Poles have been complaining for years that they’ve been portrayed as perpetrators of the Holocaust in revisionist circles, based solely on the geographic location of the camps; the fact that they fought and lost a war against Germany in 1939, and were invaded simultaneously from the east by the Soviets, is completely ignored. Poles had no Vichy or Quisling; they were occupied by Nazis and communists throughout the war, and didn’t regain their freedom for nearly half a century afterwards.
As much as I enjoyed “Exodus” by Leon Uris, he was one of the first to push this idea that the camps were somehow the Poles fault. He’s quite vicious about it too.
The Russians were Poland’s enemies twice, during the same waR! First, they invaded with the Germans in September 1939. Had they not, the vaunted Blitzkreig would have slowed significantly. (The result would unlikely have changed, but certainly would have taken much longer.)
Then, when the Russians had the upperhand on the Eastern Front and were rolling the Germans back the Poles assisted with the Warsaw uprising in August and September of 1944. But the Russians, deliberately halted their movements in Poland while the Germans brutally put down the uprising. This calculated move should never be forgotten.
I remember a conversation in the coffee room when I was in graduate school. An American graduate student with a German surname was trying to get an Israeli graduate student to say that the Poles shared in the blame for the Holocaust, and the Israeli refused to take the bait.