The film was heavily criticised by Poland’s hard-right Law and Justice party, which governed the country between 2015 and 2023 and, in 2018, passed a controversial law making it a criminal offence to accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in the Holocaust.
Likewise, a high-ranking official working for President Karol Nawrocki, who won office with the support of Law and Justice, claimed that TVP, as a station that has “Polish” in its name, should not have the film on its airwaves.
Agnieszka Jędrzak, a senior civil servant in Nawrocki’s office, attacked the broadcaster six days after the documentary was aired, calling it “anti-Polish manipulation”.
Jędrzak is responsible for state relations with the Polish diaspora and, before joining the civil service, she worked for 15 years at the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), formerly led by Nawrocki, which became known for promoting nationalist interpretations of the Holocaust.
According to her official government biography, she headed the IPN during a period when it “responded to defamatory statements that harmed the reputation of Poland and the Polish nation”.
Artistic depiction of Yaacov Goldstein and family featured in the documentary Among Neighbors (Credit: 8 Above)[Missing Credit]
Meanwhile, the Ordo Iuris Institute, a conservative Polish Catholic think tank, filed a complaint about the documentary with the country’s TV regulator, the National Broadcasting Council.
The group claimed in November that “the narrative presented in the documentary film… clearly undermines values important to Poles, such as historical truth”.
"Above all, the film creates a false image of Poles as a nation co-responsible for the German genocide of Jews during [the Second World War]. What is particularly outrageous is the fact that the production was released by Polish television,” it added.
The NBC subsequently opened an investigation into the film, which could see it banned from airing in Poland.
TVP has stood by its decision to air it, however, and continues to do so, arguing that it is neither “anti-Polish” nor “a judgement on the entire Polish nation”.
The film was backed by the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Among Neighbors was filmed over the course of a decade, with Potash inspired to begin the project after a 2014 trip to Gniewoszów, where he planned to document a rededication ceremony for the town’s Jewish cemetery.
He said that, during the course of his stay in the town, he spoke with an elderly woman who told him that Jews were killed there well after the war.
“That just really struck me as a very different kind of story, because it was not the Germans doing the killing, it was the Poles,” Potash said around the time of the film’s release. “It was not during the war, it was well after, when it should have been a time of peace.”
