Polish law amounts to Holocaust denial

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pronounced himself “disappointed” this week when Poland’s president signed legislation that criminalizes any reference to the country’s role in the Holocaust. Tillerson’s comment was too tame.

In fact, the law seeks to rewrite history that Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party finds inconvenient. It follows other actions over the last three years by the right-wing, populist government to restrict the media and the courts, and to demonize critics. In a further insult, the legislation came just before Holocaust Remembrance Day and the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The law reads: “Whoever claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich … or for other felonies that constitute crimes against peace, crimes against humanity or war crimes, or whoever otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the true perpetrators of said crimes — shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to three years.”

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, agrees that the term “Polish death camps” misrepresents history. As with Auschwitz, the Nazis built and operated such extermination camps as Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

In a statement, however, the center said the law was “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust.”

And the Polish Center for Holocaust Research said, “We consider the adopted law a tool intended to facilitate the ideological manipulation and imposition of the history policy of the Polish state.”

Israel, which has had a good relationship with the Polish government, urged President Andrzej Duda not to sign the bill. So did the United States. Duda tried to minimize the effect by saying he would ask Poland’s constitutional court to review the law, but critics say the ruling party has so intimidated the judiciary that the review will be meaningless.

Historians point out that Poland — unlike some countries — never set up a collaborative government after the Nazis invaded in 1939. Many Polish underground groups resisted the occupiers. Three million non-Jewish Poles were killed along with the three million Jews killed as part of The Final Solution.

Yair Lapid is the leader of Israel’s Yesh Atid Party. In an op-ed for the Times of Israel, Lapid noted that Yad Vashem has recognized more Righteous Persons from Poland — nearly 7,000 — than from any other country. “Most of them,” Lapid wrote, “were normal people whose conscience wouldn’t allow them to be bystanders.”

But Lapid also pointed out that those brave Poles didn’t just hide Jews from Germans. “The Jews were hidden from Poles, Polish informers, Polish murderers.”

“The Germans managed the extermination and bear ultimate responsibility but they could not have done it alone,” he added. “The anti-Semitism that existed before the rise of the Nazis was rife across all of Europe, including in Poland.”

Historians cite the July 1941 murder of Jews by their Polish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. The Jews had fled to a barn to escape the Nazis. The barn was set on fire, killing as many as 1,600 people. Some in Poland still claim that Nazis did the killing, despite evidence compiled by the historian Jan Gross — a Polish-born American — that it was a pogrom committed by Poles.

Such attempts to rewrite history often follow the rise to power by nationalist parties. Four years ago, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe tried to backtrack on the country’s apology 21 years earlier for using “comfort women” — sex slaves from other nations — for Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Any attempt at Holocaust denial especially resonates in South Florida. We are home to one of the world’s largest Jewish populations. That means we are home to many Holocaust survivors.

As with the World War II veterans who liberated the death camps, we are losing more of those survivors — and their memories — every year. The loss of witnesses could make it easier to whitewash the truth as part of some misplaced drive for national pride.

Poland’s law is one example. A survivor told the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aronoth how her father urged her to run away when the Nazis began rounding up Jews. “We were very scared and fled into the woods. The Poles threw stones at us and cursed us.”

Under the law, such testimony could be illegal in Poland.

Strong nations accept their history, not run from it.

Ironically, in terms of facing responsibility for the Holocaust, the lesson for Poland comes from Germany.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Elana Simms, Andy Reid and Editor-in-Chief Howard Saltz.