Polish president calls to ‘bear witness to the truth’ in four days

Polish President Andrzej Duda published an opinion piece in 'The Washington Post' on Thursday in which he discusses the Nazi crimes committed on Polish soil, and Polish resistance to them.

By HAGAY HACOHEN
Poland's President Andrzej Duda delivers a speech before the official start of a march marking the 100th anniversary of Polish independence in Warsaw, Poland November 11, 2018. (photo credit: AGENCJA GAZETA/ADAM STEPIEN VIA REUTERS)
Poland's President Andrzej Duda delivers a speech before the official start of a march marking the 100th anniversary of Polish independence in Warsaw, Poland November 11, 2018.
(photo credit: AGENCJA GAZETA/ADAM STEPIEN VIA REUTERS)
Polish President Andrzej Duda published an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Thursday in which he lamented the loss of a thousand years of Jewish presence on Polish land due to the crimes of the Nazis, and called on the world to shoulder the burden of remembering the horrors that took place.
“What befell the nation of descendants of Leibniz, Goethe, Schiller and Bach, when they were infected with the virus of imperial pride and racist contempt,“ he warned, “ may come as an everlasting warning.”
Duda made public his refusal to take part at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem on Thursday after, he claimed, he was not invited to speak.
As the head of the country in which many of the death camps were built by the Nazi occupiers – and due to the fact that millions of the victims had been Jews who were Polish citizens, as well as Catholic Poles marked for destruction by the Germans – he argued that he must be given a chance to represent his nation.
He wrote of the upcoming official ceremony marking the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, which took place on January 27 1945, and mentioned the efforts made by the Home Army, one of the Polish resistance movements, to save Jews. He also mentioned Polish hero Jan Karski, who delivered news of the crimes against the Jews in Poland to the allies.
The reports were considered as Polish propaganda and not believed by the British and American officials to whom they were given. It was this refusal that led to the suicide of Szmul Zygielbojm, a Jewish member of the Polish government in exile, who took his own life in April 1943. “I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered,” he wrote in a suicide letter.  
The Polish leader did not mention the mass killing of Jews that took place in Poland after the Second World War ended – when the country was allegedly free of its Nazi occupiers – such as the Krakow pogrom of 1945 and the Kielce pogrom of 1946. It was such violent events that led many of the remaining Jews of Poland to leave their former homeland.
Those who stayed in the People’s Republic of Poland, such as poet Julian Tuwim, theater director Tadeusz Kantor, science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem or even politician Jakub Berman, did so for complex, personal reasons such as their deep ties to the Polish language and culture or their belief in socialism.
“The truth about the Holocaust must not die,” wrote Duda, “it must not be distorted or used for any purpose.” 
Polish-Israeli relations suffered considerably in 2019 due to the policy of Poland's Peace and Justice Party, which argues that the Polish nation can not be accused of any of the crimes committed against the Jews in occupied Poland. They legislated a law making the publication of such views a criminal offense, saying that one may speak of Polish individuals who committed crimes but not of the nation – which, in this world view, is embodied in the Home Army or the Polish Government in Exile.
Historians in Israel and elsewhere warned that such a law might cause the quality of public debate concerning history to go down, as people might be too scared to openly say what they think or have discovered.
Such a world view also ignored the Communist-inspired Polish resistance movement Armia Ludowa, the right-wing resistance movement National Armed Forces, and their complex attitudes to Jews.
American war reporter Martha Gellhorn, writing about the Polish fighters in her 1959 book The Face of War, that “the Poles could not be classified, which was one of their greatest charms.”