This Saturday, 60,000 hard-right nationalists took to the streets of Warsaw to affirm their commitment to a "white Europe," "clean blood," and to “Get Jews out of power.” Some held banners reading "We Want God" - a quote from an old Polish religious song that U.S. president Donald Trump invoked during his visit to Poland this past July. [...]
Yet instead of impartially describing what happened at Auschwitz, tours drift into nationalistic bias. Encomia to Polish heroism and selflessness abound, with the resistance movement and the preponderance of Poles in the Avenue of the Righteous Among Nations at Yad Vashem, taking pride of place. Even as righteous Poles are glorified, their less-than-righteous counterparts - perpetrators of atrocities like the Jedwabne massacre and the Kielce pogrom - are simply ignored. [...]
In July 2016, Education Minister Anna Zalewska disavowed Polish responsibility for both Jedwabne and Kielce, leading to condemnations from Jewish organizations worldwide. Zalewska’s statements came days before the controversial appointment of journalist and historian Jaroslaw Szarek, another public denier of Polish complicity at Jedwabne, to the Presidency of the Institute of National Remembrance, a government-affiliated research organization. [...]
According to a 2005 public opinion poll, 51% of respondents believed that the majority of the victims of Auschwitz were Jewish. A poll from January 2015 revealed that only 33% of Poles currently associate Auschwitz with Jewish deaths, with 47% believing it to be primarily a site of Polish suffering.
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