Poland and Israel in Tense Talks Over Law Likened to Holocaust Denial

JERUSALEM — Polish and Israeli officials met Thursday to address the diplomatic rift that erupted over a new Polish law that makes it a crime to blame Poland for the Holocaust, a measure that Israeli officials have likened to Holocaust denial.

The law, adopted last month over the furious objections of Israel and scholars from around the world, makes it a crime to blame “the Polish nation” for the Holocaust and other World War II atrocities carried out by the Nazis during their occupation from 1939 to 1945.

It was the Nazis who oversaw the exterminations — by means of mass shootings, gas chambers, starvation and slave labor — that claimed the lives of some 6 million Jews. But the role of Polish collaborators, participants and enablers in the Nazi-run system of mechanized death, remains a subject of fraught historical inquiry.

Poland’s right-wing government says its goal is to defend the nation from slander, but scholars say the result is to stifle inquiry and reconciliation.

Last week, a group of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II added their voices to the debate.

“We ask you not to rewrite history,” the Poles — among 6,850 Poles recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem, as “righteous among the nations” for their heroism — wrote in an open letter to both Polish and Israeli leaders.

One of those who signed the letter was Anna Stupnicka-Bando, 89, who was a teenager when she and her mother smuggled books and food into the Warsaw ghetto. It was during one of those illegal trips that they met an 11-year-old Jewish girl, Liliana Adler, whom they hid in their two-bedroom apartment at her father’s urging.

Posing as Anna’s cousin, Liliana lived with the family — under their neighbors’ suspicious gazes — for four years until they were liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. “Everyone knows that there were those who were good and those who were bad,” Stupnicka-Bando said in a phone interview. “Those who were saving Jews, and those who were robbing and murdering them. There were heroes just as there were thieves and killers. Just like there were in every other nation. To say different is harmful and nonsensical.”

She added: “What is it now with all this counting — this checking how many of us were good and how many were bad? We are not some potatoes planted in a field that can be counted. We are people. Let it go.”

Stupnicka-Bando said the new dispute was unnecessary. “In recent years, we had finally managed to get some peace and quiet,” she said. “It seemed like all those conflicts, tensions were gone. How can they be back? How can one unfortunate phrase, one inaccurately written sentence destroy all of it?”

On Thursday, Israeli and Polish diplomats met for more than three hours in what the Israeli Foreign Ministry described as “candid and open dialogue,” although the talks were inconclusive.

The Israeli side was represented by Yuval Rotem, the ministry’s director general, and included diplomats, legal experts and historians from Yad Vashem.

At the start of the talks, Rotem told the Polish team — led by the deputy foreign minister, Bartosz Cichocki — that it was “no secret” that the legislation was “a matter of concern to Israel and to the Jewish people worldwide.”

He added: “We must make sure that historical truths are preserved, that there be no restrictions on the freedom of research and speech, and that the wide threat of criminalization in this regard is addressed and resolved.” After the closed-door talks, the ministry said it was especially concerned about “the criminalization clause, which constitutes an obstacle to the study of the truth and to open historical debate.”

The statement also expressed “concern about the public atmosphere that had recently been created in Poland and manifestations of anti-Semitism, and stressed the need for the Polish government to act with zero tolerance in the face of anti-Semitism.”

The dispute has strained relations between Israel and Poland. At a security conference last month in Munich, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, confronted his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki.

During a discussion, Ronen Bergman, a journalist who covers intelligence affairs for Yediot Ahronot and writes for The New York Times Magazine, remarked that his parents, who were born in Poland, “lost much of their families because their Polish neighbors snitched to the Gestapo.”

He added, “After the war my mother swore she would never speak Polish for the rest of her life, not even a single word.”

In a rambling response, Morawiecki said it would remain legal “to say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian, not only German perpetrators.”

The reference to “Jewish perpetrators” infuriated Israelis and others. Netanyahu called the comments “outrageous” and added, “There is a problem here of an inability to understand history and a lack of sensitivity to the tragedy of our people.”

Even so, Netanyahu has resisted pressure from legislators — including some from within his governing coalition — to recall Israel’s ambassador to Poland.

In an opinion article in Haaretz on Thursday, the deputy prime minister of Poland, Jaroslaw Gowin, said Israeli-Polish cooperation had improved in recent years and urged further dialogue.

How the law will be enforced remains to be seen. Historians, journalists and artists are to be exempted from prosecution under the law, and Joanna Kopcinska, a government spokeswoman, said “witnesses of history” would also be exempt. The Polish government, which has also curbed judicial independence and the press, is feuding with the European Union over the state of the rule of law in Poland.

On Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution supporting the European Commission, the bloc’s executive body, which has threatened to strip Poland of voting rights because of threats to democratic norms.

The commission warned Poland this week that it had until March 20 to backtrack on its judicial changes before Brussels takes action. “The clock is ticking,” Michael Roth, Germany’s minister for European Union affairs, told journalists.

The tensions on both fronts might have given the governing Law and Justice party pause. This week, the speaker of Parliament delayed debate on a proposal to establish a day of memorial honoring Poles who saved Jews.

Stupnicka-Bando said she hoped the current tensions were a result of a “misunderstanding and not ill will.” She added, “We, the righteous ones, are optimists.”

Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka, president of the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, which organized the open letter, noted that many of the letter’s signers were in their 90s, and she worried that memories of righteous acts were fading.

“They are worried that their legacy — the mutual understanding between Poles and Jews they achieved — might now be lost,” Junczyk-Ziomecka said.

She added that it would be important to study the experiences of both groups — Jews inside the ghetto walls, non-Jewish Poles in their occupied country.

“Jews and Poles spent years learning about what is a source of pain for the Jews, and what it is in the Polish soul that hurts,” Junczyk-Ziomecka said. “Their memories complete each other. They can’t imagine that someone might break them apart.”