Contractors illegally bulldoze Jewish cemetery in Poland

A construction crew bulldozed a Jewish cemetery in the Polish city of Maszewo last week, only a year after it was registered as a protected site.

Citing the Polsat news website, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the contractors had illegally bulldozed the site "leveling the headstones, pushing the debris, along with bones, to the edge of the plot where the headstones used to stand.”

City authorities stated that they were unaware of the construction at the site, which had recently been sold, but pledged to restore what they could. The new owner is now being investigated.

Last month, Polish historian Krzysztof Krasowsk actively called  for his country’s Institute of National Remembrance to exhume 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.