Last weekend, former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin visited Poland. The event was a conference organized by the European Jewish Association on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day which falls a week later. Billionaire and owner of the X platform, Elon Musk, also took part in the conference.

As it turned out, on the occasion of Rivlin's visit to the Vistula River, Jonny Gould, an Israeli blogger and creator of the “Jewish State” podcast in “The Times of Israel”, conducted an interview with him, in which the former president of Israel stated that during World War II “the Jews also killed by the Poles.” He used a more drastic word: massacred.

This is a fact we do not want to ignore. We have to educate people to understand what happened during the Shoah, to understand what happened to their people, and then we will understand what happened to our nation.

-added the Israeli president. Later in the interview, Rivlin told Gould how he “confronted” Andrzej Duda during the Polish president's last visit to Israel.

In Polish, I said to Duda: Please don't ignore the past, you need to know what happened in the past. To say that nothing happened, that both nations (Polish and Jewish) were victims, is incorrect, and in order to avoid a repetition of what happened and to understand what the words “never again” mean, we must first remember what happened then. . has occurred. We said: “Never again” and the Polish people should know it

– he pointed out. The podcaster himself added that Jews hope that the Law on the Institute of National Remembrance adopted in 2018 will be completely withdrawn by the new government of Donald Tusk. Let us recall: the law prohibited the promotion of Polish participation in the Holocaust.

Gould acknowledged that Polish society suffered greatly under German occupation, and that members of the Polish resistance movement and the government-in-exile tried to warn the world about the mass murder of Jews, and “thousands of Poles risked their lives to do so.”

However, Holocaust researchers have gathered a lot of evidence that Poles killed Jews fleeing the Nazis and that Polish extortionists preyed on defenseless Jews for financial gain.

-add.

It is difficult to resist the impression that it was extremely difficult for Jews to accept the fact that anyone other than themselves were victims of German crimes. They also could not accept that Poland as a nation and state did not participate in the Holocaust. Apparently, the Poles' ultimate sacrifice to save the Jews was not important to them.

Reuven Rivlin was president of Israel from 24 July 2014 to 7 July 2021.

You can listen to the full interview here (in English):

—JJW, blogs.timesofisrael.com/