The news has been spread everywhere in Europe and not only: Poland’s Senate approved a highly controversial bill on Thursday that bans
any Holocaust accusations against Poles as well as descriptions of Nazi
death camps as Polish (source The Washington Post). If President Duda will approve it, the law will become effective with a penalty for the transgressors up to three years in jail.
It is a little bit difficult to understand why this law was issued.
During the II WW, six millions of poles died (the half were Jewish). Poland is the first country for number of Righteous Among the Nations (an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis): 6706.
It is also true that some Poles helped Nazis during the occupation and the war like in the case of the Jedwabne pogrom, where 340 Polish Jews were killed by a group of Polish inhabitants of the town with the complicity of the Nazis.
US and Israel stated that this law is against the freedom of speech and also against the responsibilities of Poles during the II World War.
What I see is that it looks hard for all the countries take their own responsibility on the shame on the Holocaust and on the caused that originated the war.
In a very interesting book - Origins Of The Second World War - the author, A.J.P. Taylor, in the Sixties was claiming how not only Germany was the cause of the war, but many other events under the responsibility of all the European Countries, UK and France of course, but also Poland and Czechoslovakia for instance.
Auschwitz was a Nazi camp and even if it is within the Polish border, it was created by the Germans during their occupation. But this doesn't mean deny the responsibility of everybody in what happened.
An interesting article by Jonathan Freedland published on The Gardian explains well the Polish problem:
It’s not hard to see why this has happened. Polish nationalists want Poles to have been the untainted victims of Nazism: it’s hard to admit that too many were willing assistants to genocide. Like almost every nation occupied by the Nazis, and unlike Germany itself, Poland has not yet made a clear-eyed reckoning with its past. It has not fully wrestled with the fact that a Jewish community that once made up 10% of its population, and which was the largest in Europe, has gone, murdered en masse in just over three years. “Poland is not at peace with its Jewish ghosts,” says [Konstanty] Gebert. “These are phantom limbs. You amputate the limb and it still hurts.”
