Leader says Holocaust debate shows world is against Poland

WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s prime minister defended his country’s new Holocaust law and said the international outcry only exposed the rising tide of anti-Polish sentiment that seeks to vilify his compatriots.

In an interview at his office in Warsaw, Mateusz Morawiecki was adamant that nothing will halt his government’s efforts to repair the country, including the legislation criminalizing suggestions that Poland was in any way responsible for the genocide. What he termed “anti-Polonism” explains the need for a more assertive policy, he said.

“The situation is worsening from Poland’s point of view,” Morawiecki, 49, said on Wednesday. “Some people are saying that Poles were worse than Nazis,” which is a “complete misrepresentation, complete misunderstanding of the history of what has happened on Polish soil,” he said.

The rebuttal of world opinion shows how far Poland’s nationalist leadership has come in two years with its quest to defect from the European mainstream. The us-against-them narrative forged by the governing Law & Justice party puts into sharp relief how political forces in Europe’s east — from Warsaw to Prague and Budapest — are cementing a new kind of division through the continent almost three decades since the collapse of communism.

While the U.S. under President Donald Trump until now has been supportive of Poland’s effort to challenge the European Union, the State Department said the Holocaust law could harm the NATO country’s strategic interests.

Morawiecki said it was Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, who exposed Polish weakness in 2012 when he incorrectly said that death camps built and operated by Nazis on occupied Polish lands were Polish, not German.

The White House apologized, saying Obama misspoke at a ceremony honoring Jan Karski, a Pole who helped tell the world about German plans to kill off European Jews.

“Anti-Polonism around the world has been gaining in power because of a lack of reaction from Poland and the weakness of this reaction for the last 10 years,” Morawiecki said. “If the president of the United States is saying things like this, it’s for me an alarm that something should be changed.”

Until Law & Justice took power in October 2015, the term “Anti-Polonism” was typically used by more radical nationalist groups to depict the country being suppressed by the western powers. It feeds into the party’s theme of standing up for ordinary citizens against global elites that’s seen it only gain in popularity a little over half way through its first term.

Only 380,000 of Poland’s 3 million Jews, Europe’s largest prewar Jewish community, survived the Shoah, according to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. While some Polish civilians participated in the genocide, others resisted. Yad Vashem has commemorated about 6,700 Poles for rescuing Jews, the largest number of “Righteous Gentiles” in any country.