Israel’s education minister said Monday that Poland cancelled his visit to the country amid uproar over proposed Polish legislation that would outlaw blaming Poland for crimes committed during the Holocaust.
“The blood of Polish Jews cries from the ground, and no law will silence it,” Naftali Bennett said in a statement late Monday. “The government of Poland cancelled my visit, because I mentioned the crimes of its people. I am honored.”
The cancellation of Bennett’s trip scheduled for Wednesday came several days after Israel’s Foreign Ministry requested the postponement of the planned visit of the head of the Polish National Security Council that was set to take place in coming weeks.
The bill proposed by Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice Party calls for fines and prison sentences of up to three years for purposely trying to attribute the crimes Nazi Germany carried out during the nearly six-year occupation to the Polish nation as a whole.
Poland’s government has argued that it is fighting against the use of phrases like “Polish death camps” to refer to the camps Nazi Germany operated on Polish soil. Poland has also sought to highlight its own suffering at the hands of the Nazis.
The bill sparked outrage in Israel, raising tensions with a close ally.
Israel sees it as an attempt to whitewash the role some Poles played in the killing of Jews during World War II.
“Yes, the death camps in Poland were built and operated by the Germans, and we cannot allow them to evade responsibility for these actions,” Bennett said. “However, many Polish people, all over the country, chased, informed or actively took part in the murder of over 200,000 Jews during, and after, the Holocaust. Only a few thousand people, Righteous Among the Nations, risked themselves to save Jews.”
The Nazis and their collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews, wiping out a third of world Jewry.
(AP)
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3 Responses
Widely known that Ukrainians and Poles were involved on a large scale. The truth hurts, but it doesn’t change.
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President Barack Hussein Obama, a Shiite Muslim, referred in a speech in 2017 to “Polish death camps.”
The Polish government insisted that Obama should apologize for calling the death camps “Polish.”
This was a fact not a gaffe.
Poland was known for its anti-Semitism centuries before the Nazis conquered them and occupied their land.
Read “Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust”
Edited by KevinP. Spicer, C.S.C.
Tzerciak, a Polish pseudo “scholar,” called kosher ritual slaughter “a monstrosity of the 20th century” and pushed for banning of it. The Sejm (parliament) Administrative Council of the Committee of the Polish parliament declared he was an ignoramus in Judaism and Jewish a Law but popular opinon was with him.
Shortly before the Nazis invaded Poland the most important concern of the Polish Sejm in 1939 was in creating the anti-Scheitah law which would forbid kosher slaughter of animals—the topic of the coming war was not as important to Poland.
Yes, their were righteous Polish gentiles before and after WW II but only too few.
Most willing participated in sadistically beating Jews to death so viciously that even the Nazi soldiers were appalled by it.
In WW II, 35 million Poles turned on their Jewish neighbors—whose ancestors lived in Poland for hundreds of years—and participated in the vile roundup and sadistic killing throughout the war.
“Volksdeutsch” once referred to Poles who, during the Nazi occupation, betrayed Poland by registering as ethnic Germans to secure the occupier’s favor.
The credo of the WWII Polish partisans army, Armia Krajowa (AK) was “Polska bez Zydow” (Poland without Jews).
Where is the belated apology (and reparations) by Poland for the savage, sadistic, murder of millions of innocent Jews during WW II?
How about the pogroms and murders of Polish Jews in past centuries?
There was a wave of pogroms in 1881-1884.
In a riot in Warsaw alone twelve Jews were killed, many others were wounded, and women were raped while over two million rubles worth of Jewish property was destroyed.
Poles killed many Jews who tried to regain their homes after WW II.
This is a bastardly nation.
No different from Nazi Germany.
No different.
The death camps were rightfully called and will forever be called
“Polish Death Camps.”
Poland is a Polish Joke!