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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
The new US ambassador to Poland, Thomas Rose, has criticised those who blame Poles for the Holocaust, calling it a “blood libel” against a nation that was a victim of the war. He said that such “historically false and morally scandalous” claims have long “poisoned relations between Jews and Poles”.
Rose, who is himself Jewish, also said that Poland is today “the safest country in Europe for a Jew to walk the streets”.
Wczoraj wieczorem rozpocząłem rozmowę, która — mam nadzieję — przyczyni się do skorygowania bardzo niesprawiedliwej narracji historycznej na temat Polski. pic.twitter.com/5O6TgIs4We
— Ambasador Tom Rose (@USAmbPoland) November 20, 2025
“For too long, this nation has been burdened with the moral stain that was never its own, the persistent belief that Poland shares guilt for the barbaric crimes committed against it,” said Rose, who took up his post as ambassador this month.
“It’s a grotesque falsehood and the equivalent of a blood libel against the Polish people and Polish nation,” added the ambassador, who was speaking at a conference on antisemitism in Warsaw organised by the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.
The term “blood libel” is usually used to describe false claims made throughout history that Jews murder Christians to use their blood for religious rituals.
Most of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust died in German-occupied Poland, where the Nazis established Jewish ghettos and death camps. Around half of Holocaust victims were Polish Jews.
Non-Jewish Poles also suffered enormously under the German occupation, with around 3 million killed during the war. Many ethnic Poles were also sent to the Nazi camps. At Auschwitz, for example, they made up the second largest number of victims after Jews.
During the war, some Poles were involved in crimes against Jews, in some cases directly, such as during the Jedwabne massacre, or indirectly, by handing Jews over to the Germans. But many Poles also risked their lives to hide Jews, and the Polish underground resistance also sought to help Jews.
Over 30,000 pilgrims and Poland’s most senior officials attended a ceremony to mark the beatification – a step on the path to possible sainthood – of a Polish family murdered by the Nazi German occupiers for hiding Jews in their home during the Holocaust https://t.co/QhsQBG51R3
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 10, 2023
“Poland created the only government-sponsored underground institution in all of occupied Europe devoted solely to saving Jews,” said Rose, referring to Żegota, a body set up in 1942 to help Jews. It is believed to have saved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.
The ambassador also noted that Poland was the only place in German-occupied Europe where any kind of aid to Jews was punishable with the execution of the person and their entire family.
“Thousands of Poles died saving Jews,” said Rose. “Of course it wasn’t enough, didn’t stop the slaughter, but they proved, these heroic Poles proved, that even in their country’s bleakest night, multitudes of Poles chose conscience over fear and humanity over terror.”
President @AndrzejDuda has unveiled a monument in a small Polish town honouring over 30 Poles, most of them children, killed by the occupying Germans during WWII as a punishment for helping Jews hiding in the area https://t.co/NiaopXOT64
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) March 24, 2025
The ambassador noted, however, that Poles have often been blamed “for a genocide perpetrated by others on its soil”, which has “poisoned relations between Jews and Poles, between Israel and Poland, and between the United States and Poland for decades”.
Such accusations are “historically false and morally scandalous”, declared Rose, who also noted that “no country outside Israel has done more to commemorate and sacralize the Shoah than Poland – certainly not Germany, which committed the crimes, nor Russia, which suppressed them”.
He also noted that the relationship between Poles and Jews stretches far beyond the Second World War. “This was our home for 600 years. It was the centre of the Jewish world,” said Rose. Poland once had the world’s largest Jewish population.
The ambassador, a practising Jew who wears a skullcap, said that Poland today “is the safest country in Europe for a Jew to walk the streets”.
The Polish and Israeli presidents jointly led thousands of participants – including both Holocaust survivors and former Hamas hostages – on the annual March of the Living at Auschwitz.
"Never again antisemitism," declared Poland's @AndrzejDuda https://t.co/uV10qsSzOY
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 25, 2025
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: Grzegorz Krzyżewski BRPO (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)
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.
