How many Polish PR specialists does it take
to defuse outrage over a Holocaust law?
MICHAŁ BRONIATOWSKI
Shocked by the reaction from Israel and the US, Warsaw seeks to set the record straight.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki delivers a speech during the main ceremony marking the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp | Stanislaw Rozpedzik/EPA
WARSAW — Poland’s public relations counteroffensive against criticism of its new Holocaust law is becoming a bit of a PR joke.
Keen to restore calm after a wave of attacks on a controversial law that makes it a criminal offense to tie Poland to the wartime crimes of Nazi Germany, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki last week delivered a solemn prime-time speech in which he stressed that Poland does indeed respect the memory of those who died in the Holocaust.
Alas, when the speech was uploaded to YouTube and translated into English, the following appeared onscreen: “Camps where millions of Jews were murdered were Polish.”
The law makes it a crime to say concentration camps were Polish, not German.
The government had to issue a correction that there was a missing word — “not” — in that sentence in the PM’s speech.
But then when Morawiecki recorded an English version of the address, with the “not” now included, he said that Germans were responsible for all World War II crimes, including the murder of thousands of Polish officers at the Katyń. This atrocity, in fact, was committed by the Soviet Union, though Poland’s communist-era government did blame the Germans for it.
By week’s end, the prime minister’s office organized a press tour for foreign correspondents that was intended to show how difficult and risky it was for Poles to save Jews during the war (POLITICO wasn’t invited). The reporters were taken to the southeastern village of Markowa, where he showed them a new museum devoted to a Polish family who were executed — adults and children alike — for sheltering Jews.
Some of the reporters found out that the family was shopped to the Gestapo by their Polish neighbor and the firing squad included Polish officers — exactly the kind of events that the new Polish law would forbid speaking about.
The journalists were fed omelette with Kiełbasa, a Polish sausage made with pork (a curious choice on a trip the purpose of which was to make clear that the government has nothing against Jews). There were some Jewish reporters on the trip.
The purpose of the legislation, which was adopted by the Polish Senate early Thursday morning, is to counter accusations of Polish anti-Semitism during the war, which the government sees as an unfair slur.
But the international furor over the law, including by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has ended up projecting a different impression.
Beata Mazurek, spokesperson of the ruling Law and Justice party, retweeted a comment about the Israeli ambassador’s critical reaction to the law, saying that: “What the Israeli ambassador did makes it difficult for me to look at Jews with kindness and sympathy.”
 Beata Mazurek @beatamk
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A prominent pro-government journalist called Israeli parliamentarians “greedy scabs” while another state TV journalist called on Polish Jews who don’t like the law to move to Israel. Neither has apologized.
Speaking to reporters in Markowa, Morawiecki was unrepentant: “It is our government that made more efforts than any previous government to mend Polish-Israeli relations,” he said, according to a journalist on the trip.
Polish President Andrzej Duda has until February 21 to decide whether to sign the Holocaust bill into law.
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