The controversial Polish bill that calls for the imprisonment of anyone who accuses Poland of being complicit in the Holocaust has devolved, as expected, into the type of public conversation that is anything but productive.
Israel has justifiably been among those to sound the alarm over the bill's provisions, saying the measure is outlandish, dangerous and insulting, especially toward Holocaust survivors, but overall, the reaction to the bill's passage by the Polish lower house of parliament is troubling. Why? Because it proves, once again, that when current affairs and the Holocaust converge in the Israeli psyche, the result is panic. This, in turn, creates a binary and uninformed discourse.
Israeli politicians have turned this bill into a matter of Holocaust denial, focusing on whether the Poles are to be blamed for the killing of Jews during World War II. Only a handful of Israeli public figures have actually taken the time to see the bigger picture: that the bill is yet another manifestation of the dangerous trend of rewriting the historical narrative, as has been the case in Poland of the past decade.
Israelis have always looked at the Holocaust through an emotional prism, and that should continue to be the case. But it would be wise to occasionally pause and think by letting logic prevail over the Pavlovian response. One should keep in mind how the bill came about and what the politics behind it are. It should not be dismissed as yet example of anti-Semitism, because this only adds to the uninformed discourse and prevents people from actually familiarizing themselves with history.
On the one hand, it is well known that Poles carried out atrocities against the Jews in Jedwabne, Krakow and Kielce. The Poles took it upon themselves, in those cases and in many other less documented events, to kill Jews, both during the war and in its aftermath. On the other hand, 6,706 Poles have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, and indeed it was the Germans who were responsible for the death camps.On top of that, numerous Poles were imprisoned and even sent to those very camps.
Immediately after he was elected in 2015, Polish President Andrzej Duda promised he would pursue a "new strategy toward history." One of Duda's first steps was to ask that historian Jan Tomasz Gross be stripped of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, a national honor he received for his scholarship in 1996. Duda was outraged over Gross' 2001 book, "Neighbors," in which the historian said it was Poles, not the Nazis, who were responsible for the massacre of some 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne by burning them alive in a locked-up silo.
The latest piece of legislation should be seen as yet another step in implementing this strategy of suppressing scholarship and testimonies that do not fit with the Polish government's narrative. The bill does not apply to the general public and no one is going to be arrested just because they told their friend over coffee that the Poles are to blame for the Holocaust. The bill targets the agents of memory: historians, authors and journalists, who continue to open the historical wounds and dig up some inconvenient truths as part of their profession. This attack on free speech is what makes this bill dangerous.
But this increased focus on history should not be reduced to a debate on total guilt vs. complete vindication. Recognizing the complex reality is just part of the path we have to take in order to ensure the memory of the Holocaust lives on. This challenge takes on a greater significance as we near the point where survivors of the ghettos and death camps are no longer with us. We are duty-bound to rise up to this challenge in a mature, responsible and honest manner, not through some reckless reaction.
