Auschwitz museum criticises politicisation of Holocaust after Polish ruling party uses camp in video

The Auschwitz museum has issued a statement condemning the use of the Holocaust for political purposes after Poland’s ruling party featured the former German Nazi death camp in a video criticising an upcoming anti-government march by the opposition.

“The instrumentalisation of the tragedy of people who suffered and died in the German Nazi Auschwitz camp – by either side of the political conflict – is an insult to the memory of the victims,” tweeted the museum’s official account.

“It is a sad, painful and unacceptable manifestation of the moral and intellectual corruption of public debate,” they added.

The museum’s statement did not refer directly to any political group or specific occurrence. However, it was published just over an hour after the conservative ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party had broadcast a new video featuring Auschwitz, in which over one million people, most of them Jews, were killed during World War Two. Ethnic Poles were the second largest group of victims.

In the clip, PiS presented a tweet from earlier this week by Tomasz Lis, a prominent journalist and commentator who is critical of the government and supportive of the opposition but is not formally associated with any party.

Lis had written, in response to a new law creating a commission to investigate Russian influence that critics say will be used by the government against the opposition: “A chamber [komora] will be found for [President Andrzej] Duda and the Duck [Kaczor, a derisive nickname for PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński].”

PiS and its supporters claim that Lis was threatening that Duda and Kaczyński would be sent to a gas chamber. In its new video, the party suggests that his words will be the slogan for a mass opposition march planned to take place on Sunday and asks people if, that being the case, they really want to attend.

Lis himself, who has since deleted the tweet, claims that his words had been “twisted and manipulated by PiS propaganda”.

The term he used for chamber, komora, does have various meanings in Polish. Historically it was a used to refer to a storage room, for example, and can suggest a closed, windowless space. Lis later tweeted that he had been using the word to mean a solitary confinement cell in a prison.

However, komora is most commonly associated in Polish with the gas chambers (komory gazowe) that Nazi Germany used to murder millions of Jews and others during World War Two, including at Auschwitz, which was located in German-occupied Poland.

A deputy interior minister, Maciej Wąsik, argued that “in Poland, ‘chamber’ [komora] is associated only with the gas chamber”. He called for the justice minister to request that prosecutors investigate Lis’s remarks.

Lis yesterday said he was “very sorry for his post about a ‘chamber’. Obviously I was thinking about a cell but I should have predicted that people of ill will would adopt an absurd interpretation. I hope that Duda and Kaczyński will pay for their crimes against democracy, but I wish them [good] health and a long life”.

Regardless of the true meaning and intent behind Lis’s original tweet, PiS’s response today received widespread criticism from opposition politicians as well as many commentators, including some conservative figures normally sympathetic towards the government.

One opposition party, Agreement (Porozumienie), announced that it would today submit a notification to prosecutors alleging that the ruling party had committed a crime by publishing the video, though it has not yet specified which law they believe was broken.

The chief of PiS’s election campaign, Tomasz Poręmba, however, accused such critics of being “hypocrites” as they had failed to react to Lis’s original threat to “send Kaczyński and Duda to the chamber”.

A number of politicians and commentators reserved particular criticism for Anna Zalewska, a PiS MEP and former education minister, who shared the video on Twitter with the comment “Für Deutschland” (“For Germany”).

That phrase, once spoken by Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Platform (PO), the largest opposition party, is often quoted without context by PiS and its supportive media to suggest that Tusk represents German rather than Polish interests.

Tusk is the leading figure behind a march planned in Warsaw this Sunday, which is the anniversary of the first partially free elections in 1989 after the fall of the communist regime.

The PO leader called for all other opposition parties to join the event, which he says will be a protest against the “high prices, theft and lies” the government is responsible for. The other main centrist, centre-right and left-wing opposition groups have confirmed they will be present.

Main image credit: PiS/Twitter (screenshot)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.