Poland backtracks on Holocaust speech law
Scraps threat of prison for attributing Nazi crimes to Polish nation
POLISH lawmakers passed changes to a disputed Holocaust speech law yesterday, scrapping the threat of prison for attributing Nazi crimes to the Polish nation.
The passage of the amendments means that Polish authorities have largely backtracked on a law supposedly aimed at defending the country’s “good name” but mostly had the opposite effect. There were widespread suspicions that the true intent was to suppress free inquiry into a complex past, and the law was compared by some to history laws in Turkey and Russia.
The amendments presented to lawmakers by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki were passed yesterday in the lower house of parliament by 388-25, with five abstentions following an emotional but short debate.
The original version of the law, passed early this year, called for prison terms of up to three years for falsely and intentionally accusing the Polish nation of Holocaust crimes that were committed by Nazi Germany. The ruling Law and Justice party said it needed a tool to fight back against foreign media and politicians who sometimes used the expression “Polish death camps” to refer to German-run camps in occupied Poland.
Even former US President Barack Obama once used such terminology, sparking outrage in Poland. Polish authorities insisted that nobody would be punished for any statement backed up by facts and that there would be no criminal punishment for discussing individual cases of Polish wrongdoing.
But the law nonetheless sparked a major diplomatic crisis with Israel, where Holocaust survivors and politicians feared it was an attempt to whitewash episodes of Polish violence against Jews during World War II. The US warned it threatened academic freedom and it would harm Poland’s “strategic position”.
Ukraine was also opposed because the law made it a crime to deny atrocities committed by Ukrainian nationalists against Poles during World War II.
The strained ties with those three allies came as Poland’s ties with the EU and individual Western European nations are also threatened by a judicial overhaul seen as an erosion of democratic checks and balances.
Many critics argued that the Holocaust speech law would be useless against people outside Poland and feared it was mostly meant to suppress a growing body of scholarly research about Polish violence against Jews during the war.
The focus on that side of Polish history is deeply unsettling to many Poles, who fear it will come to overshadow the heroic aspects of Poland’s resistance to Nazi Germany and the massive suffering inflicting on the country. During the war, nearly six million Polish citizens were killed: three million Jews but almost as many Christian Poles.
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said he was pleased that the Polish government “is now taking the appropriate steps to amend one of the most problematic and dangerous clauses and remove the criminal penalties imposed by the law.”
Lawmakers held an emotional debate, with members of the opposition lashing out at the Law and Justice party for passing the law in the first place.
Stefan Niesiolowski of Civic Platform called the original law “idiocy” while Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz, of the Modern party, asked why it took the ruling party half-a-year to reverse a move that had harmed Poland’s most important international relationships. “Why so late? Why did so much have to be broken?” she asked.
With the move, the ruling party risked losing some domestic support from its conservative base.
One nationalist, Robert Winnicki, described it as caving in to Jewish interests. He even tried to block the podium but the vote went ahead anyway.
Morawiecki tried to put a positive spin on the whole affair, arguing that the legislation had still been a success because it had made Poland’s wartime history a topic of international discussion.
“Our basic goal was to fight for the truth, for Poland’s good name, to present what reality looked like, the realities of World War II, and we achieved this,” he said.
The dispute with Israel sparked a wave of anti-Semitic rhetoric in Poland, even by members of the government and commentators in public media, as well as hate speech directed against Poles abroad.
The law was also sent to the Constitutional Tribunal for review by the president, who said he had some doubts about it. – AP