The following is a statement I have sent to Gazeta Wyborcza, which is covering the outsize reaction to my recent article in The New Yorker, "The Historians Under Attack for Exploring Poland's Role in the Holocaust":
I am all too aware of the controversy that has erupted in Poland in response to this article. By "all too aware" I mean, among other things, a barrage of hate mail, including death threats, that has been directed at me in the last couple of days. Most of the react...ions seem to focus on a single phrase concerning the Polish government's "effort to exonerate Poland—both ethnic Poles and the Polish state—of the deaths of three million Jews in Poland during the Nazi occupation." Contrary to the laws of both linguistics and logic, this sentence has been interpreted as an assertion that Poles, or Poland, is responsible for the deaths of all three million Jews killed on its land during the Holocaust. I said no such thing. Here is what I did say: Three million Jews perished on the territory of occupied Poland during the Holocaust; some ethnic Poles, and some structures of the pre-war Polish state, are implicated in some of the deaths; in its efforts to clear Poles and Poland of any blame in any part of the Holocaust, the government has gone so far as to quash intellectual inquiry.
I understand that the subtleties of word usage can evade even people who know a foreign language well. But the misinterpretation involves a harder-to-forgive logical fallacy as well. Saying "the government is going overboard to prove A false" does not equal the statement "A is true." Understanding this does not require a mastery of English. That so many people and institutions, including the Aushcwitz Museum, have chosen to ignore the rules of logic in reacting to my piece is, frankly, shocking . I understand that this gives me barely a taste of the intellectual climate in which Polish historians of the Holocaust now live.
As a final note, I would like to state that I am no stranger to this topic, as a person and as a writer. Before the war, my family lived in Bialystok and Warsaw. Of a sprawling family - my great-grandparents had 25 siblings between them - only four people survived: my grandmother and great-grandmother, who ended up in the Soviet Union, and my great aunt and her young daughter, who were saved by ethnic Poles. To be more specific, they were saved by strangers after their Polish friends, fearing repercussions, turned them away. I grew up with this complicated history, and one of my first books, written twenty years ago, delved deeply into it. Complicated, contradictory stories cannot be told in a climate of outrage and denunciation, when a writer knows that any word or phrase of theirs is likely to be taken out of context, twisted, and used against them. What I have seen in the last couple of days, since the publication of my short piece thousands of miles away from Poland, is the very opposite of a climate in which intellectual inquiry and nuanced story telling are possible.