How the Polish Right is Rewriting the History of the Shoah
Discussion: Jan Grabowski, Konstanty Gebert
Konstanty Gebert
How the Polish Right is Rewriting the History of the Shoah
Since 2016, there has been a major reversal in the way the history of the Shoah in Poland is being presented in official discourse. The concept of Polish participation in the Shoah is being rejected as slanderous, while the efforts of Polish Righteous are being presented as typical for Polish society at the time. Vast public funds are being invested in this effort, which has been endorsed by leading political personalities, while academic and law enforcement repression is directed at critics. This is combined with a sustained campaign of refusing to provide property restitution to victims of the Shoah and their descendants. These processes make historical distortion official Polish policy.
Konstanty Gebert is a journalist and co-founder of the Polish-Jewish monthly Midrasz. He was a democratic opposition activist in the 1970s and underground journalist in the eighties in Poland. Gebert is author of several books on Poland’s round table negotiations of 1989, on the Yugoslav wars and on Israeli history. He most recently published Ostateczne rozwiązania (2022), a book on comparative genocide.