Smash hit

“I believe it’s just a consistent Polish anti-Semitism and the Poles are sloughing [palming] off their own crimes of being an enemy of the Jews during World War II,” said Robert Bielski, Tuvia’s son, in Jewish newspaper The Forward. “The 128 people are in no way close to the millions of people that the Polish people herded towards the Germans so they could be extinguished.” He insisted that the Bielskis were not in Naliboki at the time of the massacre.

The subject of anti-Semitism is fraught with complexity in Poland. Some commentators claim Polish gentiles were complicit in the Holocaust. Around 37 Jews were killed by Polish gentiles in the 1946 Kielce pogrom, and over 20,000 Polish Jews were forced by the Soviet-backed regime to emigrate in 1968.

But many Poles argue they are not a generally anti-Semitic nation. No Polish organizations collaborated with the Nazis and more Poles are honoured at Israel’s Yad Vashem than any other nation. The Polish Home Army, the largest resistance movement in Europe, saved thousands of Jews through organizations like Zegota, the ’Polish Council to Aid Jews’. Over 2.3 million Polish gentiles were killed by the Nazis, many as a penalty for saving Jewish people.

The last living Bielski brother, Aharon Bielski, who changed his name to Aron Bell when he emigrated to the US in 1951, was arrested in Florida last year on suspicion of swindling around $250,000 in life savings from his Polish Catholic neighbour Janina Zaniewska, who herself survived Nazi imprisonment during the war.

Several members of the Bielski family served in the Israeli armed forces, including Zus Bielski’s grandson Elan, who recently joined up to the Israeli Defence Force.

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