Poland passed a bill on January 26 making it illegal to claim Poles or the Polish state were complicit in Nazi crimes during the Second World War, sparking an angry response from Israel, which accused Warsaw of plotting to rewrite the history of Holocaust.

The row erupted on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day that falls each year on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by the Red Army in 1945.

The law seeks to penalise those who “publicly and against the facts ascribe responsibility or co-responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the Third German Reich to the Polish nation or the Polish state”.

One of the reasons for passing the law was to end the use of the phrase “Polish death camps”, which the Western officials or media sometimes wrongly employ to describe death camps such as Auschwitz or Belzec, set up by the Nazis in occupied Poland.

In the opinion of top Israeli officials, however, the law could open door to rewriting the history of Holocaust. “We will not tolerate distorting the truth, rewriting history or denying the Holocaust,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on January 28.

There is no doubt that the Nazi-organised extermination of Jews led to the killing of more than 90% of Poland’s pre-war Jewish community of around three million people, the largest in Europe at the time. 

However, historians have long been exposing cases of Poles turning against Jews under occupation by killing them or turning them in to the Nazi authorities. 

Poland typically responds to these accusations by pointing to a relatively large number of Poles who helped save Jews. The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre Yad Vashem lists over 6,700 Poles who rescued Jews during the war, the largest number of any other country. The second-listed Netherlands – a much smaller country – has nearly 6,000 entries.

Some historians have said, however, that the number of Jews who died at the hands of Poles during Nazi occupation was greater than the number of Jews saved by fellow Polish citizens. Such research invariably creates backlash from the conservative circles in Poland that like to claim wartime heroism was the norm.

“Jews, Poles, and all victims should be guardians of the memory of all who were murdered by German Nazis. Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a Polish name, and Arbeit Macht Frei [the infamous slogan atop the entrance to the camp] is not a Polish phrase,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote on his Twitter account.

The controversial law is yet to pass through the Polish Senate and needs a signature from President Andrzej Duda to become effective. 

Poland and Israel agreed to discuss the legislation further. 

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke this evening by telephone with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. The two agreed that teams from the two countries would open an immediate dialogue in order to try to reach understandings regarding the legislation,” the Israeli PM’s office said on Twitter.