Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said Poland has as much a right as Jews to invoke Nazi aggression in political discourse.
“I am very surprised by the view of those who say that one is not allowed to return to the questions of history,” Kaczynski told the German daily Die Welt on Friday. “The Germans return to this question,” he said, and “the Jews also return to these questions, to the question of the Holocaust. Does that mean others are allowed to do it but not Poland?”
Kaczynski was defending his recent outburst at a European Union summit in June at which he said a reduction of voting rights for Poland within the E.U. decision-making apparatus was unfair because if it had not been for Germany, Poland would have a much larger population, thus granting it more votes.
At least 6 million Poles died as a result of Nazi aggression, including 3 million Jews a greater loss of life than in any other European country during World War II except the Soviet Union.
It is an unspoken rule in E.U. politics not to allude to Germany’s responsibility for World War II in an effort to maintain a high level of diplomacy and to account for the country’s efforts at peacemaking and reparations.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
