Poland’s Curb on Holocaust Speech

Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, recently signed a bill that would outlaw statements blaming Poland for the crimes of the Holocaust. Since then, multiple nations, including Israel and the U.S., have criticized this bill, which they see as yet another authoritarian move to restrict free speech by Poland’s right-wing government. The bill treads the line between outlawing falsehoods and libel and outlawing free speech, making it very difficult to either oppose or support the bill.

The bill is composed of two main parts. The first provision of the bill is to abolish the use of the phrase “Polish death camps.” This is internationally supported, as concentration camps located in Poland were controlled entirely by the Nazis, and none of the guards or personnel were Polish—the majority were Ukrainian. It is thus correct to say that the camps in question are “Nazi death camps” and not “Polish death camps.”

The second part of the law is far more controversial. It criminalizes claiming that Poland was in any way “responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” This is controversial for a number of reasons, the first being that many citizens of Poland were directly or indirectly responsible for helping to perpetuate Nazi crimes. Some Poles worked with the Nazis to help capture and reveal their fellow Polish Jews who were attempting to escape. One Polish historian, Jan Grabowski, estimates that Poles working with the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of 200,000 Polish Jews.

The second reason this provision is controversial is that it attempts to change and shape Poland’s Holocaust history. In Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement about the bill, he argued, “One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied.” He follows a similar logic to that of Dr. Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, who commented that “the worst thing about a law like this is that it convinces you that you understand yourself. Your confidence in yourself grows as your knowledge of yourself goes down.”

This law would cover up and rewrite an uncomfortable yet important part of Poland’s history. It is understandable that Poland doesn’t want to be associated with the inhumane crimes of Nazi Germany, but attempting to censor provocative speech does more harm than good. In fact, the censorship of free speech about the Holocaust may lead Poland down a slippery slope into an Orwellian world where the government can change and mold history for its own purposes. When people cannot express opinions and different views of history, these views of history fade away and succumb to the government’s enforced view of the world.

We saw this at the very beginning of Nazi Germany, and while it is unlikely Poland’s situation will escalate to that point, it could become similar to Cuba, where the totalitarian government’s censorship laws allow them to control the media. Poland is at the point where its censorships on speech have begun to revise and mold past and current history in a subtle manner, one that can nonetheless escalate over time.

For Poland, this law was originally meant to act as a way of fending off a common assumption of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Many world leaders, including Obama, have made the mistake of referring to “Polish concentration camps,” and Poland has long sought to remove this negative connotation. Yet this law does more than just clarify Poland’s role in World War II: its limits on free speech can be seen as fitting into a larger context of a crackdown on democratic freedoms and the media.

Since the reigning Law and Justice Party was formed in 2001, it has been challenging the status quo of Europe that has existed since World War II in a way that threatens Europe’s peaceful, democratic ambitions. The European Union has always upheld human rights and personal liberties, including the right to freedom of expression. Yet the Law and Justice Party has proposed discriminatory policies against members of the LGBTQ+ community and xenophobic anti-refugee policies and has stated that the European Union should “benefit Poland and not the other way around.”

Poland is attempting to veer away from pluralism, in which laws allow free speech but prohibit libel and slander (which is the current state of most European countries) and is in turn replacing it with oppressive laws that define acceptable speech. While platforms that blame the Polish government for the Holocaust are false, outlawing them takes away both freedom and power from the people. This allows the government to set a precedent for similar restrictions on other types of speech and undermines the democratic system that the people can hold each other and their government accountable for their actions.