Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki explained tonight that Poland condemns all crimes during the Holocaust and World War II, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators and victims.
Morawiecki said that Poland does not intend to stifle free debate about the crimes of individual Poles with the newly amended law, but that it wants to punish a form of Holocaust denial that shifts the responsibility of Hitler's fascists to someone else.
"The lie about the Holocaust is not only the denial of German crimes. One of the worst forms of that lie is diminishing the responsibility of the true culprits and attributing responsibility to their victims," warned Morawiecki in a speech on state television TVP.
Morawiecki emphasized that Poland was the first victim of the German fascists and that the camps where millions of Jews were killed were not Polish camps, but Nazi German ones, and that this truth must be preserved because it is also an integral part of the truth about the Holocaust.
"The Polish government condemns all crimes committed during the Second World War on Polish soil, regardless of the nation of the perpetrators and the nationality of the victims. We will never limit the freedom of debate about the Holocaust, because we owe it to all those who went through it," he said. Moravjecki.
The Polish Prime Minister expressed his understanding for the outraged emotions caused by changes to the Polish law on the Institute of People's Memory.
Based on those changes, any attribution to Poland as a state and Poles as a people, complicity or responsibility for the Holocaust and war crimes committed by German fascists in occupied Poland can be punished with a fine or up to three years in prison.
"We understand the emotions in Israel. It takes a lot of effort to succeed in telling our often complicated history together. Jewish culture is an inseparable part of Polish heritage," said Morawiecki.
The Prime Minister reminded that of the six million victims of the Second World War in Poland, three million were Polish Jews, that is, citizens of Poland.
He also said that the Polish Resistance Movement, through the special organization "Žegota", helped Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to avoid certain death in German camps like Auschwitz.
The Prime Minister also reminded that the Pole, Jan Karski, carried the first reports and tried to alert the authorities of Great Britain and the USA about the gruesome fate that Hitler intended for European Jews.
Amendments to the law on the Institute of People's Remembrance, whose main goal was to defend the reputation of Poland and Poles against the false designation of Auschwitz and other fascist concentration camps as Polish camps, due to the vague provision of what will be punished and prison terms, first caused a storm of indignation in Israel . Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Poland of trying to cover up and rewrite history and prevent testimony about the Holocaust.
The US State Department, threatening official Warsaw that this could reflect badly on allied US-Polish relations, joined in the condemnation of the new legal paragraph, fearing that any public mention of it among the Poles except those who saved the Jews would be punished during the Holocaust, there were also those who killed them in pogroms, and even immediately after the war, when the German fascists were no longer there, they looted or handed them over to the German occupation authorities.
The OSCE requested the withdrawal of those changes, especially tactlessly adopted in the Sejm of the Polish Parliament on January 26, just before Holocaust Remembrance Day, i.e. the veto of Polish President Andrzej Duda, and European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans appealed to it, as did Polish intellectuals and public figures. and Jewish organizations.
But Polish officials refused all that, because allegedly Poland would show that it is not a sovereign state if it withdraws or changes the law under pressure from Israel.
In addition to the condemnation from the world, the changes that were adopted last night by the Upper House of the Parliament, and they are only waiting for the signature of President Duda, have paradoxically brought about the fact that a wave of hate speech and accusations that Poles are anti-Semites and are trying to pour into Poland on the Internet to "wash away" the hideous pages of their history. The term "Polish death camps", which for years only occasionally appeared in some media, more as a geographical designation, has now flooded the Internet in tens of millions of mentions and as a "hashtag" "#polishdetahcamps".
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