Poland outlaws references to their complicity in Holocaust

BY EMMA COOPER ’20

The President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, signed a bill that will make it illegal to call Holocaust death camps “Polish” on Feb. 6, 2018. According to The New York Times, failure to comply with the legislation will result in a fine or imprisonment for up to three years. 

As the bill passed through Poland’s parliamentary bodies, it garnered international criticism and Duda faced pressure to veto the bill, particularly from Israel and the United States. While Duda ignored the chance to veto the bill, BBC News reported that he plans to have Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal evaluate the bill to determine whether freedom of speech will be “unjustifiably restricted.” At this stage, the tribunal is the only contingent that could reverse the law or make amendments.

Poland has long sought to dismiss implications that Poles as a nation were perpetrators in the Holocaust, and has discouraged people from labeling concentration camps or death camps as “Polish,” as doing so implies complicity. Government officials, like Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, have defended the bill as a necessary means of protecting Poland’s reputation and securing recognition that Poles were also victims of the Nazis. 

At the outset of World War II, Poland was invaded and occupied by both Germany and the Soviet Union. Large areas were annexed and controlled by the German government. Professor Jeremy King of the Mount Holyoke history department explained, “Poland was wiped off the map in 1939. All that remained was an exiled government and an underground resistance movement.”

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, many concentration camps were located in occupied Poland, as well as the six death camps: Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, “[t]hose camps were run by the Nazi S.S., and had nothing to do with any Polish public authority. To call them ‘Polish’ would be misinformed and even silly. That’s clear to anyone with specialized knowledge about the Holocaust,” said King.

During World War II, approximately six million Polish citizens were killed, including an estimated three million Polish Jews, according to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Quite a few Polish individuals and groups courageously tried to provide aid and ease the suffering of the Jews. Poles constituted the largest national group within the Righteous Among the Nations (an honorific used to describe gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust) recognized by Yad Vashem. However, historians have acknowledged that others were complicit in disclosing information about Jews and collaborating with Nazis, even participating in massacres. 

Concerns have been raised that Poland is seeking to rewrite history and that the bill may lead to a rise of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the country. In regards to the politics of the legislation, King said, “Very few of the people who committed crimes during WWII are alive today, so the big question is not about justice of a legal, courtroom kind. Instead, what’s at stake is how Poland presents its past to its citizens and to other people in the world today. In classrooms, in newspapers, on TV, in public commemorations and museums. Does it confront that yes, Christian Poles in many cases risked their lives to help Jews, but in other cases harmed Jews — perhaps out of fear of the Nazis, but perhaps for other reasons as well?”

King continued, “To criminalize study of the past, to set arbitrary (and unclear) boundaries beyond which no one should go under pain of prosecution, is a mistake. It points to defensiveness and to a lack of civic courage.”