Warsaw – Polish Education Minister Anna Zalewska has come under
fire for remarks appearing to deny Polish responsibility for two massacres of
Jews, one during the Holocaust and the other after the end of World War II.
Zalewska had addressed the Jedwabne massacre of 1941, during which Poles
burned alive more than 300 Jews inside a barn, and the Kielce massacre in 1946,
in which 42 people were shot by Polish police because of a false blood libel
accusation. The anniversaries of both pogroms were observed in Poland last
week.
For many years, Poles tended to avoid discussing these pogroms, and when
they did address them, they denied that Polish antisemitism had been a motive
and instead blamed the Germans for the massacres. But the book Neighbors,
published in 2000 by Polish-American sociologist Jan Tomasz Gross, began to
change Polish perspectives on the issue, creating greater soul-searching in
Polish society and leading to official state apologies for the pogroms.
But when Zalewska was asked about the two pogroms by a journalist in an
interview on the public broadcaster TVN, she said that ”Jedwabne is a
historical fact that has led to many misunderstandings and very biased
opinions.”
When the journalist retorted that “Poles burned Jews in a barn,”
Zalewska responded, “That’s your opinion.”
The head of Never Again, an anti-racism watchdog group, told the
Associated Press on Thursday that it is “appalled by those comments which
amount to denial of the historical truth about antisemitic pogroms.”
Former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted that if the
government of Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo “doesn’t fire Zalewska, then
nobody should be surprised if her government is considered ‘Judeo-skeptic.’”
Sikorski was referring to several members of the populist ruling party, Law and
Justice, who have made controversial statements pandering to extreme nationalists.
