Last week, on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), instead of mourning the three million Polish Jews who were brutally murdered by the Nazi regime, Polish MP Konrad Berkowicz staged a hateful demonstration during a parliamentary debate.
Berkowicz, a member of the far-right Confederation party, brandished a distorted Israeli flag – on which the Star of David had been replaced with a Nazi swastika – while delivering a speech accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and comparing it to Nazi Germany, going so far as to call it the “new Third Reich.” He has also previously been photographed making a Nazi salute.
This incident is particularly striking in Poland – a country that holds a unique and deeply significant place in Jewish history, both profoundly positive and deeply tragic. Jewish life and culture were inextricably linked with Poland for nearly 1,000 years before the Second World War, the German Nazi occupation, and the Holocaust.
Since the collapse of communism in 1989, Poland has struggled to come to terms with its complex past. While important progress has been made, much remains unresolved. This reckoning has never been linear and today it appears to be entering a new and dangerous phase.
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the events that followed have triggered an unprecedented wave of antisemitism worldwide – and Poland is no exception. What makes the situation here distinct, however, is the weight of its own historical experience.
Poland and the Polish people witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. If there is any place where the reality of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis should be fully understood, it is here. If there is any place where the meaning of genocide – and its enduring consequences – should be beyond dispute, it is Poland.
Yet this is not always the case.
Jedwabne, a small town in eastern Poland, remains one of the most difficult examples. After a long and painful investigation, Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance established in 2002 that at least 350 local Jews – men, women, children, and the elderly – were burned alive in a barn by their Polish neighbours during a 1941 pogrom. Acknowledging this crime has been one of the most painful yet essential elements of Poland’s post-communist reckoning with its past.
However, even this process is now being challenged. Last year, during a modest commemoration at the site of the massacre, mourners were met not with solidarity but with boulders bearing plaques that denied Polish involvement and attributed the crime solely to the Germans. These plaques also promoted antisemitic narratives, including references to a supposed “symbiosis” between Jews and Germans during the occupation and citations from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Attendees were harassed and threatened by far-right activists, who disrupted the memorial with loudspeakers and screens showing films denying the history of the massacre.
In recent days, these efforts have escalated further. Adjacent to the memorial, right-wing groups have established a so-called “centre of resistance,” intended to host meetings, lectures, and “educational tours” that risk further distorting historical truth.
At the same time, Poland remains one of the few European Union countries that, despite years of preparation, has yet to adopt a national strategy to combat antisemitism and promote Jewish life, a document widely regarded by the Jewish community as essential. Even discussions surrounding this largely noncontroversial initiative have been accompanied by antisemitic imagery in parts in the media. The scale of the problem is also reflected in the volume of hateful commentary that accompanies almost any public mention of Jews or Israel.
Additional dynamics become particularly visible around key commemorative dates such as Yom HaShoah and the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Treating the Holocaust as merely one of many tragic episodes in human history – rather than as the culmination of centuries of anti-Jewish persecution – creates space for manipulation and distortion. While the Holocaust must serve as a universal warning, stripping it of its specifically Jewish dimension ultimately distorts history and does a disservice to its victims.
Against this backdrop, the rise in antisemitic incidents and rhetoric in democratic Poland is occurring on an unprecedented scale. The sources of this phenomenon span the political spectrum, emerging from both the left and the right – and many of the narratives sound disturbingly familiar.
On one side, some politicians from left-leaning parties have elevated anti-Israeli activism to a central political cause, insisting that antizionism is completely distinct from antisemitism. In a country like Poland, this argument should raise serious concerns.
History offers a stark warning. In 1968, under directives from Moscow, the Polish communist regime launched an anti-“Zionist” campaign. Using rhetoric strikingly like that heard today, authorities forced nearly 20,000 Polish Jews – many of them Holocaust survivors – to emigrate, leading to the near-total disappearance of Jewish life in Poland.
At the same time, antisemitism is also resurging on the far right, expressed through familiar stereotypes, Holocaust distortion, and broader historical revisionism. Hostility toward Israel has become one of the few points of convergence between the far left and the far right, despite their otherwise deep divisions.
All of this is unfolding in a country that remains relatively homogeneous, with limited ethnic and religious diversity and only a small Jewish community. Yet political polarisation, increasing radicalisation, and a growing sense of geopolitical instability are creating conditions in which confronting antisemitism is too often avoided rather than addressed.
This reluctance carries serious risks.
In this context, the controversy surrounding the Israeli flag takes on particular significance. How does it fit into all of this – and in Poland of all places?
Some – including activists who recently called for a ban on the Israeli flag at commemorations of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – argue that the Star of David has little or nothing to do with the memory of the Holocaust, the identity of its victims, or Jews living today.
Others, such as MP Berkowicz, go even further, treating it as interchangeable with a swastika.
Together, these positions reflect a broader and deeply troubling trend. The growing normalisation of hostility toward Israel and Jews, combined with distorted and manipulated historical narratives, is paving the way for an unprecedented wave of antisemitism. No matter where it comes from, or the form it takes, this resurgence of anti-Jewish hate cannot be allowed to become the new norm.
This should be especially clear in Poland, a country where millions of Jews lived for centuries and were later murdered in death camps established by Nazi Germany. There are lines that must not be crossed and there are concrete steps that must be taken, among the first being adopting the long overdue national strategy to combat antisemitism and foster Jewish life and confronting the denial of the Jedwabne pogrom.
Otherwise, we risk allowing the distortion of both past and present to become accepted truth and, with it, the normalisation of hatred once thought unimaginable.
Agnieszka Markiewicz is the Rubin Frances Partel Director of the Shapiro Silverberg AJC Central Europe Institute
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