Statement by the IHRA Honorary President on Polish legislation

The 1st February 2018

“I would like to express myself on the current issue of the IHRA’s position regarding the amendment to the law, voted by the Polish Parliament, concerning the alleged protection of the Polish national honour vis-à-vis the Holocaust.

The mission of the IHRA, as defined by the Stockholm Declaration, is to transmit the memory of the Shoah and to promote research and studies on topics related to this genocide. Poland has committed itself to this declaration, and this is the basis for its membership in the IHRA. Beyond the verbiage, the legislation in question refers to at least three distinct problems.

The first concerns the refusal to call 'Polish' camps, the concentration and extermination camps in Poland during the Second World War, an obvious and justified demand in this case: these camps were German camps, installed on occupied Polish territory. There were no Polish guards, only Polish prisoners and victims. But this is a false problem: no researcher, politician or serious government will find fault with this demand of the Polish government. The IHRA fully supports the position of Poland on this subject. However, the fact that the Polish government insists on reiterating a claim accepted by almost all research centers and Holocaust memorials – and certainly by all major centers in Jerusalem, Washington, Amsterdam, Paris (and elsewhere in the world), affiliated with the IHRA – seems to obscure the true purpose of this legislation, namely to attack the freedom of Holocaust research in Poland. I am deeply wary of notions such as 'national honour', all the more so when they are applied to entire nations or ethnic groups.

The second problem is that this legislation criminalizes anyone who would hold the Polish nation or government responsible for crimes committed on national territory during the war. Here is a very strange argument. The Polish nation or state could not commit any action on Polish territory during the war, since Poland was then occupied and terrorized by a foreign power. There certainly existed a political and military anti-German resistance, which obviously could not act as a recognized government. The Polish government in exile controlled resistance only to a limited extent. It is true that, unlike other countries, Poland did not cooperate politically with Nazi Germany. Nothing very surprising about that, since Nazi Germany did not seek to establish or negotiate with any Polish political group – the Nazis wanted to eliminate Polish nationality as such and reduce the Polish people to slavery. National pride is therefore, here again, a false problem.

The third point, fundamental, concerns the question of relations between Jews and Poles on Polish territory occupied during the war. Historians of the establishment in Poland claim that the Poles tried to save the Jews. According to them, there were a plethora of Polish rescuers, the typical example being the Ulma family, in the small town of Markowa. The Ulmas had tried to save two Jewish families, they were denounced and murdered with the Jews they had wanted to hide. The museum erected in this small town describes the Polish nation as a nation of rescuers. It is a shameless lie, which masks the fact that in the villages and small towns around Markowa, peasants, armed with pitchforks and clubs, hunted down Jews, killing those who tried to escape or handing them back into the hands of the Polish police, who fully collaborated with the Germans, or even delivered them directly to the latter. This state of affairs reproduced throughout the country. The participation of Poles in the murder of Jews was widespread. The rescuers – not in number of 60,000, as some Polish pseudo-historians put it, but perhaps one third or even less of this figure, out of some 21 million Poles – were themselves true heroes, who had to protect the Jews not only from the Germans, but often also from their Polish neighbors. However, beyond the rescuers themselves, a significant minority showed a positive attitude towards the Jews and many were those who gave them their help. Some resistance movements were well disposed towards the Jews. Most, however, were not. But no Jew could survive in Poland without the help of the Poles.

It is this complex reality that is today at the heart of the debate. The legislation is intended to make research on this difficult subject impossible: it supposedly protects scientific and artistic works from any criminalization. But who determines what such works are? What about an investigative journalist? A budding artist, but not (yet) recognized? Or a tourist guide explaining how the local population merrily looted Jewish property, while their owners were gathered to be murdered? Or a simple undergraduate student, writing an assignment as part of a course, and who would ask to consult archives – when they submit their copy, will they have to serve three years in prison for discovering that a group of villagers murdered their Jewish neighbors? I suppose they would prefer not to write this assignment. Freedom of research or publication cannot exist in such an atmosphere, such an authoritarian and intolerant climate. Excellent Polish historians openly and courageously oppose it, mainly but not only around the Polish Holocaust Research Center, including eminent professors such as Barbara Engelking, Dariusz Libionka and many others. On 28 January, they published their own statement (in fact the re-publication in 2016 of a very strong opposition to the legislation). The government policy also meets with opposition from the director of POLIN, the museum of the history of the Polish Jews, in Warsaw.

The IHRA demands, in the most vehement way possible, that this type of legislation, which cannot be recognized by a civilized society, should be repealed. Poland is a major member of the IHRA and relations within the IHRA with Polish colleagues have always been nothing less than excellent. But the Polish government must make a decision: in favor of freedom of investigation, research and publication, for the right to make mistakes as well as to be right, or against, which then means going against the Stockholm declaration and the IHRA.”

Professor Yehuda Bauer, honorary president of the IHRA