Nazi collaborator monuments in Poland

The country has two monuments to Hungarian prime minister Pál Teleki who stripped Jews of rights in the prelude to the Holocaust

Pál Teleki statue, second from right, Skierniewice (Google Maps). Image by Lev Golinkin

By Lev Golinkin July 21, 2025

This list is part of an ongoing investigative project the Forward first published in January 2021 documenting hundreds of monuments around the world that honor people involved in the Holocaust. We are continuing to update each country’s list; if you know of any not included here, or of statues that have been removed or streets renamed, please email [email protected], subject line: Nazi monument project.

Left: Pál Teleki (Wikimedia Commons). Right: Teleki statue, Krakow (Wikimedia Commons). Image by Lev Golinkin

Krakow and two other locales – There are a statue and street to Pál Teleki (1879–1941), a count and geographer who was twice prime minister of Hungary in Poland. During his first premiership (1920–1921), Hungary passed antisemitic laws limiting Jewish access to education. During his second premiership (1939–1941), Teleki championed and signed into law numerous pieces of antisemitic legislation stripping Hungarian Jews of rights and instituting forced labor for Jewish men. The laws, which were modeled on the Nuremberg Laws, paved the way for the annihilation of Hungary’s Jews. In total, around 550,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated thanks to efforts of collaborators like Teleki. Jewish organizations including the Simon Wiesenthal Center have protested attempts to honor him.

Poland’s other honors to Teleki include a statue in Skierniewice (below right) and a street in Warsaw. The Skierniewice statue is part of a complex of leaders of countries that supported Poland during its war against the USSR in 1918–1921. Another statue in the complex is of Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura (1879–1926) whose troops murdered tens of thousands of Jews, but two decades before the Holocaust.

See the Hungary, Romania, Serbia and U.S. sections for more Teleki honors.

Left: Pál Teleki and Hitler, Vienna, November 20, 1940 (Wikimedia Commons). Right: Teleki statue, in back; Symon Petliura’s statue is on the right, Skierniewice (Google Maps). Image by Lev Golinkin

Lev Golinkin is a regular contributor to the Forward whose work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time.com. His memoir, A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, chronicles his immigration from Ukraine.