The EconomistFebruary 10th 2018 Europe 51O
N FEBRUARY 6th 1943 Auschwitz received 2,000 Polish Jews
from a ghetto in Bialystok, in north-east Poland. Almost all
of them were murdered in the death camp’s gas chambers; just
one grisly episode in the six-year saga of Nazi barbarity in Poland.
Six million Poles were killed in the second world war, most of
them victims of the Third Reich. This week, exactly 75 years after
that routine day in Auschwitz, Poland passed a law that threatens
fines and imprisonment upon anyone who attributesthose
crimes to the “Polish nation”.
Poles have long railed against the phrase “Polish death
camps”, as Barack Obama learned when he thoughtlessly de-
ployed it in 2012. But the term reflects clumsiness, not historical re-
visionism: no one argues that Poles ran Auschwitz or any of the
other camps in Poland. As he prepared to sign the law Andrzej
Duda, Poland’s president, said no Holocaust survivor should feel
scared to give personal testimony. Academics and artists are ex-
empt from its provisions. But Polish teachers orjournalists may
now hesitate before bringing up, for instance, the Jedwabne mas-
sacre of 1941, in which hundreds of Jews were locked in a barn
and burned alive by Poles under Nazi occupation.
In that case, why legislate? A closer reading of the law pro-
vides a clue. Its writ extends beyond the Holocaust to cover the
denial of crimes committed by “Ukrainian nationalists” against
Poles during the war. Poles and Ukrainians are bound together by
a history of occupation, pogroms and deportation, sometimes as
allies, more often as foes. Poles shudder when Ukrainian towns
devote statues or streets to Stepan Bandera, a nationalist hero
whose independence movement spawned an insurgent army
that killed tens of thousands of Poles in Nazi-occupied regions in- But Ukrainians believe their actions are part of a broader his-
tory of Polish oppression and colonisation. Such disputes are
best litigated by academics, not politicians. Yet Poland’s govern-
ment, run since 2015 by the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party,
wants history pressed into partisan political service.
Eastern Europe is criss-crossed by scars of war and occupation
to a degree that many westerners struggle to understand. In a re-
gion of competing narratives, latent grievances and weak states,
leaders with a taste fordemagoguery will alwaysbe tempted to
draw from an ample arsenal of historical memory. Ukraine’s con-
troversial “decommunisation” laws enshrine one particular his-
torical narrative in statute. Viktor Orban’s populist nationalism in
Hungary is undergirded by an old grudge against the treaty of
Trianon, which dismembered Hungarian territory after the first
world war. Russia and Lithuania have passed laws on the inter-
pretation of history. Nor is this solely an ex-communist phenome-
non. In Greece, politicians who should know better have been
encouraging nationalists’ resistance to a resolution of the “name
problem” of Macedonia, their formerYugoslav neighbour (they
believe it implies territorial ambitions overan identically named
province in northern Greece). This pointless row has held up
Macedonia’s membership of the EU and NATOfor years, though
it could soon be resolved if Greece permits.
But disturbing the earth of history can exhume all manner of
nasties. Fearful that Mr Duda would veto the history law, a bunch
of thugs demonstrated outside the presidential palace urging him
to “tear off his yarmulke” (he is not Jewish). Skinheads calling for
a “Pure Poland” are a common sight on Polish marches, and there
are even signsof xenophobia againstthe country’s 1m or so Uk-
rainians. Relations with allies have suffered, too. If the Israeli at-
tack on the Polish law grabbed headlines, the reaction from Uk-
raine was equally hostile. The Rada (parliament) called it
“distorted”, and a group of Ukrainian historians said they would
no longer visit Poland to work. PiSseems to be legislating its way
towards the cynical definition of a nation offered by Karl
Deutsch, a Czech political scientist: “A group of people united by
a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours”.
It need not be like this. In the 1990s Polish leaders were guided
by the “Giedroyc doctrine” of friendly relations with ex-Soviet
neighbours. More recently Poland has championed Ukraine’s in-
tegration with the EU. Ukraine’s motives are more complicated;
the mythologising of Bandera reflects a need for national heroes
at a time when the countryhas been undermined by Russian in-
vasion and occupation. Few Ukrainians know about the atroc-
ities their forefathers visited upon Poles, though that might have
changed in 2016 had the government not banned screenings of
“Wolyn”, a Polish film that documented the 1943 massacres.No one likes us, we don’t care
If Poland’s new law was designed to deflect attention from Polish
wrongdoing, it backfired. For weeks foreign media have been re-
counting the details of Polish wartime atrocities. An own goal,
then? Hardly. PiSthrives on thissort ofopprobrium. Its political
assault on Poland’s institutions, especially the judiciary, and its
diplomatic missteps have left it ostracised inside Europe and
alienated from allies, including America. Yet while many voters
hate this, a growing number do not: PiScommands almost 50%
support in polls. The international reaction to the law cements
the government’s narrative that only it can be relied on to pre-
serve historical truth and defend the honour of the Polish nation.
Hours after MrDuda signed the bill, Mateusz Morawiecki, the
prime minister, said Poland was only now beginning to emerge
from the dependence on outsiders that had marked the decades
after communism. His government’s law is less about correcting
the record than twisting Poland’s national story into one of his-
torical victimhood—and casting sceptics as traitors. Amid the re-
cent burst of optimism surrounding Macedonia’s name, Nikola
Dimitrov, its foreign minister, sayshe spots an “opportunity to
step out from the trenches of history”. With luck, it will be taken.
But other countries are digging further in. 7History wars
Poland’s historical-memory law is divisive and hurtful. That’s the pointCharlemagne