Trump’s Poland is a nation of fighters for freedom and justice who fell victim to the dictatorial conquests that ruined the land – but which survived thanks to its devotion to the values of liberty and its love of life. In Trump’s Poland, there is no trace of the Poles who persecuted, betrayed and murdered thousands of Jews in all over the country, before, during and after the Nazi occupation. No trace remains of the deep-rooted anti-Semitism and venomous hatred of Jews, which they suffered throughout the period of Jewish-Polish existence even before the Nazis destroyed it. [...]
In Trump’s Poland, the Poles were and remain the ultimate victims – of the Nazis and the Russians. But there is no mention of the Polish Jews, who were often forced to hide not only from the Nazis but from their Polish neighbors as well. It is therefore not surprising that Trump chose to deliver his main speech at the Warsaw Uprising Monument, which marks the 1944 Polish uprising that ended with the murder of 200,000 Poles by the Germans and the destruction of Warsaw, but skipped a visit to the famous monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the 1943 Jewish revolt which the Polish underground failed to join.
The fact that he chose to skip a visit to the monument (although his daughter Ivanka did visit it) – despite it being barely a mile away from the monument where he spoke – infuriated the local Jewish community. In a protest declaration, they wrote that Trump is the first U.S. president since the fall of communism in 1989 who neglected to visit it. As far as they’re concerned, it’s as though Trump decided to skip a visit to Yad Vashem during his visit to Israel. [...]
The last two statements, referring to “Polish pride” and “great heroes,” are very true when it comes to the thousands of Polish Righteous of the Nations, who risked their lives and saved Jews in the Holocaust, like the Ulma family from the town of Markowa, all of whom, including their six children, were murdered along with Jews they were hiding from the Nazis in their house. But these statements are not at all true when it comes to thousands of other Poles, whose behavior towards their Jewish neighbors during World War II was the exact opposite of “great heroism.”
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