Polish president signs Holocaust speech legislation into law

Andrzej Duda said in a televised address the legislation would safeguard Poland’s worldwide reputation, but Israel called for amendments, saying the two countries had a “joint responsibility” to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into law on Tuesday a controversial bill outlawing any implications of Warsaw’s culpability for crimes committed during the Holocaust.

But Israel has raised concerns it could stifle the truth about the involvement of some Poles.

Holocaust historians and other scholars in Poland and overseas came out firmly against the law, with many saying it will lead to self-censorship. The very swift and vocal opposition from Israel caught many Poles off guard and put them on the defensive.

The law has received criticism from both Israel and the United States.

What does the bill state? It is the opinion of this author that the use of the term “Polish death camps” is misleading and simply untrue.

The camps were built and operated by Nazi Germany after it invaded Poland in 1939. Some of the worst Nazi atrocities were committed on Polish soil.

Israeli Minister of Education Naftali Bennett was slated to head to Poland on Wednesday on an official trip to meet government officials and students, as well as visit survivors and World War II memorials. “The government of Poland canceled my visit, because I mentioned the crimes of its people”.

The bill was passed by the Polish parliament before being presented to President Duda.

But, he added, “if the law only dealt with so-called Polish death camps then the Israeli side would understand it”.

PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski told Polish public radio on Saturday that Poland was fighting against a “great defamatory campaign”. Anti-Semitism in eastern giant (some 38 million inhabitants) and now one of most unitary countries ethnically and religiously, has increased, according to latest report of 2017 of Israeli government, which each year polls attitudes of different countries. “This truth needs to be protected”, he said. “Meanwhile, together with likeminded friends inside and outside Poland, we shall continue to urge respectful and open dialogue among all the parties involved to try to help restore the bonds of trust that ought to be in everyone’s best interest”. No such situation happened in Poland. Millions of its citizens were killed, including three million Polish Jews in the Holocaust.

The Nazis and their collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews, wiping out a third of world Jewry. “[We] do not deny that there were cases of huge wickedness” in which Poles denounced Jews, he said, according to the AP.

Before WWII, Poland was home to roughly 3.2 million Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe.

“Individual collaborators” in Nazi-occupied regions during World War II did not change the fact that Germany was responsible for the Holocaust, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in a Foreign Office statement on Saturday.

But he said the point of the law is to prevent Poles and Poland from being wrongly accused of institutionalized participation in the Holocaust.