Polish Government Criminalizes History

These are Facebook posts I wrote about Poland criminalizing talking about Polish atrocities during the Holocaust. 


The Polish government is releasing disgusting, sophisticated propaganda to justify their asinine, autocratic, ethnonationalist, backwards law criminalizing discussing Polish atrocities during the Holocaust. No one refutes that the Polish people suffered during WWII. No one refutes that many Poles were righteous among the nations. Also, no one thinks that Poles today need to take responsibility for the atrocities of their ancestors. HOWEVER, that does not change the fact that ordinary Poles indeed committed atrocities against their Jewish neighbors. You can't change history to suit your narrative and these lies spit in the faces of not only those murdered, but the Poles who were righteous. This is a shameful turn in Polish history and portends more bad things to come.

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The Polish Prime Minister explains that Jews perpetrated the Holocaust to explain criminalizing history. Some Polish people are excited by this! But guess what? That's not news.

To my Polish friends, there were Jews who collaborated with Nazis: Capos and the head of the Judenrat. But they all met the same fate as the people that they betrayed, and if they didn't, they were put on trial for war crimes or exiled from the community. During slavery in the South, there were slaves who supervised other slaves or were the head of the household. Does that mean they weren't slaves? The Jewish collaborators were so few when you think of the 6 million who died. But why is your prime minister's focus on this? Why does he have no problem calling out these problematic figures, yet he supports a law that criminalizes mention of Polish atrocities during the Holocaust. There is no such laws about discussing or learning about Judenrat or Capos in Israel or anywhere else in the world that is democratic. When your leader and your people feel the need to distort history, you are heading down a very dark path. I hope that the people of Poland have the courage to confront their leaders and leave the past in tact, for better or worse.