HISTORIAN HITS BACK AT POLAND
HISTORIAN JAN Tomasz Gross, who has been censured by the Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party for highlighting the role some Poles played in perpetrating the Holocaust, has warned that the government is looking to take its whitewash of history into the country’s classrooms.
Mr Gross, who discovered two weeks ago that the government was considering withdrawing an Order of Merit awarded to him in 1996 by the then president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, for his research into the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations, said: “The current regime in Poland is nationalist, xenophobic, and authoritarian.
“It openly states that it will enforce a political agenda with respect to teaching and commemorating Polish history.”
Mr Gross insisted that historians like him would continue to publish their research “until the government turns violently repressive”.
He added: “On the other hand, students in schools and universities will have their curricula skewed, impoverished, and falsified if need be, to conform with a nationalist agenda. Critical thinking and respect for multicultural values will be discouraged.”
The result of this educational purge, he said, was that Poland would become “spiritually marginalised within the European community”.
Mr Gross said his claim last year that the Poles murdered more Jews than Nazis in Poland during the Second World War, as well as his documentation of the role of Poles in massacres of Jews during the Holocaust, had set the Law and Justice
‘The current regime is xenophobic and authoritarian’
Party against him.
However, he said, “what triggered the initiative to take away my medal was the publication of my article criticising Poland’s stand in the refugee crisis in Europe.
“It was portrayed in Polish media as a piece written by me for the German press, which visibly increased the anger of critics. In reality, I wrote this essay for Project Syndicate, and it was published in some two dozen countries.”
Mr Gross said that the Polish prosecutor’s office had been urged to investigate the Project Syndicate article by a variety of nationalist organisations and politicians.
The probe could lead Mr Gross being indicted on the charge of slandering the Polish
nation.