Polish press raps prime minister over Holocaust remark

Commentators in Poland are scathing over remarks made by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki about “Jewish perpetrators” of the Holocaust which drew Israel’s fury and exacerbated a spat with the Jewish state.

The prime minister “should have been putting out the fire in Polish-Israeli ties but instead of using water, he used petrol,” writes the liberal Gazeta Wyborcza daily in an article headlined “Political bungling.”

“Who, according to the prime minister, were these ‘Jewish perpetrators’?” it asks.

“Was he perhaps thinking of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz — Jews who were selected to serve in the gas chambers and the crematoria? Or maybe he was thinking about the Jewish police service in the ghettos?

“Or maybe he meant the members of Judenrat, the councils set up within these same ghettos and charged with being a contact point with the Germans?” it says.

The dispute arose as Morawiecki tried to defend Poland’s new and controversial Holocaust law but ended up coming under fire after he said there were “Jewish perpetrators” as well as Polish ones.

His remark fueled an already seething diplomatic row with Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoning him on Sunday to say his comments were “unacceptable” and tantamount to denying the Holocaust.

— AFP