Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday lashed out at remarks by his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki who said the Holocaust had involved Jewish perpetrators.
Netanyahu who like Morawiecki was in Munich for a global security conference in a statement claimed the latter’s remarks stem from “an inability to understand history and a lack of sensitivity to the tragedy of our people”.
“The Polish Prime Minister’s remarks here in Munich are outrageous” he said adding that he intended to speak to Morawiecki “forthwith” about the matter.
Appearing at the Munich Security Conference Morawiecki was questioned by a journalist who told of his mother’s narrow escape from the Gestapo in Poland after learning that neighbors were planning to denounce them.
The journalist Ronen Bergman asked if by recounting this “I am a criminal in your country?”
Morawiecki responded: “It’s not going to be punishable not going to be seen as criminal to say that there were Polish perpetrators as there were Jewish perpetrators as there were Russian perpetrators as there were Ukraine and German perpetrators.”
He reiterated that the point of the law was to defend Poland’s honor by making clear that people knew “there were no Polish death camps… There were German Nazi death camps.”
“But we cannot agree with mixing perpetrators with victims because it would be first of all an offence to all the Jews and all the Poles who suffered greatly during the Second World War.”
Morawiecki’s remarks about the Holocaust’s perpetrators came amid an unprecedented diplomatic row with Israel sparked by a law passed by Poland’s senate this month.
The law sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone ascribing “responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich”.
