I think outside of Poland people think of it as a victim mostly in the context of the XX century, but inside, the martyrology begins much earlier and was the leading ideological current in the XIX century. It just seems we have a long tradition of not wanting to own up to our faults, always ready to blame someone else for our misfortunes. This also jives with the catholic doctrine of noble suffering.

Personally I’m a fan of taking responsibility. And in the context of falling into partitions we did have a role in that internally the country was a mess, conflicted and for sale. We could learn something from our western neighbours when it comes to forming some unity and valuing work/grit over aristocratic navel-gazing.

Poland was partitioned in XVIII century by three similarly backwards neighboring Eastern European powers: Russia, Prussia and Austria. They were more efficient that Poland though, because they were ruled by ruthless tyrants, while Poland was a democracy of the nobles, with all the worst traits that can occur in democracies (triumph of small egoisms, power and votes for sale, domination of politics by few richest oligarchs who don’t care about the country etc.). It’s basically a great pre-modern era cautionary tale of how a democracy can degenerate to the levels of complete state failure.

I would argue most of the mess of the 17th-18th centuries comes from not having a strong centralized government at a time when that meant having an absolute monarch or emperor. Sure the back-biting oligarchy was not ideal, but neither was the alternative, at least to most modern audiences. Getting it's act together as a nation would have been an anachronistic thought until well after the first partition. So while wallowing in victimhood isn't helpful, neither are/were Poland's issues entirely self-inflicted.

One somewhat weird aspect of it I encountered: my Polish grandfather (born in Łódź in the 1920s and fled as a refugee at the beginning of WW2) always told of how his experience growing up Jewish in Poland was that Poles were virulently antisemitic and he didn’t really consider them any better than the Nazis (on that specific account).

I multiple times had exchanges online where Poles absolutely refused to acknowledge any antisemitism was ever present and that everything was the Germans’ fault (to the point where if there was any it was “due to German influences” and other such weird reasoning). I don’t consider anyone at fault for something their ancestors did, I just didn’t expect such total denial of wrongdoings before encountering it.

It is something that was present everywhere.

People tend to value their own group than the other. Jews tended to keep to themselves, which had two reasons: they were forced to by laws in many countries (e.g. Ashkenazi group evolved to have good math skills mostly because they were forbidden from owning land etc. but were allowed to be merchants) and by Jews themselves tending to one another and keeping outsiders out (which is quite natural for any group, but not to that extent). Consider what happens in most cases when w given ethnicity moves out of their country - they integrate in century or two (see USA). Jews do not, at least orthodox ones (which were majority before I think).

Similar thing happens with other immigrants - if they don't integrate, they are feared. If they have different religion even more so.

Countries outside of Germany during (and before) WWII didn't have state level killings of those "alien" groups.

It can be illegal to ague otherwise.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42898882.amp

You may be surprised to learn that if you go to the garden of the Yad Vashem institute the trees there have tags with names of Poles. Each tree is planted for the person who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Here are the statistics https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/statistics.html Those numbers do not only matter as statistics, there was a law in place in occupied Poland that allowed the whole family to be sentenced to death if one of the members was caught helping Jews. Herr Schindler was not the only person who was saving Jews.

My grandfather was talking about his childhood, before WW2.

And I’m not at all surprised to know there are many Poles that saved Jews in WW2 - there are also a lot of Germans! I’m sure individually a lot of Poles were and are fine people.

But at least according to my late grandfather it sounded like it was pretty common to experience anti-semitism as well (my grandfather grew up in an ultra orthodox family so was easily identified on the street as Jewish - he became secular during the war).

> I multiple times had exchanges online where Poles absolutely refused to acknowledge any antisemitism was ever present and that everything was the Germans’ fault

Perhaps it's just that antisemitism didn't stand out among other -isms and frankly paled in comparison to nazi industrialized genocide.

Make no mistake - it was there - but pre-WW2 Poland was actually fairly diverse with ethnic Poles being 69% of the population and the rest consisting of (population numbers in descending order) Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Germans.

It was a melting pot of mutual antipathy.

Case in point: to this day in literature there are two terms for the largest of these minorities - Ukrainians and the Rus' (the generally agreed on definition notwithstanding), the difference being that the latter did not display ambitions of forming an independent state.

For a fledgling state any such notion was of course dangerous and Ukrainians were treated in accordance to that (badly).

And for Jews specifically, it might sound weird, but in Poland they were actually better off than average citizen.

It's just an artifact of our history: even in 18th century, before partitioning of Poland the social structures we like this: Polish nobles > Jewish bankers, merchants, clerks, lawyers, doctors > Polish peasants. This structure persisted through 19th century into the 1920s and 1930s. You could say, that Poland basically outsourced most of the middle-class jobs to Jews.

In the late 1930s Poland actually ran kind of "affirmative action" to get more Polish students accepted to Polish universities, which had pretty high percentage of Jewish students: 15-25%, compared to 8.5% of Jews in general population.

All this naturally created some outrage against Jews, with Polish people feeling like a second class citizens in their own country, sometimes (but rarely) resulting in violence.

There's a long history of persecutions of Jews in Europe. They found Poland relatively liberal and settled there. Germans chose Poland to make it their graveyard. Poland is not immune from antisemitism, but there is also a long history or Poles and Jews living together and Poles helping Jews during the Holocaust. Poland was also used as a route to transport tens of thousands of Jews from the failing Soviet Union during Gorbachev rule when Israel set up a resettlement programme.

Antisemitism has always been used by those seeking to gain power through ripping up the society to shreds and it was not and is not limited to Poland.