TORONTO — A “significant number” of young people in Poland today can’t understand why Poles generally stood by indifferently as Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, a Polish scholar said last week.

Andrzej Zbikowski – a professor of history at the University of Warsaw, a researcher at the Jewish Historical Institute and an associate of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research – made this comment at the conclusion of a lect­ure on Polish-Jewish relations in World War II.

But in the course of his speech at the University of Toronto, Zbikowski, a specialist in Polish Jewish history, provided the answers to his rhetorical question.

As he starkly observed, antisem­itism in German-occupied Poland did not diminish, while stereotypes about the affinity of Jews with Communism were prevalent in Polish so­ciety and the underground press in Poland portrayed Polish Jews as “the other.”

Although the London-based Po­lish government-in-exile promised equal treatment for Polish Jews after the war,  one of its members dissented, saying that Jews could not be permitted to re­sume their prewar role in the econ­omy. His position was supported by right-wing nationalists, he observed.

Zbikowski, whose talk was sponsored by the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, said that Po­lish-Jewish relations were strained  because Poles “grabbed” as much Jewish property as they could.

He suggested that Jews without means were automatically condem­ned, because they could not barter property for shelter and food.

By 1941, the Polish underground was aware of the anti-Jewish atrocities being committed by the Nazis. Though it did not materially help Jews, it sent reports to the Polish government-in-exile about Nazi crimes.

Only two per cent of Poles joined the underground, while up to 15 per cent read its publications, he said.

For the Polish underground, the paramount issue was the Nazi persecution of Catholic Poles, said Zbikowski, who recently published a biography of Jan Karski, the Polish courier who gave the Allies first-hand information about the brutal Ger­man occupation of Poland.

The mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 prompted the Polish government-in-exile to pay greater attention to Nazi antisemitism, he said.

After much of the ghetto was liquidated, the Polish foreign minister urged his British counterpart to issue a declaration warning Germany of the consequences of its crimes, while the Polish government-in-exile published a pamphlet on the topic.

According to Zbikowski, Poles regarded the Nazi extermination of Jews  as a template of what awaited them, he added.

In a sharp critique of the Home Army, the dominant Polish resistance movement, he accused it of sending far too few arms to Jewish fighters in the War­saw Ghetto. Jews were thus forced to buy guns and bullets on the black market.

Left-wing Polish partisans accepted Jews into their ranks, but the Home Army generally did not, he noted.

Poles who help­ed Jews were summarily executed, and as a result, they were usually loath to take such risks, Zbik­owski pointed out.

Nonetheless, more than 50,000 Jews out of a prewar Jewish population of 3.3 million survived the war in Po­land. Of these, 27,000 Jews went into hi­d­ing in Warsaw, depending on Catholics for survival.

In this vein, Zbikowski reminded the audience that more than 6,000 Polish Catholics who assisted Jews have been honoured by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations.

On the other hand, some 4,000 Polish blackmailers betrayed Jews to the Nazis.

Zbik­owski said that more than 1,000 books have been published on Polish-Jewish relations in wartime Poland.