WJC President Lauder condemns Polish PM’s ‘absurd and unconscionable’ claim of Jewish responsibility for Holocaust
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder has strongly condemned Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s “absurd and unconscionable” allegation at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday that Jews could be counted among the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and demanded an immediate retraction and apology from the Polish government.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Photo : Miriam Alster/Flash90.
“The Polish prime minister has displayed appalling ignorance with his unconscionable claim that so-called ‘Jewish perpetrators’ were partly responsible for the Nazi German attempt to wipe out European Jewry,” Lauder said. “While Poles are understandably sensitive about Nazi German extermination and concentration camps in occupied Poland being called Polish, this government is going to extreme and unfathomable lengths to exonerate some of their countrymen’s own complicity in the murders of their neighbors.”
“This is nothing short of an attempt to falsify history, that rings of the very worst forms of antisemitism and Holocaust obfuscation,” Lauder said. “We demand an immediate retraction and apology from the Polish government of these absurd and offensive remarks. It is time for all European governments, including that of Poland, to own up to the role of their societies in abetting the Nazis and contributing to the near destruction of the Jewish people. Including Jews among the perpetrators of these horrors, and blaming the victims instead of the killers, is a travesty that will only draw us further back to some of the darkest moments in human history.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “The Polish Prime Minister’s remarks here in Munich are outrageous. There is a problem here of an inability to understand history and a lack of sensitivity to the tragedy of our people. I intend to speak with him forthwith.”
