Israeli students will learn about nations that helped in the “Final Solution” in reaction to a proposed Polish law making it a crime to refer to Polish death camps.

By: Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

All Israeli students in state-run schools, Grades 7-12, will get two extra hours of history instruction this week that will concentrate on the part played by Nazi-conquered European nations in the German attempt to liquidate the Jewish people during World War II. The purpose of the lesson is educate the students about how the collaboration between ordinary people and officials when it came to anti-Jewish policies and the Nazis who had taken over their countries.

Naftali Bennett, Minister of Education, made it clear that the timing was not accidental. Although Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked in Israel on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan (which usually falls in April), along with extensive educational programming, International Holocaust Day was on Saturday.

Poland’s parliament on Friday approved legislation which sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone – including foreigners — who refers to Nazi German death camps as being Polish. The Polish government has always strongly protested when foreign media called the Nazi-run camps “Polish,” considering it a defamation of their nation’s character and a lie.

However, although the Poles’ claim that the concentration and death camps were German inventions run by Germans on Polish soil is true, Bennett said, “The truth is that many nations, including the Poles, were engaged in helping the Nazis murder Jews and in murdering Jews themselves.”

The lesson plan’s introduction refers to the sensitivity in Israel “to the different attempts to deny the local populations’ involvement, including in Poland, in the Holocaust of the Jewish people.” Ignoring the help the Nazis got from local populations would simply not be historically accurate, the education ministry says.

“If so many civilians outside of Germany hadn’t taken part in the extermination, far fewer Jews would have been murdered in the Holocaust,” the plan explains, pointing out that in Poland’s case, “some 200,000 of Poland’s Jews were murdered by the Poles themselves.”

The lessons will also make it clear, however, that those who risked their lives to help the Jews should be lauded – such as the 6,700 Poles who have already been identified by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined a host of Israeli lawmakers from both sides of the political divide who criticized the Polish law, calling it “baseless,” and saying that “one cannot change history.” After speaking with his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Sunday evening, the two agreed to set up teams in order to reach an “understanding” regarding the law, leaving the way open to making changes before it is signed by the Polish president.

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Netanyahu and Morawiecki agreed that teams from the two countries would try to reach understandings regarding a Polish law that bans phrases such as “Polish death camps.”

By: World Israel News Staff

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday spoke by telephone with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in wake of the bill recently passed by the Polish parliament that prohibits any references to Polish involvement in the Holocaust. The move angered Israelis across the political spectrum and elicited much criticism from groups around the world.

The two leaders agreed that teams from both countries would open an immediate dialogue in order to try and reach understandings regarding the legislation.

The bill, passed by the lower house of the Polish parliament on Friday, specifies prison time for those who ‘defame’ Poland by using phrases such as “Polish death camps” when referring to Auschwitz and other Nazi-run death camps located in Poland during World War II.

The bill still needs approval from Poland’s Senate and President Andrzej Duda before becoming law.

Netanyahu rejected the bill as “baseless.” Israeli President Reuven Rivlin slammed it as an attempt at “fake history.”

‘Surprising and unfortunate’

Piotr Kozlowski, the deputy ambassador of Poland in Israel, was summoned on Sunday to the Foreign Ministry for discussion with the deputy director-general of the European Division and the head of the Diaspora Division.

The timing of the bill, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was marked on Saturday, was “particularly surprising and unfortunate,” the Foreign Ministry stated.

“The legislation will not help further the exposure of historical truth and may harm freedom of research, as well as prevent discussion of the historical message and legacy of World War II,” the statement said, adding that Israel expects the Polish government to change the wording of the bill before its final adoption and to conduct a dialogue with Israel on the subject.

Speaking to reporters after his meeting, Kozlowski said the intent of the legislation was not to “whitewash” history. It is already a crime in Poland to deny that the Holocaust happened.

“It is to safeguard it, to safeguard the truth about the Holocaust and to prevent its distortion,” he said of the proposed legislation.

Netanyahu and Morawiecki spoke later in the day and agreed to discuss the bill’s wording.

Two families in the same house?

However, Polish legislators said that they would oppose any changing of the bill’s text.

“We will not change any provisions in the bill,” said Beata Mazurek, spokeswoman for the ruling conservative-nationalist Law and Justice party, “We have had enough of Poland and Poles being blamed for German crimes.”

The Polish prime minister on Sunday night compared Poles and Jews to two families who lived in the same house, Poland, before the war and were both victimized by the Nazis.

In a post on Twitter, Morawiecki said: “A gang of professional thugs enters a two-family house. They kill the first family almost entirely. They kill the parents of the second, torturing the kids. They loot and raze the house. Could one, in good conscience, say that the second family is guilty for the murder of the first?”

Princeton University Professor Jan Tomasz Gross, an expert on Polish compliance with the Holocaust, has previously stated that Poland’s new stance on dissociating itself from the Holocaust is “a step back to the dark ages of anti-Semitism.”

The Polish-born sociologist and historian has stoked controversy in Poland with works that expose dark chapters in a wartime history that Poles are otherwise proud of thanks to a strong resistance by Poles to Nazi Germany.

The latest uproar surrounding Gross began after he asserted in 2015 that Poles killed more Jews than Germans during the war. Though the exact numbers are difficult to measure, Gross said evidence indicates that Poles killed up to 30,000 Germans during the war, at most, while they probably killed 70,000 to 90,000 Jews, but possibly more.

AP contributed to this report. 

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