In his Passover Message in London today Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has sought to distance himself from anti-Semitic incidents within the Labour Party but has upset many members of the Polish community in the UK by referring to recent Polish legislation which has sought to criminalize the statement that Poland was responsible for the Holocaust in the same breath as the racist murder of a Jewish woman in Paris.
In this way he wrongly implied that the Polish government is a Holocaust denier and that the Polish nation was responsible for the Holocaust. Both propositions are manifestly not true and overlook the fact that it was the wartime Polish government which did its utmost to publicize in the West the mass killings and persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany, while its courageous underground leaders set up agencies to protect and save Jews in Poland at the same time as they sought to protect Poland's Christian population against persecution. Any attempt by a Pole to save a Jew would lead to the execution of the entire Polish family. Nobody denies that in the severity and privation of the German occupation individual Poles betrayed Jews and even hunted them in the forests, but that was not the response of the Polish nation as a whole, while betraying a Jew to the German authorities was punishable by a death sentence from the Polish underground. .
Yours faithfully,
Wiktor Moszczynski
Chairman,
Friends of Polish Veterans Association.
Stowarzyszenie Przyjaciol Polskich Weteranow (SPPW)
Author of "Hello, I'm Your Polish Neighbour"
