Polish legislation denying complicity in the Holocaust draws concerns of revisionism

The exchanges between Israel and Poland flared on February 6, when Polish president Andrzej Duda signed legislation that would outlaw any speech with any implication Polish culpability in the atrocities of the Holocaust, in addition to certain phrases alluding to the same. The law, passed by the Polish parliament in late January, has been the subject of intense controversy worldwide, with outraged academics and public officials abroad branding it as censorship and a form of Holocaust denial.

An excerpt of the law, translated from Polish, states, “Whoever claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation …  is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich … , or whoever otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the true perpetrators of said crimes — shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to three years.”

The law also restricts certain phrases that could assert Polish “responsibility,” most famously the term “Polish death camps.” That term was used by President Obama in a 2012 ceremony where he posthumously awarded Jan Karski, a member of the Polish resistance who investigated the atrocities occurring at the German extermination camps. The reference infuriated Polish officials for its implication of Poles in the operation of the Nazi camps and prompted the American president to apologize for his misleading choice of words.

On January 28, Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance wrote a statement defending the law: “Poland has been repeatedly slandered and portrayed as Hitler’s accomplice,” referring to international acknowledgement of some Poles cooperating with the Nazi occupiers during WWII to murder and brutalize Polish Jews. Refuting this perspective, the statement continued that “defending the good name of our nation against statements that have nothing to do with historical truth seems to be an obvious and necessary stance.”

The same controversy as to whether Poles could be seen as accomplices in the atrocities of Nazis or whether they were merely subjugated by an occupying force surfaced in 2015 when former FBI Director James Comey published an opinion piece in the Washington Post detailing why he requires all FBI agents to visit the United Holocaust Memorial Museum. As a lesson in the abuse of authority and human nature during WWII, Comey warned, “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil.”

His claim that some Polish citizens assisted in the murder of Polish Jews during the war drew the ire of Polish officials and prompted sentiments that the international community does not understand the plight of ethnic Poles during the WWII. A widely cited Polish government report released in 1947 held that roughly 6 million Poles died during the war, including 3 million Polish Jews (half of the total 6 million Jewish deaths) and 3 million ethnic Poles.

Remarking on the law on his Twitter account, Polish prime minister emphasized Poles were not behind the creation or administration of the concentration camps in their country during WWII. He focused on commonality in the suffering that the Nazis brought to Poland, writing that “Auschwitz is the most bitter lesson on how evil ideologies can lead to hell on earth. Jews, Poles, and all victims should be guardians of the memory of all who were murdered by German Nazis.”

Still, he dismissed assertions of Polish complicity in the war, continuing to say that “Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a Polish name, and Arbeit Macht Frei is not a Polish phrase.” The latter phrase is German for “Work sets you free” and appears on the entrance to Auschwitz.

The international community did not receive the new Polish law with the same perspective. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his distaste for the law in late January this year, commenting that “One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied.” Other Israeli officials similarly expressed that the law seemed to support revisionist interpretations of the Holocaust: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement expressing that: “Israel and Poland hold a joint responsibility to research and preserve the History of the Holocaust.”

The main criticism against the law lies in how it could be used to target certain academic perspectives and dissenting voices in discussion of the Holocaust and the Second World War. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson specified in a press release that “Enactment of this law adversely affects freedom of speech and academic inquiry.” While agreeing that the term “Polish death camps” is misleading and unfairly hurts Poland’s image in history, he maintained “that open debate, scholarship, and education are the best means of countering misleading speech.”

The notion that Polish nationals were not by any measure complicit in the atrocities of the Holocaust is disputed by some academics. In an interview with the New York Times, Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, explained, “The notion of wartime victimhood at the hand of Germans follows pretty easily into one of sovereignty.” Those with such power, he continued, have the ability to claim innocence after the fact, which is the explicit intent of the law.

The Polish president, concerned by questions about the law’s legality, has sent the law to be reviewed by Poland’s Constitutional Court, which could strike down some or all of its provisions of the law. However, President Duda and his governing Law and Justice Party appointed the judges sitting on the bench of the Court, a fact that will likely influence the judges’ deliberations.

Some Poles were not as muted in their response to the law’s international detractors. Piotr Nisztor, a Polish state radio commentator, wrote on Twitter that “If somebody acts as a spokesman for Israeli interests, maybe they should think about giving up their Polish citizenship and accepting Israeli citizenship.” There were also reports that far-right groups like the National Movement planned to gather outside the Israeli embassy in Warsaw on January 31 to protest Israeli criticisms against the law, but a Warsaw regional governor banned traffic near the embassy for five days on account of security concerns, resulting in organizers calling off the protest.

However, there was some criticism of the law coming from Polish citizens as well. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews released a statement on January 29 that warned of how the law could damage historical research. The director of the museum Dariusz Stola emphasized that “Allowing space for honest debates on events from our dramatic past was a great success of the Third Polish Republic.” He continued, “Polish debates on Jedwabne, on collaboration with the Communist Security Service, or on the postwar deportations of Germans from the Western Territories were our joint national achievement …”

The incident in Jedwabne that Stola refers to occurred in 1941, when a group of at least 40 ethnic Poles were handed bats by Gestapo officers and the occupying German police force and ordered to beat the hundreds of Polish Jews rounded up before them. As Paweł Machcewicz, the Director of Office of Public Education in 2001 for what is now the Institute of National Remembrance, related in a interview that year,

“There were several score Poles who acted with such cruelty. The [postwar] prosecutors identified over forty such individuals. There was also a crowd composed of Poles who behaved variously. Some of them poked and verbally abused the Jews, some of them looked on with interest, some were helpless.”

Machcewicz stated that in the same interview that 340 or more Polish Jews were killed in the Jedwabne incident. It, alongside several other pogroms (a Russian term for organized massacres of an ethnic group, typically Jews) in Poland, are often cited as examples of some level of Polish complicity in the Nazi atrocities and evidence of Polish anti-Semitism during the war.

Another pogrom in the town of Kielce occurred in 1946, after the Nazi occupiers had been driven from Poland. According to the United States Holocaust Museum, the incident started when a Polish child claimed he had been kidnapped by the Jews being sheltered at the local Jewish Committee, prompting police authorities and town locals to raid the shelter and kill roughly 40 Jews there.

Some Polish scholars, like the late Polish author Krzysztof Kąkolewski, claim that the pogrom was instigated by Soviet agents in the mob who sought to label the anti-communist ethnic Poles forming the postwar government as anti-Semitic and thereby disempower them to make way for the rise of the Soviet-backed communist regime eventually set up in Poland.

Such disputes only scratch the surface of the debates regarding Polish-Jewish relations in the country during WWII. Ethnic Poles, Jews, and communist sympathizers formed separate resistance groups during the war to resist the Nazis and rarely cooperated or merged on account of the Poles refusing to allow Jews to join their ranks. Yet, some scholars like Joshua Zimmerman at Yeshiva University insist that, for example, the Home Army, the main Polish resistance group, sent aid and supplies to the Jews fighting Nazi occupiers during the three-month Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1944.

Whatever changes that may be made to the law remain to be seen pending the decision of the Constitutional Court. However, the law’s passage indicates an increasing tendency from far-right groups in Central/Eastern Europe, a region that was dominated by the Nazis for much of the war, to antagonize minority groups in their countries for the sake of either whitewashing national history or preserving their national identities. The recent demonstrations against Middle Eastern or African migrants in all over Europe, the present anti-Semitic comments in this case, and the historical persecution of groups like the Roma in this region all demonstrate this recurrent trend.

Populist ethnocentrism seems to be the dominant mode of politics for these countries, and the Jewish people, after less than a century, seem to be the perennial victims.

Article by MoCo Student staff writer Alex Rankine of Rockville High School