Poland U-turns over law against linking nation to the Holocaust
● International ties strained with fears legislation would ‘whitewash’ history
Polish politicians have passed changes to a disputed Holocaust speech law, scrapping the threat of prison for attributing Nazi crimes to the Polish nation.
The passage of the amendments means Polish authorities have largely backtracked on a law that was supposedly aimed at defending the country’s “good name”, but which mostly had the opposite effect.
There were widespread suspicions that the true intent was to suppress free inquiry into the country’s complex past. The legislation was compared by some to history laws in Turkey and Russia.
The amendments, presented to politicians by prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, were passed 388-25 in the Lower House of Parliament with five abstentions following a short but emotional 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 nobody would be punished for any statement backed up by facts and 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 the Second World War.
The US warned it threatened academic freedom and said it would harm Poland’s “straduring tegic position”. Ukraine was also opposed because the law made it a crime to deny atrocities committed by Ukrainian nationalists against Poles during and after the war.
The strained ties with those three allies came as Poland’s ties with the European Union and individual western European nations were also threatened by a judicial overhaul seen as an erosion of democratic checks and balances.
Many critics argued 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 overshadow the heroic aspects of Poland’s resistance to Nazi Germany and the massive suffering inflicted on the country. Nearly six million Polish citizens were killed the war – three million were Jews, but almost as many were Christian Poles.
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said he was pleased 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”.
Members of the opposition lashed out at the Law and Justice party for ever passing the legislation in the first place.
Stefan Niesiolowski, from the Civic Platform party, called the original law “idiocy”. Kamila Gasiuk-pihowicz, from the Modern party, asked why it took the ruling party half a year to perform a U-turn on a move that harmed Poland’s international relationships.
But the ruling party risked losing support from its conservative base through the reversal. Nationalist politician Robert Winnicki described it as caving in to Jewish interests.