Polish President To Sign Holocaust Speech Bill, Send It To Judges For Review
Polish President Andrzej Duda with Croatian President Kolinda Grabar- Kitarovic at Auschwitz in 2016. Image by Getty
(JTA) — Polish President Andrzej Duda said he would sign a controversial law limiting rhetoric on atrocities committed in his country during World War II, but added he would refer it for review by a constitutional court.
The bill would make it illegal — and punishable by up to three years in prison — to say that the Polish government, nation or people took part in the Holocaust. The bill would also make it illegal to describe Nazi death camps located in Poland — including Auschwitz-Birkenau — as “Polish.”
Duda said this Tuesday during a press conference in Warsaw about the bill that the lower and upper houses of the Polish parliament passed after Jan. 26. It criminalizes blaming the Polish state or nation of crimes and atrocities the bill says were perpetrated exclusively by Nazis during their occupation of Poland.
The bill generated an outpouring of condemnations from international Jewish groups and from the highest levels of the Israel government, who suggested it whitewashes the actions of some Poles who are responsible for killing Jews during the Holocaust.
The bill was submitted following many years in which Polish officials protested the use of the term “Polish death camps” to describe facilities set up on Polish soil by the German Nazis. To become law, Duda must sign the bills passed in parliament.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
