Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, summoned Israel’s ambassador yesterday to express discontent regarding a post on X from the official Yad Vashem account.
The post read: “Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear a distinctive badge in order to isolate them from the surrounding population.”
The order for Jews aged ten and above to wear a 10cm-wide white cloth armband marked with a blue Star of David was issued to Polish Jews by on 23 November 1939.
However, Sikorski claimed that the post did not make it sufficiently clear that the war crimes mentioned in the post were committed by occupying Nazi forces, and not Poland itself.
He first requested on X that Yad Vashem “specify that it was ‘German-occupied’ Poland”.
Yad Vashem then reshared the post, stating that “as noted by many users and specified explicitly in the linked article, it was done by order of the German authorities”.
However, dissatisfied that the original was left unchanged, the next day Sikorski posted: “Since the misleading post has not been amended, I have decided to summon the ambassador.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk reinforced Sikorski’s criticism, calling the post a “disgrace” and saying that it looked “not like a mistake, but like bad will on the part of whoever edited that text, because it is so contrary to history and so obviously untrue”.
Yad Vashem’s chairman Dani Dayan responded: “Yad Vashem presents the historical realities of Nazism and the Second World War, including countries under German occupation, control or influence. Poland was indeed under German occupation. This is clearly reflected in our material. Any other interpretation misreads our commitment to accuracy”.
Warsaw has historically been sensitive when it comes to talking about the persecution of Jews in the Second World War.
In 2018, the Polish government briefly made it a criminal offence to accuse the country of complicity in Nazi war crimes, before reversing the decision five months later.
Around three million Polish Jews, accounting for 90 per cent of the nation’s Jewish population, were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
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