Poland’s prime minister is again evading responsibility for the horrors executed by his countrymen during the Holocaust and rejecting calls to pay restitution to survivors and their families.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has declared: “If anyone says that Poland must pay any reparations to anyone, then we answer: we do not agree to it. We do not, and will not, agree. There will be no agreement to this, as long as Law and Justice will stay in power.”
He even argued that if Poland paid restitution, it would be a victory for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
“Because if it were to happen, ladies and gentlemen, at any point in time, this terrible injustice, if the executioner and the victim were swapped in place, it would be an insult to all rules of the international law, and it would also be a posthumous victory for Hitler. This is why we will never allow this to happen,” said the Polish prime minister, whitewashing Polish culpability in the suffering and death of millions of Jews in that country.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, says that in fact, assistance offered by Poles to Jews during the Holocaust “was relatively rare, and attacks against and even the murder of Jews were widespread phenomena.”
Yet, the Warsaw government persists in whitewashing Polish culpability.
This month, Poland’s Foreign Ministry announced that it was canceling the visit of a senior Israeli delegation to Warsaw to discuss Holocaust reparations.
The ministry said that it made the decision after “Israel made last-minute changes in the composition of the delegation, indicating that the talks will focus mainly on issues related to the return of Jewish property during the Holocaust.”
Yad Vashem concurs that “we should put an end to the use of the misleading and ill-conceived concept of ‘Polish death camps,” which were fun by the German Nazi regime, but adds that “research has long since disproved…that the Polish government-in-exile and its underground arms strove indefatigably—in occupied Poland and elsewhere—to thwart the extermination of Polish Jewry.”
Recently, thousands of Polish nationalists marched to the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw protesting Washington’s pressure on Poland to compensate Jews whose families lost property during the Holocaust.
Polish officials must cease resisting any effort to tie their people to collaboration with the Nazis. The denial must stop.
Demand that Polish government pay restitution to Holocaust survivors!
Email Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki: [email protected]
Contact Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs: https://www.gov.pl/web/diplomacy/jacek-czaputowicz
