The Politics of National Memory
Poland's new law criminalizing mention of the complicity of the "Polish nation” in the crimes of the Holocaust is a dangerous attempt to use history as a political tool. Yet Poland's government is hardly the first to edit the past to serve a nationalist narrative, as Israelis should know very well.
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MADRID – When, on a visit to Warsaw in 1970, German Chancellor Willy Brandt suddenly dropped to his knees before the Monument to the Ghetto Uprising, Władysław Gomułka, Poland’s communist leader, whispered, “wrong monument.” Gomułka would have preferred a tribute to Poland’s fallen soldiers in World War II. Poland’s current ultra-nationalist government, led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, would probably have agreed.