‘Jewish perpetrators’ Holocaust remark strains Israeli-Polish relations
WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s government refused to apologize on Monday for Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s comments about “Jewish perpetrators” during the Second World War, escalating a row that’s upended the country’s relations with Israel and is alarming the U.S.
When confronted during a conference in Munich on Saturday over Poland’s new law that criminalizes suggestions that the Polish nation bore any responsibility for the Holocaust, Morawiecki listed Jews among nations that along with Germans were “perpetrators” of Nazi-era crimes. His list included Ukrainians, Russians and Poles.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the comments were “outrageous,” while Yair Lapid, an opposition politician, called on Israel to recall its ambassador from Poland.
Morawiecki’s intention was to list nations that collaborated with the Germans, Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz said on Monday, adding that use of the word “perpetrators” was a “linguistic mistake” for which there’s no need to apologize.
Last month, Poland’s ruling party passed the Holocaust law despite U.S. warnings that it censors free speech and might weaken the east European nation’s “strategic interests and relations.”
The prime minister’s “remarks were not aimed at denying the Holocaust or hiding its real perpetrators,” Czaputowicz told private broadcaster Polsat News on Monday.
“One has to be ill-willed to look for a willingness to put an equal sign between the suffering of Jews and other nations under Nazi occupation.”
The Union of Jewish Communities in Poland said in a statement that while there were “Jewish criminals and Jewish police in the ghettos” set up by the Nazis during the war, Morawiecki’s comments signalled a “moral blindness and historical ignorance” by putting those “who acted under the greatest duress in one sentence with Polish perpetrators and Ukrainian and German criminals.”
Relations between Poland and Israel have deteriorated over legislation that makes suggestion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust a crime punishable by up to three years in jail — a move seen by critics as an attempt to whitewash history.