Poland Opposes Calls To Scrap Bill Banning Nazi Complicity Talk

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Poland has rejected Israel’s demand to scrap a bill that would make it a crime to blame Poles for Holocaust-era atrocities.

Poles say they are unfairly held complicit in Nazi war crimes at a time when their country was occupied and an estimated 2.7 million non-Jewish civilians were killed, including a large number of resistance fighters.

Israeli leaders and Holocaust survivors see the proposed legislation as an attempt to whitewash Polish wartime crimes against the Jews.

“We will not tolerate distorting the truth, rewriting history or denying the Holocaust,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of the Israeli Cabinet meeting on Sunday.

Netanyahu and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki spoke late Sunday and agreed to try to reach an understanding regarding the draft law.

Some historians of the Holocaust have concluded that Poles made the Nazi genocide possible. Poland’s Jewish community was the biggest in all of Europe before World War II, at more than 3 million, and only 380,000 survived the genocide, according to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

Poland objects to that narrative of culpability. While some Polish civilians participated in the murder of Jews or turned them over to Nazis to avoid being executed for hiding them, others resisted. About 6,700 Poles were commemorated by Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews, the largest number in any country.

For years, Poland has sought to eradicate the use of phrases such as “Polish death camps” that suggest collaboration with the Nazis. The draft law would impose fines or up to three years in jail for claiming that Poland or the Polish nation bears responsibility for crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany on its soil. Works of art and science are exempt from penalties.

“Jews, Poles, and all victims should be guardians of the memory of all who were murdered by German Nazis,” Morawiecki wrote on his Twitter account after the annual ceremony at the camp’s museum. “Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a Polish name, and Arbeit Macht Frei is not a Polish phrase.”

Israeli lawmaker Yair Lapid, chairman of the opposition Yesh Atid party, scoffed at that argument.

The Holocaust “was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier,” Lapid, the son of a Holocaust survivor, wrote on his Twitter account. “There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that.”

(c) 2018, Bloomberg · Konrad Krasuski 

{Matzav.com}


8 COMMENTS

  1. My father’s mother, sister, brother-in-law and nephew were herded into the brisker ghetto by the nazis (all documented with names pictures and signatures). When the nazis wanted to kill them, however, they did nothing but open the doors for the poles and lithuanians who killed every one of them.

  2. Poland can change history books but the truth will remain forever – they were no better or even worse than the Germans yms”h.

  3. “How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” – Abraham Lincoln

    …kind of like denying Polish complicity in the murder of millions of innocent Jewish men, women and children, including infants who weren’t even old enough to understand that they were Jewish, let alone that they were being killed for that. We will never forget, even if Poland denies what its citizens did for the rest of eternity.

  4. And yet, we have wealthy idiots living in Brooklyn who still hire these filthy poison anti semitic Polisher cleaning ladies/babysitters.

  5. Its disappointing that the article and almost every article on this topic interviews politicians and not historians> its worth taking some time and reading a bit about this topic and you might be shocked to find (as I was) that yes: Poland had, has, and will have many antis emits but the official polish government (and institutions before war and in exile) resisted the Nazis and particularly resisted the extermination of the Jews. There were also more Chasidei Umos Haolam from this country than any other according to Yad Vashem.

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