WARSAW — An effort by the Polish parliament to ensure Poland isn’t tarred with responsibility for helping Germany commit the Holocaust during World War II exploded into a Polish-Israeli war of words over the weekend.
The controversy pulled in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki, and is undermining one of the closest relationships between Israel and any EU country.
It cast a shadow over Saturday’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked by Morawiecki and surviving prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Morawiecki said: “Auschwitz isn’t a Polish name and Arbeit macht frei [the motto over the entrance to the camp] isn’t a Polish phrase.”
The lower house of the Polish parliament passed a bill Friday criminalizing statements that “publicly and against the facts ascribe responsibility or co-responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the Third German Reich to the Polish nation or the Polish state.”
The law, which still has to be approved by the upper house senate and signed by President Andrzej Duda, carries a penalty of a fine or up to three years in jail whether the statements are made in Poland or abroad. There is an exception for “academic or artistic” work, but Polish prosecutors would examine any such research.
“It was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier” — Centrist Israeli politician Yair Lapid
The reason for the legislation is a long-running battle by Polish authorities to curb a practice in the media and elsewhere of using terms like “Polish concentration camps” to describe the camps built in German-occupied Poland during the war to kill Jews and others.
That campaign has been largely successful, and Polish embassies around the world launch immediate protests when such comments appear in the foreign press. Former U.S. President Barack Obama beat a hasty retreat after using the term in 2012 at a ceremony honoring a Polish wartime resistance fighter.
But the immediate concern in Israel is that the law is also an effort to whitewash some of the darker parts of Poland’s wartime experience, in which a small minority of Poles either outed Jews trying to hide from the Germans, extorted money from them, or killed Jews themselves.
There were heroic Poles who helped rescue Jews, although the large majority of ethnic Poles did little, partly out of fear over the German death penalty for aiding Jews.
When the war started there were about 3 million Polish Jews. By 1945, only thousands remained.
Those who dwell on that uncomfortable past like Jan Tomasz Gross, a Polish-American historian who wrote about the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom in which Polish villagers killed their Jewish neighbors, are often criticized in Poland.
The current right-wing government is especially allergic to anything that casts Poles in a less than heroic light, as it has a policy of boosting patriotism and national pride in an effort to bolster its own political support.
However, the bill is reopening historic wounds with Israel, normally a very close Polish ally.
Israeli fury
Centrist Israeli politician Yair Lapid, whose father was a Holocaust survivor, tweeted: “I utterly condemn the new Polish law which tries to deny Polish complicity in the Holocaust. It was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier. There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that.”
The Polish embassy in Israel fired back, denouncing Lapid’s “unsupportable claims.”
“I am a son of a Holocaust survivor. My grandmother was murdered in Poland by Germans and Poles. I don’t need Holocaust education from you,” responded Lapid.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, issued a statement opposing the new legislation, describing it as “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust.”
“We’ve had enough of Poland and Poles being blamed for German crimes” — Beata Mazurek, deputy speaker of parliament
Netanyahu, who is battling a domestic corruption scandal and whose Likud party trails Lapid’s Yesh Atid grouping in opinion polls, instructed the Israeli ambassador in Warsaw to meet with Morawiecki over the issue. Morawiecki tweeted a reminder that Poland and Israel had jointly agreed to combat “mistaken terms like ‘Polish death camps.’”
Stanisław Karczewski, the speaker of the Polish senate, said on Sunday he would meet with Israeli Ambassador Anna Azari for a conversation “to eliminate doubts about the German death camps.”
However, the willingness of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party to budge on such an emotional issue appears limited.
“We aren’t going to change any regulations in the law,” tweeted Beata Mazurek, the deputy speaker of parliament. “We’ve had enough of Poland and Poles being blamed for German crimes.”