mainly railway workers, carpenters, doctors, tailors, bricklayers”. All Poles, as we can gather from their names. I must correct myself: the word “Jew” appears once, in the glossary. The glossary teaches the children that the Jews are “a group of people who now have their own country called Israel. They have the Hebrew language, which they use, and a religion called Judaism.” Contrast this with the entry for the Roma and Sinti people, who are “a nation which does not have its own country but has its own customs and language. During the war, German Nazis took away their rights and deported them to death camps, for instance to Treblinka II,” The Jews, unlike the Sinti and Roma, are not a nation, and the fact that they have some kind of connection to the place called Treblinka has been judged by the authors altogether irrelevant.

Polish children will learn from The History of Sad Places that Treblinka I is a place of Polish suffering, and all its prisoners and victims were Poles. They will not read about the thousands of Jews who perished inside the camp. The person responsible for vetting the content of this intriguing publication is Edward Kopówka, the director of the state museum in Treblinka. The book was financed by the German foundation Der Trägerkreis Schoah-Gedenkstätten from Bielefeld, which supports the erection of Shoah-­related monuments in Poland. One can only hope that the German philanthropists did not know their funds helped to shore up the narrative of Holocaust negationism.

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the jewish quarterly