Poland fumes over Israeli Holocaust Museum social media post

In 2018, Poland enacted legislation making it a criminal offense to attribute Nazi crimes to the Polish nation.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Poland summoned Israel’s ambassador on Monday in objection to a social media post by Yad Vashem, saying it failed to clarify that Nazi German occupiers — not Polish authorities — forced Jews to wear identifying badges during World War II.

Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said the message, published a day earlier, created a misleading impression about Poland’s role during the Holocaust and should have explicitly stated that the country was under German control at the time.

In 2018, Poland enacted legislation making it a criminal offense to attribute Nazi crimes to the Polish nation. The measure, part of the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, banned the use of terms such as “Polish death camps” and penalized statements that imply Polish institutions were responsible for the genocide.

Sikorski wrote that he ordered the ambassador’s appearance at the foreign ministry because the post had not been corrected.

“Since the misleading post has not been amended, I have decided to summon the ambassador of Israel to the foreign ministry,” he stated on X/Twitter.

Israel’s foreign ministry did not immediately comment.

Yad Vashem later reposted the original message and added that “as noted by many users and specified explicitly in the linked article, it was done by order of the German authorities,” but the clarification did not satisfy officials in Warsaw.

Polish leaders regularly stress that their country was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1945 and that the atrocities carried out on Polish soil, including those at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were acts of the German regime.

More than three million of the country’s 3.2 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany, representing roughly half of the European Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Warsaw maintains that acknowledging the historical record requires making it clear that the machinery of persecution was imposed by the occupiers rather than by Polish authorities.

However, research shows that the genocide of the Polish Jews would have been impossible to carry out without the Poles’ enthusiastic collaboration.

In 2018, in an article titled “A Major Blow to Holocaust Research and Remembrance” that was published on the website of the Yad Vashem, Prof. Havi Dreifuss, head of its International Institute of Holocaust Research, says that the law “aims to ‘revise’ history, while censoring broad swathes of it through legislation. This constitutes a clear and dangerous attempt to intimidate educators, guides on trips to Poland, journalists and politicians, and to prevent them from relating freely to these important parts of Polish and Jewish history during the Holocaust.”

University of Ottawa Professor Jan Grabowski, who spent two decades examining the Holocaust in Poland and the role Poles played in it, told Legion-Canada’s Military History Magazine: “We are talking here about complicity in the Holocaust on a quite significant level.”