Polish MP ripped for holding up swastika flag on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Far-right Polish MP Konrad Berkowicz faces criminal complaint after he compared Israel to Nazi Germany and held up a swastika flag on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

By World Israel News Staff

A far-right Polish lawmaker is facing mounting backlash after displaying an Israeli flag defaced with a swastika from the floor of parliament, with the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation filing a criminal complaint and demanding disciplinary action over what it called a distortion of Holocaust history.

The complaint targets Konrad Berkowicz, a lawmaker from the far-right Confederation party, after he used a speech in the Sejm on April 14 to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza and declare, “Israel is the new Third Reich,” before unfurling the altered, swastika-bearing flag.

The incident immediately drew shouts of protest in the chamber.

The backlash quickly moved beyond condemnation.

The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation said it filed a criminal complaint with prosecutors in Warsaw on April 15, alleging violations of Polish laws that ban the promotion of totalitarian ideologies and the incitement of hatred based on nationality, ethnicity or religion.

The group also lodged an ethics complaint with the Sejm, urging disciplinary measures against Berkowicz.

The timing sharpened the outrage, with the complaint noting that the display took place on Holocaust Remembrance Day as survivors, officials, and thousands of visitors were gathering at Auschwitz-Birkenau for commemorations.

“This complaint is not symbolic. Polish law prohibits what occurred in that chamber, and we expect it to be enforced,” Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation Chairman Simon Bergson said in the foundation’s statement. “Democratic institutions either hold the line or they do not.”

AJCF Director General Jack Simony said the incident was not legitimate political criticism.

“What we witnessed was not criticism of a state, but the inversion of the Holocaust itself,” Simony said. “To take the symbol of the Jewish state and deface it with a Nazi emblem on Yom HaShoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day] is not political expression. It is the deliberate abuse of history to incite hatred.”

Tomasz Kuncewicz, director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, said, “When that history is inverted and its symbols are weaponized to incite new hatred, it is not only an offense against the dead. It is a direct assault on everything this institution stands for.”

Parliamentary leaders also signaled possible sanctions.

Sejm Speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty condemned the act, saying, “Displaying the swastika in the Polish Sejm is in no way justified.”

He said he would ask the chamber’s leadership to consider a financial penalty and review whether further legal steps should follow.

Poland’s Foreign Ministry issued a formal statement the same day, saying it “strongly condemns” Berkowicz’s use of the symbol.

“Criticism of Israel’s regional policy by the MP does not justify such a gesture,” the ministry said, calling it “deeply offensive not only to Jews and Israelis, but also to all those for whom the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes constitute an important element of memory and identity.”

Jewish institutions in Poland also demanded punitive measures.

Dariusz Stola, director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and Piotr Wiślicki, chairman of the Jewish Historical Institute, called for “the prosecutor’s office to take decisive steps to punish the politician whose actions — in front of all of Poland and the world — insulted the Polish Parliament.”

“There can be no consent or tolerance for such acts,” they said.

The Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland warned that the episode was “particularly worrying” because it “was not the first incident of its kind.” “The line between words and actual actions can be very thin,” the group said. “How many more of these situations have to happen before someone says ‘enough?’”