What Mr. DiDonna read today
WARSAW — President Andrzej Duda said on Tuesday that he would sign into law a bill making it illegal to accuse “the Polish nation” of complicity in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, a measure that has roiled relations with Israel and the United States, and spurred claims that the nationalist government is trying to whitewash one of the bloodiest chapters in Poland’s history.
Opponents have predicted that the law — which prohibits, among other things, the phrase “Polish death camp” — would stifle free speech and put questions of historical accuracy into the hands of judges and prosecutors who may be more motivated by politics than scholarship. Despite weeks of ferocious criticism from other nations and from independent scholars, Mr. Duda’s right-wing Law and Justice Party pressed ahead with the bill.
Mr. Duda said in a speech broadcast on Polish television and radio that he would sign the measure, while asking the Constitutional Court to determine whether the law violated free-speech protections and to make clear specifically what kinds of speech could be prosecuted. He said that the government wanted to be sure that survivors of war crimes felt free to tell their stories without fear.
But a judicial review is unlikely to placate those who have accused the Law and Justice Party of dangerous revisionism. It is unclear when the high court, which is controlled by judges appointed by Mr. Duda’s party, might act; the law would remain in effect at least until then.
In Poland, the governing party has tightened its control of the courts and state media in ways that have brought condemnation from the European Union, which has accused it of undermining democracy, and has opened the door to the bloc’s taking punitive action. The new law reflects a broader effort by the government to shape both memories of the country’s past and its vision for the future.
For more than 20 minutes on Tuesday, Mr. Duda reviewed his country’s bloody history, noting time and again that both ethnic Poles and Jews died during the war. Like many Poles, he has a personal story of suffering: He said that h is grandfather’s brother was killed by the Nazis.
“Those years when Poland was occupied by the Nazis was one of the darkest time in Poland’s history,” he said.
The Israeli response was muted on Tuesday, unlike the angry reactions of recent weeks, as the law neared enactment. The Foreign Ministry took note of the Constitutional Court review, and expressed hope that Israel would “manage to agree on changes and corrections.”
“Israel and Poland hold a joint responsibility to research and preserve the History of the Holocaust,” the ministry said.
Ten days earlier, after Polish legislators approved the bill, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied.” Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, canceled a planned speech, saying, “Everyone in Israel was revolted at this news.”
Polish officials have said they will work with Israel and others to ensure that the law would not affect the work of scholars and artists.
“The worst thing about a law like this is that it convinces you that you understand yourself,” said Timothy D. Snyder, a professor of history at Yale whose book “Bloodlands” examined the deaths of 14 million civilians in Eastern Europe who were killed by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. “Your confidence in yourself grows as your knowledge of yourself goes down.”
Dr. Snyder, whose book spurred highly politicized arguments about collaboration, national suffering and ethnic chauvinism, said the fight over the Holocaust law was also tied to current tensions with the European Union, which in Poland is closely identified with Germany.
“The notion of wartime victimhood at the hand of Germans follows pretty easily into one of sovereignty,” he said, adding that sovereignty “is the right to define yourself as innocent.”
The new law taps into the widespread feeling in Poland that the the world does not fully understand the scale of wartime suffering for ethnic Poles.
From 1939 to 1945, some six million Poles were killed, more than one-sixth of the population. Half of those were ethnic Jews, and the Nazi regime built some of the most notorious concentration camps on Polish soil, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belzec.
At the outset of the war, Germany invaded from the west and the Soviet Union from the east; they partitioned Poland, which did not exist as an independent nation for more than five years. As a result, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told foreign journalists on Friday, it was not possible to blame the country for any of the horrors that took place during the war.
He compared it to a bandit invading a home with two families: If the bandit slaughtered one family and killed several members of the other, he asked, how could that second family bear any culpability in the crime.
Even those who oppose the law agree that the phrase “Polish death camp” is historically inaccurate. Both Israel and Germany have issued statements saying that the use of the phrase is wrong.
But it is the part of the law making it a crime to accuse the “Polish nation” of atrocities that has caused the deepest concern.
“Whoever claims, publicly and contrary to the facts,” the law reads, “that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich or for other felonies that constitute crimes against peace, crimes against humanity or war crimes, or whoever otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the true perpetrators of said crimes — shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to three years.”
The Constitutional Court could decide uphold all of the law or none of it, or could strike down only those provisions that have drawn the harshest condemnation.
The Polish law is similar to one in Russia that makes it a crime to say that the Soviet Union was an aggressor during World War II, or to describe Soviet actions as war crimes.
The Polish government has said repeatedly that it wants to work with Israel and other opponents to address their concerns. But on Monday, the government canceled a planned visit by the Israeli education minister, Naftali Bennett, after he criticized the law.
“The blood of Polish Jews cries from the ground, and no law will silence it,” Mr. Bennett said in response. “The Government of Poland canceled my visit, because I mentioned the crimes of its people. I am honored.”
“Now, the next generation has an important lesson about the Holocaust of our people, and I will ensure that they learn it,” he said, adding that the Polish government’s decision “has a role to play in Holocaust education, even if they intended it to achieve something else.”
Mr. Morawiecki, who called the fight over the law Poland’s “Rubicon,” told state-run television in an interview on Monday that it was too late to change the law.
He said that the “real intention” of the legislation was “not to write history differently” or to “cover it up.”
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