On February 7, Andrzej Melak, a Law and Justice member of parliament, called for Medallions to be provided with editorial commentary. He had discovered that Nałkowska uses phrases the recent Polish legislation was designed to combat. In the last piece in the collection, “The Adults and Children of Auschwitz,” Nałkowska writes: “Not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of human beings underwent manufacture into raw materials and goods in the Polish death camps.” And a few paragraphs later: “The Germans promised Jews arrested in Italy, Holland, Norway, and Czechoslovakia prime working conditions in Polish camps.” (My italics, in both cases.) There is the phrase, not mentioned in the recent law but reflecting precisely the language against which the amendment is aimed. Nałkowska is beyond the reach of a legal suit, and the wording of the law suggests it will not be applied to historians or artists, but this only raises the question of how and to whom it will be applied. In a statement in English on its website, the IPN points to “the media” as chiefly responsible for what it considers the repeated slander of Poland, but the fact that many scholars and artists involved in the debate on Polish-Jewish history are also regular contributors to media outlets makes it clear that they, too, may be liable for prosecution if their views receive a sufficiently wide airing. [...]
In Poland, as in virtually every country that has been occupied by hostile powers, the dead are unsettling presences not just because they are dead but also because invoking their real presences means acknowledging the humiliation involved in the kind of choices people were forced to make in wartime. In their statement, the historians at the IPN make the astonishing assertion that “the truth never humiliates.” But as much as we want them to sit still for us as martyrs (or criminals), the dead contain a discomfiting mixture of guilt and innocence. Some of the Polish soldiers who fought the Nazis and the Communists also engaged in murderous actions against Jews. Those whose identity and national pride are bound up with those soldiers may well feel humiliated by that fact. In a democracy, these complicated realities of human history cannot be left for state officials to adjudicate. These moral knots are the stuff from which the greatest Polish literature has sprung. This is why the kind of insidious ideological control that has returned to Poland under the Law and Justice party is so disturbing and bizarre. [...]
To try to fix a country’s history and victim status by force of law is both foolish and futile. Like Holocaust denial laws, the Polish law will not stop people from saying things the Poles find offensive. It also leads the government immediately into inconsistencies. The Polish government resents the judgment laid upon it by the European Court of Human Rights for facilitating the CIA’s torture program—both by making available a building in the town of Stare Kiejkuty that was used to interrogate terror suspects, brutally and unlawfully, in 2002 and 2003, and by letting the US use an airport to fly detainees in and out. But when it is the United States that Poland is helping, turns of phrase suggestive of complicity (“Polish black sites”) do not excite the same legislative fervor.
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