Lost in Thursday’s kerfuffle over whether the U.S. Coast Guard would no longer consider the swastika as a symbol of hate was a far more troubling development in antisemitism. The new U.S. ambassador to Poland, Thomas Rose, delivered a speech in which he absolves Poland, and by extension, the Polish people, of any responsibility whatsoever for the Holocaust.

This is a distortion that cannot be allowed to go unchallenged or unrefuted.

Addressing a conference on antisemitism in Warsaw organized by the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, Rose declared categorically that Poland “has been burdened with the moral stain that was never its own, the persistent belief that Poland shares guilt for the barbaric crimes committed against it,” adding, for good measure, “It’s a grotesque falsehood and the equivalent of a blood libel against the Polish people and Polish nation.”

The reality is far more complex and far more nuanced than the simplistic and sanitized one-sided image put forward by Rose. While Poles and Poland did not perpetrate the Holocaust, those Poles who assisted the Germans in doing so must not be whitewashed out of history.

I do not write as a disinterested observer. My parents were Polish Jews who were incarcerated in the ghettos of their respective hometowns, Będzin and Sosnowiec, and then deported to Auschwitz, also in Poland, where virtually their entire families were murdered. In her memoir, my mother recalled that there were Poles and ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) who behaved altruistically and decently. “Many Poles, however,” she added pointedly, “were very happy about what was happening to the Jews.”

To be........

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