 | The English used in this article or section may not be easy for everybody to understand. (November 2025) |
Shira Klein is an associate professor of history at Chapman University, specializing in the history of Italian Jews.
| The English used in this article or section may not be easy for everybody to understand. (November 2025) |
Shira Klein is an associate professor of history at Chapman University, specializing in the history of Italian Jews.
Klein got her PhD from New York University before joining Chapman University in 2012. In 2018, her book Italy's Jews from Emancipation to Fascism won the double finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She teaches the history of Jews, Europe and the Holocaust at her university.
Klein's research areas include the history of Italian Jews, and online antisemitism.
In February 2023, Klein and Jan Grabowski published the 57-page article Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust in The Journal of Holocaust Research in which they said to have found widespread distortion of Poland's Holocaust history on English Wikipedia, which involved the exaggeration of Jewish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers, invention of Jewish "war crimes" against Poles, downplaying of Polish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers and blaming Jews for their own suffering in the Holocaust.
Klein and Grabowski also criticized English Wikipedia's administrators and the Wikimedia Foundation's lack of will to handle, leaving the site vulnerable to disinformation:
Wikipedia's administrators have largely failed to uphold Wikipedia’s policies [. ...] unable to deal with the issue of persistent distortion [...] Wikipedia's articles [...] have become a hub of misinformation and antisemitic canards.
Some misconceptions about the Holocaust in Poland discussed in their article are summarized as follows:
| Type | Summary |
|---|---|
| Death toll | Myth 1: "3 million non-Jewish Poles were killed in WWII." Fact: The number was claimed in 1946 by Jakub Berman, the head of the Polish communist secret police, to create a false equivalence between Jewish and Polish victimhood. The death toll of non-Jewish Poles was 1.8 million as per the most recent estimates. |
| Scale of helping Jews | Myth 2: "Thousands of Poles were executed for helping Jews." Fact: 800 Poles were executed for helping Jews as per the most recent estimates. |
| Scale of hiding Jews | Myth 3: "450,000 Poles hid Jews in their houses during the Holocaust." Fact: The number was promoted by Władysław Żarski-Zajdler, a writer propagandizing for the Polish communist regime during the 1968 antisemitic campaign. Fewer than 30,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust. |
| Scale of Polish collaboration | Myth 4: "<1% Poles collaborated with Nazi occupiers." Fact: Several independent research showed otherwise. |
| Polish Blue Police | Myth 5: "Many Polish Blue Police were executed for refusing to follow Nazi orders to arrest Jews." Fact: Proven cases have not been found by mainstream historians yet. Instead, the Polish Blue Police helped Nazi occupiers kill Jews enthusiastically. |
| Polish Underground State | Myth 6: "The Polish Underground State's court investigated 17,000 suspected Polish collaborators and sentenced 3,500 to death." Fact: No more than seven collaborators were sentenced to death by the Polish Underground State's court, despite desperate requests from the Committee to Aid Jews (Żegota). |
| Policies against helping Jews | Myth 7: "Poles were specifically targeted by the Nazis for helping Jews. The Nazis imposed death penalty on Poles because of this." Fact: Nazi laws against helping Jews were applied equally to millions of non-German subjects under Nazi occupation. The death penalty was introduced on October 15, 1941, long before any obvious help could have been noticed. |
| Revelation of the Holocaust | Myth 8: "Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki told the Allies about the Holocaust via Polish government-in-exile courier Jan Karski." Fact: Jan Karski did not tell the Allies about the Holocaust. Karski left Poland in fall 1942, while Pilecki did not write a report about the Holocaust until summer 1943, when most Polish Jews had already been killed. Pilecki could not have given Karski a report that did not exist when Karski left. |
| Nazi reprisals against Poles helping Jews | Myth 9: "The Nazi murdered 20,000 Polish villagers in Białka over some of them helping Jews." Fact: It is true that individual shootings of Białka's Polish villagers happened, but the confirmed death toll was 96. |
| Post-war pogroms against Jews | Myth 10: "The July 1946 Kielce pogrom was planned by the Soviet occupiers." Fact: The claim has been roundly rejected by mainstream scholars, including Joanna Tokarska-Bakir who won the 2019 Yad Vashem International Book Award for a book that disproved the claim, which is only held by some Polish nationalists and conspiracy theorists. |
In the 1970s the rulers of the USSR launched a sustained 'anti-Zionist' campaign, in fact anti-semitic [...] much of what many British and international leftists [...] say about Israel is an indirect and unwitting copy of the Stalinists' efforts at constructing a Marxist-sounding gloss on old anti-semitic themes [...] an anti-semitic show-trial was due to be staged, in which five Jewish doctors from the Kremlin's own hospital were to face charges of poisoning and plotting.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)But Poland's tiny Jewish population diminished even further in 1968, when the communist government forced thousands to leave the country in an anti-Semitic purge [...] Scapegoating the Jews was a tried-and-true tactic used by leaders for millennia, and it worked just as the communists [...] After Israel's victory over its Arab neighbors in 1967's Six-Day War, Poland's communist party leader Władysław Gomułka spoke out against a "fifth column" of Polish Jews, in what became known as the "Zionist" speech – evoking a wave of anti-Semitism...some 13,000 Polish Jews who were given a one-way ticket out of his country.
Jan Grabowski spent more than 10 years conducting his research, including going through Polish archives, private diaries and records from more than 100 small towns where Jews lived in high concentrations.
Polish police murdered Jews during the Holocaust with gusto and even without Nazi orders, according to new resesarch.
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