The ‘passivity’ of Jews during Nazi reprisals explains Israel’s angry reaction to Poland’s controversial new law, which forbids blaming Poles for their complicity in the Holocaust, an adviser to the country’s president claims.

The law in question was adopted in the Eastern European state earlier in February and outlaws blaming Poles for their complicity in the crimes of the Holocaust during the Second World War. The legislation, which also criminalizes the words “Polish death camp,” has predictably angered Israeli leaders and sparked a row between Warsaw and Tel Aviv.

Now, Andrzej Zybertowicz, an adviser to the Polish president, told the Polska Times newspaper that Israel’s furious reaction has much to do with a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust.” Zybertowicz, who served as “security advisor” to then-President Lech Kaczynski from 2008 until 2010, claimed Israel is “clearly fighting to keep the monopoly on the Holocaust.”

According to Zybertowicz, “many Jews engaged in denunciation, collaboration during the war,” a fact that is awaiting open discussion in Israel. His remarks come on the back of a political row that unfolded after the Polish Senate voted to approve the controversial bill.

President Andrzej Duda, who signed the bill into law last Tuesday, maintained it was necessary to combat an unfair perception of Poles as collaborators in the Nazi genocide of Jews. According to other Polish government officials, the expression “Polish death camps” hurts the feelings of their countrymen.

In the meantime, Warsaw tried to defuse tensions by taking some conciliatory steps. In a nod to critics, President Duda also asked the country’s Constitutional Court to review the law, signaling that it could be amended in future.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Poland does not intend to limit freedom of speech when it comes to the Holocaust. “We understand the emotions in Israel. A lot of work is needed for us to be able to tell, together, our shared and often complicated history,” he said on Thursday, as cited by Radio Poland.

The Holocaust law has been widely condemned in Israel, home to many Polish Jews who survived the Nazi death camps. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lambasted the law as a “distortion of the truth, the rewriting of history and the denial of the Holocaust,” while the Israeli envoy to Poland, Anna Azari, said the legislation would open “a possibility of punishment for Holocaust survivors’ testimony.”

Jews were sometimes described as being submissive to Nazi authorities even in the face of the Holocaust, but some notable historic events seemingly contradict this theory. To name a few, Polish Jews took up arms against the Germans during the 1943 Warsaw Uprising. Other acts of resistance took place in Nazi extermination camps, including in Sobibor and Treblinka, where starving Jewish prisoners confronted armed German guards.

Polish official accused Jews of "passivity during the Holocaust"


Adviser to the President of Poland Andrzej Zirtsovic believes that Israel's response to the law, which criminalizes some of the comments of Poland's actions during the Second World War, stems from "a sense of shame for the passivity of Jews during the Holocaust." The adviser said this in an interview with the newspaper Polska-The Times.

"The Holocaust is also a monstrous humiliation in that they (Jews) did not fight, did not resist," Zyrtovich said.

According to the adviser, "the brutal persecution of the Palestinians or Hezbollah is now a form of liberation" from this passivity.

In addition, Zyrtkovic accused the Israeli leadership of undercover games. He recalled that in 2016, former Prime Minister of Poland Beata Shidlo and Benjamin Netanyahu signed a joint statement condemning the use of the phrase "Polish death camps."

"The current conflict can be perceived as a signal that the friendly relations between Poland and Israel are not as deep as we thought," the adviser said.

Meanwhile, according to the American historian, sociologist and political scientist of Polish descent, a specialist in the Second World War and the Holocaust Jan Tomas Gross, the bill prohibiting attributing "Nazi crimes" to the "Polish state and people" is due to anti-Semitic motives.

"The fact that the Israeli political leaders protested when the Diet voted in the beginning for the bill, inspired most Polish senators to approve this document in order to demonstrate to the Polish public opinion that they will not yield to the demand of the Jews," Gross told Le Monde.

He believes that the adopted document serves as an additional stage in the struggle conducted by "Right and Justice" to "curb historians working on this topic."

"Two years ago I was summoned to the judicial department on the grounds that I had inflicted an insult on the Polish people," Gross said.In one of my articles I stated that during the Second World War the Poles killed more Jews than the Germans, which is "The prosecutor ordered the case to be closed for lack of corpus delicti, but the state ordered him not to close this file." The case is still in production. "

Of course, they would not even risk losing a one hair if this situation concerned a Pole. There has never been and will not be a legal provision, ordering a second man to save a stranger at the price of his life and his whole family, and that was the price, and it was Poles who saved the most Jews during the Second World War. Today, the Prime Minister of Israel proclaims disgusting theses as an amendment to the law whose main assumption is to make public using the term "Polish death camps" is supposed to "falsify historical facts", it is simply a bastard, it knows well what it says, it says it consciously, and then people are surprised where "anti-Semitism" comes from.