Polish identity, like that of many other former Eastern Bloc nations, is still a work in progress. Massacred by the Nazis and steamrollered by the Soviets for four decades, Poland recovered its ability to define itself and its past relatively recently. Since emerging from under the Soviet shadow in 1989, Poland has — very slowly — prised open the story of what happened to its three million Jews. In recent years, the country has done much to memorialise the Holocaust, re-engage with its vanished Jewish past and carry out the delicate historical balancing act of recognising that, while Poles suffered enormously, some of them were also perpetrators. The Polish government rightly received high praise for its 1996 decision to award an Order of Merit to Holocaust historian Jan Gross for his work documenting historical Polish antisemitism and the episodes in which Poles joined the Nazis in torturing and killing the country’s Jews. But, having been elected to power last year, the ruling, neo-nationalist Law and Justice party is undoing this progress. Last week, it threatened to strip Gross of his award and is now pushing for a new law that would make it a crime to imply that the country bears any responsibility for atrocities carried out on Polish soil in the Nazi era. Such a law would be a form of institutional Holocaust denial, and a sad reminder that Jews, once again, must keep a wary eye on nationalist movements in Europe.