While I seriously regret the misguided decision by an over sensitive Polish Parliament in passing an amendment in March to its law on the Institute of National Remembrance which criminalizes certain aspects of the debate on the Holocaust in relation to “the Polish nation or the Polish state” and can understand the concerns it has raised in the international community, including in the British parliament, I would not want the subsequent parliamentary debate on June 5th to transform itself into a diatribe against the Polish nation. I should not want it to minimize the Polish nation’s heroic struggle against Nazi Germany including its valiant attempts to rescue many Jews from the Holocaust or to equate Poland’s new law with anti-Semitism or the overall description of “Holocaust denial”. The legislation stems from a perceived concern in Poland that their country was being depicted in Holocaust liter ature as being equally responsible as Germany for the Holocaust being carried out on what had been and is now Polish soil, but which at the time of the Final Solution was under German occupation. The Polish government rightfully claims that if Germany had not invaded Poland in 1939 there would have been no Holocaust.
Please remember that Poland was subjected to a level of murder, brutality and subjugation under German occupation that far surpassed what occupied Western European countries experienced. 3 million Polish non-Jews were murdered as well as 3 million Polish Jews, while a further 3 million Poles were taken for forced labour. In German occupied Poland uniquely any attempt to save or assist Jews was automatically punished by the execution of the whole family. Yet a whole industry was set up by the Polish Underground movement, involving churches, nunneries, children’s homes, factories, as well as individual Polish families, to save Jewish families and especially Jewish children from death. Thousands of Poles were executed or were tortured because of this activity. It is also important to be aware that the clandestine courts run by the Polish underground state condemned Poles to be executed as traitors for betraying Jews to the Germans. It was also the Polish government in exile which publicized the underground state’s reports on the death camps and the genocide of the Jewish people to an unbelieving public in the West. The official behaviour of the Polish state towards the Jews was not perfect, but it deserves approval, bearing in mind its precarious situation. There was no Vichy regime or Quisling government in Poland systematically betraying Jews to the Germans.
On the other hand, thousands of individuals Poles, for whatever motive, betrayed and blackmailed Jews, mocked their killing or helped to hunt them down in the forests. Others in Eastern Poland took a misguided revenge on innocent Jewish communities in remoter towns like Jedwabne after these towns had been “liberated” from a Soviet occupation which until then had been as brutal and murderous towards Poles as the Germans had been. The majority of Poles simply remained uncommitted as they struggled for their own survival under the Nazi German terror. All these facts are regrettably true, and Poland must live with the shameful consequences of these crimes as much as with a sense of pride in what its more heroic countrymen did. No sensible Pole denies these crimes occurred and neither does the new law deny it as it speaks only of the whole “nation” or the whole “state” being criticized. Under German occupation Polish official authorities, themselves clandestine and under constant threat of capture and death, were unable to fully prevent these crimes being carried out by their countrymen, even though many were executed as traitors.
However, if this issue is to be debated on June 5th with full sensitivity towards both Poles and Jews, without heaping overblown statements of condemnation against the Polish government and the Polish nation, MPs would be right to use that occasion to urge the Polish government to rescind this legislation. In place of an increasingly fruitful earlier dialogue and mutual re-examination between Polish and Jewish historians we now have a dialogue by megaphone which debases all the arguments, subjecting facts to self-serving emotions, which in turn will only encourage both anti-Semitism on the one hand and Polonophobia on the other. The Polish government must be given the breathing space to be able to repeal the controversial amendment voluntarily because it is in the best interests not only of the international dialogue on the Holocaust, but of Poland as well.
Also, the debate would be a useful occasion to remind the British public and the British media that the term “Polish death camps”, however innocently intended as a geographical description, is offensive to all Poles because of its unwritten implication that the death camps were set up or run by Poles.
I hope that, if you do choose to take part in this debate, you will seek to avoid a confrontational approach to the Polish government and and instead urge them to recognize the futility of replacing dialogue with legislation and to repeal the controversial legislation.
Yours sincerely
Wiktor Moszczynski
former Labour Councillor and parliamentary candidate
