Jan Tomasz Gross in the article published on the German „Die Welt” daily’s website and also in the interview he gave in February 2016 for the German broadcast station Deutschlandfunk (DLF), stated that during WW2 the Polish killed between 25.000 – 30.000 Germans and many times more Jews, since only 40.000 survived on the Polish territory. Gross is not a historian, but a sociologist, he writes his own historic essays instead of dissertations based on documents. Hence, he airs erroneous information. The scientific studies show, that during WW2 the Polish killed between 60 to 80 thousand German soldiers, police officers and officials who had exerted terror and repression. On the other hand, about 100 thousand Jews survived Holocaust on the territory of Poland only thanks to the aid of the people. In the historic evaluation of Polish-Jewish relations, Jan Tomasz Gross by airing erroneous information went beyond a border of confabulation. Such actions performed by Gross can only be compared to the ahistorical and false terms “Polish death camps”, which have been used in the German press and other mass media, and Gross “conformed” to the German model of evaluation of the Polish nation. But the WW2 executioner, that is Germany, are not entitled to use such a term towards their victim, that is Poland. Therefore, the Germans, having murdered about 6 million Polish citizens, are the last ones who should instruct us on the issue of accepting Muslim refugees, as they have no moral right to it.

In this paper, I wish to present the complexity of Jewish-Polish relations from the 19th century until the interwar period, with emphasis on sociolinguistic issues. I will illustrate the circumstances of the contact between the Polish and Hebrew languages. Poles and Jews, who lived side by side, developed successful relationships, but mainly in the criminal underworld. That was reflected in a sociolect – a dialect of criminals that constituted a mixture of Polish, Yiddish, Russian, and several other languages, including quite a few Hebrew words, which with time adopted new meanings. Moreover, I  will provide some examples of Hebrew words used in Polish criminal jargon, as well as those which have been coined in every-day Polish. Then I will refer to some Hebrew words that are not connected with a world of crime and are still in use in spoken Polish.

In his new bestseller, Black Earth, Thimoty Snyder spotlights the covert relationship at the end 1930s between the Polish Government and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Jewish underground formation in Palestine affiliated with Vladimir Jabotinsky’s New Zionist Organization. One of the most important figures in that affair was the Irgun representative in Poland, Henryk Strasman, a Warsaw assistant public prosecutor who was later murdered by the NKVD in Kharkov in April 1940, together with other Polish officers in Soviet captivity. Ably aided by his wife, Alicja Strasman (née Friedberg), and in close cooperation with the shadowy Abraham Stern, he sought to acquire arms and ammunition and to secure the training of the Irgun cadres by the Polish army. Strasman was also involved in the establishment of a militant Polish- -language bi-weekly (Jerozolima Wyzwolone) and another paper (Di Tat) in Yiddish to popularize the cause of the insurgency in Palestine among the Jewish public in Poland. In December 1938, Strasman briefed the American ambassador to Poland, A.J. Biddle, on his undertakings. Biddle’s report to Secretary of State Cordell Hull about that meeting adds to our knowledge of clandestine Zionist activity in Poland and illuminates Strasman’s tragic and little-known story.