Three members of the advisory council to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum – one third of its composition – have resigned after the government appointed a leading figure from the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. Two of the departing members expressed concern over the “politicisation” of the council.
On Tuesday, it was revealed that Beata Szydło – who served as prime minister from 2015 to 2017 and is now a PiS MEP as well as deputy leader of the party – had been appointed to the council by the culture and national heritage minister, Piotr Gliński.
Szydło announced that it was “an honour and great responsibility” to be chosen for the position, especially as she herself is from Oświęcim, the Polish town where the former Nazi-German camp is located.
Dziękuję premierowi @PiotrGlinski za powołanie w skład Rady Muzeum przy @AuschwitzMuseum. Ta społeczna funkcja jest dla mnie, mieszkanki Ziemi Oświęcimskiej, zaszczytem i wielkim obowiązkiem.
— Beata Szydło (@BeataSzydlo) April 13, 2021
In response, Stanisław Krajewski, a University of Warsaw professor and active member of Poland’s Jewish community, wrote to Gliński to inform him that he was quitting the council.
“I understand [Szydło’s appointment] as a politicisation of the council [and] cannot see a possibility of functioning within its framework,” he told the culture minister.
Subsequently, two further members of the council – Marek Lasota, director of the Home Army Museum, and Krystyna Oleksy, a former deputy director of the Auschwitz Museum – also submitted their resignations.
“The reasons for my decision are similar to those expressed by Stanisław Krajewski,” Lasota, a historian and former PiS candidate for mayor of Kraków, told Gazeta Wyborcza. “[The council] has always been a body dealing with historical and conservation issues, not politics.”
Krystyna Oleksy, who was chair of the council during its previous term, has not revealed the reasons for her resignation. In addition to her, Lasota and Krajewski, the remaining members of the council are Bogdan Bartnikowski, Grzegorz Berendt, Tomasz Gąsowski, Edward Kosakowski and Jan Nowak.
The museum, which is a Polish state institution, is located at the site of the largest German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where at least 1.1 million people died.
The vast majority of them – around 91% – were Jews, but the second largest group of victims were ethnic Poles. They made up 11% of those deported to the camp and 6% of those who died there.
Since returning to power in 2015, PiS has been keen to emphasise the victimhood of Poles during the war. Speaking ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day last year – which is held on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called for anti-Polonism to be fought in the same manner as antisemitism.
Szydło herself in 2017 announced a new museum commemorating “heroes and good and decent people” from the area around Auschwitz. Its aim would be to “remind the world who were the executioners and who were the victims”, she said.
Many in Poland feel that Poles are wrongly blamed for German atrocities against Jews, such as through the misleading labelling of Nazi-German concentration and extermination facilities in occupied Poland as “Polish camps”.
Germany using “systematic information activities” to evade WW2 responsibility, says Polish spokesman
A spokesman for Poland’s security services recently claimed that Germany has been carrying out “coherent and systematic information activities” designed to evade responsibility for the atrocities of the Second World War.
However, many accuse the Polish government of also seeking to whitewash history by downplaying or ignoring instances in which ethnic Poles were involved in the persecution or murder of Jews during the war.
Szydło’s appointment to the Auschwitz Museum’s advisory council – which oversees the institution’s activities – has been interpreted by some as an effort to further expand PiS’s “historical policy”.
“Her mission in the council will no doubt be the Polonisation of Auschwitz,” Agnieszka Magdziak-Miszewska, a former Polish ambassador to Israel and previous member of the International Auschwitz Council (a separate body to the advisory council), told Catholic magazine Więź this week.
This would include expressing the view that “the memory of Poles is insufficiently emphasised in the museum, that Polish themes are neglected”, predicted Magdziak-Miszewska. But such accusations – often heard from Polish conservatives and nationalists – are untrue, she added.
A poll published last year found that, when asked what they most associate with Auschwitz, half of Poles say “the martyrdom of the Polish nation”. A smaller proportion, 43%, associate it primarily with “the destruction of the Jews”.
Main image credit: P. Tracz/KPRM (under public domain)
Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.
