Poland's Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism Run Far Deeper Than Just Its Latest Controversial Law
Just before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the lower house of the Polish parliament voted in favor of a bill that condemns anyone who acknowledges Polish complicity in the Holocaust to up to three years in prison. According to the Polish state narrative, the Holocaust was an entirely German affair, and both the Polish government and the Polish people are entirely innocent of it. Although I was dismayed to learn this news, I was hardly surprised. After spending some time in Poland this month, I would expect no better.
Before leaving the United States, I researched the history of the Holocaust in Poland and quickly began to suspect the Polish government of whitewashing. For example, the website of the State Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau includes an Orwellian tool called “Remember.” It invites visitors “to correct collective memory errors” by reporting journalists who use the phrase “Polish death camp”—referring to death camps established by the Nazis on Polish soil, sometimes in Polish cities, where Jews who were turned in by their Polish neighbors and others were sent to their deaths—to the Polish authorities. I also read about efforts by Polish politicians to discredit and silence those who have dared to tell the story of Jedwabne, the site of a particularly egregious pogrom perpetrated by Poles against their Jewish neighbors and culminating in the burning alive of more than 300 Jews in a barn (over 1,500 total were murdered). By the time that I boarded the plane to Europe, I was very wary of the intentions of the Polish state in retaining control over the Holocaust-related sites I was planning to visit.