Israel and Poland are locked in a battle over the latter’s controversial Holocaust Bill. After a series of comments by both nations, Warsaw on Sunday sought to defend remarks by its prime minister, which Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu called “outrageous”
Safeguarding country’s image
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda on February 6 signed into law the Bill intended to safeguard his country’s image abroad but which has instead sparked tensions with Israel, the US and Ukraine. He said he would send the law to the Constitutional Tribunal to rule on whether it conforms with constitutional guarantees on freedom of speech
Auschwitz, the emblematic site of Nazi atrocities
The law sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone who erroneously describes Nazi German death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau as being Polish, simply due to their geographical location
“As the most lethal of the Nazi extermination camps, Auschwitz has become the emblematic site of the ‘final solution’, a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz; 90 percent of them were Jews,” according to Encyclopædia Britannica. The Poles constituted the second largest victim group at Auschwitz, where some 83,000 were killed or died
Tensions with Israel and Ukraine
Israel, however, has expressed concern that the legislation could open the door to prosecuting Holocaust survivors for their testimony, should it concern the involvement of individual Poles for allegedly killing or giving up Jews to the Germans
Ukraine has also protested against the law with President Petro Poroshenko protesting against “absolutely biased and categorically unacceptable” articles that allow for the prosecution of anyone denying the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists committed between 1925 and 1950