Why is the state blocking the truth? The falsified history of Poland - Leszek Żebrowski

Żebrowski emphasises that language was manipulated by the communist regime: 'Związek Radziecki' sounds warm, almost neutral, while 'sowiecki' carries the harsh reality of the Soviet occupation. In the Second Polish Republic, nobody said 'radziecki' — that was communist newspeak. By reclaiming the pre-war vocabulary, one refuses to participate in the linguistic whitewashing of the Soviet terror. This is part of a broader set of language corrections (e.g., 'na Ukrainie' not 'w Ukrainie') that affirm historical Polish sovereignty and reject Russian/communist impositions.

He gives concrete examples: the Delegatura reports detail the blessing of knives in 1942 in Volhynia, the Hungarian soldiers parading captured Ukrainian killers through Lwów with their tools tied to them, and letters from terrified women hiding in cellars. These are not postwar recollections but contemporaneous records. The published volumes of these reports are available; historians have used them. Yet the media ignore them. He urges people to directly access those volumes, pointing out that his own work relies on them. This practice of source verification builds a personal, evidence-based understanding that is immune to censorship.

The protocol emerges from a positive story he tells: a teenage boy complained that he knew nothing about his grandparents. Żebrowski advised him to ask neighbours and older relatives. Some time later, the boy returned beaming, having learned that his grandparents brought underground newspapers into the village and read them aloud. The boy 'regained identity, was not historical trash but a Pole born and raised here, and he wants to be one.' He also recounts a teenage girl in a camouflage jacket with a Polish flag sewn on her sleeve who said, when people try to spit on the flag, 'I cover it with my hand so they won't spit on the Polish flag.' That consciousness, he says, grows through such family archaeology. The protocol therefore is not just genealogical; it is a method of psychological and patriotic reconstruction.

Żebrowski describes a mechanism of grassroots cultural renaissance: in the informational 'rubbish heap' of the internet, a person without critical mental tools gets lost, but when a small group forms with one sharper person, they become a self-appointed leader who guides the group — 'I found this, I found that, now we'll have a meeting on this topic, you prepare a 20-minute talk, then we can have a beer.' Such circles are springing up. They constitute the only feasible 'rebirth' because a revolution is not possible. He insists this is already happening, albeit too slowly, and gives hope. The protocol is a direct answer to the question 'how can we defend this truth today?'.

Żebrowski notes that in Jedwabne, the exhumation was stopped precisely because it would have exposed lies about numbers and German involvement. In Volhynia, out of ~7,000 known massacre sites, one or two exhumations per year are permitted — at that pace, 'we won't finish even in several thousand years.' The few exhumations that did happen, such as those by IPN, revealed tiny fetal skeletons inside mothers' pelvises, terrifying the Ukrainian side because they showed the last trimester of pregnancy, confirming the stories of impaled fetuses. He says the Ukrainian authorities now know exactly what happened and do not want it revealed. The demand for exhumations is thus not just a forensic act but a tool to force moral and political confession. When the truth comes out, it will be 'who could be the perpetrators? Those who now block it.'

Żebrowski claims that the version found in textbooks, schools, and mass media is 'skrajnie zafałszowane'. The state behaves as an adversary: speaking about Ukrainian or Lithuanian crimes is forbidden with the excuse that there is a war now or that they will change their heroes. But four years have passed and they still celebrate Bandera and Shukhevych with street names and school honours. He gives the example of Rosa Luxemburg's plaque being restored in Zamość under pressure from a German foundation — someone who venomously opposed Polish independence. This shows how historical truth is systematically inverted.

The phenomenon is rooted in a population that is 'ogłupione' (stupefied) by PRL education and the subsequent 'Third Republic' transition. People do not understand that the PRL was a Soviet occupation, not a sovereign state. The post-1944 period saw 60–80 thousand Poles murdered on current Polish territory alone, and a similar number on the lost eastern territories. This scale is unimaginable and deliberately hidden. The lack of historical awareness makes the population manipulable — they can be told 'it wasn't so bad' because they only remember the late PRL queues, not the early terror. The result is a society that lives 'like an animal, just in the present moment', without historical bearings.

He points to the eradication of the Polish intelligentsia as a key cause: Katyń was not just officers but also the civilian elite — lawyers, doctors, engineers. Their murder created a vacuum that could not be filled for generations. Today, some politicians' relatives openly praise Stalin for doing the right thing, and nothing happens, illustrating the moral and intellectual decay that persists because of this missing class.

Żebrowski distinguishes the 1944 situation from two earlier Polish attempts to spark a rising: in August 1914 Piłsudski's legionaries crossed into the Russian partition and issued a proclamation — the response was zero, people treated them as madmen because a million-strong tsarist army was stationed there. The second was in 1982 during martial law when Jacek Kuroń, interned on Białołęka, called through smuggled letters for young people to go out with stones in their backpacks, seize weapons, and launch a rising against the communist army. It was pathetically unrealistic and never took off. By contrast, the Warsaw Uprising was not a central command whim — it was driven by the sight at the end of July 1944: transports of wounded, bloodied, bandaged German soldiers passing through the city on horse-drawn carts. Ordinary Warsawers saw the Reich collapsing and, after years of occupation and mass murder, wanted to finally strike. He says you could have issued orders forbidding participation, and they would have been only partially effective — the people would have risen anyway. The generation was raised for action, not passivity. Thus, the Uprising should be honored as an expression of national will, not condemned.

Żebrowski explains that Polish law mandates, when a crime site is revealed, to determine the number of victims, cause of death, and perpetrators. In Jedwabne, an exhumation would have shown how many bodies, what kind of wounds, and likely from shell casings whether Germans were involved. Already during preliminary probes, German bullets were found. The demography of the town also contradicts the high numbers: in June 1941, only about 400-something Jews lived there; after some fled with the Soviets and some were conscripted into the Red Army, no more than 100-200 remained. During the supposed pogrom day and for 17 months after, those Jews lived freely among the Polish population — not in a ghetto, not murdered afterward. The pre-war president of the Jewish community, Józef Grondowski, lived there until the 1960s, unafraid, known to everyone as a Jew. No genocide survivor stays voluntarily among murderers. Nevertheless, Lech Kaczyński, as prosecutor general, stopped the exhumation — allegedly at the request of New York rabbis — and then instructed that the number be set at 340, adding 40 to an estimated 300 to make it look less rounded. This became the official position of the Polish state. The result is a false history that paints Poles as perpetrators.

Żebrowski recalls that Tadeusz Mazowiecki insisted on keeping pacts with the communists. When in January 1990 the PZPR dissolved itself, there was a perfect moment to strike — the communists themselves expected repression and some committed hysterical suicides. But nothing happened. Young people who tried to seize party committees where documents were being burned were pacified — among those involved in the pacifications was Bronisław Komorowski as deputy defence minister. The grassroots decommunization impulse was crushed. The old guard then stayed, hid, and after seeing no danger, came out. They privatized state property for next to nothing, converting themselves from communists into capitalists — a pattern seen across post-socialist countries but especially entrenched in Poland. Today, those people and their descendants occupy key positions: Włodzimierz Czarzasty, Krzysztof Gawkowski (who sang the Internationale in a Stalin-era Soviet version), Wanda Nowicka's son who publicly said Stalin was right to slaughter the officers. The entire 'new left' and its cultural offshoots are rooted in the communist substratum. Meanwhile, the lack of decommunization means no one was ever banned from public office, and the narrative they control stifles any true historical reckoning.

The expert states that the original scale given by the first Ukrainian president (over 500,000 Polish citizens, including Jews, Roma, Hungarians, etc.) is likely correct, and that Ukrainian perpetrators aimed to leave 'no foreigner alive', unlike the Germans. He cites contemporaneous reports from the Polish underground where the blessing of knives and axes is documented as early as 1942. The methods were not random but ritualized: a recurring motif found in many homes was a pregnant woman with her belly sliced open, the unborn child placed on a platter, and Poles nailed around the table — the so-called 'polska uczta' (Polish feast). 'Polish infant is to be eaten' is the phrase he uses. He compares it to the Epstein network's depravity, saying 'Epstein could learn from them'. This is not ancient history — the villages still exist, and during rare exhumations, tiny skeletons of full-term fetuses inside the mothers' pelvises have been found, shocking even the Ukrainian side when the truth emerged. Despite years of publication, Ukrainians know but don't want to know. The official line is 'wydarzenia' (events) or 'epizody' — reducing genocide to an episode, which Żebrowski finds obscene.