of Poland, Lithuania. And neither Poland or Lithuania would be a country for the coming 123 years. It is during this time we start to see Poland adopting almost a messianic identity of suffering.
00:28:45
Speaker
During and after the participation, there began to become an idea that Poland was or is the Christ of Europe, while traces of this idea can be found way back during the conflicts between the Ottoman Empire the poet Adam Mikiewiec revitalized the idea. Mikiewiec wrote Polska Christusem Narodov, or Poland, the Christ of Europe, incorporating the idea of a victimhood into the Polish identity
00:29:21
Speaker
It also reshapes the Polish identity from being based on ethnicity to one of religion. Being Catholic Poland, torn apart and threatened by a Protestant and Orthodox Christian is not strange that the focused shift from ethnicity to religion. The Catholic Church is still a fundamental part in Poland and a big part on the national identity. And this idea of ah messianic suffering has also been kind of adopted into the national identity. And we see it clearly in how
00:30:04
Speaker
The Polish people look upon their history and the how they have suffered. So in the early 2000, in a study by Irene Kriminski, a survey was performed and 78% of those asked agreed that Poland has been the victim of injustice more than any other nation. and this number has been relatively steady and according to a 2019 IPESOS survey there were 74% of respondents that agree that Poland have faced more injustices than any other country has.
00:30:45
Speaker
And with this historical identity of victimhood, it's not strange that the Populistic National Conservancy, PIS, can use and abuse this to their advantage. We can see the parallels between how they promote ideas of and history of World War II and Poland behind the iron curtains and direct connections to the participation of Poland lithuania and an act that was nothing in less than daylight mugging in front of the rest of Europe, who idly stood by, basically. And this crime was justified by the 18th century xenophobic enlightenment ideas, as Larry Wolff put it.
00:31:31
Speaker
The Poles and the Slavs were portrayed by Russia and Prussia and Austria as backward, as barbaric. People definitely in need of the helpful, benevolent, the guiding hand of the intellectual superior West.
00:31:52
Speaker
So what's the harm then? With a good understanding of Poland's past, let's see what all of this led to. So let's return to the museum we talked about before. We're back in this immersive and emotional exhibition and walking around and experiencing his history on both an emotional plane and being fed with fact in the information. But something Something is missing here, to be honest. I believe that most visitors won't even realize it, however. But when you walk down the exhibition, there is a story that's not being told here.
00:32:32
Speaker
The only story we see here is black and white. The Russians, the Germans, those are the enemies, those are the soul responsible for the slaughter, for the suffering. The Poles are the heroes, the saviors doing what nobody else dare to do and risking their own lives in this process. And it makes for a good story, but it's far from the truth. The reality is covered in more gray, something that the ruling party, PIS, has tried to solve by enacting these memory laws. And while memory laws aren't necessarily bad, the Polish laws are written in a way that hinder scholarly research and academic academic discussion.
00:33:27
Speaker
Now, memory laws have existed in Poland and other nations for that matter for quite some time. in And in 1998, the first version of the act of the Institute of National Remembrance was enacted in Poland. In short, this law made public denial against the facts of Nazi crime, communist crimes and other offenses, constitution against peace illegal, meaning you can't deny the Holocaust. and those kind of things. Laws we find in Germany and many other countries around Europe. And that's not the issue. But in 2018, PIS added an addendum to the act.
00:34:12
Speaker
making it unlawful for a person to publicity and contrary to the facts, attributes the Polish nation or the Polish state as responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crime. So at first this law was kind of sold as a way to try to stop people from referring to the concentration camps built by Nazi Germany as Polish death camps. even Barack Obama was forced to issue an apology when referring to the concentration camps as being Polish. But the law, as we will see, has instead been used, and I think that was the original idea, used in attempts to silence academics and research in Polish complicity in the Holocaust created and led by Nazi Germany. Of course, that's not the disputing part here. It's
00:35:04
Speaker
How much did Polish citizen, Polish people, Polish politician for that matter, participate in the Holocaust? And the reality is that many Polish people did help use other went the other way and participated in the Jugendjagt or the Juhunt. Poles would turn on their neighbors, harboring Jews or partisans. And in the 2016 book, Hump for the Jews, Jan Grabowski used the rural area of Dabrowa Tarnowska in the Southeast Poland as a case study. and And if we can look at the gray area that's left out in the history written by PIS.
00:35:55
Speaker
there's a large amount of anti-Semitic idea and policies in place before Germany's invasion. As Robowski points out, during in the 1930s in Poland, the relationships between the Jews and the Poles were quickly deteriorating. Anti-Semitic ideas could be found in mainstream politics and within the that Catholic Church. In 1936, then the-Prime Minister Felizian Swavoy Skvodovsk said in a speech to the same that the people should financially boycott Jewish businesses. Just between 1932 and 1933, there is a vast number of reported criminal cases, all of them having anti-Jewish agenda.
00:36:47
Speaker
and these ranging from vandalism of stores to all-out riots. And these cases get into the double digits just in this small Polish town of Dabrowa, Tarnowska. Grabowski, you want to quote the Jewish Polish historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, who said, quote, where the environment had been infected with antisemitism before the war, hiding Jews presented great difficulties. And denunciation by antisemitic neighbors were more to be feared there than the German terror.
00:37:29
Speaker
Emmanuel Ringelblum went through a lot of trouble trying to document the life in the ghetto Warsaw and the refugees from Zabowieśin. Unfortunately, he was executed in 1944 after his hiding spot in Warsaw was disclosed to the Gestapo by a Polish collaborator. As we see there, there was a great deal of Poles who actively and willingly participated in the German instigated genocide of Jews in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany. Luckily, or maybe unluckily for a Polish self-image, Soviet Russia was also very anti-Semitic.
00:38:15
Speaker
Something that led to these crimes against humanity was allowed to be swept under the rug when Poland was behind the iron curtain, and this image of the noble Polish citizen risking themselves for the Jewish people would be, well, the standard self-image that would take quiet Quite a hit in 2001 when John Gross published a book called Neighbours, the destruction of the Jewish community in Yedvabneh was released.
00:38:57
Speaker
In this small Polish town, there was a plaque put up commemorating the Jews who were killed in the city. Up until 2001, the plaque mentioned that these people were killed by the Nazis, Nazi soldiers. People passed that sign daily. Many probably didn't know that this was a lie. As it would turn out, at least 340 men, women and children were killed by the Polish town folk. The highest estimate of people killed in this massacre is 1,500. The lower number is what's so far been able to confirm through research and excavations. As Jan Gross writes on page 73 in his books,
00:39:45
Speaker
quote The massacre of Jebvabneh Jews on July 10, 1941, was coordinated by the town's mayor, Marian Korolak. His name appears in virtually every deposition. He issued orders to others and was himself otherwise more practically engaged throughout the pogrom. while a station containing 11 German grenadiers were located in the area. It's hard to save these massacre walls on their orders. While witnesses claim to have seen Mayor Korlak speak with the soldiers, nobody knows if they actually made the order. Anti-Semitic spirit was present in the village even before the Nazi German occupation.
00:40:38
Speaker
What we can say for sure is that this massacre would not have taken place without German consent. They would have been able to stop it if they wanted to. But what we know for sure, the German involvement was limited to have been taking a few pictures. What we know for sure at least. We don't know if the use of the Edwabne would have been spared if Poland had not been invaded. pogroms were taking place even after the war such as the kelitz massacre where 42 at least Jews were killed by Polish people. Hundreds of Jews were killed after the war by Polish nationalists. Jedwabne might have followed in these steps after the war, but what we do know for sure is that on the 10th of July in 1941 the townsfolk
00:41:36
Speaker
under the leadership of their city council, raped, mutilated and murdered and looted the Jewish neighbors. Not on the direct orders of the Nazi occupiers, but on the orders of the major of their town. When the news of this came out, many doubt it to be true, and these people still are around today. Even the new monument that was put up leaves room for deniability. Only if we can read to the memory of youths from Yeboabne and the surrounding area, men, women, children, co-inhabitants of this land, who were murdered and burned alive on this spot on July 10, 1941.
00:42:23
Speaker
But it's good that Poland is starting to deal with this, right? Well, hair here's the thing. I'm not sure if this would be possible research in today's Poland with the 2018 law the Polish government can't be accused of complicity. This stretches down to local city councils, as two respected history professors, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, learned in 2001 when they were put on trial for breaking the 2018 law. and The trial was based on witness account that Engelking published in a chapter of the 2018 book, The Lay Yes to Nuts, or Night Without End, the fate of use in selected countries in occupied Poland.
00:43:12
Speaker
In this account, we follow Astera Drogitska, who was held by the Savti or the head of the village of Malinova, Edvard Malinowski. A little Polish word lesson here, the word Malinova translates to raspberries in English. And in this account, we see the duality of humans, while Malinowski, according to this account, did seem to help use Escape. Even if he seems to have charged quite a bit for it, the author noted that he ah took the opportunity to rob her.
00:43:49
Speaker
He also is also supposed to have reported Jews that were hiding in the the nearby forest to the Nazi authorities. So while he did seem to help at least this a Jewish ah woman, he also revealed a location or others in Heiden. Something is often repeated is that the Germans would punish those who hid Jews with death and Well, that's that did happen. ah Some were executed for hiding use, but many others got just served fines. And the author have thoroughly documented an accounting for all their sources in their book, for how providing a quite comprehensive list of references. Yet
00:44:39
Speaker
The 2018 law has opened up for researchers to be dragged into court by people who don't like their findings. The law, however, makes it a bit of a civil matter, but the Nationalistic Right-wing Organization, good name redoubt, Polish League against defamation, that has of course ties to PIS has taken it um on upon them themselves to sponsor these kind of lawsuits, for example, the one we just heard about. So they even got Malinowski's niece Filomena Leszczynska involved. In later interviews, she commented, quote,
00:45:20
Speaker
This book is intended to keep us crawling, accuse us of antisemitism, of collaboration with the Germans, of the worst things. And these three shows have deeply rooted this idea of suffering of the noble Poles really is in the society. However, the government itself is also investigating researchers who published on these subjects. Masha Gresham from The New Yorker, who interviewed Jan Grabowski, wrote in two thousand and twenty one quote The machinery of the Polish state is engaged in the suppression of independent research, Grabowski told me. State-employed researchers have been looking at each and every footnote to see if we made a mistake in Night Without End, he said. The book has more than 3,500 footnotes.
00:46:17
Speaker
John Gross, whom we mentioned earlier, has also been subjugated to investigation and hour-long interrogations by the Polish government. And this was after he made a comment that Polish people in occupied Poland probably killed more Jews than they killed Nazis. The president even threatened to take away an award Gross got from the state in 1996. PIS also had a museum the director of Warsaw's Poland, a museum about the Polish youth, Darius Stola, oust from his position. What led to this was an exhibition that the museum see and put up about the anti-Zionist campaigns and purges of youth that happened in March 1968 as a response to a political crisis that took place then.
00:47:09
Speaker
at the end of the exhibition where anonymized the anti-Jewish quote both from 1968 and modern times and they were kind of mixed up so you would get the feeling that what happened then still happens today. Still some of these could be recognized as belonging to the member of, guess what, the PIS party. The investigation of Jan Gross, however, was dropped when he retired from Princeton, and while Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engell-King were initially convicted, an appeal court later overturned the ruling. Judge Juana Wisniewska-Sadomska declared in the ruling that, quote, the courtroom was not the right place for a historical debate.
00:48:01
Speaker
However, the verdict still has ah effect. For example, the section about Malinowski was removed from the English translation. You won't find it in print of the English version of this book. You only find it in the books published in Polish in 2018. Also, who knows what will happen the next time something similar goes to court. We know that PAS have a huge influence over the court system and appointed judge and they are not as free as you might want them to be in a democratic state.
00:48:44
Speaker
And this little case study of Poland shows the danger of a government trying to control the historical narrative. While some of you might not agree with my assessment that this is a sort of alternative history narrative, I do stand by this claim. At a bare minimum, I think we all can agree that this is a distortion of history. We have, in the past, covered how nationalistic governments have sponsored pseudo-archaeological projects in Boston and Indonesia, as I mentioned several times. This is maybe an even more dangerous version of this, and something we need to keep an eye out, both as archaeologists, historians, and just people who enjoy history.
00:49:31
Speaker
because I fear it will be more of this in the future in more countries than just Poland. But it's worth keeping an eye on. On that bombshell, we will end this episode for this time. So until I meet you again, I really would love it if you left a positive review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen on this, or even better, share it with a friend or two, three, your whole family, put it on in the car stereo when you go on a road trip next time. And if you want to learn more about the things that I bring up in this episode, more about Polish history, I've put extensive sources and resources on digging up ancientaliels.com on the episode page for this episode. If you want to support the show, I really hope you do.
00:50:37
Speaker
you can head over to patreon.com slash digging up ancient aliens or if you prefer you can sign up for a membership on digging up ancient aliens dot com slash support you get access to bonus content early content extended content and my eternal gratefulness. You can also become a member at the archaeologicalpodcastnetwork.com where you get bonus content from other from other shows and you get slack channels and early elre episodes.
00:51:13
Speaker
then that money goes to support the archaeological podcast network and a bit of all of those who is so when putting up shows there. And if you want to contact me, you can do that through most social media sites or if you have any comments, corrections, suggestions, or you want to write an email in all caps in Polish at this point. My email is frederick at diggingupinshiraleons.com. Now Sandra Martelor created the intro music and our outro is by the band called Tralskriv who sings their song Thovliat. Links to both of these artists can be found in the show notes. Until next time, keep shoveling that science.
00:52:05
Speaker
me to get out the
00:52:35
Speaker
you