Joint statement on Holocaust fuels anger it was meant to end

said the prime ministers’ statement contains “grave errors and deceptions.” The Jerusalembased institution said the document exaggerates in particular the work of Poland’s wartime resistance to help the country’s sizeable Jewish population.

“Much of the Polish resistance in its various movements not only failed to help Jews, but was also not infrequently actively involved in persecuting them,” Yad Vashem said.

The prime ministers’ statement acknowledged the cruelty perpetuated against Jews by individual Poles in some cases, but largely stressed Polish resistance efforts to protect Jews.

“We acknowledge and condemn every single case of cruelty against Jews perpetrated by Poles during the World War II” and honour the “heroic acts of numerous Poles” who saved Jews, the statement read. It also rejected “blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations.”

In Poland, the bank has also faced some questions for paying what was likely a large sum to get the statement a wide audience.

“It is sad, all things considered, that a bank in which millions of Poles hold their savings wasted its funds to troll the Israeli public,” said Michal Bilewicz, a social psychologist at Warsaw University who specializes in the Holocaust. “On the one hand, they lower interest rates on accounts, and on the other hand they spend millions on government propaganda.”

While Netanyahu faces calls to disavow the statement, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Bartosz Cichocki said Poland considers it “binding.”

The reaction in Israel “confirms our belief that we need to further enhance the co-operation of Polish, Israeli, and Jewish historians, teachers and museum guides to protect the truth about World War II and the Holocaust,” he said.

Yad Vashem also said Poland’s amended Holocaust speech law, while no longer allowing prison as a criminal penalty, still provides for possible civil penalties that could impede Holocaust research.