On a rainy afternoon in March, Andrzej Nowak’s lanky frame loomed in the cramped, faux-Renaissance entryway of the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, in Warsaw’s Old Town Market Square. For the past twenty-five years, Nowak, a decorated historian of Poland and Russia, has been conducting regular interviews with Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Law and Justice, the conservative political party that came to power in Poland in 2015. Since then, liberal leaders and intellectuals in Western Europe have begun to fear that the country, after two decades as the model student of European liberalism, is retreating from democracy. Critics point to the loyalists at the heads of public media, the increasing harassment of opposition politicians and judges, the country’s refusal to accept its European Union-mandated quota of refugees, and, especially, a series of dramatic reforms to the court system that may consolidate Law and Justice’s control. The Party says that these are necessary modernizations of Poland’s creaky institutions, which were mostly established after the country negotiated an end to Communist rule, in 1989. “You may disagree,” Nowak told me. “But Kaczyński perceived that the lack of revolutionary change after 1989 was something for which Poland paid very dearly.”

In 2016, Law and Justice lawmakers introduced a bill known as the “Polish-death-camps amendment,” an update to a 1998 law addressing the denial of war crimes. The amendment included a sentence of up to three years in prison for any false claim that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” The amendment was meant, in part, to put an end to the phrase “Polish death camps,” which many Poles feel blames the country for the barbarism that took place on Polish soil. One popular Polish tale holds that the phrase was spread by a postwar West German intelligence unit, to exonerate the German recruits who had worked in the camps.

Nowak said that the Western European and American press, when referring to the perpetrators of the Holocaust, never use the word “German.” “There is always one word: ‘Nazi,’ ” he told me. There is concern that, over time, people might begin to assume that the Nazi death camps in Poland were, in fact, Polish.

The phrase has attained wide currency. President Barack Obama used it, in a 2012 ceremony honoring Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter who, in 1943, gave Franklin Roosevelt an eyewitness account of Jews being transported to Belzec. (Karski himself used the phrase, as the title of an article for Collier’s.)

In the two years after the law was proposed, it made its way through the legislative process, despite warnings from parliamentary committees that its wording was poor and it was essentially unenforceable. On January 26, 2018, the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the bill cleared the Polish parliament, and, in early February, President Andrzej Duda, of Law and Justice, signed it, though he sent it to the constitutional tribunal for review, knowing that parts of it would likely be rejected.

Israel’s Ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, said that the law could be seen as criminalizing Holocaust survivors, many of whom were betrayed to the Nazis by Poles, simply for speaking about their experience. In the furor that ensued, it became clear that the law had backfired: a Polish friend told me about a meme showing two aliens newly arrived on Earth in late January. “Now even we have heard of Polish death camps!” they exclaim.

Nowak opposed the bill—he felt that research, not legal regulation, should shape our judgments of history—but he said that it was “an awkward reaction to a real problem.” He cited a speech that James Comey, then the director of the F.B.I., gave in 2015, at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, in which he spoke of the Holocaust’s perpetrators and their accomplices: Nazis, Poles, and Hungarians. “He numbered just these three names: unnamed Nazis, and two other nations,” Nowak said.

Unlike most European states that were occupied by the Germans, Poland didn’t collaborate with Hitler in any official capacity. After Germany invaded Poland, in September, 1939, the government went into exile, directing the Home Army, the main organization of what was perhaps the largest resistance force in Europe, from London. In contrast to France or Belgium, the Polish state did not administer its occupation, nor did it oversee the extermination camps that the Germans established, largely for Polish Jews. There were no Polish units working under the Waffen S.S., as was the case with Dutch, Norwegian, and Estonian units.

In Warsaw, the Home Army ran information and education networks, provided Jews in hiding outside the ghetto with identity documents, and declared that accepting employment at a concentration camp would be considered treasonous. It executed Poles who betrayed Jews or tried to blackmail them. In the summer of 1942, the Polish government-in-exile relayed intelligence to the Americans and the British about the Nazis’ mass murder at Treblinka, urging the Allies to do something. They did nothing.

Warsaw suffered like no other European capital during the war. Ninety-five per cent of the structures in the Old Town, where the Manteuffel Institute is located, were destroyed by the Germans in the late summer of 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, a desperate bid for sovereignty by the city’s residents. Within nine weeks, more than a hundred and fifty thousand Poles were killed.

When the Soviets took Warsaw from the Nazis, in 1945, they set about shooting Home Army soldiers for participating in political actions that were not organized by Communists. “The Home Army was called Fascist,” Nowak said. “Even right after the war, Polish victims were identified as perpetrators.” This was a continuation of a historical tradition, he argued, dating at least to the eighteenth century, when Voltaire, influenced by his admiration of Catherine the Great, wrote that Poland was the home of “chaos,” “barbarity,” and “fanaticism.” For hundreds of years, Poland’s German and Russian neighbors had depicted Poland as backward and unenlightened, deserving of invasion.

In 2012, Nowak joined Reduta Dobrego Imienia, the Polish League Against Defamation, an organization of private citizens who wrote letters and helped launch lawsuits against media outlets, especially German ones, that perpetuated inaccurate characterizations of Polish history. But now, Nowak said, the group was not necessary; Kaczyński’s government was doing the work.

“The pinging noise is a broken valve, and the knocking noise is some dude in the trunk.” Facebook

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A few days after my meeting with Nowak, I looked up Comey’s speech. Nowak is a careful speaker, so I was surprised to find that what he’d told me wasn’t entirely true. In his address, Comey said that he asked every F.B.I. special agent he hired to visit the Holocaust Museum, in order to understand the human propensity for moral surrender. “In their minds,” Comey said, “the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places, didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do.”

Jan Pietrzak, an affable eighty-one-year-old with thick white hair and a white mustache, grinned at the crowd that had gathered before a large stage in front of the Royal Castle, in Warsaw, an immense papaya-colored manor at the edge of the Old Town. “I have the blessing of the President to be here!” he shouted into a microphone. “And that’s a big change for me.” That morning, President Duda had stood on the same stage to celebrate the anniversary of the May 3rd Constitution of 1791, the second national constitution in the world. In 1792, Poland was invaded by Russia. Each year, on Constitution Day, the Jan Pietrzak Patriotic Association hosts a performance of the polonaise, a traditional dance. “Kaczyński’s government is the first one that is really betting on the Polish interests,” Pietrzak told me.