On February 6, 1943 Auschwitz received 2,000 Polish Jews from a ghetto in Bialystok, in north-east Poland. Almost all of them were murdered in the death camp’s gas chambers; just one grisly episode in the six-year saga of Nazi barbarity in Poland. Six million Poles were killed in the second world war, most of them victims of the Third Reich. This week, exactly 75 years after that routine day in Auschwitz, Poland passed a law that threatens fines and imprisonment upon anyone who attributes those crimes to the “Polish nation”.
Poles have long railed against the phrase “Polish death camps”, as Barack Obama learned when he thoughtlessly deployed it in 2012. But the term reflects clumsiness, not historical revisionism: no one argues that Poles ran Auschwitz or any of the other camps in Poland. As he prepared to sign the law Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, said no Holocaust survivor should feel scared to give personal testimony. Academics and artists are exempt from its provisions. But Polish teachers or journalists may now hesitate before bringing up, for instance, the Jedwabne massacre of 1941, in which hundreds of Jews were locked in a barn and burned alive by Poles under Nazi occupation.
