Polish historian Krzysztof Krasowsk has petitioned his country’s Institute of National Remembrance to disinter the bodies of hundreds of Jews murdered in the village of Jedwabne during the Second World War in order to exonerate their Polish neighbors. In his request, he cited the testimony of an 89-year-old woman identified in the Polish media only as Antonina K.
Hundreds of Jews were brutally killed in Jedwabne in 1941, a crime widely attributed to the Germans until 16 years ago, with the publication of a groundbreaking book on the massacre by historian Jan Gross.
Poland and other post-Soviet states have been struggling with coming to terms with their wartime records and, in many cases, pushing back with alternative narratives, since they gained independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union. This trend has only accelerated under the nationalist Law and Justice Party, which took power in 2015.
In recent years, Poland has been censured by historians for legislating a specific Holocaust narrative that casts Poland in the best light possible.
In 2016 the country’s parliament passed a bill that would ban the use of the phrase "Polish death camps” and its derivatives. In 2015 the government opened an investigation into Gross over his historical statements, claiming that he had publicly insulted the Polish nation.
Last year Poland passed a bill that would ban the use of the phrase "Polish death camps” and its derivatives.
Poland has also clashed with neighboring Ukraine over its own historical approach. Since the end of the EuroMaidan revolution in early 2014, the Ukrainian authorities have sought to rehabilitate members of the OUN and UPA, ultra-nationalist organizations which initially collaborated with the Nazis and murdered tens of thousands of Poles and Jews.
One senior Polish official said last year that Ukraine will never obtain its cherished goal of European integration as long as it continues to glorify wartime “heroes” like OUN leader Stepan Bandera. The Polish parliament declared the mass murder of Poles by Ukrainians during the war to be a genocide, a move that was not well received by Kiev.
