Polish legislature tries to erase complicity in Holocaust

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Even as international pressure mounted on Poland to back away from a new law that would make it illegal to blame Poles for crimes committed by Nazi Germany, the Senate passed the legislation on Thursday.

The bill, which sets prison penalties for using phrases like “Polish death camps” to refer to concentration camps set up by the Nazis, is subject to the approval of President Andrzej Duda. Supporters are urging him to sign it, even at the risk of rupturing relations with Israel and the United States.

This week, Mr. Duda said that he would review the legislation closely before deciding whether to sign, but he added that he was “absolutely outraged” that the Israeli ambassador had criticized the legislation during a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp on Polish soil.

“I don’t know if there is some misrepresentation or misinformation in regard to how the Israeli side understands parts of this legislation,” Mr. Duda told the state broadcaster on Monday. “But we, as a state, as a nation, have a right to defend ourselves from an evident slander, an evident falsification of historical truth, which, in this case, for us is a slap in the face.”

Even Poles who do not support the law consider the phrase “Polish death camps” deeply offensive and historically wrong. A draft of the legislation to ban the phrase has been in the works for more than a year

The current measure passed the lower house of Parliament on Friday. The move, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, seemed planned to provoke a reaction.

It got one.

“The law is baseless; I strongly oppose it,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement released on Saturday. “One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied.”

On Thursday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Israel would seek to postpone a planned visit by a top Polish national security official.

Poland was invaded and occupied by Germany in 1939, but unlike in neighboring countries, there was no collaborationist government in Warsaw. Roughly three million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and another three million Polish citizens died.

Several international organizations have been quick to condemn the law, including Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

The United States has asked Polish officials to rethink plans to enact the bill, arguing that it is a threat to freedom of speech and to Poland’s international relationships.

But even as international condemnation poured in, the Polish Senate, took up the measure for debate late Wednesday. The body, controlled by the governing Law and Justice party, moved swiftly, ignoring all of the opposition’s amendments. The legislation passed 57 to 23, with two abstentions.

But even some Law and Justice lawmakers thought it was reckless.

“How is it that nobody had foreseen that it was a terrible idea to accept this bill on the eve of the anniversary of International Holocaust Remembrance Day?” Senator Anna Maria Anders, the daughter of a Polish war hero, asked during the debate.

Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council and a former Polish prime minister, suggested in a Twitter post on Thursday that the Polish government was guilty of the very thing the law was intended to fight.

“Who spreads false accusations about the ‘Polish camps’ damages Poland’s good name and interests,” he wrote. “The authors of this bill have promoted this slander all over the world, and have been successful in it as no one before them.”

The law would essentially ban accusations that some Poles were complicit in the Nazi crimes committed on Polish soil, including in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where more than 1.1 million people died. Germany operated six camps in Poland where Jews and others that the Nazis considered enemies were killed

Once the legislation is signed into law by Polish President Andrzej Duda, anyone convicted under the law could face fines or up to three years in jail.

Agnieszka Markiewicz, director of the American Jewish Committee's central Europe office, agreed that the term “Polish death camps” should not be used, but she emphasized that a ban was the wrong way forward. “Where the problem lies is that the bill is very broad, and [that term] is not even mentioned in it,” Markiewicz told The Washington Post on Thursday.

Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center similarly cautioned that the bill could “blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust,” though it agreed that the term “Polish death camps” was a historical misrepresentation.

Speaking to The Post, Warsaw-based political scientist and advocate Rafal Pankowski said he had never experienced as much anti-Semitism in Polish public discourse as he did this week.

“Anti-Semitism is not a new phenomenon here, but we're seeing an explosion of that sentiment in popular media mainstream. It's something that is very worrying,” Pankowski said.

Leading Polish politicians defended the legislation on Friday, with Morawiecki again emphasizing that Poland did not share any responsibility for the Holocaust. Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, said that the term “Polish death camps” and other comparisons constituted “a scandalous and immensely immoral lie.”

Poland’s deputy chief of mission in Israel, Piotr Kozlowski, has said the goal of the proposed law “is not to whitewash history, but to safeguard it and safeguard the truth about the Holocaust and prevent its distortion.”

But historians worry that such a law would make it impossible to discuss the culpability of at least some Poles in Nazi crimes. It is still a matter of controversy, for instance, whether a 1941 atrocity by a group of Poles in the town of Jedwabne was carried out after pressure from the Nazis or whether the crimes occurred without German involvement.

The party's critics say that the new draft legislation is mainly supposed to fuel nationalistic sentiments in the country. “This is all about nationalism really, and about the imposition of a nationalist historic narrative,” said political scientist Pankowski. Poland is not a unique case, he said, and there's a similar Holocaust-related law in Ukraine, for instance. But so far, Poland was considered to be central Europe's most progressive nation in dealing with its past.

In November, an estimated 60,000 people marched alongside ultranationalists and Nazis to mark the 99th anniversary of Polish independence. Some of the protesters carried banners and held up signs that had a clear far-right extremist message, including “Clean Blood,” reported by Politico, and “White Europe,” described by the Associated Press.

They had Holocaust camps in Poland-----many of the famous ones happened to have been in Poland.

The Poles themselves had nothing to do with them. They were conquered by Nazi Germany in 1939.

But it was the Germans who established the death camps.

You're right: of course there were Poles who approved.

But the Polish NATION had nothing to do with these camps.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Maybe we "deny" sometimes because we don't want to believe that humans are capable of such depravity.

I wish all these things didn't happen. It would be nice if they didn't---but they did! There's no denying it!