On Tuesday, 25 October, a publication appeared on the official Twitter account of the POLIN Museum on the occasion of an upcoming conference commemorating the 80th anniversary of “Operation Reinhardt”.
All would be well if the Museum would not formulate its message in a way leaving room for erroneous interpretations. According to POLIN, the “International Conference: Operation Reinhardt and the Destruction of Polish Jews” seeks to “present the latest research on the Holocaust in Poland”. Here lies the problematic part.
Polish MP Arkadiusz Mularczyk reacted by commenting on the publication. He argued that “a more appropriate description would be “the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland”.
Just to clarify, @polinmuseum, a more appropriate description would be “the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland”! We mustn’t allow any room for error and/or distortion when it comes to our history!!! https://t.co/rzMTos9i63
— Arkadiusz Mularczyk MEP (@arekmularczyk) October 25, 2022
In the past decades, a growing tendency to dissolve the responsibility for the Holocaust among various nations can be observed. Although the genocide of European Jews was entirely coordinated by the German Third Reich in the first half of the 1940s, it’s very often vaguely identified as “nazis” who are nowadays presented as culprits.
The danger with such formulations is that other nationalities, such as Poles who fiercely fought the German invader, are sometimes put in the same back as the genuine criminals of that time. Many Poles still remember very well Barack Obama’s “slip of the tongue” when referring to “Polish death camps” while President of the US.
POLIN is a massive Warsaw museum telling the story of Jews who have been inhabiting Poland for centuries. As it can be read on the official website, the initiative to create the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was born in association with the Jewish Historical Institute and gradually gained recognition both in Poland and abroad.
Image: Wikipedia, public domain
Author: Sébastien Meuwissen
