Poland Tries to Curb Holocaust Speech, and Israel Puts Up a Fight

WARSAW, Poland — Even as international pressure mounted on Poland to back away from a new law that would make it illegal to blame Poles for crimes committed by Nazi Germany, the Senate passed the legislation Thursday.

The bill, which sets prison penalties for using phrases like “Polish death camps” to refer to concentration camps set up by the Nazis, is subject to the approval of President Andrzej Duda. Supporters are urging him to sign it, even at the risk of rupturing relations with Israel and the United States.

This week, Duda said that he would review the legislation closely before deciding whether to sign, but he added that he was “absolutely outraged” that the Israeli ambassador had criticized the legislation during a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp on Polish soil.

“I don’t know if there is some misrepresentation or misinformation in regard to how the Israeli side understands parts of this legislation,” Duda told the state broadcaster Monday. “But we, as a state, as a nation, have a right to defend ourselves from an evident slander, an evident falsification of historical truth, which, in this case, for us is a slap in the face.”

Even Poles who do not support the law consider the phrase “Polish death camps” deeply offensive and historically wrong. A draft of the legislation to ban the phrase has been in the works for more than a year.

The current measure passed the lower house of Parliament on Friday. The move, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, seemed planned to provoke a reaction.

It got one.

“The law is baseless; I strongly oppose it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement released Saturday. “One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied.”

On Thursday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Israel would seek to postpone a planned visit by a top Polish national security official.

“On the backdrop of the approval of the bill by the Polish Senate,” the ministry said in a statement, “Israel has requested the postponement of the planned visit of the head of the Polish National Security Council.”

Yair Lapid, leader of a centrist opposition party in Israel and the son of a Holocaust survivor, wrote on Twitter, “There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that.”

Israeli journalist Lahav Harkov wrote a tweet simply repeating “Polish death camps” 14 times.

Poland was invaded and occupied by Germany in 1939, but unlike in neighboring countries, there was no collaborationist government in Warsaw. Roughly 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and another 3 million Polish citizens died.

Several international organizations have been quick to condemn the law, including Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

The United States has asked Polish officials to rethink plans to enact the bill, arguing that it is a threat to freedom of speech and to Poland’s international relationships.

But even as international condemnation poured in, the Polish Senate took up the measure for debate late Wednesday. The body, controlled by the governing Law and Justice party, moved swiftly, ignoring all of the opposition’s amendments. The legislation passed 57 to 23, with two abstentions.

But even some Law and Justice lawmakers thought it was reckless.

“How is it that nobody had foreseen that it was a terrible idea to accept this bill on the eve of the anniversary of International Holocaust Remembrance Day?” Sen. Anna Maria Anders, the daughter of a Polish war hero, asked during the debate.

“We could have done it a week, two weeks later,” she said. “And now we have a terrible, terrible international crisis. The crisis is not just in Poland and Israel. The American Congress has begged Poland not to pass this bill. This is so unnecessary. Why didn’t anyone predict that this would be the reaction?”

Deputy Justice Minister Patryk Jaki responded that Poland “could not have predicted this reaction because the Israelis had never expressed any criticism in regard to this bill.”

Donald Tusk, president of the European Council and a former Polish prime minister, suggested in a Twitter post on Thursday that the Polish government was guilty of the very thing the law was intended to fight.

“Who spreads false accusations about the ‘Polish camps’ damages Poland’s good name and interests,” he wrote. “The authors of this bill have promoted this slander all over the world, and have been successful in it as no one before them.”