Legislative monstrosities like these, written in a hurry and voted through parliament in the dead of night, are a specialty of the PiS. That they are strange, absurd, and imprecise is not just a result of the haste in which they are written and the lack of any prior consultation or discussion. This law, which contradicts both the constitution and common sense, was designed deliberately. Its purpose is to give PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński — who exercises total power in Poland, even though formally he’s just an ordinary member of parliament — and his acolytes the ability to prosecute any case they deem necessary at a given moment. Given PiS control of the courts, article 55 can even be enforced retroactively as an ex post facto law. [...]
It turned out that Poles, represented in previous historical accounts — whether by communists in the 1945-1989 period, or by right-wing liberals, nationalists, and neoliberal post-communists since 1990 — as only victims of either German or Soviet terror, were in fact complicit in the Nazi Holocaust. In the book My z Jedwabnego (We from Jedwabne), published in 2004, Anna Bikont presented a brilliant reconstruction of the events on the territory near Jedwabne following German occupation in July 1941. She showed that there were in fact many towns where Poles, without the participation of Germans, only their permission, murdered their Jewish neighbors. Descriptions of the pogroms included elaborate torture, rape, mutilation, and ended with burning their victims alive. It was so shocking that it caused a large segment of public opinion, together with right-wing historians and journalists, to simply deny these facts as impossible and unbelievable. [...]
From the dozens of memoirs and diaries of Jewish victims and survivors, as well as historical studies that have been published in Poland over the last twenty years, it has become clear that Jews in hiding were more afraid of Poles than of Germans. Germans could not recognize Polish Jews, while Poles picked them out unerringly. Some Poles, of course, helped or tried to help Jews in hiding, but they did so in opposition to the majority. This majority was infected with the prewar, pan-European virus of antisemitism and saw the Jews as their mortal enemies.
Researchers from the Polish Center for Holocaust Research estimate the number of Jews murdered directly by Poles or denounced by them to be in the tens of thousands. Some estimates even speak of 100,000 victims. The perpetrators of these murders and denunciations were: Polish policemen, Polish employees of the German construction service, members of the volunteer fire brigades, peasants, and city dwellers. Jews were also killed by partisan units of all political stripes: the extreme right-wing National Armed Forces (NSZ), the majority Home Army (AK), and the Peasant Battalions (BCh). Even some troops of the communist People’s Guard (later renamed the People’s Army) committed some murders, although for the most part Jews who were in the ranks of the People’s Guards or under their protection survived.
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