Poland turns history into diplomatic weapon

Jo Harper

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A Polish-Jewish historian comes under fire for questioning Poland’s historical record.

Jan Gross is a U.S.-Polish Holocaust historian | Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty

WARSAW — In a campaign to give a better gloss to Poland’s history, President Andrzej Duda launched what he calls an “offensive,” and the first target is U.S.-Polish Holocaust historian Jan Gross.

Duda is mulling whether to strip Gross of one of Poland’s highest honors for suggesting that during World War II Poles killed more Jews than they killed Germans. The assertion, which Gross backed up with numbers in an interview with POLITICO, strikes at the heart of Poland’s national narrative — that it is a nation uniquely harmed by history and for that reason should have a louder voice on the world stage.

It’s a key component of the worldview of the country’s nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) ruling party.

“Historical politics should be conducted by the Polish state as an element of the construction of our international position,” Duda said at a recent conference dedicated to the country’s revision of history.

“The majority of Poles grew up on the myths of Polish knighthood, conspiracy and struggle and this majority is unwilling and unlikely to change its mind” — Jan Muś, an academic from Lublin.

Duda’s efforts are part of a broader campaign by Law and Justice to use the wrongs of the past to fend off criticism of the present.

Death camps

The party has come under international censure for recent steps undermining the functioning of the constitutional court, politicizing the civil service, combining the offices of justice minister and prosecutor general, and putting state media under tighter government control. Officials like Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro have been especially sensitive to any disapproval from German politicians, quickly bringing up Germany’s bloody wartime occupation of Poland.

Ziobro is also behind a push to punish publications that refer to “Polish death camps” in reference to wartime Nazi concentration camps on Polish soil. The previous center-right government would send angry diplomatic letters to newspapers and magazines which slighted Poland in that way, but Ziobro wants miscreants to serve jail time for the suggestion.

“This will be a project that meets the expectations of Poles, who are blasphemed in the world, in Europe, even in Germany, that they are the Holocaust perpetrators, that in Poland there were Polish concentration camps, Polish gas chambers. Enough with this lie. There has to be responsibility,” Ziobro said.

The government isn’t just focusing on World War II.

Wałęsa’s past

One of the central narratives of Law and Justice, strongly promoted by its leader Jarosław Kaczyński, is that the end of communist rule in 1989 was in large measure a trick that allowed communist elites to enrich themselves with the help of corrupt leaders of the pro-democracy Solidarity labor movement. That means Poland’s independence over the last quarter century has been a sham.

A central part of that account is that Lech Wałęsa, the Solidarity leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Polish president, was in fact a communist agent.

Duda’s efforts are part of a broader campaign
by Law and Justice | Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty

This week fresh allegations arose that he worked for the communist secret services in the 1970s. He was cleared some years ago by the Institute of National Remembrance, a body that investigates Nazi and communist crimes, but documents seized this week from the house of recently deceased General Czesław Kiszczak, a communist-era interior minister, suggest Wałęsa had been issued with the a codename ‘Bolek.’ Wałęsa has admitted to an “incident” with the secret police in the early 1970s, but has adamantly denied being an informant.

“You aren’t able to change the real facts with lies,” he wrote on his blog.

That’s not the view of Sławomir Cenckiewicz, an anti-Wałęsa historian, who issued a statement that Wałęsa’s past “had a crucial meaning” in the way he ran Solidarity and “on the shape of reforms after 1989.”

Mateusz Morawiecki, deputy prime minister and development minister, told Poland’s TVN television that it was “obvious” that Wałęsa was a communist-era agent.

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