DARIUSZ STOLA, the owlish director of Polin, the museum of Jewish life in Warsaw, remembers when Jewish sections first started to appear in bookshops in Poland. “I thought it would fade out,” he says. It didn’t. Instead, over the past two decades Poland has become a place where the nation’s past, in particular its relationship to the 3m Polish Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, is debated more vigorously by politicians, intellectuals and ordinary people. Many bookshops now have a section on Polish-Jewish history; since it opened in 2013, Polin has become one of the capital’s most popular museums.
This debate may now be under threat. The Polish government, led by Law and Justice, a radical nationalist party, appears intent on politicising historical discussion—and even criminalising it. In February Patryk Jaki, the deputy minister for justice, proposed banning the phrase “Polish death camps” on pain of a fine or three years’ imprisonment.
Poles detest this phrase, since it inaccurately suggests that Poles, not Germans, ran concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka on Polish soil. When Barack Obama used it in a…
